Discourses of Crisis and Loss: Analysing the ‘Boys' Underachievement’ Debate

Abstract

An analysis is presented of the various discourses through which the recent debate over boys' ‘underachievement’ in school was constituted in the British broadsheet newspapers, in academic research, and in the statements of politicians and policy makers during the late 1990s. A number of academic commentators have argued that the debate over boys' ‘underachievement’ represents a ‘moral panic’ and/or a crisis of contemporary masculinity. In this article it is argued that the debate over ‘underachieving boys' has been constituted through a discourse of crisis and loss which focuses on particular representations of gender, masculinity (and femininity) and feminism whilst marginalizing issues of ‘race’ and class. The ways are examined in which the boys' ‘underachievement’ debate operates as a form of ‘collective (and selective) forgetting’, making few or no connections with previous debates over ‘academic underachievement’ amongst other groups, such as Paul Willis's work on the anti-school cultures of white working-class young men, feminists' concerns over girls' relative ‘underachievement’ compared to boys in science and mathematics, and the Rampton/Swann Reports on ‘academic underachievement’ amongst Black (especially African Caribbean) students during the 1970s and 1980s. The article ends by considering the implications of this analysis for current understandings of the relationship between gender, ‘race’ and class as they are constituted and lived both inside and outside of the academic domain.