Education Policy, Gender and Boys’ Schooling

Abstract

As noted in Chapter 1, there is now a globalized educational discourse about ‘failing boys’ circulating in the privileged nations of the global north — what Marcus Weaver-Hightower (2003a) has called the ‘boy turn’ in gender policies in schooling and in associated politics and theorizing. Weaver-Hightower uses the evocative concept ‘boy turn’ to encapsulate two aspects of contemporary gender politics in schooling, namely to depict the turn away from a girls’ focus, and secondly to capture the anti-feminist stance which suggests it is time for boys to have a ‘turn’ in respect of policies and funding. This boy turn works with an essentialized category of ‘boys’, and indeed of ‘girls’, rather than working with and recognizing various and variegated practices of mas­culinities and femininities. In our view what is required instead is a more complex ‘post’ approach to policy production and practice which would recognize the complexity of both the categories of boys and girls, or rather practices of masculinity and femininity, and acknowledge as well other factors such as social class, poverty, ethnicity, sexuality, disability and so on.