Should boys play with guns? The question is raised in a new British report. Most parents' reaction is to stop gun play at once. Parents' websites contain much anxious discussion, especially from mothers, who worry about seeing their child playing with a gun.
Not having a toy gun provides the opportunity for many boys to invent one. Parents say their sons bite into a sandwich, which becomes a gun. "Bang, bang, you're dead."
No mother or father wants their son to become a gun-wielding monster who destroys other people's lives.
There is a huge range of difference among boys across socio-economic status, race and language. Yet it appears that boys all over the world often play with guns, and later in their lives with computer games in which they aim at being the best and eliminating the rest.
But these games may be useful to get boys learning, the new British report on the early years of learning suggests. The report is called Confident, Capable and Creative: Supporting Boys' Achievements, and comes from Britain's Department for Children, Schools and Families.
It says that boys often watch TV and games and act out what they see males in them doing. We don't have to look hard to find examples of men on TV or in movies with a weapon in their hands, from John Wayne to the stream of movies with Arnie Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude van Damme and others.
The report says, "Adults can find this type of play particularly challenging and have a natural instinct to stop it."
Britain's Children's Minister, Beverley Hughes, called it "a common sense approach to the fact that many children, and perhaps particularly many boys, like boisterous, physical activity".
Her masterful wording encompasses many debates and will create many more.
The report says every child is entitled to challenging and enjoyable learning; this must include boys. It says many children do chose gender-specific activities, and each has a personal learning journey. We must trust the richness of children's ideas, the report says, not impose our own. Case studies in the report emphasise exploration, experimentation and "mucking about with things".
Some might see this as the kind of play that males typically do "messing about in boats" as described in Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows. Many men do enjoy mucking about with cars, computers and boats. Fathers play with children (especially sons) and it's usually in a more challenging and competitive way. They nurture (as mothers do) but in characteristically different styles.
Efforts to improve boys' achievement in Britain and Australia have looked principally at behaviour and learning.
Without wishing to make gross comparisons between boys and girls, there are worrying trends in behaviour among boys. Oppositional and conduct disorders are twice as common among boys, according to Sebastian Kraemer's report in the British Medical Journal.
Despite many academic articles, a gap between boys' and girls' achievement remains. Among low-achievers in Britain, boys outnumber girls by 20 per cent. A gender gap in achievement between boys and girls has been discussed in Australia since the O'Doherty report was published in NSW in 1994. Last year, the subject rose to prominence in the United States and is still being hotly debated.
The British report says too many boys develop negative images of themselves as learners, in part because of learning that is not purposeful. The issue was summarised when one British boy wrote in an exam, "I will try my hardest, no matter how pointless the task is."
Following boys' agendas does improve learning, the report says. Staff should "help boys to achieve more rapidly by providing opportunities for learning that engage them".
Engaging boys in school work has been discussed in all countries surveyed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's Program for International Student Assessment report. Emphatically, boys are not all the same. But the problem of capturing boys' interests has been registered in almost all countries surveyed by the OECD and it keeps cropping up in unexpected places. Recently, I was asked by the Globe Theatre in London, "How on earth do we engage the boys who visit us?"
There will be many implications from Britain's Confident, Capable and Creative report. For instance, do we have enough men in teaching? The Oxford University's Professor Andrew Martin says that although teacher quality is paramount, boys prefer to raise certain issues with a trusted older male, not always a father. And Kraemer argues that males often tolerate more active and boyish learning.
Getting suitable males into teaching has been oft-discussed, but no workable solution has been found.
Perhaps the report follows a trend back to more boy and girl-specific learning. It might encourage a move back to single-sex learning, even within a coeducational school.
There are also some echoes in the work done by the Federal Government's Boys Education Lighthouse Schools Program. Among its 10 principles for engaging boys are flexibility of approach, rather than a standard, teacher-directed activity, practical and hands-on learning, and the use of appropriate male role models.
Like the British report, the lighthouse program wants teachers and carers not to enforce stereotypes but to challenge them. The balance among all these principles is difficult to maintain.
The report is not a sensational call encouraging boys to be aggressive in child-care centres and the early years of school. It is a cautious call questioning carers' understandable anxiety about the ways in which many boys play. It supports those of us who argued that schools should be made more boy-friendly.
It may spark a useful debate on what is permissible in the early years and how to channel the restless activity that many boys show, rather than condemn it and turn boys off learning.
Dr Peter West is a Sydney academic who provides workshops on boys' learning. www.boyslearning.com.au