Prince Hal in Time Out, or Boys’ Education and the Bogus Crisis of Masculinity

A book you probably won't find on David Brooks' bookshelf

 I follow the journalism of my country of birth just closely enough to suspect that David Brooks is a rather significant part of what is wrong with it. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky once suggested that behind the great scandals that attract everyone’s outrage there are often bigger abuses that pass virtually undetected. Thus, Herman and Chomsky argue, when the Watergate scandal broke there was widespread outrage, but no one ever seemed to care that Nixon had infiltrated and harassed non-establishment political organisations for years beforehand. Likewise, the Neanderthal commentary on Fox News deservedly attracts derision from those of us who are pretty sure that Obama is not a Kenyan-born socialist and other members of the reality-based community, yet perhaps the bigger outrage is that the supposedly rational New York Times employs a commentator of such stark prejudices and feeble argumentative skills as David Brooks.

When Brooks isn't opining that rich people make better presidents or concluding that America's rich got that way by working harder than everyone else, he's fouling the intellectual air with thought-farts like this recent piece on gender and education (reprinted in The Age last week). Before we light a math and open a window let's bask in the heady pong of Brooks' opening paragraphs:

Honor Code, by David Brooks

Henry V is one of Shakespeare’s most appealing characters. He was rambunctious when young and courageous when older. But suppose Henry went to an American school.

By about the third week of nursery school, Henry’s teacher would be sending notes home saying that Henry “had another hard day today.” He was disruptive during circle time. By midyear, there’d be sly little hints dropped that maybe Henry’s parents should think about medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Many of the other boys are on it, and they find school much easier.

Laurence Olivier as Henry V

By elementary school, Henry would be lucky to get 20-minute snatches of recess. During one, he’d jump off the top of the jungle gym, and, by the time he hit the ground, the supervising teachers would be all over him for breaking the safety rules. He’d get in a serious wrestling match with his buddy Falstaff, and, by the time he got him in a headlock, there’d be suspensions all around.

First, Henry would withdraw. He’d decide that the official school culture is for wimps and softies and he’d just disengage. In kindergarten, he’d wonder why he just couldn’t be good. By junior high, he’d lose interest in trying and his grades would plummet.

Then he’d rebel. If the official high school culture was über-nurturing, he’d be über-crude. If it valued cooperation and sensitivity, he’d devote his mental energies to violent video games and aggressive music. If college wanted him to be focused and tightly ambitious, he’d exile himself into a lewd and unsupervised laddie subculture. He’d have vague high ambitions but no realistic way to realize them. Day to day, he’d look completely adrift.


This is roughly what’s happening in schools across the Western world. ...

* * * * *

Yes, something like this is happening all the time in schools across the Western world. Everywhere you look, Shakespearean heroes are being tormented by politically correct schoolmarms and faceless education bureaucrats. Just last week, Richard III was suspended for bullying, and Othello got detention for pulling the pigtails of one of his classmates. 

David Brooks as Overpaid Milquetoast Hack

It's easy to ridicule Brooks for the pretentiousness of his references and the sloppiness of his thinking and writing--and it's also a great deal of fun--but this particular piece of drivel is worth a closer look. In her book Symptoms of Culture, Marjorie Garber suggests that borrowing from Shakespeare works as a sort of rhetorical Viagra to artificially engorge a rather flaccid argument. Given that Brooks seems to be complaining that schools as institutions don't do enough to nurture institution-defying genius, judging by this case at least, Garber's diagnosis would seem to be pretty sound.

Things really don't get any better as the piece goes on. Brooks notes, apparently with displeasure, that "the education system has become culturally cohesive, rewarding and encouraging a certain sort of person: one who is nurturing, collaborative, disciplined, neat, studious, industrious and ambitious." The children "who don't fit this ideal" are not aggravating little shits, but potential geniuses and charismatic leaders, poised to whip some Frog arse at the Battle of Agincourt or do some other kind of Great Heroic Act that Would Give American Conservatives a Big Boner. 


Brooks continues by noting that "Far from all, but many of the people who don’t fit in are boys." Of course, this is the problem. It's the "boy crisis." Brooks explains how "a decade or so ago, people started writing books and articles on the boy crisis. At the time, the evidence was disputable and some experts pushed back. Since then, the evidence that boys are falling behind has mounted. The case is closed. The numbers for boys get worse and worse." 


Even assuming that Brooks' description of the state of affairs is correct, we are entitled to ask a couple of questions. The first of these is, so what? Perhaps Brooks' glass of testosterone is not half empty but half full--that is, maybe we ought to look at the situation not as male underachievement but as girls fighting back against entrenched gender discrimination and at long last achieving closer to their full potential. The second question is, how, precisely, would rewarding rambunctiousness improve literacy performance and discipline among boys? I really doubt that encouraging wrestling and other forms of boyish boisterousness is going to result in a heightened appreciation of Shakespearean drama.


It seems significant that the normally staid Brooks--FFS, he blames the Sixties counterculture for Wall Street greed!--makes special pleading for boys' raucousness. To read Brooks usually means getting mercilessly flogged with a Victorian era sermon on the virtues of thrift, discipline and what not. Brooks isn't completely inconsistent here--he only seems to want to allow a bit of Y chromosome berserkery before bottling that carbonated testosterone up in government issue olive drab receptacles (yes, yes, David--what America really needs is a more martial culture. For God's sake, will someone think of the soldiers?!). In her guide to cultural symptoms, Marjorie Garber explains how the symptom is, as Freud put it, "a compromise formation": or, in Garber's words, the symptom is

quotation from pp 4-5

a sign of inner conflict, a symbol of conflicting desires. "I want to / but I am forbidden to"; 'I desire it / but I fear the consequences" 




There's certainly a lot to be said for looking at crises of masculinity this way. It certainly explains a lot of the special pleading that goes on for men and masculinity: in the early years of the 21st century, "men" means a special category of gendered individuals, not a synonym for a universal transcendent subject. This would simultaneously seem to give men (or, as I might put it, "us"--pretending for the moment that I'm a male of your species and not the supreme godly being you normally worship and adore) licence to make certain claims, thought there would have to be drawbacks, wouldn't there--like people asking why "we" had to go and fuck everything up so badly.