Gender Justice

Some philosophers make a a key distinction between value and values. Value refers to the relative utility of an object, whereas values refers to the behavioural disposition of a person or social group. In the former category, it might seem strange to include such diverse items as the beautiful River Spey, which runs closely past my window, or the evening canticles in A major by Charles Stanford which I look forwards to singing at evensong. It is possible in both cases to quantify how much I and others value these. They therefore have value. In contrast, the disposition to treat all people equally regardless of any attribute of identity is one of my personal values and we would probably not think of evaluating it as a quantity, though we could evaluate the truth of my claim to value equality by observing and recording how I actually treated people. Not long after I moved from a boys' choir school to teach in the state sector I became disturbed to find that significantly more boys than girls appeared not to value schooling, a phenomenon that was new to me. The result of this was readily quantifiable in the statistics of classroom disruption, exclusions, exam results and male violence. These suggested that there was a “problem with boys” and it was a problem I wanted to get to the bottom of. There could be no gender justice for as long as the behaviour of boys was problematic. Problematic boys surely become problematic men.

The Theory Behind the Action

Placing a value on a human life takes us into the realm of values incommensurability. We like to think a life is "beyond price" but human lives are regularly priced when calculations are made about an expensive new safety measure or drug. The existence of so many neglected and unloved children is a major challenge to our views on childhood. Why do so many parents, when judged by observation of behaviour, appear not to value their children? -A seminal contribution in this field is John Bowlby's attachment theory. Peer Attachments and Social Deviancy in the Primary School drew on this theory to demonstrate the extent to which the lack of a secure bond at school might be associated with "bad behaviour". I had originally hypothesised that the necessary bond would be with the teacher, one reason for primary school children being allocated a familiar class teacher rather than being expected to cope with different subject teachers. My research demonstrated that teachers were not attachment figures and questioned the need for class generalists beyond Key Stage 1. What mattered was not bonding with a teacher as a substitute parent but attachments to peers. The "problem with boys" was strongly associated with either no attachments to peers, or strong attachments to sub groups with values opposed to those of the school.

Socialisation and Enculturation

Socialisation and enculturation can be viewed as derivatives of attachment. Many if not most problems of masculinity show an association with the quality of social bonding. It is a generalisation, but boys tend to bond in different ways to girls. Boys most commonly bond into teams where the activity is the main focus. As a musician, I could see that team bonding was dominated by sport at the expense of other activities such as choir singing. Whilst I have no problems with sport as such (indeed, I once coached boys’ rugby), Maírtín Mac an Ghaill’s The Making of Men: Masculinities, Sexualities and Schooling (1994) famously coined the eminently quotable “3Fs” (“fightin’,fuckin’, n’ football”) to describe the values of the “macho lads”. Whilst the macho lads were but one sub-group of boys, the tendency of boys more generally to be interested in little other than football unless positively socialised into other activities has underlain my longstanding attempts to stress choral singing as a complementary space for boys to bond positively.

Singing High, Aiming High

Singing High, Aiming High was the title of a seminal large scale evaluation of the Bristol Cathedral Chorister Outreach programme. The city wide Bristol Voices singing challenge had received received substantial funding from Youth Music and attracted a good degree of positive media coverage. Much was revealed by the detailed research but perhaps the most consequential of the findings were:

the extent to which generalist primary teachers had little knowledge of music and held serious misconception about singing;
that girls were actually bullying boys and pushing them out of singing (pp 27-29 in report).

This was not gender justice. It challenged the received wisdom and still touches nerves made raw by the traditional exclusion of females from ecclesiastical choirs. It has, though, been the foundation of a more sophisticated understanding of the "problem with boys", and importantly the finding that girls were pushing boys out of singing has replicated in later research.

This monograph is primarily about masculinity, not teaching singing, but the publisher insisted on renaming it!

At the time, the work was clearly valued in the form of a post-doctoral research fellowship that freed me from teaching and administration for a whole year. My monograph on the young male voice and the problem of masculinity was the outcome and this led eventually to the Boys Keep Singing project in 2008. What has endured from all this in the year 2026?

The "problem with boys" still needs to be reconceptualised as a problem with government and schooling.

Music is not valued by school managements

Singing is valued even less

The idea of socialising boys through singing has received very little recognition and any evidence that it works is routinely ignored.

Key Publications

1992 The validity of sociometric status, Educational Research, 34(2):149-154

1993 Peer attachments and Social Deviancy in the Primary School. Unpublished MPhil thesis, University of the West of England, Bristol.

2003 Women Teaching Boys: Caring And Working in the Primary School. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books.

2002 Singing, gender and health: perspectives from boys singing in a church choir, Health Education, 102 (4).

2006 Primary School Boys’, Identity and the Male Role Model: An Exploration of Sexual Identity and Gender Identity in the UK Through Attachment Theory, Sex Education, 3 (3) 257 - 270.

2007 with Nicholson, M. What makes a pedagogy fit for key stage two? In P. Harnett, (ed.), Understanding Primary Education: developing professional attributes, knowledge and skills. London: Routledge, 54 - 70.

2008 Teaching Singing to Boys and Teenagers: The Young Male Voice And the Problem of Masculinity Lampeter/Lewiston/New York: Edwin Mellen Press.

2008 Boyhood melancholia and the vocal projection of masculinity, THYMOS: Journal of Boyhood Studies, 2 (1), 26 – 35.

2009 Time to Confront Willis's Lads with a ballet class? A case study of educational orthodoxy and white working-class boys, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 30 (2): 179 – 191.

2010 The perpetuation of hegemonic male power and the loss of boyhood innocence: case studies from the music industry. Journal of Youth Studies, 14 (1): 59 – 76.

(2010) Slappers who gouge your eyes: Vocal performance as exemplification of disturbing inertia in gender equality, Gender and Education, 22 (1): 47-62.

2010 “Real boys” don’t sing, but real boys do: the challenge of constructing and communicating acceptable boyhood, THYMOS Journal of Boyhood Studies, 4 (1), 54 – 69.

2012 Do boys need ‘Lads and Dads’? Interventions to increase resilience in the face of educational failure Keynote and seminar paper for Visiting Professorial Scholarship to University of Queensland, February 2012.