Julia Grant. The Boy Problem: Educating Boys in Urban America, 1870–1970.

Abstract

Julia Grant's The Boy Problem: Educating Boys in Urban America, 1870–1970 came at an opportune moment when I struggled to understand why my eight-year-old son had difficulties in his fourth-grade class. Unable to sit for extended periods and complete his assignments on time, my son interrupted his peers and his teacher. Rather than linking my son's problems to what Grant calls the current “moral panic” (p. 2) over bad boys of color, I learned that my son's difficulties were, instead, tied to centuries' old notions of acceptable and unacceptable behavior—in reality, learning styles—in and outside the classroom. Indeed, Grant's book forces us to reconsider the ineffective and destructive approaches in attempting to mold racially and ethnically diverse, migrant and immigrant, poor, working-class young boys into productive male citizens. She demonstrates that even when many European American boys in the early twentieth century had the opportunity to escape the clutches of poverty, prejudice, and the ghetto, entrenched racism, intimidation, and violence locked out African American boys from those same avenues of social mobility, forcing them to occupy the current ranks of the “boy problem.” Today's boy problem, she says, is a long-term “consequence of inadequate and punitive schools, poverty, race, ethnicity, and cultures of masculinity that emerge as an antidote to oppressive social structures” (p. 1).