Customer Reviews

Real Men or Real Teachers? : Contradictions in the Lives of Men Elementary School Teachers

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I'm a big fan of Christine Williams' work. She studies men in predominately female occupations. She firmly states that unlike women who enter mostly male work spaces, these men are encouraged and promoted. She states that they face slight resistance, but otherwise they are privileged. Here Paul Sargent interviews male teachers in elementary schools and shows how the picture is not as rosy as Williams portrays it.

Male teachers are not allowed to hug students, though female teachers are. Male teachers get more disruptive students in their classes. Male teachers are coerced into handling the technology at the school. The idea that they are on easy street is proved false.

Williams writes that males are quickly promoted. Sargent says men are pressured to become principals even when they do not want to. Men are forced to be less affectionate to their students and it just fuels longstanding ideas that men are distant. Sargent paints a clear portrait of how gender rigidity is constantly maintained.

What I love is that Sargent's informants do not say males need affirmative action. They say that would encourage men that don't belong in the profession. They said changing media images and increasing salaries would be the cure.

Though Sargent doesn't point this out, the male teachers interviewed are such liberal humanists. Williams first noticed that these men are not gender radicals or workplace pioneers. Still, you could tell that the men Sargent interviewed wanted to be seen as teachers without a gender. They were reluctant to see things in masculine or feminine terms. The informants were just a step away from crying out, "I'm not a man, I'm a person!" I know many 21st century postmoderns want to avoid labels and identity politics, but the apoliticality or desire not to investigate group dynamics was quite a surprise to me.

Sargent does not treat men as a monolithic group. He brings up sexuality, parenthood, and class matters at times. Still, near the end of the book when he wrote that many of the informants were men of color, I became surprised that race did not come up more.

This book is quite academic. Lay readers may have problems swimming through the sociological and gender studies terms. Still, this is a rewarding book for those who will take the time to peruse it.