Boys and the humanities: Making the twain meet

For many years, writers, scholars, and researchers have expressed concern about the apparent misalignment between boys’ physical and intellectual development and the requirements of most K-12 schools (e.g., Froschl & Sprung, 2005; Gurian & Stephens, 2006). This situation has received increased public attention in the U.S. with the recent publication of Richard Reeves’ (2022) book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.

Although much of the current emphasis on boys’ disengagement from school is U.S.-focused, an international report by UNESCO (2022a) notes that, globally, 132 million boys of primary and secondary school age are out of school entirely, and those who do attend are at greater risk than girls of failure, grade repeating, and overall poor outcomes. Unsurprisingly, the situation for low-income and minoritized boys is even more dire, as a great deal of recent scholarship has found (Hines et al., 2020).

The point of this work is not to pit the needs of boys and girls against each other, but rather to note that boys and girls have different developmental patterns that likely require gender-specific interventions in schools and society. The research from UNESCO (2022b) tells us that “girls have more difficulty accessing education and are more likely than boys to be out of school, particularly at primary level. But as education progresses, it becomes a boys’ problem” (UNESCO, 2022b, p. 3). Engaging with the challenges boys face need not come at the expense of girls, as the authors of the UNESCO (2022a) report take great pains to point out: