In recent months, national headlines have once again highlighted the pandemic of violence against women and girls. At the same time, schools across the country are considering the best approaches to safeguard students drawn into Andrew Tate’s misogynistic rhetoric. However, it continues to feel that there is something missing from the national narrative: how can schools positively engage young men in the fight against misogyny?
Since 2021, I have led whole-school initiatives on gender equality, including a research project which gathered data from over 800 students aged 11 to 18. The key principle guiding my work on this topic is this: To make meaningful progress and further the equality agenda for women and girls, young men must be positively engaged in the debate.
The teaching profession has a delicate balance to strike. We must be committed to promoting gender equality, while also ensuring that young men don’t feel alienated and unprepared to join in the conversation. My research shows that it is possible to share strong and important messages about gender equality, bringing young men along with us without compromising on message.
Teacher confidence is key in these situations; so how do we empower our colleagues to steer these potentially challenging conversations, ensuring that they feel confident to respond effectively to students’ questions and comments? A whole-school approach is vital, and here is what my research has shown:
Open up the dialogue
It sounds simple, but of course these conversations take time. Teachers are all experts in building trust with their students, and it is vital that they feel supported by senior leaders to take the time out of their lessons to address these issues and turn them into teachable moments.
Listening and accepting that students’ feelings are real and valid helps to build trust, as does questioning students’ comments in a non-judgemental fashion.
Coach students through their thinking
In our setting, unpicking students’ concerns and the language they use has yielded positive results and effected a shift in attitudes. Once again, students need to know that they are not being judged, and they describe feeling supported when teachers repeat this message explicitly.
Providing concrete evidence is also key, but our research has shown that teachers do not need to have all the answers then and there. Students report that they respect teachers who go away and do their research, re-approaching the subject once they feel well-prepared and informed.
Consider intersectionality
Discussions about gender equality provide the perfect opportunity to open up the discussion about diversity more widely. Listening to our students, it has been helpful to understand their perceptions of what feminism means for men and boys.
Meeting them at this level has shown us that students need the opportunity to explore how gender inequalities affect men as well as women. In turn, this has prompted productive and meaningful discussions on how gender equality benefits everyone, and has shown students that teachers support them.
End with a call to action
It is important to reassure students that we know that they did not invent the culture of gender inequality in which they find themselves. However, they did inherit it. As such, they have control of their place within it.
The fight for gender equality will be won far faster with the help of male allies. This is where schools have a real opportunity to lead a call to action and empower young men. It feels crucial to focus on positive progress and to look towards the future, as this allows students to regain a sense of control over the situation.
Education professionals can and must advocate for sustainable and meaningful work on gender equality within education. We need to show that proactively and positively engaging young men on this issue will help to further the equality agenda for women.
Listening to our students and showing them that gender equality has benefits for all is the first step towards empowering them to use their agency and privilege to be allies.
Adolescent boys are best guided by their fathers, not intersectionality and the false assumptions of critical theory, critical pedagogy etc.
The evidence is overwhelming. Boys without fathers are more likely to fall into gangs, do worse at school and end up in prison.
Yet intersectionality, underpinned by the evolutionary-denialist and blank slate assumptions, reduces fatherhood to a mere “role” that could be performed by anyone.
Critical theory reduces the family to a unit that perpetuates “social norms”. No wonder young people want to run a mile from it.
Intersectionality is a harmful ideology that makes zero-sum assumptions about relationships, that is predicated on making assumptions about children based on their identity markers. It removes individual responsibility and agency, assuming that we act-out, ESP like, “social norms”.
Intersectionality labels children as marginalised or privileged based on protected characteristics, where we should be treating them as individuals.
Hence boys are now being taught that their ambition is aggression. That their attraction is perpetuating misogyny. That families are harmful. That girls must be “empowered”, boys disempowered, all in the name of equity. Well many white working-class boys belong to the poorest communities in the countries, but we must obey the ideology of intersectionality which classes them as having white male -privilege and persecute them accordingly.
It’s an ideology that should have no place in driving how we treat children. It is a form of mental abuse.
Admin, I really apricate to you For sharing this article.