Oatmeal Facials and Sock Wrestling: The Perils and Promises of Extra-Curricular Strategies for 'Fixing' Boys' Education

Advocates for boys' education have forwarded numerous "fixes" for boys' supposed educational woes, including both academic and non-academic programs and strategies. This article focuses on the lesser-discussed non-academic, extra-curricular means suggested, specifically outdoor education. Using qualitative analysis of an Australian school's outdoor education program, I demonstrate that outdoor and other non-academic sites and strategies for addressing boys' education have particular gendered dangers alongside progressive possibilities. The dangers include reproducing dominant masculinist gender regimes through social interaction, requirements for gendered self-disclosure, and philosophies of the "uses" of nature. Progressive possibilities, conversely, include re-imagining outdoor education as a space for explicit resistance to gender or reimagining the uses of nature to eschew gender altogether.