Wanted: Men of Purpose

The Manosphere. This online, man-made safe space serves as a kind of glasshouse of masculine performance, there for observers to imitate or revile. However one might measure the relative percentages of truth and lies on offer in the Manosphere, however one might separate the true masculinity on offer there from the Manosphere’s many vain effeminacies masquerading as virile strength, one thing is clear: men are in the middle of an identity crisis.

We could leave aside the various instances of that crisis that emanate from the sexual Left, by which I mean the LGBTQ emporium of options for how one might live out one’s manhood. But why should we? Left, Right, and Center—we can’t agree on what it means to be truly manly. A central cause of the present crisis is that America’s men have almost a complete lack of experience with single-sex education before college.

While I agree completely with Scott Yenor’s point regarding military academies and the fittingness of especially male preparation for the work of war, my primary advocacy for single-sex education concerns pubescent children, whose faculties require immediate and urgent shaping, modeling, and self-discipline in sex-specific environments, especially during the critical years of middle school and high school. The now multigenerational ubiquity of coeducation and the resulting erasure of manly memory and tradition have come home to roost in the not-so-climate-controlled hothouse of the Manosphere. The result is nostalgic guessing and ludicrous—and sometimes hideous—innovations about what it means to be a real man.

The physical shapelessness of boys today has been much commented on by everyone from Bobby Kennedy Jr. to the weightlifting bro on YouTube with 30 views of his morning workout. The moral shapelessness of boys, however, has been less clearly established.

Shaping a sweet boy into a strong and good man is principally a soulful venture, one that requires great attention to virtues. But while virtues are for both men and women, boys and girls, most virtues must be articulated, explained, acquired, and possessed in a particularly male or manly way for boys to become good men. For instance, there is sex-specific training required for the specifically masculine wit, which is a kind of verbal and mental power barely even recognized in today’s educational discourse, except perhaps when it is noticed as the problem of boys’ verbal bullying in coed schools, where it all too often goes uneducated and ungoverned.

Lest we waste too much time warming our hands on the third rail of normative statements concerning sexual difference, let us retreat to a few overwhelming statistics. According to a Stetson University comparative study, in coed classes, girls scored 59% proficiency, while boys scored just 37%. But in single-sex classes, boys surpassed girls, scoring at 86% proficiency, while girls also surpassed coed classrooms, albeit to a lesser extent, at 75%. This study, conducted over three years in the 2000s, featured identical demographics in both cohorts from the same large public school in Florida, using the same test results from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.

As a statistical matter, we have long understood that boys and girls learn differently and require different kinds of pedagogical formation and techniques. If you tease out the numbers, a unisex education tends to drag down both boys’ and girls’ experiences in contrast to sex-specific environments.

Or if we are tired of blaming boys—I know I am—we can just blame the teachers and school administrators who sit on such statistical (and duplicable) stunners like this study. As all wise educators for millennia and many neurobiologists of the last 50 years know well, boys have a different shape, inside and out, body and mind, which means shaping them into men requires different strategies than shaping girls into women.

If shaping boys in a sex-specific, educational way is rare, modeling manliness in education is even rarer. Though studies show that single-sex education is a statistical slam dunk, those who know the literature sometimes make seemingly shrewd caveats over instances where the single-sex education of boys seemed to backfire.

Leonard Sax, who has done very good work on the importance of boys’ distinct needs in education (and who contributed to this symposium), offered an example of this in a 2005 piece, “The Promise and Peril of Single-Sex Public Education” (emphasis theirs) in Education Week. Sax lays out various aspects of the statistical juggernaut that show boys (and girls) greatly benefit from single-sex education in elementary and middle schools, but then points out a number of cautionary examples:

But not all schools achieve good results when they venture into single-sex education. Newport Middle School in Newport, Ky., and Eagle Rock Junior High School in Idaho Falls, Idaho, abandoned single-sex classrooms after just one year. In each case, there was no significant improvement in grades or test scores; at Newport Middle School, discipline referrals for the boys soared. Becky Lenihan, a teacher at Newport Middle School with 14 years of teaching experience, said that she wrote up more boys for discipline problems during the one year the single-sex program was in place than in all of her previous years in education combined.

Yet, the fact that it was “Becky” at Newport Middle School and not, say, “Bob” or “Brian” tells us enough to suspect that what little problems there are in single-sex education stem from the lack of male teachers who can deal effectively with rowdy, bumptious boys. The explosion of Ritalin and other drugs being prescribed for boys in unisex classrooms over the past decades has effectively tranquilized them, a major indicator that we have lost the muscle memory, so to speak, of how to teach boys.

While Sax is right that we can reinvent the wheel with professional development for teaching boys—which is good to do for male and female teachers alike—we should not obscure the simpler lesson: men are best at teaching boys because men understand boys very well. Men are quicker to intuit how to run a classroom of boys, because that classroom is full of little versions of their younger selves.

And yet even in unisex education generally, men are roughly only 23% of the teachers in secondary and elementary classrooms, down from 30% in the late 1980s. Given the effeminacy of too many young men today, the number of genuinely masculine men in classrooms may be even lower, but good luck finding a pollster willing to ask that question. In single-sex education, it is only the rarest of schools that attempt to put male teachers in front of their all-boy classes—and yet it is a crying need. We cannot become what we cannot see. Girls have a great many women role models at the front of their classrooms; boys, not so much (especially outside of gym class). Little wonder that boys see academic excellence less and less as a manly pursuit.

Boys need living, breathing, serious men of high character and talent. They need their fathers, yes, but they also need men beyond their fathers, men who can show them that their fathers’ example is not an exception to the rule. They need men as their teachers who can serve as role models if they realize, as many do, they are more like their mom’s brother in temperament or talent than they are like their dad.

These arguments sound cornpone, even to my ears, but in our technocratic era of social dysfunction, perhaps some basic common sense is in order, even if it leads us to difficult proposals for rejuvenating male, single-sex education. For if the only other men talking to boys besides Dad are the likes of Andrew Tate, the possibility of handing down a healthy masculinity to the next generation is fraught indeed.

Masculine-focused self-discipline is another crucial benefit of male single-sex education. Puberty and its drives are profoundly different experiences for the two sexes, and the male hormonal turmoil creates powerful anger and strong desires for procreation. Those two desires, wild and uncontrolled when they first burst into the emotional world of a young boy, require certain habits of self-control that are different in form than the self-control girls must acquire.

Much of the Manosphere is made up of young men who were nearly destroyed by the power of their desires in their youth because they were not disciplined in any serious or mature way. Only in their 20s did they discover some online guru, be he good, bad, or ugly, who helped them by way of TikTok clips to begin to resist their own urges (to one extent or another). Marcus Aurelius is often tossed around as a kind of life raft of masculine hardness and solitary strength. But all these conversion stories mean a great many adult males who were too damaged in their youth to grow naturally, gently, humanly, and infinitely more powerfully self-controlled through long habit without heavy scars to their desires, their will, and, as is so often the case, their mind’s conception of what it means truly to be a good and great man.

Single-sex education benefits both girls and boys. In fact, there are more single-sex girls’ classrooms today than boys’ classrooms. That fits, given that boys have long been neglected, a fact best observed through the digital window we all have into the Manosphere.

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