Boys’ schools — we ignore the signs at our peril

Seven pupils were charged with breaching Bishops Diocesan College's code of conduct. File photo.
Seven pupils were charged with breaching Bishops Diocesan College's code of conduct. File photo.
Image: Esa Alexander

Should we rethink the role of boys’ schools in SA?

Two highly disturbing events demand that the question be grappled with by education authorities but also by parents and teachers in the schools themselves. We ignore the signs at our peril.

At Bishops, one of the most elite boys’ schools on the continent, a group of pupils in one residence beat up a fellow pupil, landing the child in hospital for two days.

It was the sickening brutality of the crime that caught the attention.

This is certainly not the first time that this school grabbed media attention for male violence, such as in competitive sports against a neighbouring school.

The problem, of course, with violence in prestigious schools is that the first impulse of leaders is to close rank in the hope that the story goes away.

When exposed, there is a flurry of activity that follows a familiar script — we condemn violence in all its forms, we will leave no stone unturned to get to the bottom of things, we will act firmly against the transgressors, whatever happened does not represent the values of our school. That kind of thing.

What also happens among the boys themselves, especially in the residences, is the ring of silence in the wake of an atrocity: what happens in Vegas ...

How do I know this? Because the pattern is familiar from my own experience in a men’s residence at my former university.

Do not believe the Bishops leaders: the problem does not simply go away with sanction for the violent boys.

Once embedded in an institutional culture, trust me, it takes extraordinary measures to change the behaviour of young men and nothing in the Bishops’ response indicates that they are serious about the underlying problem.

Such vicious and violent behaviour among the boys will recur in one form or another at Bishops, of that I am sure.

Further down the main road of elite schools, the principal of Wynberg Boys made one of the most misogynistic speeches to senior boys on the occasion of the valedictory service.

In the audience sat not only the boys receiving the departing message ahead of the final exams, but the mothers of the matriculants, some of their sisters, and female teachers.

The speech was shared widely online and was about reasons that the boys should be “extremely thankful” that they were male.

Sickening, but here are some of those reasons to be so thankful, says the head of the school: “You can’t fall pregnant. Car mechanics tell you the truth. Your underwear costs R49.99 for a three-pack. You only have to shave your face and neck. You have one mood all the time. Phone conversations are over in 30 seconds flat. You can open all your own jars. You can do your nails with a pocket knife.” 

“Concerned staff” from the sister school, Wynberg Girls, wrote a stinging, though measured, rebuke of this sexist speech, charging that it “reinforced the very gender biases we should be working to dismantle” and “promoted ideas that perpetuate toxic masculinity”.

There is a connection between what happened at Bishops and Boys.

At Bishops you see the consequences of the toxic masculinity encouraged at Boys.

At Boys, you witness the connections between what leaders think and say that leads to the incidence of young men’s violence at Bishops.

One thing is clear from research and common sense: young men are not born with these sexist and violent behaviours — they learn them from powerful institutions of socialisation, one of them on display being our schools.

Which, of course, raises a question about that other socialising institution, the home.

Where are the parents in all of this? What values are the youngsters taught about being boys and young men, before and after school?

No doubt, there are many good parents of Bishops boys; I know some of them.

But I do not for one minute believe that the onus for such violent behaviour lies with the school alone.

If I recall, Bishops is an Anglican school with a lovely chapel.

What on earth do they teach these young men about being human?

What Bishops needs to do is launch an external intervention to deal with the dangerous masculinity in its midst.

The violent boys can be thankful that the parents of the assaulted child did not report a criminal complaint out of concern for the effect it would have rest of their lives.

That is a reprieve.

What is now needed is a systematic of re-education for those boys and everyone else.

What Wynberg Boys needs to do is for the principal to apologise unreservedly for that disturbing speech and demonstrate in his leadership that he will make amends for what happened; failing that, the governing body needs to sanction the behaviour in public since this was a public event in a public school.

And what all of us need to think about is how Boys’ schools should be radically changed in SA to avert these kinds of behaviours — or whether they should exist at all in a democratic society grappling with the scourge of societal violence in general and gender-based violence in particular.


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