What's going wrong for boys?

Some black spots continue to be Aboriginal youth, working-class children, and kids from the impoverished outer suburbs. Rural youth still suffer from isolation and despair from confronting a future in towns threatened by drought and population decline. While females and males each have their problems, females often internalise. We don’t show young males safe ways of expressing their feelings. Sebastian Kraemer from the UK’s Tavistock Institute talks of alexythymia, or lack of an emotional vocabulary for men.

Males more often turn to alcohol, drugs, drive wildly, have car accidents and commit suicide. And boys are similar. At the same time there are tremendous differences in the ways boys mature and find their masculinity. In the process, many boys overcompensate for their insecurities with a show of male bravado and a fear of not being masculine enough. Academics call this homophobia and it is why we need a better range of masculine role models available to boys other than the machismo we get in Hollywood movies, or the “boofhead” antics of Rugby League. There are many ways of being a good man but boys need some guidance if they are to find their way and avoid the pitfalls of alcohol, drugs and violence.

We all have different life experiences, and there is a range of ideas about how to educate kids. We needn’t worry too much about extreme views, crank journalists and noisy pressure groups. I hope the NSW Department of Education will accept the challenge of getting all our kids learning.

Boys grow up to be fathers, husbands, lovers: we want them to be able to express themselves well as well as be knowledgeable and skillful. It’s not a question of favouring girls or boys. And it shouldn’t be about favouring one ideology or another. Improving teaching and learning will benefit all students. If Australia is to be the clever country, we want to see all Australian children learning.