Publications

Boys At Play: Sports and Transformation
By William S. Pollack, PhD
Dr. William Pollack writes, "For boys sports provide a true form of brotherhood. It is not surprising that women often do not appreciate men's love of sports and underestimate men's relatedness since, as in the ancient Olympics, they are usually kept distant from men's private world of play."

Dr. Pollack is an assistant clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School. He co-authored In A Time of Fallen Heroes: The Re-Creation of Masculinity and co-edited A New Psychology of Men. In the monograph Pollack seeks to debunk the myth that boys and men are not empathic or nurturant in their own right. He postulates that male mentoring and the psychologically transformative aspects of boy's play; i.e., coaching and sports, weave a fabric strong enough to begin to heal the psychological split between a boy's need for self-assertion and affiliative connection.

Women Teaching Boys: The Confessions of Nancy Lerner
By Nancy Lerner
Is there something unexpectedly positive for women to discover about single-sex schools for males? And is there a type of woman who is an effective teacher in an all-male school? These are the questions Nancy Lerner posed for herself in this monograph. Dr. Lerner taught English at University School for several years.

Told largely through first person anecdotes, Lerner's story unfolds as a lesson in overcoming stereotypes and myths. It has been theorized that boys are less self-conscious about expressing emotions in a single sex environment. How would a female teacher change the dynamics? "The value of women teaching in a boys' school is that the awareness of the differences allows us to feel the joy of transcending them. If polarization everywhere is the plague of the late twentieth century, here in the artificial world of the school, boundaries and barriers can be obviated."

Teaching Boys To Become "Gender Bi-lingual": A Challenge to Singe Sex Schools
By John Bednall
Do in fact males and females use similar words but speak a different nuance of language which is the product of their sex? John Bednall, Headmaster of the Hutchins School, Hobart, Tasmania, emphatically answers - they do! How do boys and girls learn to understand what the other is saying? Bednall asserts that the basic difference in the way males and females communicate makes it imperative that males learn "gender bi-linguality" as one of the most important skills for living.

Bednall challenges boys' schools to lead boys to an understanding of what "it means to be female and hence enhance their capacity to co-operate, negotiate and share: it is a challenge for them to be human in its fullest and noblest sense." Only through such understanding will males learn how to negotiate respectfully with female perceptions of the world and become "gender bi-lingual".

Brad and Cory: A study of Middle School Boys
By Diane  J. Hulse
Brad and Cory represent the composite images of two boys attending independent schools. For the purposes of the monograph, 'Brad' attends a boys' school and 'Cory' attends a co-educational school. Ms. Hulse uses their stories to illustrate the data gathered from four educational surveys. Their fictional experiences help the reader understand what Hulse believes are measurable differences between boys in single-sex and coed schools. Her monograph attempts to discover whether the qualitative, subjective observations she made as an educator in a single sex school might be empirically verifiable.

Statistical information was gathered using the Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory, the School Attitude Measure, the School Motivation Analysis Test and the Sex Role Egalitarianism Scale. Then Hulse humanized the results using the life experiences of Brad and Cory as fictional illustrations. Her conclusions about value of single sex schools make the monograph a must read for educators. The future of single sex schools has been in doubt and Hulse hypothecates that something should be done before boys' schools become extinct.