Schools and boys

From themid-1990s the ‘problems of educating boys’ have dominated government agendas on educational policy and grabbed media headlines in the UK, Australia and, more recently, the USA, Canada and Continental Europe. The general public and teachers are told that boys are underachieving in examinations when compared to girls. Nor, so we are told, are boys as interested in education (Biddulph, 1998; Hoff Sommers, 2000; Neall, 2002). There are acres of print and numerous websites that discuss ‘boys’ underachievement’, some questioning the extent to which all boys are failing and how ethnicity and social class interact to contribute to success and failure, but, for the most part, offering (stereotypical) solutions as to how to encourage boys’ engagement in education. It is not our intention in this chapter to do more than acknowledge and draw out from the current debates on boys’ underachievement because deliberations are already so well rehearsed in the literature (including our own writing, e.g. Francis, 2000; Skelton, 2001; Francis and Skelton, 2005; Skelton et al., 2007). Rather, we intend to explore the conceptualisations of boys, men andmasculinities within education and how these have been, and are, considered by feminists and pro-feminists. However, to begin with we want to raise the issue of feminist engagement with research and writing on men and masculinities. In these days of ‘third-wave feminism’ (see Chapter 2) where gender is sometimes seen as potentially disembodied then not to acknowledge the interplay of masculinities and femininities would be regarded as naïve or essentialist research. Yet, second-wave feminists began their work at a time when gender theory was in its infancy and masculinity and femininity were regarded as properties of, respectively, male and female bodies. As such, the first section sets out the struggles feminists had in negotiating and reconciling investigations of boys, men and masculinities. We then look at the perspectives male researchers adopted as they began to explore masculinities and how this work fitted with feminist theorising. The chapter then moves on to provide an overview of the development of research into boys, men andmasculinities in schooling and feminist engagement with these.