Description
Book SynopsisGrant's cogent analysis will interest education policy-makers and educators, as well as scholars of the history of education, childhood, gender studies, American studies, and urban history.
Trade ReviewGrant is a superb historian who does more than just chronicle events; she also sketches their context and thus their significance. Choice Grant's study is successful for its engaging prose and ability to reach across a broad variety of fields, including education, juvenile justice, and childhood, youth, and gender studies, to delineate the interlocking histories of institutions of social control for young people and reveal the deeply entrenched ideologies of gender, class, ethnicity, and race that shaped their establishment and development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. -- Miroslava Chavez-Garcia American Historical Review This short book provides a much-needed historical perspective on a question that has generated a lot of debate: why do boys so often perform poorly academically and act disruptively at school?... The Boy Problem is a valuable historical study of a pressing social problem that will find wide readership in social work, childhood studies, and education. -- Molly Ladd-Taylor Historical Studies in Education [Grant] makes an original contribution by keeping her eye on the prize: understanding the many ways in which gender shaped the world and life chances of lower class boys since the nineteenth century. That is a major accomplishment in this succintly written history. Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. Schooling the "Dangerous Classes": Reforming Boys in Nineteenth-Century America
2. The Nature of Boy Nature: Education and Recreation for Masculinity
3. The Perils of Public Education: Truants, Underachievers, and School Leavers
4. Bad or Backward? Gender and the Genesis of Special Education
5. "The Boys' Own Story": "The Boys' Own Story"
6. Black Boys and Native Sons: Race, Delinquency, and Schooling in the Urban North
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
