Let Boys Become Men: The Need for All-Male Education
by Anthony Esolen (June 2018)
Ashton Grammar Boy Cycling to School 1960s, Steven Bruce
white Americans, a difficult thing to explain by systemic anything, unless perhaps the Mage is hard of hearing and mistakes the winsome lilt of a Nigerian accent for something Scandinavian, and so forgets in those cases to do his malignant work.
Nor am I the first to notice that men and women, if they are not pestered to death by the canyon-fillers, sometimes actually enjoy doing different kinds of work, and that a young man with a family dependent upon his income is by far the most aggressive worker in the world. He takes on more overtime, he stays on the lookout for more lucrative jobs, he presses for promotions and raises, and he plays a little hardball with employers to begin with. I did that when I was young, and so did my male friends who were in the same situation. Catch a tiger by the tail, ladies.
—or, for that matter, by differences in native intelligence, family income, place of residence, quality of schools attended, sheer need, or the vicissitudes of home life. For this case, we are talking about two groups of people who have exactly the same family income, who live in the same place, attend the same schools, have the same decent or lousy home life, and roughly the same intelligence, if not that the group of people who perform more poorly are actually on average just a wee bit more intelligent, and more daring about it, by nature. The two groups are boys and girls.
en masse. If I hear of a boy who has failed out of high school, I can make no assumptions as to his intelligence; he may be a genius. Certainly, the capacity to do well in our high schools, such as they are, is a strong indication against genius, and in favor of a neat and happy willingness to please, to do what is always socially acceptable, however that is defined from place to place and from time to time.
If you wanted to come up with teaching methods, school policies, and a curriculum perversely designed to bore the ordinary boy half to death, to frustrate him, to fail to engage his natural propensities, to give him no hope, to cut his heart right out, then you could hardly improve on what we have now.
Summa Theologiae, and consider how vast, subtle, comprehensive, and architectonically organized such a thing is; how masculine in its features, in its almost complete dispensing with emotion, its surgical acuity, its drawing of clean distinctions, and its never fleeing from where the logic leads. Then give students just the reverse of that. Give them a “unit” here and a “unit” there, politically chosen, and stress what the young people are supposed to feel about Nefertiti or the Navajos.
Boys are map-makers. I have met plenty of men who love to do as I do, pore over a road map, look up cities in an atlas, find pictures of strange islands, chart out rivers, and plot mountain ranges. So get rid of geography entirely. While you are at it, make sure that you are not really learning history either, because that too may be charted, map-like. Do current events. Make a lot of political poses. Get out the pom-poms for the next progressive leap.
grow and harden by rough play, and that explains what is otherwise pretty strange, that boys actually like not only to tackle but to be tackled. So make sure there is no dodgeball, no climbing trees, no pick-up games of football on the school playground, no king-of-the-hill. One way to do this is to make sure that there is no time for it. Check out Charlie Chaplin’s movie Modern Times, and see if you cannot improve on the Billows Feeding Machine, for children in school. Give them ten or fifteen minutes to shove the calories down their throats, and when boys grow jittery and jumpy and won’t listen in class—because who in the hell wants to listen to a lady teacher talking about women’s suffrage and how rotten men used to be, anyway?—then drug the kid up, because obviously he has a disorder. We do not do to big energetic dogs what we do to boys.
Now, I do meet women who understand these things about boys, and who might make excellent teachers for them. But those women are seldom to be found graduating from our programs in education. In general, contemporary women seem quite content to watch the boys fail. So I draw an obvious conclusion. It is long past due. Men need to see, themselves, to the education of their sons.
It was the gymnasion that produced Socrates, the yeshiva that produced Judah Halevi, the medieval university that produced Thomas Aquinas, the Renaissance studio that produced Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto and some thousands of others, the English schools and colleges that produced John Henry Newman, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and in general the greatest tradition of prose writing in our language, with its hearty echo in the American schools that produced Emerson, Thoreau, Henry Adams, and those intellectual rogues the James Brothers. The male schools need no apologies, nor do I insist that they are for everyone. I do insist that we ought to have many more than we do have, and soon. They worked—and I can bring forth powerful anthropological reasons why they did, and why they must. What we are doing now quite obviously does not work. In the end, only men can make men out of boys anyway, and men do speak with an authority and a clear and hearty passion for truth, that boys respect and will hear. Go for it, then. Why suppress the male genius? Let Michelangelo thrive. He is a gift to everyone.
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Anthony Esolen is a Fellow of Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts, in Merrimack, New Hampshire. He is a translator of several epic works, including Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House), and the author of a variety of books on culture, literature, education, and theology. Among the latter are Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (ISI). His newest book, to appear in the fall, is Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World (Regnery).
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