An obedient little boy

School doesn't prepare boys for dating

Emily King is an influencer who speaks on behalf of men. Men who are exhausted with the dating game. Every day she highlights another woman posting on Instagram, talking about how men won’t approach women anymore, won’t take the lead. Emily points out the rampant double standards of the feminine, who complain about not being approached by any men at the bar to buy them a drink, and in the same breath being grossed out by a man approaching with the ‘wrong energy’. Men, she says, just can’t win these days.

So men have gotten wise. They’ve stopped approaching because they don’t want to be a creep. They’ve stopped buying women drinks because women blow them off anyway. If he manages to get a date, she complains about him not buying her meal, and shames him on IG. If he doesn’t make a move, she complains. If he makes a move, she rejects it. The man realizes he’s never going to win, so what’s the point?

A good man, Emily says, will often go unnoticed by women. Or be flat out rejected by them. And yet from the man’s perspective, with Me Too lawsuits all abuzz, we’re just doing what we’re being told. Don’t be a creep. Be respectful. That’s what women want, right?

Wrong.

I’ve been leading a men’s group for 5 years, and one of the books on the required reading list for men’s work is No More Mr Nice Guy by Robert Glover. Glover describes an epidemic of nice guys, trained by a generation of overwhelmed single mothers. Boys — like myself — who were implicitly responsible for their mother’s emotional well being. We learned from an early age to obey our maternal figure, to not rock an unstable boat. We were the man of the house, without formally having the title, whether by the physical absence of a father or by his emotional absence.

The other day I was watching one of these posts from Emily on Instagram, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. In school, at home, I spent all of my time with female authority figures. I learned to anticipate any criticism from them, and would change my behavior to avoid it, for fear of punishment. If I didn’t please my teacher, my grades would suffer. If I didn’t get my work done in class, I would have to do it at home.

I think women, for me, all started to blend together into one big authority figure. I had to figure them out to get what I wanted. I had to learn to please them. Always be respectful, or be punished. Do my homework, or fall behind. If I fell behind, I would lose the approval of my mother. If I didn’t have her approval, there was no love. Be on time for class. Get good grades. Be a model student. Be a teacher’s pet.

So imagine the dissonance when I started to date, and realized that women aren’t selecting mates who are respectful. They’re selecting mates who are strong. They’re selecting mates who take the lead. They’re selecting mates who wield considerable agency. They’re selecting men who aren’t afraid of how they’ll react when the man approaches them. They’re selecting men who are confident in who they are.

And yet when, in school, do boys learn the skills of confidence, agency, and leadership? A leader isn’t following directions, because there’s nobody to take the directions from. A leader has to define his own guideline and believe in it, often in spite the reactions of others. A confident man is a man who experiments and learns from his mistakes. Mistakes are part of learning. Mistakes are necessary for learning.

In the school system, mistakes are punished. Make a mistake on the exam and you lose points. When you lose points, you lose status. When you lose status, you lose credibility. And when you lose credibility, you lose confidence.

In the school system, everything we work on is prescribed to us. We’re given the lessons and told to execute them perfectly. Do it perfectly, as prescribed, and you get status. Status is gained by obedience. The valedictorian is the most obedient boy in school. So when does that boy learn to cultivate his own agency?

Our greatest leaders, says astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, were never the valedictorians, never the top of their class. Never handed their homework in on time:

If you look at the biggest shakers and movers in society, in practically any field, none of them were valedictorians. … The current CEOs were never the top of their class. They were too distracted by their own thoughts and ideas. … My grades in school were pretty average. Because they were average, no teacher at any time in my life, from K through 12, ever said “look at that guy Tyson, he’ll go far.” … They don’t even care. They only care what grade you got. A person is so much more than the numerics of their GPA. If you only focus on a GPA, you will lose people. There will be people who go unrecognized, unsupported, unidentified by the school system.

And yet the myopia of the school system is so much worse than Tyson describes. Because it trains generations of men to be obedient, to follow the rules. The rules handed to them by teachers. And most of those teachers are women of authority. School trained all of us boys to obey women, not to be strong leaders for them.

My son is currently in grade three, and last year in grade two he had an incredibly difficult time. His teacher ran a traditional classroom, drilling spelling tests every morning to bring all the students “up to grade level.” He started to refuse to go to school. We later found out he has dysgraphia, and doing timed spelling exams every morning was forcing his brain to work on overdrive just to meet the standard.

One day the teacher announced to me in front of all the other children and parents that my son was “one of the bad writers” in class. “He’ll probably become and engineer,” she said, “the bad writers usually do.” I called a meeting with her and the principle and told them in no uncertain terms how inappropriate it was for her say that. I told them I was concerned that this would permanently damage his relationship with school. The principle did nothing to discipline the teacher. And the teacher did nothing to change her behavior.

We pulled him out of the school when he started showing signs of severe burnout. We changed his school, and no matter how many supports we put in place, he would not go back there. This grade two teacher did exactly what I told her she was doing: ruining his relationship with school entirely.

“School,” the principle had told my son one day, “is a must”. But in the fine print it’s more complicated than that. As an autistic person, I go to school at my own risk. And that risk needs to be a deliberate choice on the part of my family, not a requirement. A system that truly promotes the agency of developing humans needs to begin the relationship with agency, with choice.

Why? Because this is the very agency we value so highly in adults, and in grown men in particular. And men learn to wield agency by practicing using their agency in low-stakes environments. Because learning requires safe iteration. And that’s what school is supposed to be for, right?