Boys Can’t Be Boys in Modern Schooling Systems

“Be quiet!” “Sit still!” “Don’t do that!” “Keep your hands to yourself!”

This is a far too common disciplining practice for most schoolboys across the country—almost as if there’s inherently natural friction. It’s not just the occasional disruptive student that gets this treatment, it’s most boys of all ages. 

Why is it that so many boys need repeated corrections, and are these corrections en masse helping to form men of good study, values, morals, and citizenry? The answer isn’t as clear as you might think.

Boys tend to drop out of high school at higher rates than girls and have lower GPAs than girls. Boys have more behavioral problems than girls and more girls go on to graduate from college. And studies have shown that all young children, not just boys, benefit from increased physical activity during the school day that’s complementary to academic instruction.

Boys do need to be appropriately disciplined, but is there a natural clash at play here? Are boys acting outlandishly because they are understimulated in their current environment? Are boys being asked to do things contrary to their nature? Do boys need an outlet that traditional school schedules don’t currently take into account?

If true, the current disciplinarian strategy for young boys is both a product of the system that promotes prolonged periods of sedentary existence, and a natural tendency for boys free to release bottled up energy.

Again, this isn’t to say that classroom management and discipline or the classroom setting should not apply to boys or has no place, but rather an idea that boys are not naturally wired for what modern schooling demands of them—prolonged hyper-structured, monotonous schooling with limited outlets.

Therefore, boys can’t be boys in modern schooling systems. In school, boys are in a daily dilemma: either conform to the classroom culture and suppress sporadic bursts of energy or act in accordance with these fluctuations and get disciplined accordingly (see above).

Not all schools are as rigid as the average modern school system. Some K-12 schools encourage boys to get out and explore nature at young ages, to take an extended lunch break to be able to eat and play, and possibly even built-in, school-endorsed games or events to break up the monotony of the day.

This is the story of my alma mater, The Avalon School, located in Wheaton, Maryland. The school encourages learning from a variety of perspectives, which include rigorous classroom instruction, but it is coupled with a house system that promotes play, competition, and poetry. A prolonged lunch is given to students so that they have enough time to eat and play if they want. These are just a few examples of a school embracing the holistic mentality of the human person, one that benefits from formal schooling, but is not limited to it.

Our boys need a schooling environment that promotes a variety of educational approaches and stimulates interest from both formal schooling and informal schooling. The ideal system, at the very least, will recognize that education doesn’t only come in the form of a textbook. It’s time that school administrations, school boards, and school teachers take a critical look at how their school day is structured, and experiment if any of the aforementioned will help boys succeed in modern-day school systems.

We need to stop measuring boys’ success by the quantity of time spent in the classroom and shift focus to the quality of time spent in the classroom. The statistics show that the current system isn’t working, and boys are not better off because of it. Many may say that “boys will be boys” is harmful, toxic masculinity, but I think there’s a case to be made that boys are not inherently toxic, but rather existing in an environment contrary to its nature.