The seniors in the most recent section of my Crafts of Nonfiction class at Milton Academy (MA) were demographically different than any class I’ve taught before at Milton. Of the 13 remarkable students who took this class, eight were boys. Amid the ongoing national conversation about the health and well-being of boys who, according to a 2024 UK study, disproportionately felt the impact of the pandemic, this unusual classroom composition struck me as an opportunity to consider how boys are affected by the current climate.
I have spent much of my life confronting sexism and advocating for girls and women, work made even more profound to me when I became a mother of three daughters. I feel within me, and anticipate in others, resistance to turn the focus back onto boys when girls and women, after a long history of discrimination, have just started making gains, hard-won through tireless persistence. But education teaches us that living and learning are never zero-sum games.
Efforts to elevate students across genders must occur simultaneously, not at the expense of one another, underscored by the belief that gender inequities limit the potential of everyone. Schools have the unique responsibility and capacity for revisioning, knowing that the high stakes of shepherding human development require trial and error.
Interrogating how we educate boys, particularly at this cultural and political moment, is critical work. And giving boys the opportunity to assess and articulate their well-being in a variety of ways is important work for the classroom.
Are Boys Really Struggling?
“The Gender Gap in Teen Experiences,” a 2025 Pew Research report following a survey, which asked 1,391 U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 about their perceptions of boys and girls in school, shows a major shift in the last decade. Whereas boys “dominated” American classrooms in the 1980s and 1990s, more than half of teenagers now report that girls and boys perform equally in school, with large percentages believing that girls outperform boys in academic performance, in classroom participation and behavior, and in leadership roles.
According to the report, student perception corroborates well-publicized research that boys have fallen behind girls in education. Specifically, that in high school, two-thirds of the students in the top 10% of the class are girls, while about two-thirds of the students in the bottom decile are boys, with girls 15% more likely to get a college degree.
Richard Reeves, author of the 2022 book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It and founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, writes about how these gender gaps in education manifest in our broader cultural and political landscape. While women have achieved more social choice, mobility, and economic power in our lifetimes, men have stagnated. According to Reeves’s book, boys and men report feeling a sense of worthlessness, expressed in a range of ways, including a devastating 40% increase in suicide of young men under the age of 30 since 2010.
With the possibility of economic independence, women have achieved freedom from traditional gender roles; yet, men remain stuck in the old script, Reeves argues, leaving them fumbling for purpose in a new social order. This sense of disenfranchisement drove a major realignment of young men to the political right. According to the 2024 Pew Research report, “How Americans See Men and Masculinity,” nearly half of Republican men say American society has negative views of men, beginning when they are boys in school. These statistics beg all of us, educators and students alike, to pay attention.
Are We Setting Boys Up for Success?
As schools work to identify and address gender inequities on our campuses, do we ever ask our boys how they are doing or how they feel they are perceived? As schools have worked to expose and dismantle privilege, have boys felt blamed or silenced from participation? Has a phrase like “toxic masculinity” even inadvertently limited how our boys self-define, creating a sense that their behavior is a foregone conclusion?
Do we encourage opportunities and rituals for boys to directly imagine purposeful, fulfilling, and forward-thinking manhood? Have we scrubbed clean the conversation about how boys and girls are different and differently socialized as learners?
One of my past nonfiction students wrote a feature article on the use of artificial intelligence to cheat at Milton, finding anecdotally that boys use AI more than girls when they are explicitly instructed not to. Has the advent of AI and, broadly speaking, the ubiquity of technology reshaped how boys view the classroom?
No one knows, exactly, what matrix of factors has influenced a widening gender gap in educational environments, and we need more data to measure any gap, real or perceived. But when we ask questions, answers emerge that improve the education of all of our students.
The Democratic Work of the Classroom
I have thought a lot about the group of boys in my nonfiction class this year. They are thinkers and athletes; they have revealed their vulnerabilities and skills at the table, in conversation, and on the page. They laugh a lot. They hug. They have grown up together.
After watching a student project film exposing persistent sexism on campus, I asked students how they assessed the well-being of boys on campus; one answered that he believed that Milton boys were more self and socially aware than a lot of boys elsewhere, and by the evidence in this classroom, I would agree. But they are also works-in-progress, as we all are, striving to consider what they hadn’t before.
During a memoir project, one student wrote about his complicated relationship with his father; another, about how many influences in his life—father and brothers, grandparents and girlfriend—are shaping his sense of manhood. Another wrote about the impact of being raised by a single mother, his father only a backdrop. Yet another wrote about how a commitment to being kind and good every day has always landed him female, rather than male, best friends.
Through the skilled, honest, and brave efforts of students, like the 13 around my classroom table, we will all expand our understanding of what it means to be human: foundational learning for any social change. Here, together over time, we can know each other as more than the gendered stereotypes we might have been slotted into, and with this knowledge, we are more likely to work to create a world that allows each of us to express our full, complex selves. We achieve social progress only when we each feel valued enough to participate in shaping a collective vision, I suspect. School is a place to forge a better tomorrow than today, collective work that requires the voices of boys.