EDUCATING BOYS

BOYS AND THE

HUMANITIES:
MAKING THE
TWAIN MEET

Are the stereotypes that have kept girls from

STEM preventing boys from pursuing
HEALing professions?
By Tim Spitsberg & Jonathan A. Plucker
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!
-Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West”

F
or many years, writers, scholars, and
researchers have expressed concern about
the apparent misalignment between boys’
physical and intellectual development and
the requirements of most K-12 schools (e.g., Froschl
& Sprung, 2005; Gurian & Stephens, 2006). This situ-
ation has received increased public attention in the
U.S. with the recent publication of Richard Reeves’
GETTY IMAGES

TIM SPITSBERG (tim_spitsberg1@baylor.edu; @TMSpitsberg) is a doctoral student in the School of Education

at Baylor University, Waco, TX. JONATHAN A. PLUCKER (jplucker@jhu.edu; @JonathanPlucker) is a
professor of education in the School of Education at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.

12 Kappan April 2023

(2022) book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male
is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About
It.
Although much of the current emphasis on boys’
disengagement from school is U.S.-focused, an
international report by UNESCO (2022a) notes
that, globally, 132 million boys of primary and
secondary school age are out of school entirely, and
those who do attend are at greater risk than girls of
failure, grade repeating, and overall poor outcomes.
Unsurprisingly, the situation for low-income and
minoritized boys is even more dire, as a great deal
of recent scholarship has found (Hines et al., 2020).
The point of this work is not to pit the needs of
boys and girls against each other, but rather to note
that boys and girls have different developmental
patterns that likely require gender-specific inter-
ventions in schools and society. The research from
UNESCO (2022b) tells us that “girls have more diffi-
culty accessing education and are more likely than
boys to be out of school, particularly at primary
level. But as education progresses, it becomes a
boys’ problem” (UNESCO, 2022b, p. 3). Engaging
with the challenges boys face need not come at the
expense of girls, as the authors of the UNESCO
(2022a) report take great pains to point out:
addressing boys’ disengagement from and
disadvantage in education is not a zero-sum
game. Supporting boys does not mean that girls
lose out and vice versa. Equal education opportu-
nities benefit both girls and boys and the broader
society. (p. 12)
Boys and the HEAL professions
The gender stereotyping that often discourages
girls from pursuing certain fields is no less a fac-
tor for boys, who face different but still pervasive
career stereotypes. Large, well-funded STEM pro-
grams for girls have helped counter the perception
that these fields are primarily for men. In a 2018
commentary, Christine Henseler suggests that a
similar effort might be needed in the humanities
for boys:
Young girls are realizing they can have careers in
STEM, and women today are succeeding in such
male-dominated industries. While many hurdles
persist, the attitudes that kept women out of STEM
are changing and being discussed in public. But
our society suffers when boys and men are actively
discouraged from pursuing their interests in the
arts and humanities. . . . So where, then, are the
programs and mentoring networks that encourage
AT A GLANCE
• Boys worldwide are increasingly disengaged from
formal schooling and are at greater risk of poor
outcomes than girls.
• Boys in the U.S. are falling significantly behind girls in
reading achievement, and the gap doubles as they move
through school.
• Men are much less likely than women to enter the
health, education, administration, and literacy (HEAL)
professions.
• Efforts similar to those used to promote STEM to girls
might be useful for improving HEAL participation among
boys.
• Educators can support boys’ interest in HEAL and the
humanities by ensuring that their curricula are engaging
to boys and do not reinforce gender stereotypes.
boys and men to pursue professional careers in the
arts and humanities? Such an intervention could
ultimately strengthen society struggling under the
pressures of great, sweeping technological change.
Reeves (2022) also notes the lack of men in health,
education, administration, and literacy (HEAL)
professions. In some HEAL fields, such as psychol-
ogy, social work, and K-8 teaching, the percentage
of men has dropped by at least half since 1980, to
around 20% in 2020 (Reeves, 2022). Issues of race
and socioeconomic status create additional layers
of complication. At a time when research high-
lights the need for an increasingly diverse teacher
workforce that mirrors our increasingly diverse
student population (Goldhaber, Theobald, & Tien,
2019; Redding, 2019; Terrier, 2020), the decrease
in Black and Hispanic male teachers complicates
any efforts to diversify the education workforce
(National Center for Education Statistics, 2019;
Wong, 2019).
HEAL jobs may offer lower pay than many STEM
jobs, but many tend to be fairly recession-proof. And
attracting men into HEAL fields is not just good for
men, given that many HEAL professions — espe-
cially health care and education — are currently
experiencing labor shortages that are likely to
worsen (Reeves, 2022). Encouraging boys and men
to consider these professions can benefit our econ-
omy and culture as a whole.
Kappan V104 N7 13
EDUCATING BOYS | HUMANITIES
Engaging with the challenges boys
face need not come at the expense
of girls.
A lack of engagement in reading
The most recently available National Assessment
of Educational Progress (NAEP) report cards for
American schools support the findings regarding
disengagement and lower performance, in read-
ing in particular, as boys progress through formal
schooling. Data spanning 2019 to 2022 show that
a 7-point reading score gender gap in 4th grade (on
a 500-point scale) stretches to 9 points by 8th grade
and 13 by 12th grade. Boys start behind, and stay
behind, girls when it comes to reading achievement
(National Center for Education Statistics, 2022).
For comparison, in math, girls start with a smaller
3-point gap behind boys, which peaks during mid-
dle school at 6 points, and then drops back to 3
points by 12th grade. Schools still have work to do
regarding girls’ STEM achievement, but whereas
gender gaps stay roughly steady for girls in math,
the gap for boys in reading starts nearly two and half
times larger and roughly doubles throughout boys’
tenure in school. Similar patterns can be found in
English language arts, writing, and social studies
assessment results at both the national and state
level.
Troubling trends such as these are nothing new
for boys and the humanities. The release of the
1998 NAEP results, along with their own obser-
vations, led former secondary teachers Michael
Smith and Jeffery D. Wilhelm to write (2002)
Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys: Literacy in the Lives
of Young Men, in which they engaged in an inten-
sive, longitudinal study of 49 diverse boys and
their lives in and around literacy. The authors use
Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) flow theory as
a theoretical framework for their observations and
conclusions.
Flow theory focuses on periods of deep task
engagement that lead to optimal performance. Smith
and Wilhelm condense Csikszentmihalyi’s original
description of the flow state to four characteristics
that facilitate this experience of flow:
• Competence and control.
• Appropriate level of challenge.
• Clear goals and feedback.
• A focus on the immediate.
14 Kappan April 2023
To these, they add a fifth characteristic based on
their engagement with the boys in their study:
• A social connection.
These qualities tend to be rare in school reading,
Smith and Wilhelm explain. In fact, schools instead
often offer up curriculum and teaching strategies
that seem diametrically opposed to the attain-
ment of flow states. In the words of one of the boys
they interviewed, “reading don’t fix no Chevys.”
School-based reading instruction isn’t engaging for
students, especially boys. Instead, it is something
done to them. And given the importance of agency
for talent development, this fact presents a major
developmental roadblock (Plucker, Williams, & Gao,
2021).
Smith and Wilhelm provide five expectations
that boys have of their teachers, an “implicit social
contract” required for them to trust that the work
in school may be worth their engagement. In short,
they want teachers to:
• Get to know them personally.
• Care about them as individuals.
• P
 ay attention to their interests in some
manner.
• H
 elp them learn and endeavor to make sure
that they’ve actually done so.
• B
 e personally passionate, committed,
hardworking, and knowledgeable.
As Kenny McKee (2022) explains, these expec-
tations still have significant value for practitioners
who want to make their instruction more engaging.
Assessing curricula and instructional practices for
these expectations, as well as the five characteristics
(Smith & Wilhelm, 1990) that produce flow, provides
leaders a robust, but not unwieldy, appraisal that
can occur at the district, school, department, or even
individual classroom level. And, when present, these
qualities are likely to raise engagement and achieve-
ment for both boys and girls.
Targeted interventions for boys
The flow-based interventions described above
are a good starting point for many educators and
schools. But boys’ underachievement and lack of
participation in the humanities and HEAL pro-
fessions are so severe that we may need to take
additional, bolder steps to address them. As both
the UNESCO report and Reeves note, there are
precious few interventions targeted specifically
for increasing boys’ achievement and attracting
them into HEAL careers, especially compared to
the numerous, often well-funded programs for
assisting girls in STEM education and careers. The
success of many of these STEM programs provides
evidence that investing in HEAL interventions for
boys is a promising practice.
Big-picture changes
Reeves and others recommend some “big swings”
at the problem. One of the most intriguing sugges-
tions is starting boys a year later in school. Given
boys’ physical and intellectual immaturity relative
to girls of the same age — a difference with import-
ant implications for schools and learning — Reeves
hypothesizes that a one-year delay could help foster
boys’ learning in school and perhaps even improve
the learning experience for girls.
We expected this suggestion to be an especially
controversial idea, but in our conversations with
parents, it has proved to be anything but contro-
versial. It is already a common practice in upper-
middle-class communities, with parents holding
boys out of school for a year or having them be held
back at some point in elementary school, a practice
commonly referred to as redshirting. Of course, most
students do not have upper-middle-class parents,
and the costs to a caregiver of starting a boy a year
later in school can be significant. For this reason, the
idea of academic redshirting should be limited to
those communities with easy access to high-quality
and affordable early childhood programs.
Another potential strategy is to ramp up efforts to
recruit men into HEAL professions, especially early
childhood education and English teaching. The
use of pipeline or pathways programs is common
when encouraging girls to consider and thrive in
STEM fields (Almukhambetova, Torrano, & Nam,
2023; Rincón & Rodriguez, 2021). Such programs
are less common regarding boys and HEAL-related
disciplines and careers, and Reeves (2022) provides
evidence that they tend to be significantly under-
funded, calling into question whether the few exist-
ing programs can have an appreciable impact. If they
are to have an impact, these programs should be
expanded and funded at much higher levels.
The UNESCO report (2022a) opens with a set of
recommendations that include advancing equal
access to education and preventing boys from
dropping out; making learning transformative, safe,
and inclusive for learners of all genders; investing
in better data and generating evidence; building
and financing equitable and inclusive education
systems; and promoting and ensuring integrated,
coordinated, and system-wide approaches. Any
solutions likely will involve changes to the microsys-
tem (students, parents, and peers); the mesosystem
(communities and schools); and the macrosystem
(governments and development partners). None of
these ideas seem particularly radical or controver-
sial in the context of the report, but its authors are
constantly aware of the fraught landscape of gender
and regularly remind readers that politicization and
polarization won’t advance positive educational
outcomes.
Gender-sensitive curricula and classrooms
Although there has been “mixed progress in tack-
ling bias in textbooks,” the presence of gender
stereotypes in curricular materials “has serious
implications on how boys construct their own sense
of masculinity and may limit their career choices,
such as in the care and teaching sector” (UNESCO,
2022a, p. 107). Removing gender-discriminatory
language and concepts and actively making texts
more gender-sensitive has the potential to enable
boys to see themselves in HEAL careers.
The UNESCO report also recommends child-
friendly transformations, including learning
environments in which student differences are
acknowledged and appreciated. Building such envi-
ronments may require, perhaps non-intuitively, more
attention to gender, not less. Gender-responsive
pedagogy, originally created to train teachers and
schools to educate girls appropriately, may benefit
all students when it reflects “an understanding of
gender roles and biases, and in addressing these,
encourages equitable participation and outcomes”
Kappan V104 N7 15
EDUCATING BOYS | HUMANITIES
Removing gender-discriminatory
language and concepts and actively
making texts more gender-sensitive
has the potential to enable boys to
see themselves in HEAL careers.
(UNESCO, 2022a, p. 107). Gender-friendly learning
strategies, such as paying attention to how teachers
interact with students of all genders, adopting inclu-
sive language, and eliminating gender bias in lesson
content and materials, can help teachers provide
the kind of individualized instruction that is often
recommended but difficult to implement.
16 Kappan April 2023
Reporting results
We should not pretend that gender isn’t important
in educational settings or decide that resources and
attention should shift to boys at the expense of girls.
Instead, we must acknowledge the complexity of
gender, engage in thoughtful research, and create
research-derived interventions that serve all school
populations. These solutions are not one-size-fits-
all, nor do they require us to bifurcate programs and
resources according to gender. But we do need to
address gender differences in educational settings.
In the category of lowest-hanging fruit, gender
differences in student outcomes should be reported
in press releases, publicly released data, and reports
at every level of education. This transparency will
help hold us accountable as we tackle gender issues,
including the presence of boys and men in the
humanities and HEAL fields and of girls and women
GETTY IMAGES
in STEM education and careers. Currently, not all
states report outcomes by gender. For example, a
quick look at the Tennessee K-12 assessment results
via the State Report Card shows test results broken
out for students in a large range of subgroups,
including race/ethnicity, economic disadvantage,
disability, English learner, foster, homeless, migrant,
and active-duty military parents. Reporting data
within all these categories is laudable. But the
absence of gender is glaring, especially because the
inclusion of gender would almost certainly lead to
interesting and important interactions in the data.
Differences, not destiny
The epigraph for and title of this paper are based
on Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The Ballad of East and
West.” The title comes from the famous first two
lines, which are often interpreted as a statement that
some things are simply incompatible and should be
accepted as such. However, Kipling’s next two lines
make it clear that he believes differences should be
acknowledged but not allowed to rule our expecta-
tions and actions.
We believe this is a wise approach for educators,
parents, and policy makers as we tackle the problem
of male achievement in humanities education and
HEAL professions: Acknowledge the problems yet
refuse to accept them as destiny and instead work
together to address them comprehensively.
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