If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. |
|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#1
|
|||
|
|||
Essay: The Myth of Boyhood
Essay: The Myth of Boyhood
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19358334/ July 2-9, 2007 issue - Picture a world where your father walks with you down a starlit road, pausing to point out Orion. He recites Robert Frost, knows how a battery works-and all the rules about girls. "The Dangerous Book for Boys," by brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden, is peaking on Amazon's best-seller list (No. 5 last week) by recalling just that world. The compendium of trivia, history and advice is geared toward preteen boys, but it's found a surprising audience in men in their 30s and 40s, too. The book's marbled endpapers, archival illustrations and dry, humorous tone ("excitable bouts of windbreaking will not endear you to a girl") offers a portal back to a time of "Sunday afternoons and long summer days." But did this world ever exist? The book's success suggests we'd like to think so. First published in Britain last year, it was conceived as a homage to the popular "Boy's Own" periodicals from the early 1900s. It's inspired a host of copycats, including "211 Things a Bright Boy Can Do," by Thomas Cutler, and "The Daring Book for Girls," out in October, while a reissue of the 1890s volume "The American Boy's Handy Book," by Daniel Carter Beard, is moving up the charts on Amazon. Clearly, nostalgia for the halcyon world of our fathers and grandfathers is strong. But that nostalgia may tell us more about who we are now than who we were. Stephanie Coontz, author of "The Way We Never We American Families and the Nostalgia Trap," says parents worry they're not spending as much time with their kids as past generations did. In truth, "people are spending more interactive time and resources on their kids than ever before," Coontz says. The real problem is they think they have less to teach them. "Dangerous" author Conn Iggulden says technology is partially responsible for this insecurity. "I can't fix a car like my father used to, because my car has a computer in it," he says. "Once it was possible to know everything. It gets harder in the modern world." Such is the nature of nostalgia: "When you have anxieties about the present you express them by hearkening back to a safer past," says Coontz. As gender roles become less defined, possession of a discrete store of traditionally "masculine" knowledge (how to build a go-kart) gives men a sense of order in a disordered universe. For now, conservative pundits and bloggers have seized upon "Dangerous" as a corrective to the "feminization" of the cultu Christina Hoff Summers writes that it "valorizes risk, adventure and manliness." The anxiety might also be for our children. Robert Baden Powell, father of the Boy Scout movement, wrote "Scouting for Boys" in 1908, out of concern that the young soldiers he had fought with in the Boer War were physically and morally unfit. "At the height of the British Empire, the older generation worried about boys' becoming pasty and soft and useless," says Conn Iggulden. "I see similar concerns today." But the Boy Scouts of America, with its exclusionary policies toward gays and atheists, and emphasis on safety over fun, may feel old- fashioned in a bad way: enrollment has declined steadily for a decade. "The Dangerous Book for Boys," on the other hand, suggests activities with a whiff of rebelliousness without advocating anything truly unsafe. It also gives parents a product, in today's commercial age, refreshingly free of brands or logos. Of course, they're still falling for one of the most enduring brands of all: nostalgia. -Jennie Yabroff |
#2
|
|||
|
|||
Essay: The Myth of Boyhood
Fred Goodwin, CMA wrote:
Essay: The Myth of Boyhood http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19358334/ Thank you, Fred. I think Ms. Yabroff is on to something. Most everyone realizes that boys need to grow up, to become men, during some period of their lives. Most everyone realizes that in the process, the boys will take some risks, and in the process will learn a lot about the world and about other people, and about themselves. And, most everyone realizes that taking risks involves some actual chance of getting hurt... What some people don't realize is that by trying to eliminate the risks, we also limit the learning and growing. Baden-Powell realized all of those things, and provided a program which would maximize the learning and growing, while teaching the boys to minimize and manage the risks. The woods is, after all, really a very safe place. The risks associated with fire, knives, weather, and bears are, really, mostly avoided by some easily-understood common sense methods. In the Guide to Safe Scouting, and the various other "safety" rules, BSA lawyers have tried to completely eliminate any possibility that the BSA could be liable for any injury to any boy... But, in doing so, they have also largely eliminated the sense of risk and excitement that really helped the boys to learn and grow. Highly supervised, double-belayed fake-rock climbing, where the kid knows there is no actual possibility of anything bad happening, is just not the same as actually climbing up a natural outcrop. And, the excitement and learning is just not the same, either. Risk taking is exciting for young people, precisely because it involves risk. Learning how to do those things, by using skill to reduce and manage risk, requires accepting some amount of risk. If we try to completely eliminate the risk, we also eliminate the possibility that the boys will learn and grow from the experience. And, in the process, we eliminate the excitement and make the program boring. I did things as a scout that would simply not be allowed today. I built pioneering structures from which a fall could have injured. I went, and took patrols, on overnight trips without adults, or tour permits, often on the spur of the moment after a few of us got together on a Saturday morning. I went solo many times... and without an adult many more times than that. (We almost never had two or more adults.) All of those involved some amount of risk. I got cut by a knife, burned by fire, cold, wet, or hungry a few times, and I learned how to recognize and manage those risks. Later, I did my best to teach the younger scouts how to do the same, and most of them did pretty well. Perhaps the key idea is not to try to eliminate the risk. Instead, we should acknowledge the risk, accept it, teach the boys to acknowledge and recognize it, and teach them how to manage the risk. Sure, some boys will get hurt occasionally. That happens. It's part of growing up, and of being human. But, the vast majority will learn and grow. By providing a _relatively_ safe environment, in which boys can learn and grow, scouting can provide a true service to the nation, and to the families and the boys. By attempting to provide an _absolutely_ safe environment, scouting can only make itself boring, drive boys away, and put itself out of business. All of the other alternatives that the boys will find will be less safe... Running with a gang of "friends" on the streets of most cities is certainly less safe than running with a "patrol" in the woods, given even a modicum of training about knives, fires, and other scouting skills, even without the GSS or adult supervision. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Perhaps we should set the lawyers to the task of creating a consent form, in which the parents of each boy acknowledge and consent to the risks of scouting. And then, just let the volunteer in the local troops get on with the program. And then, the councils and national organization can focus on supporting the local volunteers, instead of on raising money to pay the lawyers. Steve |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
Essay by a man on BF. | [email protected] | Breastfeeding | 1 | August 1st 06 05:39 PM |
Essay on Amazon Shorts, about Fatherhood | Sergio Troncoso | General | 0 | March 7th 06 06:54 PM |
Essay on Amazon Shorts, about Fatherhood | Sergio Troncoso | Solutions | 0 | March 7th 06 06:53 PM |
THE FRAGILE STATE OF BOYHOOD | PART 1 OF 3 | Fred Goodwin, CMA | General | 0 | December 13th 05 08:23 PM |
Chernobyl motorcycle tour - photo essay | Todd Gastaldo | Pregnancy | 1 | March 28th 04 09:56 PM |