At an open house I attended last fall for an all-boys school in a New York suburb, the headmaster told the assembled audience: “Here, we know how to educate boys.” The school—which requires students to wear coats and ties, offers a double period of PE every day as well as an optional early-morning Latin class—is a throwback to an era when such institutions were expected to turn all kinds of boys into a certain kind of men.
Michael Reichert does not miss this kind of institution or the traditional way of raising boys it represents. In his new book How to Raise a Boy, Reichert writes that “there is a real opportunity to get boyhood right—perhaps for the first time.” If we “listen” to boys, he writes, they will “point the way to a more supportive, healthier, and more human boyhood.”
Read Full Article »