The research interest I have in boys dates from the time in my teaching career when I transferred from the independent to maintained sector of education during the 1980s. I had previously taught boys aged between nine and thirteen in a single sex school and thoroughly enjoyed it. Overnight I was confronted by boys I just didn’t understand and the enjoyment evaporated. Thus was born my future academic career in the form of an MPhil study of deviancy and underachievement in primary school boys. I was aware at the time of one over-riding factor and I’ve made available here the first two pages of my first thesis. It’s an “early work” and must be read as such, but the foundations of all that has followed are there. In 2003, it led to the publication of Women Teaching Boys.
Had I but realised it at the time, what I was witnessing was the operation of social class. I now believe that the study of boys cannot be simply a matter of gender. Social class exacerbated by gross inequality is an elephant in the room that turns some boys into future prime ministers and others into NEETs (not in education, employment or training). The view of gender and boyhood I had formed in my own youth and early teaching career was one in which the arts, humanities and literature, science, technology, practical craft, outdoor adventure and sport were all of equal importance in the lives of boys. Boys, therefore, grew up as liberally educated individuals, spiritually, morally and culturally developed. Like it or not, access to this kind of education and upbringing is very unevenly distributed in our society for all sorts of complex reasons. This fundamental inequality has been the real driver behind all my research. I continue to explore the problem through the theoretical lenses of attachment behaviour and, more recently, academic resilience. Of course, I draw heavily also on theories of gender construction!
