In the last opinion I wrote (Girls)that the boys at this summer session have other deficiencies, and are victims of other myths. Now it is time to give them equal time.
The standard uniform for male clothing this summer consists of underwear (I assume), a pair of shorts with pockets (tennis shorts, preferably), docksiders or sneakers (no socks usually), and a tee-shirt, though it's never other than a Lacoste or a clone of Lacoste. More sports-minded boys will wear a pair of socks with the sneakers. Haircut is pretty standard gauge, short but not too short, shaped over the ears, off the forehead, and full in back, often swept back along the side of the head. Very little if any jewelry -- I've seen no one with an earring and I don't think many with a ring or necklace. A spare group of people.
Except that they are not spare. The dress is not an expression of economy. It is dress suited for people who don't have a summer job and don't need one, whose primary duty is to hang around. The boys are pretty as well. Not effeminate, but certainly well taken care of. Most are tanned and slim, with smooth good looks. GQ-pretty in some ways.
Why all this physical description? A story. When I was teaching in a rural high school I had a group of students, mostly farmers' kids and auto mechanics, who had to learn English before they graduated, at least according to the state's standards. Somehow one knew that the males were males in that class. Most did chores before and after school and knew a lot about a lot of things. The most noticeable thing to me was their hands. Often grimy under the nails, calloused, the knuckles bitten by some piece of metal, they were most assuredly hands that worked. They were not good students in any sense of the word. Most had stopped playing the good-student game a long time before, if indeed they ever played it. They were marking time for the "paper" as they called it, and suffered the teachers.
I raise their image in contrast to the boys here for two reasons. One is that they knew they were going to have to work. The only way they were going to get any advantages in life was to earn them through their own labor. They were not saints. They were still rowdy and unread and they are not the sort of people I would like to spend eternity with. Yet they were solid. They were going to have to perform the work in this country -- fixing cars, growing corn and milk, working on the roads, doing the volunteer firefighter's job -- work that keeps communities together and allows the upper strata of society to be as insulated as it is. Perhaps they were being traditional, males that considered themselves men with all the bias that goes with that word. But at least one knew what they were and was forced to deal with them as real and functioning entities in the world.
The work that most of these summer-school boys will do will be service work: lawyers, accountants, brokers, and their ilk. Some will be doctors, though more often for the money than the profession. Their jobs will certainly have more status than the jobs of my rural students, and they will, in a sense, always be in school, for the most part comfortably salted away somewhere and discouraged from tackling the world. In this way they will never grow up and will always be adolescents.
Second, these boys suffer from an amorphousness of upbringing. My farmer kids lived in a small town, and while they had access to a large mall, video games, beer and pot, and sundry other temptations, they were not really corrupted by them. The world of that town had a strong footing to it, based on family, church (sometimes), local bars, softball teams, the high school. And while the city ten miles away lapped over into that town, the town was distinct, a registered trade mark on the countryside that gave its inhabitants some sense of identity.
These summer-school boys, vaguely liberal, well-heeled for the most part, from middle-class families that are now making the news as the new battered group in society, imbued with a vision of the world that says the world is their banquet table, are being raised in much the same manner as thoroughbred horses: beautiful to look at but essentially a frivolous item in the world. They have no useful sense of place, no center to their orbit. Outwardly they are well-groomed, delightful to the eye, as are the girls; yet inside they've not been encouraged to create a strong sense of themselves and the work they could do in the world to make it better. They have been raised to be free electrons, ready to mate with any strong center that happens by.
I like these girls and boys. They are harmless and gentle for the most part, having been made docile by decent schools and loving parents. But if people in this country cry about what is coming out of our public schools and howl that the future leaders of this country will be illiterate (not really a rational possibility, if one thinks about it), I would add that these thoroughbreds are spiritually illiterate and that that is as great a threat to our future stability as auto mechanics who can't read.