Boys and guns

Should boys play with guns? The question is raised in a new report from the United Kingdom.

Most parents’ reaction is to stop gun play at once. Parents’ websites contain much anxious discussion, especially from mothers, who worry seeing their child playing with a gun. Not having a toy gun provides the opportunity for many boys to invent one. Parents say their sons bite into a sandwich, which becomes an imaginary gun: “Bang, bang, you’re dead”.

No mother, or father, wants their son to become a gun-wielding monster who destroys other people’s lives.

There is a huge range of difference among boys across socio-economic status, race, and language. Yet it appears that boys all over the world often play with guns, and - later in their lives - with computer games in which they aim at being the best and eliminating the rest.

But these games may be useful to get boys learning, a new UK report on the early years of learning suggests. It says that boys often watch TV and games and act out what they see the males doing. We don’t have to look hard to find examples of men on TV or in movies with a weapon in their hands: from John Wayne to the stream of movies with Schwarzenegger, van Damme and others.

The report says “Adults can find this type of play particularly challenging and have a natural instinct to stop it”. The report is called Confident, Capable and Creative: Supporting Boys’ Achievements, and comes from the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families.

The UK Children’s Minister, Beverley Hughes, called it “a commonsense approach to the fact that many children, and perhaps particularly many boys, like boisterous, physical activity”. Her masterful wording encompasses many debates and will create many more.

The report says every child is entitled to challenging and enjoyable learning: this must include boys. It says many children do chose gender-specific activities, and each has a personal learning journey. We must trust the richness of children’s ideas, the report says; not impose our own.

Case studies in the report emphasise exploration, experimentation and “mucking about with things”. Some might see this as the kind of play that males typically do- “messing about in boats” as described by Kenneth Grahame in Wind in the Willows.

There is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not. Spoken by Ratty to Mole.

Many men do enjoy mucking about with cars, computers and boats. Fathers play with kids (especially sons) and it’s typically in a more challenging and competitive way. They nurture (as mothers do) but in characteristically different styles.

Efforts to improve boys’ achievement in the UK and Australia have looked principally at behaviour and learning. Without wishing to make gross comparisons between boys and girls, there are worrying trends in behaviour among boys. Oppositional and conduct disorders are twice as common among boys, according to Sebastian Kraemer’s report in the British Medical Journal.

Despite many academic articles, a gap between boys and girls’ achievement remains. Among low achievers in the UK, boys outnumber girls by 20 per cent. A gender gap in achievement between boys and girls has been discussed in Australia since the O’Doherty report, Challenges and Opportunities, was released in New South Wales in 1994. Last year the subject rose to prominence in the USA and is still being hotly debated.

The UK report says too many boys develop negative images of themselves as learners, in part because of learning that is not purposeful. The report argues that schools and childcare centres want pupils to listen patiently, speak nicely and (as they grow older) write attractive descriptions. These are exactly the things most boys find the hardest.

Boys’ natural exuberance and energy may often be misinterpreted. Thus boys can be labelled as difficult and their behaviour called “inappropriate”. Boys are not seen as positive learners and they become fed up with learning as such. If their interests and learning preferences are not respected, they lose interest in formal learning and switch off. In contrast, a project which followed boys’ interests  found sudden, dramatic improvements in their speaking and listening skills AND behaviour.

Boys cited in the report said that sitting on the carpet was boring, and “it wastes your life”.The issue was summarised when one British boy wrote in an exam, “I will try my hardest, no matter how pointless the task is”. Following boys’ agendas does improve learning, the report says. Staff should “help boys to achieve more rapidly by providing opportunities for learning that engage them”.

Engaging boys in schoolwork has been discussed in all countries surveyed by the OECD’s PISA Report. Emphatically, boys are not all the same. But the problem of capturing boys’ interests has been registered in almost all countries surveyed by the OECD and it keeps cropping up in unexpected places. Only last week I was asked by a theatre in London “How on earth do we engage the boys who visit us?”

There will be many implications from the report. For instance, do we have enough men in teaching? Professor Andrew Martin at Oxford University told me that although teacher quality is paramount, boys prefer to raise certain issues with a trusted older male, not always a father. And males often tolerate more active and boyish learning, Sebastian Kraemer argues. Yet getting suitable males into teaching has been oft-discussed, but no workable solution has been found.

Perhaps the report follows a trend back to more boy - and girl - specific learning. It might encourage a move back to single-sex learning, even within a coeducational school.

There are some echoes of the report in the work done to date by the Federal Government’s Boys Education Lighthouse Schools Program. Among its ten principles for engaging boys appear the following: flexibility of approach, rather than a standard, teacher-directed activity; practical and hands-on learning; and the use of appropriate male role-models. Like the UK report, the BELS program wants teachers and caregivers not to enforce stereotypes but to challenge them. The balance among all these principles is difficult to maintain.

The report is not a sensational call encouraging boys to be aggressive in childcare centres and the early years of school. It is a cautious call encouraging questioning of caregivers’ understandable anxiety about the ways in which many boys play. It might spark a useful debate on what is permissible in the early years and how to channel the restless activity that many boys show.