Dialogue: Cut the claptrap: boys will be boys

Michelle A'Court, of television fame, has a cute gender-bending exercise that she used to profound effect in a debate at the Bruce Mason Theatre the other night. She, Linda Clark and Pam Corkery were ranged against a male team led by Gary McCormick, on the subject that "we have seen the end of the golden weather."

Little did the organisers, the North Shore Library, know that TVNZ would can McCormick's latest show that very week, which saved the debate from descending entirely into a battle of the sexes. McCormick, brilliant as nearly always, offered his fate for the affirmative and was so good that he proved the negative.

But inevitably there was a good deal of sexuality at stake and the women won that contest, too. More to the point, males in the audience lost it. Ever so sweetly, A'Court challenged them to turn to the woman beside them, make eye contact and ask: "Do you think this shirt makes me look fat."

And could you believe, at her cue there was a rumble of male voices, enough to suggest she got about a third of those present. McCormick practically conceded then.

It was easily the most illuminating moment on the subject of male sexuality in the past fortnight, a subject that has attracted supposedly more serious discussion as educationists have used the holidays to ponder the problem of boys.

Every high school teacher knows that problem and they haven't a clue what to do about it. It is proving so intractable that it has education theorists in denial.

For more than a decade now boys have become practically comatose in the classroom. Just not interested. Brain dead. Not all, of course. There are some bright and interested exceptions. But the difficulty of motivating so many is a topic of general exasperation in the teaching fraternity.

Possibly it is no more than a passing phase of young male culture. Lassitude goes well with the retarded look, the big shoes, long shorts, cap back to front. But if it's a fashion it's a long time passing.

The Education Review Office sounded an alarm a year ago. That took the subject beyond staffroom frustration at last and put it on the table of educational research. There it remains, most unwelcome.

Last year the Ministry of Education commissioned a couple of researchers, Drs Adrienne Alton-Lee and Angelique Praat, to read everything written in the world on gender differences in school and find out what solutions are around. Their report, published last week, is a strange document.

First they try to efface the subject and substitute problems more amenable. Ethnicity and wealth, they find, are associated more clearly than gender with low educational performance. Perhaps, but its not a contest. When the other gender was a matter of concern it was up there with Polynesians and the poor for urgent educational remedies.

Alton-Lee and Praat mention that to attract girls into sciences, for example, steps were taken to break down "a recurring pattern of verbal dominance by boys and the traditional positioning of science as a masculine domain." Different ways of teaching were adopted - cooperative group tasks, integrating science and technology with social studies, use of literacy and diagrammatic representations ...

Girls were the concern, they say, "until the mid-1990s when boys and masculinities became an increasing research focus."

"Masculinities"?

That was the title of an Auckland University seminar on boys' education last week, featuring a visiting expert who blamed homophobia for everything. Evidently that is why boys don't sparkle at language and literature.

Say Alton-Lee and Praat: "Boys perceive literacy to be a feminine activity engaged in by 'wuss,' 'girl,' 'gay'-type people, implicating homophobia as an influence on boys' behaviour."

The solution they propose involves lots of "deconstructing." Teachers and students must "deconstruct the ways in which language and texts constitute males and females in opposition." Linking literacy to science and mathematics was another way to "deconstruct the gendered framing of literacy."

There is no way to avoid quoting this execrable language. The propositions simply cannot survive translations in to plain English. And it is not the work of two illiterate researchers alone. The exercise was guided and reviewed all along by a committee of education academics and ministry staff.

It was beginning about the time the All Blacks stumbled at the World Cup and the panel heard that somebody had said that the team "played like girls." That made a profound impact.

They blame much of the boys' problem on rugby, which proves only that they have been nowhere near the people they are supposed to help. If some of these clods showed a flicker of interest in rugby it would be their first sign of life.

When Alton-Lee and Praat come to the physical education curriculum they see immense possibilities. "Macho forms of masculinity organised around values of physical prowess and stoicism narrowly define the body ... Physical education is an opportunity to change these dominant definitions."

The report says more about the problem of boys than its authors realise. If they had been bent upon "deconstructing" sexuality when I was at school, I'd have tuned out, too.

* John Roughan is off to recharge in northern Cyprus, where they're having an anniversary and a heatwave. He will be back in a month.