Fear and loathing are part of the fabric of school life for boys, as familiar as smells of cabbage and the bustle of the playground. The education system has belatedly begun to recognise these fears rather than ignore or contain them. Anti-bullying initiatives are on the mainstream agenda, but the increasingly competitive environment of schooling militates against such efforts. Bob Connell has referred to schools as 'masculinity-making devices', not passive recipients of dominant gender definitions but active agents in the process of becoming male. This project is lubricated by fear; fear of failure, fear of being disliked, fear of fear itself.
These fears are particularly exposed at the point of transition from primary to secondary school, the critical moment when boyhood has to be dispensed with in favour of preparation for manhood. My own move from a small primary school to an environment of fourteen hundred children provoked a range of fears, which I was convinced that I had to manage alone. I had heard terrifying stories of the violence and punishment awaiting all of us. One boy walking to school on his first day was knocked to the ground and had his uniform ripped by a fifth year.
I had never been inside the school, and had only glanced at its grey, uniform exterior. My fantasies of its rooms drew upon a collage of distorted images of bleak locations, half-absorbed from television and nightmares. These fantasies were hard to forget, even after they had been replaced by familiar rooms and smells. Such fantasies reinforce the need for prospective secondary school children to visit their new school while still at primary school in order to discuss the move. Fortunately such visits tend to be standard practice now.
| I can still recall the terror I felt on my first journey up the hill to secondary school |
My experiences of fear to date, fear of the dark, of demons, was unlike the oppressively tangible fear of the anonymous monotony of male violence. I prepared myself for two states of existence, trying to mask my fear of being attacked or putting a brave face on the verbal and physical aggression when my turn would come. Primary school offered no strategy to deal with the latter, being attacked in secondary school would be irreversible. It would lead to social disintegration, dislocating me from those who commanded status and respect. I can still recall the terror I felt on my first journey up the hill to secondary school.
Reflecting back on that time, it would have seemed natural for the small clusters of boys and girls moving to a larger school to stick together, seeking protection within their previously known sub-group. This didn't happen with boys. All previous pecking orders were discarded as new social formations and fragile alliances were formed. These new groupings are established at a considerable cost. Angela Phillips in 'The Trouble with Boys' quotes a survey which found that half of school children reported bullying at the age of eleven, two years later this figure dropped to a third. She encapsulates the atmosphere of violence during the traditional phase;
'When boys fight it is deadly serious, when they work that is serious too, and when they fail, the failure is total.'
Total failure brings with it social isolation, the fear of knowing that no one could be relied upon when the chips are down. I felt the raw fear of being disliked keenly at this transitional stage of my life. Yet I was unable to recognise that this was a common experience for boys. Instead I concentrated on developing shared interests with my peers, to act as a shield against isolation. This search for similarity may explain the phenomenon identified in Nick Homby's Fever Pitch - his account of his lifelong obsession with Arsenal Football Club. He distinguished the genders at this stage by the tendency for girls to develop personalities while boys developed obsessions. These obsessions are typically football, cricket, computer games or pop music. Knowledge of your chosen obsession creates dialogue with others and acts as a buffer against outsiders.
Revisiting this time with a contemporary who remains a close friend, it was revealing how events were marked by 'various pop songs which we nurtured at the time as tokens of our mutual respect. I laced my obsession with pop music with humour in order to talk myself out of trouble and disguise my fears. Evenings would be spent in bed clutching my transistor radio to my ear, hearing a couple of tracks from the new Jam album, or straining to spot the differences in some remix from an obscure indie band like Modern English who virtually no one else had heard of anyway. Shored up with this knowledge, I could treat playground discussions on the top ten with appropriate disdain and gain entry into a more selective gathering of serious musos.
I am still in contact with another one of my friends from this time who now works for a national music magazine and still discusses obscure current listening. He recently perused my CD collection with recognisable disinterest and I was suitably humbled. At the age of eleven the stakes were higher, my obsession with pop music provided words to talk my way out of frightening situations, to suppress the aches in my gut. Fear of fear itself. Boys had to learn quickly.
The transition from primary to secondary school was loaded with added significance as my struggle to mask terror coincided with recognition of deeper existential fears. Sitting in my bed at night and literally shaking with fear. The first time I realised my own mortality is a resonant memory of my childhood. Waking up when everyone else is asleep and feeling my stomach churn. Imagining my gravestone, recognising that I wasn't going to be different to everyone else. That the key to immortality wouldn't be discovered before my time would come.
| My struggle to mask terror coincided with recognition of deeper existential fears |
The rawness of my mortality did not trivialise my schooltime fears. In hindsight the fears seem indivisible. The loss of the social milieu of primary school, the demands of integration into a potentially hostile peer group in itself provoked deeply held fears of annihilation. The special quality of the individual attention of the primary school teacher was gone forever. Recognition of mortality and your marginal place within the scheme of things seems an almost inevitable reaction.
Yet there is no legitimate space to express these competing fears. On the contrary, as already suggested schools implicitly foster and transmit these fears. There needs to be greater awareness within the education system of the fears underlying boys' struggle not to fail. The growing impetus towards more streaming within schools is unlikely to address the side-effects of such policies on the shaping of masculinities. In an environment which encourages demarcation and division, boys will seek out other forms of power (sporting prowess, physical aggression) to avoid failure. Those with no alternative will be marginalised or create destructive cultures of resistance.
My first year in secondary school was a learning curve, where I suppressed feeling, and fought desperately to mask my fears. The game playing in the school setting reinforces the techniques of power and control with which men are supposed to equip themselves for the demands of the workplace. These strategies also have an inevitable impact upon personal relationships.
Nevertheless there are always those who feel the fear and find it overwhelming. The education system cannot meet their needs in its present form. At best these boys become disaffected, at worse they embark upon patterns of self-destructive behaviour which ultimately leads them into institutions.
Exposing the vulnerability of masculine identity means finding viable ways for boys to articulate their fears. I am not sure how easy I would have found it to express my fears given the opportunity of a safe environment. It would have been fun to find another use for all the emotional energy I was expending trying to contain my fears and appear relaxed and indifferent. David Jackson and Jonathan Salisbury's recent book Challenging Macho Values (see review elsewhere in this issue) provides details of practical activities illustrating how these fears may be expressed in classrooms. The authors acknowledge the difficulty of such a task, but argue that while boys may buy into the competitive and masculinist discourse of school they suffer considerable emotional costs.
| Exposing the vulnerability of masculine identity means finding viable ways for boys to articulate their fears |
Feeling fear is not a totally negative experience. It has a healthy vitality if you realise that you are not alone, you are not unique in feeling this fear. Recently sharing my fears with a friend from that time was a deeply moving experience. I was finally able to reflect upon the siege mentality of that early time at secondary school. It's a mentality which men carry into their working lives and offers an insight into our disconnectedness. We can feel disabled if our earlier transition points were not 'good enough' experiences, when the fear is exposed and others appear to be coping.
The impact of transitions is of course felt well before the move from primary to secondary school. The boy's first taste of time away from his parents will provoke undisguised fear. As a parent these moments can be unbearable, prompting our own feelings of abandonment to resurface. As a father, time away may become established so early that it is easy to ignore what this means to us. But it is crucial for men to make these connections so that we recognise our fear and recognise the fears of our sons which they may experience as impossible to articulate in structured school settings. My eight year old son has already decided that expressing fear leads to derision within his peer group, and while he can still articulate these fears to me, it is unclear how long he will continue to do his.
The transition from primary to secondary school has received limited attention during the recent media interest in boy's under-achievement. There have been few attempts to dig deeper and consider the emotional conflicts which can define masculine identity and suppress potential at this stage of life. Some commentators have contrasted the disproportionate teacher-time boys obtain in mixed classrooms with their lower attainment. What is less clear is the specific quality and essence of this teacher attention. It seems unlikely that much of this attention is fostering safe expression of fear in school settings.
Men have a responsibility as role models and educators to invest time and effort in considering the long term effects on boys of the masculine flight from vulnerability, the urge to flee from terror. The great barrier to such an undertaking is a willingness to confront our own fear, perhaps for the first time.
Copyright © Achilles Heel Collective
If you've enjoyed reading this article on-line please consider subscribing to the magazine.
