Climates, not Cultures

A post about Culture, Performativity, Essentialist Masculinity and Différance. Also about boarding, which I think can be great when done right.

I became interested in masculinities through working in boarding schools with teenage boys. I moved to a boarding school for the first time about 10 years ago, and moved to living in the boarding house with the boys about two years later, thereafter spending 7 years living in two different boarding houses, in two different schools (in two different countries). It was a really cool experience, pretty full on as its sort of 24 hours a day that anything could happen, but hugely rewarding. It was also a great place to bring up children, and I know that my kids loved having so many ‘older brothers’ to play with when they wanted.

The role of a housemaster (that’s what I was doing) is really diverse: you are the main caregiver for the boys there, you oversee their academic progress, their health, happiness and their development. Given that there might be 50+ boys living together, it’s really important that the right sort of atmosphere exists in the house, or culture. There’s loads written about culture in particular organisations and amongst its participants, but for me, culture in a boarding house is the collective values and practices of its members. It is not a new research phenomenon, and here is an excerpt from Waller (1932) who is summarising the significance of school culture and introducing its complicated dimensions:

Schools have a culture that is definitely their own. There are, in the school, complex rituals of personal relationships, a set of folkways, mores, and irrational sanctions, a moral code based upon them. There are games, which are sublimated wars, teams, and an elaborate set of ceremonies concerning them. There are traditions, and traditionalists waging their world-old battle against innovators. There are laws and there is the problems of enforcing the laws, there is ‘Sittlichkeit’ (p103)

That word Sittlichkeit is from the philosopher Georg Hegel and was used as one of his ‘spheres’ as an element in the Philosophy of Right. Sittlichkeit is ethical life, and it has been argued that it transcends the other elements (Abstract right - “don’t be horrible to other people” - and Morality - “take a look at yourself!”) to describe how a person can position themselves as part of a bigger picture in a society, as an active, valuable participant. It’s not a term that I had come across before starting the research and I wish I had as it neatly describes what I think a lot of boarding houses are trying to do.

Within boarding schools, particular houses might be described as ‘the sporty house’, or ‘the house that always gets it wrong’. Through this culture the boys gain an identity too - they belong to something bigger than themselves, and they are part of something that they share with their housemates. This culture can be a really potent force: it can drive people to achieve things that they thought they couldn’t, and be a network of support between individuals that might otherwise not see similarities between themselves. But it also carries with it the potential for harm, and a weight of responsibility for those who shape the culture.

The last boarding house that I worked in has now changed its name, so I think I might be alright to use its name, and I do have a reason for doing so. It was called Munawir Hill, and if I were to describe what it was like I think I would say that it was generally a happy, honest and inclusive place to live and be a boarder. Obviously this is from my perspective as a member of staff working there, so it might be way off, but these sorts of words were echoed by others. It was certainly a fantastic place to live and work as an adult, and there were some exceptional colleagues that I worked (and lived) with, that gave me the confidence to try and consider how establishing a culture could be used to help the boys there. The conversations with these other members of staff is probably the reason why I ever started researching into sociology, so thanks!

It was a predecessor of mine who first used the term ‘the Munawir Man’, and when I became the housemaster I thought that we could use this as a way in to discussing culture with the boys. We held sessions together about ‘What makes a Munawir Man?’ where we talked about the sorts of things that we thought were important to us as a group (I believe that I tried to walk that line between being part of the house but also being separate insofar as I was an adult and staff member, so not pushing my own agenda too much), and together we came up with our list of values. One of the boys designed a crest off his own back, and we got shirts printed with our crest on it, and we gave out our awards to those boys who embodied the values that we had chosen together. And it felt great, and the boys were happy and we knew what it was to be a Munawir Man.

“A Munawir Man is Never Alone!” we shouted together, and when some of the boys might be late for something, their teachers would roll their eyes and laugh that it was ‘standard Munawir boy’. Of course, when new students joined the boarding house we continued these conversations and they would be ‘brought into the fold’ and shown the right way to behave. There would be a collective pressure from the rest of the boys to get the new guys where they needed to be, and in time they would learn that there’s a warm fuzzy feeling that comes from doing the right thing. And before too long, those new boys were chanting ‘A Munawir Man is Never Alone!’ as loud as the rest of them, and ready to step in when the newer boys turned up.

I’ve hinted at the problem there, but I realised a year or two into my work in Munawir that my pursuit of a culture to help the boys was flawed, and there is a link to gender here that is important. In a previous post I’d mentioned Judith Butler as an important contributor to the idea of body reflexive practice. That’s trying to behave in a way to fit the environment you’re in, and consequently and simultaneously creating an environment that others feel a pressure to fit into. Probably Butler’s most important work was about performativity which is the idea that gender is essentially a performance. This made Butler pretty controversial, but I think that some of the controversy might be because this idea has been misunderstood. Butler said that there is a pressure to perform a role as dictated by the culture of your society. There are rewards associated with performing your role well, like acceptance into the society, and there are also punishments for failing to play your role, such as subjugation and marginalisation (these two terms became masculinities in Connell’s Hegemonic Masculinity Theory). A lot of what culture is in boarding houses works through these methods, really.

An important question at this point is ‘is this really a problem? If a culture in a boarding house helps ‘shape’ boys through shared values, then isn’t that a good thing?’ This is tricky, and I’m not 100% sure, but I’m starting to understand a little better that culture is something that needs to be used very carefully by adults working with children. There were some boys for whom I believe being a part of Munawir, with its culture, was really beneficial, but I have to accept that there are also some boys who might have been happier or more successful elsewhere. 

Hegemonic masculinity is fuelled by a societal belief that there is right way to ‘be a man’, and I thought that if I just set the bar right, as a man who is kind, and caring and all that, then I was doing the right thing. But the issue is of course that there is no right way to be a man, and when the culture is being established in a single-sex environment then there’s a risk that even when we as dominant males are talking about masculinity and manhood to students, we’re engaging in a discourse that really isn’t beneficial for a child who is trying to work out who they are. This idea of ‘how to be a man’ is such a common theme amongst pseudo-masculinity gurus that I see popping up on Facebook with adverts about ‘The right ways to engage boys in education’ or some other snappy title that sells itself as forward thinking but sums to essentialist masculinity, where there are presupposed criteria for being a man (essentialist masculinity is an expression I picked up from Philaretou and Allen, 2001). 

Unfortunately I can see now that however well-meaning I was, essentialist masculinity was the line that I had taken in Munawir. I put forward a model of masculinity that I said would be valued in the boarding house that might be described as a tender masculinity (that's from Boys Don’t Try, by Pinkett and Roberts, which the librarian at school bought for me really early on when I was getting interesting in this stuff - cheers Ali), but really it doesn’t matter how virtuous the ends were, because the means were backwards, and they are in so many schools; culture is a potent weapon of conformity. This is from Heise (1995):

... societies have evolved elaborate rituals and rites of passage to help induct young men into manhood. Some involve brutal hazings and tests of courage while others require endurance, aptitude and skill. They all share the underlying premise that real men are made, not born. (p129)

Whilst I’m pleased to say that hazing rituals are thankfully now scorned in education, it’s the last sentence that really makes me wince, because I see it everywhere. ‘How do we build good men?’, ‘Helping our boys grow up right’ or indeed, ‘What makes a Munawir Man?’ It’s messed up really.

Within Munawir Hill when I came to understand what was going on a little better I sought to deconstruct things and we moved from considering the ‘Munawir Man’, to trying to get the boys to think beyond gender about why they were at school and what this period of life would mean for them. We did go back to ‘What does it mean to be a man?’ a few times, and each time the list got smaller and smaller. Incredibly, as much as I find post-modernism difficult to read, our discussions came down to semantics, and I was pleased with what we came up with in the end. So here it is, three years of discussion and this is the sum of the work:

A man is not a child

I think I had a perspective that I wanted to put forward to the boys, which was that of responsibility. Not because I think it is a masculine trait to be responsible, but because adults are responsible for their actions, even just from a legal perspective. It’s a weird conclusion to the time I spent talking about masculinity with the boys in Munawir, but its not reductionist - we were not trying to simplify things. I wouldn’t call it underwhelming either because there’s still a lot to talk about there. I think I like that it would have a parallel ‘A woman is not a child’ statement, but I can also accept that if you put this out in schools that perhaps you are setting adulthood as an aspiration, which again puts adults as dominant where that’s not necessary in a culture. It was at about the time that we reached our very neat conclusion that I was trying to understand Jacques Derrida’s ideas about words and différance so maybe there’s some of that influence. 

I want to finish by saying that I’m not arguing that culture in school is necessarily a bad thing (I haven’t read enough about it at all), but I think it needs to be considered very carefully. I’m hoping to write about gender regime at some point, which is a good place to go from here, and describes how the culture in a school can provide a significant constructing influence on gender. The idea of a climate within which young people can grow with the resources they need is something I would advocate before culture. The Department for Education produced a document in 2018 that overall leaned the other way, but it's all outcomes driven: it is about moulding children before it is about helping children and maybe that’s the difference that I want to highlight. A climate where diverse expressions of gender are valued is crucial to helping boys grow healthily. 

There is no right way to be a man, and great boarding houses don’t ‘make’ great boys and girls; they are made great by the boys and girls within them. So, a nod to the Munawir boys. Thank you for getting me thinking, and thank you for being amazing individuals.

Some references:

Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble (1st ed.). Routledge.

Heise, L. L. (1995). Violence, sexuality, and women's lives. In R. G. Parker & J. H. Gagnon (Eds.), Conceiving sexuality: Approaches to sex research in a postmodern world (pp. 109–134). Taylor & Frances/Routledge.

Philaretou, A. G., & Allen, K. R. (2001). Reconstructing Masculinity and Sexuality. The Journal of Men’s Studies, 9(3), 301–321. https://doi.org/10.3149/jms.0903.301

Waller, W. (1932). The sociology of teaching. New York, J. Wiley & Sons.