ABSTRACT
Moral panics over children and youth in relation to school and schooling have provided scholars with an especially productive avenue for studying complicated and important contemporary issues, including (besides education itself) the construction of social identities (those based on gender, sexuality, race, and class, for example), group psychology and behaviors, media and culture, and violence and crime. Sociologist Jordan J. Titus’s “Boy Trouble: Rhetorical Framing of Boys’ Underachievement” shows that moral panics over young people’s education are likely to stir up public concern, fear, anger, and prejudice about a variety of other social problems as well:
According to Titus, moral panic over boys’ underachievement relative to girls (which, he points out earlier in his essay, generally treats boys and girls as heterogeneous groups) both reproduces stereotypes about, for example, supposed propensities for violent behaviors among male youth of color and obscures the problems of racism, classism, and sexism in education. He concludes, “. . . where the politics of fear are also the politics of stratification the prevailing social order is maintained” (Titus 2004, 159).
