ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses how a school in survival mode can be susceptible to certain beliefs about boys’ education and how this affects teacher–student relationships and the construction of masculinities within the school site. We acknowledge pervasive forms of neoliberal governance, and the embedding of standardised testing, have contributed to the proliferation of the deficit discourse of boys in schooling. Keeping in mind boys’ education has been subject to moral panics over the last forty years, we seek to reframe some of these debates against neoliberal pressures influencing daily school life.
