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His project builds both a composite picture of the crisis within contemporary masculinity, and a warchest of sharp and useful tools with which to understand its many strands. There is a happy combination of critical and generous intellect at work here as he neatly shuffles and categorizes these perspectives and then coaxes from his survey a sound vision of what masculinity could mean.
While revealing this broad context, his special focus is the dynamic challenges of boys at the cusp of early adulthood. For Mason, late adolescence––that time of seemingly infinite power of body, mind and spirit––is the setting clay on the potter’s wheel. This is the author’s confident domain, and here he navigates controversial ground. For the adolescent male, universal and deeply embedded rites of passage enact notions of masculinity at their most personal and communal levels. For reasons that Mason unfolds, positive and life-affirming rites of passage to manhood have been negated or eroded in the modern age, and the energy directed along more destructive and pernicious channels.
As the progress of this book moves to the structure and content of a curriculum for these boys in passage to manhood, Mason distils and exploits the insights afforded by his careful review of a rich literature. What emerges is a powerful paradigm for a new masculinity for these young men––a masculinity that is humanistic, holistic, and vibrantly engaging.
The curricular program that Mason offers gives compelling content for the reconstruction of these rites of passage, a program led by caring adults and role models who want to help boys navigate to healthy and purposeful manhood. He advocates, with reason, that boys be “set apart” for this instruction in some way and at some point in their education. Here, he builds a well-rounded picture of one instructive ideal––what an all-boys’ boarding school does at each stage in their progression through the school to provide a profoundly humane and engaging curriculum, one that simulates and re-works the experience of those rites of passage. (The Grail Legend will never quite look the same again!). Not surprisingly, the lengthy course outlines that close the book are designed to inspire boys’ active encounter with the more accessible writings on masculinity reviewed in this study, spliced with imaginative resources from literature and movies.
Chris Mason’s timely book is an important resource for practitioners who seek grounding in the literature of masculinity as a basis for teaching boys, and who need a wise and experienced guide through this rich and diverse world.