The Boy Problem: Educating Boys in Urban America, 1870–1970 by Julia Grant (review)

As Julia Grant makes clear in the early pages of The Boy Problem, “Today’s discussions about how to best help boys to succeed echo a century’s worth of claims about boys, their needs, and the best way to educate them” (5). Focusing her attention on large northern cities, Grant demonstrates that large numbers of lower-class youth since the nineteenth century have faced small futures due to poverty; ethnic and racial discrimination; and the inability of many families, voluntary associations, schools, and other state-financed institutions to offer clearer pathways to adult happiness and success. She rightly worries that, not knowing that history, citizens may be doomed to repeat it.

Many scholars have explored the wide range of institutions that have tried to cope with, respond to, and, ideally, improve the lives of poor urban youth. Houses of Refuge in the antebellum period tried to tame and transform urban miscreants by separating them from adult criminals, though these institutions often became junior prisons despite the high hopes of some founders. In New York City, the celebrated Charles Loring Brace and his imitators in other cities, shocked by the throngs of homeless, abandoned, and unwanted street children, sent roughly a quarter of a million of them to live with farm families in midwestern and western states, where some found loving homes and others cause to run away. YMCAs, Boys’ Clubs, juvenile courts, and other child-saving efforts in turn similarly tried to intervene in the lives of unfortunate or wayward youth, for whom an expanding public school system seemed an alien and unwelcome intrusion. Faced with the decline of child labor in many industries and more effective enforcement of compulsory school laws, poor boys in particular often rebelled at the rules and restrictions of regular classrooms, where already overburdened teachers welcomed their removal.

School administrators frequently isolated boys in separate classes or facilities if they could not keep up with their peers academically or caused too much trouble. Classrooms were increasingly age-graded in cities by the early twentieth century, and immigrant children who lacked strong English skills and supportive families or preferred work and the streets over the school and its routines either dropped out as soon as possible or found themselves stigmatized. Stereotyped as “hand minded,” “motor minded,” and uninterested in academics, the poor were often systematically tracked into manual training and vocational education courses. To show the eerie similarity between past and present, Grant underscores how lower-class boys have long been overrep-resented in special education classes, whether white ethnics earlier in the last century or the children of color today. Special classes that isolate underachieving pupils often remain the classrooms of last resort for children alienated from school, unable to make the grade, and difficult to manage and teach. As many civil rights leaders understandably claim, the low achievement of poor children in the nation’s cities is a shameful legacy of the past and remains scandalous.

Many historians have examined the main topics in this book, often in greater depth. Grant generously acknowledges the pioneering work of many scholars, including Steven L. Schlossman on juvenile courts, Joseph L. Tropea and Barry M. Franklin on special education, and many others too numerous to mention. Drawing as well upon an impressive amount of primary research, especially archives in Chicago, Grant not only tries to see the world through the eyes of adult reformers—from settlement house workers to social scientists, and parents and teachers—but through the eyes of young people, too, through available oral histories and memoirs. And she 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 succinctly written history.