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Breaking the 'boy code' can improve learning, author says
Portland (Maine) Press Herald ^ | 18 November, 2006 | Kevin Wack

Posted on 11/18/2006 4:20:51 AM PST by NewHampshireDuo

LEWISTON - School-age boys, whose classroom struggles have recently been the cause of much concern in education circles, are being hurt by an unwritten set of social rules that discourage them from showing their emotions, a Harvard psychologist told a group of teachers Friday.

William Pollack, the author of "Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood," used a mix of anecdotes and statistics to argue that stereotypical images of manhood are detrimental to boys.

"If a boy puts on a football helmet and cleats, then he's a real boy," said Pollack, co-director of the Center for Men at Harvard Medical School. "If he puts on a ballet outfit and tutu, then we say we hope he'll grow out of it."

Pollack's remarks came during a daylong conference at Bates College on how to support the academic success of boys. About 100 people attended, most of them teachers from schools around Maine.

Nationally, a conversation is under way about the academic struggles of boys, their causes and what can be done about them. In Maine, statistics show that boys consistently lag behind their female peers, scoring lower on standardized tests, graduating from high school at lower rates and earning just 38 percent of all bachelor's degrees conferred by the state's public universities.

But even among researchers convinced that those statistics underscore a serious problem, there are differing views about what is to blame. Some researchers are focusing on the biological differences between girls and boys. Some call for more competition in the classroom. Pollack, on the other hand, emphasizes the social messages that boys absorb from their parents, teachers and peers. Pollack calls these lessons the "boy code." He told teachers Friday that the code includes the following messages: Don't show weakness, be independent, and don't show any emotion unless it's anger. He also gave tips on how teachers can connect with male students. Pollack's speech struck a chord with Colleen Madden, an English teacher at Morse High School in Bath. "He's just giving some formal scientific words for what we've been observing for years," Madden said. "He's just giving it a vocabulary."

Jimmy Joe Danala, a science teacher at Mt. Abram High School in rural Franklin County, said he sees male students whose academic success is stifled by social concerns.

As a male teacher, Danala said that he may have an easier time relating to boys than some of his female colleagues, but there are still limits. "If I challenge them too far, they will shut down and they'll go back to the boy code," he said.

The conference was sponsored by Boys To Men, a Portland-based nonprofit organization that brings fathers and sons together with the aim of reinforcing positive images of masculinity.

Executive Director Layne Gregory told attendees that Boys To Men has held focus groups in which it has asked Maine boys what it means to be a man. She said the responses have consistently included the following nine adjectives: athletic, big, cool, daring, hard-drinking, strong, tough, unemotional and violent.


TOPICS: Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: boys; bs; education; homosexualagenda; sissy
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To: Owl_Eagle
Before you neanderthals go ripping Dr. Pollack, I happen to know him personally, and he's raising a wonderful, well adjusted son... with the help of his loving husband.

I guess he wouldn't be open to reading Wild at Heart by John Eldredge? His husband probably would not approve.

21 posted on 11/18/2006 5:04:58 AM PST by marvlus
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To: NewHampshireDuo
But even among researchers convinced that those statistics underscore a serious problem, there are differing views about what is to blame. Some researchers are focusing on the biological differences between girls and boys.

What nonsense. What has changed biologically in boys in the last three decades?

22 posted on 11/18/2006 5:07:53 AM PST by raybbr (You think it's bad now - wait till the anchor babies start to vote.)
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To: WorkingClassFilth
Too bad they don't study what effects matriarchy (single parent household with a female head) too often has on young males...

Bingo. I know two single mothers with post-high school teenage boys. The women aren't the welfare types--divorced and living comfortably, but have custody of the boys. In both cases, the boys are almost identical--stunted academic and social skills. Both the boys are heavy into computer games and spend all their free time playing them. It seems to me that they're attracted to these games in an attempt to find a place in the world. Confused about the role of men generally and their role specifically in the real world, they gravitate towards one of fantasy where they're lord and master. I told my wife that if these boys were girls, they'd be looking to get pregnant so they'd have someone other than mom to take care of them.

23 posted on 11/18/2006 5:09:52 AM PST by randog (What the...?!)
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To: NewHampshireDuo
I thought we had already gotten in touch with our feminine side; now what does he want?

Little boys wearing dresses so that they can identify with the evils of male hedgemonic crimes against womyn?

This guy is a sissyfag.

24 posted on 11/18/2006 5:10:47 AM PST by Jimmy Valentine (DemocRATS - when they speak, they lie; when they are silent, they are stealing the American Dream)
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To: Owl_Eagle
with the help of his loving husband

I think I just ruined another keyboard--hot coffee does that. :-)
25 posted on 11/18/2006 5:13:41 AM PST by cgbg (We have a redhouse media/politician hot air emissions global crisis!)
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To: randog

Agreed. Whether they understand it or not, the kids (M&F) will play out one form or another of their basic make-up. When hard-edged women control their male children, they basically try to wipe-out what they don't like in males they know (other victim/victimizers). Later on, the young man reasserts a warped concept of self-image and the cycle continues. Women, as you say, are constantly looking for someone to love them - even when the need is to be mature and stable enough to provide healthy love and stable discipline to the developing young they raise as a family. IMO, 99% of our social ills are fruits (sometime literally) of deviance from the basic human framework best expressed in Judeo-Christian culture. Inventing your own world is fine - in a backyard and in a treehouse at ages 5-10. After that, real world practice is the only hope.


26 posted on 11/18/2006 5:23:27 AM PST by WorkingClassFilth (Ever learning . . .)
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To: NewHampshireDuo
How about letting boys be boys instead of trying to force them into a female like mold. And when boys are boys not drugging them with Ritalin to take the boy out of them.
27 posted on 11/18/2006 5:24:29 AM PST by DB
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To: Jimmy Valentine

Here we have cultural amnesia. We knew very well how to educate boys, at least the Jesuits did. But the grasping ambition of statists took over education and ruined it with all of their political agendas. I raised a son who is successful and well-adjusted, but these threads have made me realize that the schools gave us both a lot of grief and I had to intervene a lot more on his behalf than for my daughter. Normal parents were amazed and asked how I had the nerve to talk back to schools. A big factor was keeping him on the swim team.


28 posted on 11/18/2006 5:26:58 AM PST by ClaireSolt (Have you have gotten mixed up in a mish-masher?)
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To: NewHampshireDuo

29 posted on 11/18/2006 5:31:50 AM PST by mirkwood (Gun control isn't about guns. It's about control.)
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To: WorkingClassFilth
The feminists think they have crushed patriarchy.

That kind of thinking has a lot of males putting off marriage or not getting married at all.

Feminists have destroyed this country to no end.

30 posted on 11/18/2006 5:32:34 AM PST by unixfox (The 13th Amendment Abolished Slavery, The 16th Amendment Reinstated It !)
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To: NewHampshireDuo
Have a gawk at this fruit, William Pollock:

Here's the real story on this Harvard turd-case:

http://www.massnews.com/2006_editions/2_feb/20806_how_the_graham_are_intruding_boys_story.htm

The research that made Harvard psychologist William Pollack a famous expert on American boys and frightened American parents and educators is seriously flawed, if not fraudulent, according to people familiar with the study. It became the basis of Pollack's bestseller, "Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood."

Pollack's overtly anti-male conclusions were used by Harvard Medical School in 1998 to declare a "national emergency" that called for "major social reform" of boys.

The boys at Belmont Hill School who were used by Dr. William Pollack to conduct the research for his best-selling book about American boys thought that the survey, which reportedly employed coercion, was a farce.

"No one around me took the exam seriously with such one-sided and leading questions being asked," one former pupil says. "The test turned into a complete farce when kids began shouting out their answers to their classmates in an effort to make a joke."

31 posted on 11/18/2006 5:42:15 AM PST by SteveMcKing
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To: unixfox

Why buy the cow when you can milk it through the fence?


32 posted on 11/18/2006 5:44:35 AM PST by WorkingClassFilth (Ever learning . . .)
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To: Owl_Eagle

ROFLMAO!


33 posted on 11/18/2006 5:48:56 AM PST by browardchad
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To: NewHampshireDuo
I beleive the reason some boys are doing poorly in school is because of the feminization of education. The educational elite in this country live in a dream world.

Young boys rejecting this stupidity is a good thing.

34 posted on 11/18/2006 5:51:44 AM PST by Pietro
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To: Owl_Eagle
... with the help of his loving husband

Took me a moment to catch that. LOL.

35 posted on 11/18/2006 6:00:56 AM PST by NewHampshireDuo
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To: NewHampshireDuo
are being hurt by an unwritten set of social rules that discourage them from showing their emotions

C'mon. This is such recycled "research" as to be officially labeled a "chestnut" of laughability.

36 posted on 11/18/2006 6:46:42 AM PST by JoanVarga
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To: PeterPrinciple

"positive images of masculinity"

One must ask just who is it that gets define an attribute of "masculine" personality as "positive" or not.

Instead of trying to change boys natural inclinations toward a certain self-image, educators should be looking for better ways to communicate with boys on the boys terms.


37 posted on 11/18/2006 7:12:49 AM PST by Wuli
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To: NewHampshireDuo
"If he puts on a ballet outfit and tutu, then we say we hope he'll grow out of it."

If he puts on a ballet outfit and a tutu, he gets thumped that night out behind the bleachers.

38 posted on 11/18/2006 7:18:07 AM PST by IronJack (=)
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To: PeterPrinciple

"positive images of masculinity"

One must ask just who is it that gets to define an attribute of "masculine" personality as "positive", or not.

Instead of trying to change boys natural inclinations toward a certain self-image, educators should be looking for better ways to communicate with boys on the boys terms.

I have long said that one of the main differences between males and females (particularly in their relations with each other) is that females want to be understood, males just want to be accepted.

Apply this to the young developing male and you can see where his educators need to be - quit trying to get him to explain himself to you, to "open up"; because if you just listen to a young male he is telling you who he is and where he is coming from, so meet him on his terms and you will "reach" him.

How is it that in generations past our education system produced so many fine, intelligent well-educated men, before it was believed there was something wrong with their "male" attitudes, yet all of a sudden young males cannot be educated unless they abandon "traditional" male "attitudes".

The problem is not young males, it's their educators.


39 posted on 11/18/2006 7:21:09 AM PST by Wuli
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To: Wuli

Can someone tell me the downside to masculinity OR feminity? We are not the same by nature!!! When I need a helping hand with a bag of concrete....I wouldn't ask my girlfriend to lift it!! I'd ask my son!!


40 posted on 11/18/2006 7:24:17 AM PST by Sacajaweau (God Bless Our Troops!!)
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