(The following article is from the December 1-31, 2009, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)

Youth Fightback column, by Jamie Burnett with Chuck Saunders

Google news search "boys schools" today and you'll find major debate on a recent proposal coming out of the Toronto District School Board. As TDSB Director of Education Dr. Chris Spence has tweeted "in some instances single sex settings work." His proposal is for an alternative school for boys, staffed mainly by male teachers.

     Dr. Spence's "Male Leadership Academy" responds to StatsCan numbers for 2006/7, showing that one out of three boys don't graduate from high school, and one out of four girls (often because of pregnancy). While receiving much debate on the School Board, an Ottawa Citizen article quotes one male student as saying "I don't want to read about princesses." Sadly, this is the level of much of the debate. Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty (who opposed afrocentric schools) vocally supports the idea.

     We see two general categories of argument in support of "same sex schools". The first is the sexist argument that "boys and girls are just different", often with clarifications such as: girls like reading stories about princesses and doing what they're told, while boys like running around, playing baseball, making stuff out of wood, and learning about war, guns and cool, tough things.

     Hasn't existing gendered streaming (i.e. home economics vs. physics) and the TDSB putting armed police into schools already done enough to make "Maxim High"?

     But this isn't simply to be laughed off. It must be fiercely confronted as reactionary despite its prominent and comfortable place in public discourse. The "learning styles" (i.e. sexist gender roles) generally attributed to girls are precisely those passive, subordinate positions imposed on both women and students within our capitalist schools - which try to mould students to be obedient, productive workers. The perceived "better achievement" by girls responds to, and coincides with, their subordinate role as students.

     The second argument is considerably more sophisticated, but still problematic. It says boys and girls are just uncomfortable together. Occasionally to this argument is appended some vague reference to "hormones" - perhaps "the uterus" and "hysteria"?

     At worst this reminds me of the so-called "reformed KKK" argument: "I don't mind black people, we just shouldn't mix." At best it supposes that young men, or women, or both, just can't function in the presence of the opposite sex.

     This obscures the systemic problems of sexism faced by women and girls, fostered by employers and big business, government policies, the legal system, mass media, schools, etc. (and too often reproduced by teachers and parents), by claiming the problem is just their male peers. Any "disruptive effect" is contingent on society. To think otherwise is to cede a terrain of meaningful and necessary struggle.

     What about the comparison with afrocentric schools, another programme the TDSB recently launched?

     Unlike afrocentric schools, boys' schools would apparently not be open to all students nor exist within a regular school. Unlike boys in general, black students face sharp racism and discrimination. Ontario's curriculum arguably does little to combat this and even perpetuates white supremacy (as well as largely writing the working class out of history).

     Are boys somehow oppressed in education? To be sure, like working class women, young working class men will face exploitation and oppression their entire lives. (Out in the daily grind women face gendered violence, and make less than men - only 32% of unemployed women qualified for regular EI benefits compared to 40% of unemployed men.) Which boys (and which girls) are most at risk? But that is not what the supporters of a "Male leadership academy" are asking.

     Instead their argument rests on a fantastic misrepresentation about our education system being run by anti-baseball, anti-war, pro-princess matriarchs. This is often couched in a view that teachers, especially elementary school teachers, being predominantly women, are poor role models or managers of boys - analogous to the notion that boys can't be properly raised by single mothers!

     This too needs to be confronted. (And Dr. Spence does talk about youngsters facing a "fatherless world.") On the one hand, his proposal goes against the "de-gendering" of parenting and education as women's work. On the other hand, by claiming the problem is women being teachers or parents, it attacks women as workers and mothers. The implied idea that women actually run and organize the education system, according to some dominating feminine character, is ludicrous.

     Despite debate, all parties agree that afrocentric schools are an attempt to ameliorate particular conditions in an unhealthy society. There is no claim that gendering schooling will somehow lead to greater equality. Combine all this with the conception of boys as bossed around by big Mama, the idea that boys and girls are just two solitudes, and their obedience to capitalist schools is the key to success - and the whole project appears dangerous.

     If poor male performance in schools is the consequence of both an underfunded and oppressive school system and an oppressive gender system under capitalism, then the solution can't be a retrenchment of the former to buttress the latter. As one commentator recently said, "questions of sexuality, race, ethnicity, social class, disability, and cultural background all need to be taken into consideration when thinking about boys as individuals and the pecking order that exists among them."

     Solutions have to challenge and overcome both the condition and role of education in the gender system, combating sexism and leading towards the full development of all youth in society.