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Authors: David Adams Richards
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novels they demanded be read, were indeed sexist. “Everyone we know back east would be considered a chauvinist or a bigot,” he said to me one day, when he refused to write an essay on the radical position of a certain well-known book.
What he was telling me, in grade eleven, was that this attitude was seen as progressive and forward thinking, and young men should realize there was a price to pay.
So, after a time I realized that he, in some respects, was right. I told him to bear it, to get through high school.
He believed there was something terribly wrong in our “fair-minded country.”
He is very bright, and he graduated and moved back to the Maritimes before we did.
Once in the Maritimes, my wife and I noticed something. He became himself again. He was no longer in a city—he was no longer a rural child in an urban place. And I suppose that is when I began to realize how much of his young life was changed by our move, for he had a hard time in Toronto, and we probably made matters worse by not seeing what should have been seen—that he was not urban, and he needed the rural woods and rivers in order to belong. And once he came home, he belonged not just to the rural world, but to the world at large. If I caused him problems by moving to the city, I am sorry for them.
My second son, too, mentioned this to me, that some women teachers who had come of age in the 1970s were sexist. Or they treated the boys with more discerning condemnation than the girls. In some ways, there was no way to be a boy. And he began to be scrutinized for being a boy, and put into detention. So he was in detention many times, for many small things: building a snow fort, having a snowball fight, playing football at recess, sliding, and chewing an icicle. Now, it is not too difficult to just forgo all of this and to say that the school and the school board in some way must be right. But in another way, in some other way they are not right at all, and their methods are as puritanical and as draconian as a strap—for most of these activities are the ones boys do automatically and cannot stop.
The persistent idea in our culture was to quiet or expel these urges, because these urges were shocking—you know, wrestling and climbing trees. And how the elementary teachers—and yes, how two of the high school English teachers—taught reflected how they believed males should now act in our culture. And in all ways, as far as I could see, the intention of this was to dampen or redirect the force that pushes young boys to be boys. Because it was seen as not being “fair” to the girls, when 90 percent of the time it had nothing at all to do with the girls. And no girl was put into detention if she did the same thing.
I would not say this if it were not true, and, true or not, I would not mention it if I thought it was a positive thing. But I believe many female teachers in elementary grades are at times one-dimensional when it comes to thinking about children, and attitudes, and what children should think, for they have learned the methodology of equality and must prove it. It does not give boys who act like boys much hope. And my youngest acted like a boy.
This was not just a matter of taking on overt rough-housing and silliness, it was a systematic elimination of what boys need to be natural. I would kiss the book on this.
And so when my sons came home and told me that they had been told guns were bad and hunting was barbaric, and as they came into high school and were given books to study in which men were the only ones who were controlling—I realized we were in a place far, far away from where I had come from.
I realized that the main problem with the teachers was not that they had progressed but that they had never seen or known what they had been taught to hate. That theirvery categorization was not only wrong but ultimately deceitful. Did I tell my children this? No.
However, I mentioned to one teacher during a meeting that I
What he was telling me, in grade eleven, was that this attitude was seen as progressive and forward thinking, and young men should realize there was a price to pay.
So, after a time I realized that he, in some respects, was right. I told him to bear it, to get through high school.
He believed there was something terribly wrong in our “fair-minded country.”
He is very bright, and he graduated and moved back to the Maritimes before we did.
Once in the Maritimes, my wife and I noticed something. He became himself again. He was no longer in a city—he was no longer a rural child in an urban place. And I suppose that is when I began to realize how much of his young life was changed by our move, for he had a hard time in Toronto, and we probably made matters worse by not seeing what should have been seen—that he was not urban, and he needed the rural woods and rivers in order to belong. And once he came home, he belonged not just to the rural world, but to the world at large. If I caused him problems by moving to the city, I am sorry for them.
My second son, too, mentioned this to me, that some women teachers who had come of age in the 1970s were sexist. Or they treated the boys with more discerning condemnation than the girls. In some ways, there was no way to be a boy. And he began to be scrutinized for being a boy, and put into detention. So he was in detention many times, for many small things: building a snow fort, having a snowball fight, playing football at recess, sliding, and chewing an icicle. Now, it is not too difficult to just forgo all of this and to say that the school and the school board in some way must be right. But in another way, in some other way they are not right at all, and their methods are as puritanical and as draconian as a strap—for most of these activities are the ones boys do automatically and cannot stop.
The persistent idea in our culture was to quiet or expel these urges, because these urges were shocking—you know, wrestling and climbing trees. And how the elementary teachers—and yes, how two of the high school English teachers—taught reflected how they believed males should now act in our culture. And in all ways, as far as I could see, the intention of this was to dampen or redirect the force that pushes young boys to be boys. Because it was seen as not being “fair” to the girls, when 90 percent of the time it had nothing at all to do with the girls. And no girl was put into detention if she did the same thing.
I would not say this if it were not true, and, true or not, I would not mention it if I thought it was a positive thing. But I believe many female teachers in elementary grades are at times one-dimensional when it comes to thinking about children, and attitudes, and what children should think, for they have learned the methodology of equality and must prove it. It does not give boys who act like boys much hope. And my youngest acted like a boy.
This was not just a matter of taking on overt rough-housing and silliness, it was a systematic elimination of what boys need to be natural. I would kiss the book on this.
And so when my sons came home and told me that they had been told guns were bad and hunting was barbaric, and as they came into high school and were given books to study in which men were the only ones who were controlling—I realized we were in a place far, far away from where I had come from.
I realized that the main problem with the teachers was not that they had progressed but that they had never seen or known what they had been taught to hate. That theirvery categorization was not only wrong but ultimately deceitful. Did I tell my children this? No.
However, I mentioned to one teacher during a meeting that I
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