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The upthread discussion about male role models reminded me of a web essay that I can no longer find (damn it). The author was a male English professor for undergrads. His course satisfied a general requirement, so his male student population broadly represented the student body. In the essay, the author observed that when his male students were given an opportunity to select a text or topic to study, the most popular subject was always power.
I don’t recall the author proposing any reason for that preference. We can come up with a couple.
Broke: They know that power is the ultimate aphrodesiac.
Woke: They are already toxically masculine. The professor should focus exclusively on books by queer women of color, who hate power.
Bespoke: They are thinking about the Roman Empire.
I’ll have to expand on that last one.
Ages ago, I came across someone asking why 19th Century Britain seemed to be so obsessed with Rome. One responder said “Britain found itself with an empire unexpectedly. The 19th Century British culture was looking to ancient Rome to give it context. How should they act? What is it like to have an empire? What can they learn?”
That sprang to mind as I was reading the essay. Those teenage boys knew that they were on the cusp of having power, over themselves at least. They should, at least. What does that mean? How should they behave?
My question, then, is: What would you recommend for those boys, to help them understand the power that they will eventually wield?
The best training for boys is to take up some physical sport or activity, especially one where they are not competing with, or lead by, women. Boys need to acquire discipline in some kind of mastery, it has to be physical, and it has to involve overcoming failure. Men need to learn the humility of their weakness so they can enjoy pride in their strength.
This is basically impossible in an academic context, but whatever. If I were a parent with young boys, I would enroll them in a martial art or sport of their choice. If I were a professor, I would teach a class combining yoga or swordplay and history. If I were an administrator, I'd organize collegiate sports. And if I were dictator, I'd eliminate Title IX.
I don't think you can lecture boys into understanding. I don't think there is any mental curriculum that will make boys wise. The best you can do is excite them and nurture their passion. The current system mainly bores them with tedium and makework. For most boys, I think you need to replace most of what we teach as "history" with battles and wars. Excite their imaginations. Once they are interested in learning, they will naturally appreciate the disciplines and work.
Any nice ones that won’t kill their brain cells or give them wrestler ears?
Taekwondo is good. There are a million varieties, sometimes called things like Choikwando, or else wrapped up as Karate. But they're all fundamentally the same package, from the point of view of an American consumer. They have different heritage and will strike and train in different ways, but those details are unimportant. Brazilian Jiujitsu is popular for teenagers and guys in their mid 20s, but everyone I know who does it is always pulling something. Boxing is good for boys, but very particular, and I'm not sure I would put my kids in a sport that hits their heads.
The thing to do is see what's in your area. It makes a great deal of difference who's in charge, and who they're trying to teach to. There are a lot of martial arts programs designed for kids to run around and hit things. You can find those anywhere. In my experience, the best programs are family schools that teach to a wide variety of age ranks and groups. The big problem with a martial art, over a "traditional" sport, is that the path is much less defined. If your kids get into basketball or football or hockey the local schools will have programs that they can show up to and train in and hang out with other kids. There are matches and games and championships and teams. Martial arts isn't like that. Competition is basically solo, and not everyone competes. There's a fast rotation of kids coming in and out as they get busy or bored, and so the crew of regulars who stay becomes particular and real. Which means, in my experiences, the best martial arts studios have children and adults learning together, in the same room, and this bridges most of the problems.
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The story of my K-12 schooling. Frivolous busy work eating the hours. But also too little of it, so you mostly sit bored in an uncomfortable hard plastic chair waiting much of the day. This is apparently what education means.
AP classes were much better. Some actual education occurred in them. But as a portion of K-12 they were pretty small.
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Very related to this: one of the most immense feelings of envy that I’ve ever experienced while consuming a piece of media came during reading The Western Way of War, a book on the nitty-gritty minutiae of Ancient Greek hoplite warfare from the soldiers’ perspectives. The author is a professor at UCSD or USC or something (although I later learned that he’s more famous as a conservative pundit now, which makes some sort of sense I guess, although this content I personally haven’t engaged with), and in the book, he off-hand mentioned that he had his class dress up in replicas of hoplite armor, hold replicas of hoplite weaponry and shields, and stage a mock battle against one another, in order to have them better appreciate how the physical constraints of hoplite warfare influenced strategy. Anyway, point of all this is to say that even though it’s not even actual warfare, even though it’s not actual martial arts, even though it’s not actually building skills to be mastered — I always wished I could’ve had a professor like that. I’d imagine that a full-fledged “HEMA and the Thirty Years’ War” class would have a longer waitlist than almost all other courses offered at any given university.
Anyway, forgive my blogposting. Just had to get that off my chest.
Just on that description I'd bet money you're talking about Victor Davis Hanson. He's good.
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My university had a shop class. Using power sanders, bandsaw, drill presses, etc. That filled up within seconds of the earliest enrollment window. Students must have preloaded the webpage and then quickly clicked the very moment enrollment opened.
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ENDORSED.
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I agree with you on getting out of your mind and into your body. I was a skinny, awkward, and introverted kid who didn't do well in team sports so I withdrew from a lot of physical activity (aside from hiking and fishing) until I hit college. I took an introduction to martial arts course for my requisite PE credit. It wasn't until I was flat on my back after a hip-throw from a dude half my size that I really understood what my dad tried to teach me about men's capacity to cause injury and the ethical capacity not to exercise that capacity lightly. I understood them on an intellectual level but getting my ass handed to me pushed it from my brain to my gut.
Yep. I think most guys don't realize their own capacity for violence and as such they don't develop the competence to use it. This has many downstream effects on their psychological development.
Further, though, they don't develop the respect for other people's capacities for violence and, thus, how valuable it is to have rules and ethics to limit the use of violence. It must be hard to teach someone how to wield great power in an effective manner if they do not even know how to throw a punch.
"Yeah I can't even handle myself in a fight, but you can surely trust me to deploy legions of violent armed men against our enemies and to wield the overwhelming authority of the state with precision and efficacy."
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