Challenging Boys’ Hierarchies
© Next Gen Men 2019
By Jonathon Reed
I recently finished writing a podcast episode centred on an adolescent boy’s experience of leaving behind close friendships in moving across the country. I came away from it with a stronger sense of boys’ relational capacities existing in a peer culture and school structure with limitations that weren’t necessarily in their control.
One of the questions I posed, for example, was: “What do you do when hierarchy is built into the system instead of love?”
To follow this thread a little bit further, I found a research article that traced the evolution of compassion and social status within the school experience of a boy from age 12 to 19. One of the things the researchers found was a conflicting discourse between being a ‘compassionate boy’ and being a ‘socially esteemed boy.’ Essentially over the seven-year time frame, the boy’s narrative of compassionate sympathy within his peer relations lost ground to exclusion and subordination.
“On the basis of our analysis, we suggest that in young people’s relationship cultures, the potential exists for creating spaces that afford boys the opportunity to be and become open towards various forms of human interdependency and capable of inclusive compassion. However, hierarchically ordered peer cultures, dominant constructions of masculinity—and implicit subscription and endorsement of these hierarchies and constructions by education—together with other broader sociocultural-material structures of gender make such an orientation a tricky thing to embed in one’s attitudes, practices, and personal ethos. Compassion thus easily becomes restricted by and spoken through powerful ideologies of society and/or dominant configurations of gender.”
Granted, the article is pretty academic, but the reason I thought it was worth sharing was that part in the middle about the implicit endorsement of hierarchical structures within school. I’m wondering what might come out of conversations about how our schools can promote non-hierarchical peer relations. If you’re wondering where to start, I recommend picking up Michael Reichert’s How to Raise a Boy because he talks about his work implementing a peer counselling program at Haverford School in Philadelphia. Do some reading and then bring it up with a colleague.
ICYMI This Week
The Myth of the Silent, Sulky, Horny Teenage Boy (The New York Times)
Where Is My Mind? (The Players’ Tribune)
‘You Believe He’s Lying?’ (The Cut)
Written by Next Gen Men Program Manager Jonathon Reed as part of Learnings & Unlearnings, a weekly newsletter reflecting on our experiences working with boys and young men. Subscribe to get Learnings & Unlearnings delivered to your email inbox.