No Fellas, No Problem?

This Milkshake Brings No Boys to the Yard

I teach at one of Berlin’s flagship K-12 public schools. About 12% of the elementary staff are male. There are no male elementary administrators. These numbers surprise no one. They don’t seem to bother anyone either.

My daughter is a sixth grader at my school. She’s clever, curious, and more emotionally intelligent than I was at 30. She loves books and small animals and has a healthy disdain for authority. She doesn’t seem to see me as an authority, so I have to earn her disdain through less conventional means.

My kid has been blessed with a constellation of dedicated teachers. But across her entire educational journey, she’s had exactly one male teacher. One. A cameo in a cast of leading ladies.

I might note that this is one more male teacher than in my whole elementary school experience. So there. Progress.

I find this deeply problematic. You may or may not agree. We might agree that it’s a problem, but disagree on how we describe the problem. And that’s to say nothing of solutions, which leave yet more room for disagreement. It’s complicated, maybe a bit messy.

So I gathered a gaggle of colleagues—a principal, a fifth grade teacher, and our student services coordinator—to disentangle the mess. On a student-run podcast I produce, we grappled with the complications.

The world is complicated. So is gender. At some risk, we discussed male and female teachers with the utmost respect for other genders.

I asked my panelists to what degree and in what ways the dearth of male elementary teachers might be problematic. I’m grateful for our conversation and I urge you to listen to it wherever you get podcasts.

I’ve been reflecting on this discussion in the weeks since we recorded it. I’ve explored the issue with friends, colleagues, and students. I’m stunned by how indifferent and/or resigned good people are about this issue.

These same people would be rightfully aghast if 90% of their kid’s teachers were men. Or white. Or…

They would picket and protest. At the very least, they would form a committee.

I have little appetite for committees. And I’m not demanding that we launch a campaign to recruit droves of men into first-grade classrooms and arm them with impossibly dull scissors and incomplete boxes of Crayolas. But maybe we should. Because the absence of male teachers in elementary schools isn’t just a quirky staffing statistic—it’s a legit problem.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in the 2022-23 school year, 11% of public elementary school teachers in the United States were male. According to data from the European Commission, in 2022, 14% of primary education teachers across the European Union were men. Germany is consistent with this trend, though it varies on the margins by state. The state of Bremen—where 21% of primary schools do not employ a single male teacher—launched the “Rent a Teacherman” program. So my school is not alone here.

This would be less alarming if these same educational institutions did not claim—earnestly in most cases—a commitment to diversity, to inclusion, and to dismantling gender stereotypes. We’ve had impassioned conversations about representation in boardrooms, in STEM, in politics, in superhero franchises. But these conversations woefully disregard who’s helping our kids to learn to read and to regulate their emotions.

The absence of dudes so baked in that no one is even discussing it. WTF? Why have we collectively resigned ourselves to failing here?

Some well-intentioned folks will argue it’s not a big deal. Bigger fish to fry. After all, teaching is teaching, right? Good teaching transcends gender. There’s a teacher shortage. This is a problem of self-selection in a free market. But the idea that representation doesn’t really matter in early education is not only naive, it repudiates everything we know about child development.

Children absorb social cues from their environment with astonishing acuity. If, for the first decade of their lives, every teacher who nurtures, listens, comforts, and educates them is female, what narratives are we reinforcing? What perceptions are we crystallizing about gender and power, intellect and empathy, authority and care?

Kids need to see men modeling kindness, patience, and nurturing—not just stoicism, toughness, or, God help them, the “pull my finger” brand of paternal wisdom that my kid gets at home. Elementary school is when children are learning how to interact with the world. They’re forming relationships with adults outside their family, often for the first time. And yet, many of them won’t regularly interact with men in a nurturing, educational role until middle school, by which time it might just be too late.

We talk often—with good intentions and for the right reasons—about the importance of representation. But the absence of men in nurturing, educational roles during the foundational years of childhood sends a different message, one with long-term implications. And no one seems to mind!

The absence of men in caregiving roles reinforces outdated assumptions that nurturing is inherently feminine, and that warmth and intuition are women’s domain. The absence of men in in primary school contributes to a narrow understanding of masculinity. Kids see men in media as warriors, CEOs, or as comic relief, but rarely as empathic educators reading Charlotte’s Web aloud with theatrical flair.

I’m wary of sounding like I want to take something away from women. Elementary teachers are often criminally underpaid and overworked and still successfully shape young minds with a level of dedication that would make Olympic coaches weep. This isn’t about women not being “enough.” It’s about the system being skewed and kids missing out because of it.

So why aren’t more men in elementary education? Let’s line it up:

• The Benjamins: Teaching is not reputed for lavish salaries or stock options. For men who are culturally or personally pressured to be the primary breadwinner, the economics of early education are, to put it gently, discouraging.

• Professional Prestige: Tell someone you teach AP Physics and you’ll get a nod of respect. Tell them you teach second grade, and you’re more likely to get, “Aww, that’s so cute!”

• Role Play: Society still sees early years education as “women’s work.” It’s nurturing. It’s soft. It involves glitter!

• Cultural Stigma: There remains a persistent suspicion surrounding men interested in working with young children. Unlike their female counterparts, male elementary educators often find themselves under heightened scrutiny, as if their very presence requires an explanation.

Honestly, the only profession where a man gets weirder looks than being a male kindergarten teacher is being a mime. At least mimes suffer in silence on purpose.

Look, I’m not barking for half of my daughter’s teachers to be male. But one out of ten? That’s not just imbalance, that’s a whisper in a chorus.

Let’s be real: certain kids would benefit from a male teachers. Maybe they don’t have a positive male role model at home. Either way, they need to see that men can be silly and serious, gentle and firm, warm and wise.

I wonder if you read “certain kids,” you inferred boys. I did not imply this.

But I’ll confess that in ruminating about this issue, I can’t escape the conclusion that I would have benefitted from a male teacher or two in my elementary years. When I showed up in seventh grade, Mr. Brady (history) and Mr. Daleske (art) fundamentally reshaped my self-image, my approach to learning, and my academic interests. I’m not sure what their gender had to do with it, but I wonder.

When male teachers are present in elementary settings, they often become informal ambassadors of a different kind of masculinity—one that repudiates the toxic versions that often dominate our discussions of men. Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson and Co. pose a real problem; but they are also symptoms of another problem.

We need more fellas reading stories at circle time. More dudes crouching down to refine scissor skills. More lads offering patient encouragement to tearful first graders. More men demonstrating, every day in every way, that caring and nurturing is not a gendered act.

Love,

DL

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