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Topic 4.) Similar Programs

How Is Michael Meade's Work with Boys Similar to What We Do? 

There is in both our work and Meade's a similar reliance on discovery learning as the medium for getting boys to move from acting aloof, monosyllabic and fiercely competitive and being involved, articulate and cooperative. What we do with girls follows a similar discovery learning path with the goal of getting girls to move from keyed on what boys want from them, and how they should look, and behave - to being their authentic selves, and moved by deeper values, ambitions and mores. 

First, let's talk about where boys and girls start, joined at the hip to the gender-specific adolescent culture in which they are bathed. What boys and girls have in common is that there is no place within their adolescent culture for being one's own person. Those who don't conform to the culture are outsiders and are excluded. Or at least that is the fear that keeps them in line. The adherence to cultural norms is hardly limited to adolescents, however. Adults also grow up within, and live their lives out of a "conversation" that unconsciously shapes their beliefs and attitudes. 

Mexicans, for instance, have an overarching sense of being poor, even if they have escaped poverty - mainly because the conversation around them has always taken poverty as a given. New Englanders have a sense of being formal and serious, even if their individual lives are casual and flighty. Each family similarly creates a conversation in which its members are bathed and from which it is hard to escape. In the same way as Fernando Flores teaches doctors to fashion a "clearing" in which the historical conversation is silenced, thus paving the way for illness to dissolve, Meade has boys identify with the archetypal boy, and we have adolescents identify with the archetypal hero or warrior. In this way, a "clearing" shows up, into which something new can appear, as if out of the blue. In fact both programs start and finish by evoking different archetypes than the ones evoked in everyday life.

So, the goal of programs like ours (and like Meade's and Flores) is to create an environment in which transcending fixed attitudes and beliefs is possible. Our task-in-common is not to question the beliefs and attitudes of the youth, but to afford them an opportunity to view what they believe and feel from a different place. For Meade it is from the viewpoint of the universal boy. For us, it is from the viewpoint of the team member, committed to the success of the team, rather than of himself or herself as an individual. 

Meade does it through poetry and a bongo drum - an unlikely medium for boys to encounter, much less relate to. But relate to it they do! We do it through the attraction of puzzle-like challenges, teamwork, myth, pomp and ceremony. in each case, a switch of viewpoint allows fresh feelings and attitudes to bubble up, be considered, experimented with, and ultimately chosen. What bubbles up, when the team matters, is unexpected compassion, a blurring of ages and backgrounds, and an appreciation for what is different from what I am and an appreciation for my own uniqueness.

Neither method teaches skills, attitudes of beliefs, relying instead on what spontaneously emerges. In both methods what emerges is on a higher plane, a plane which competes well in attractiveness with following the driven path of the peer culture. Neither is fashioned to turn out adult-clone adolescents, so the participants may be even more committed to the independence-seeking behaviour of adolescence. This may be somewhat unnerving to adults in the shorter run, but in the end, after trying new attitudes on with peers first, the youth will next turn to creating a more open and receptive conversation with adults in their lives.