 “I happened to be walking through my alma mater [St Mary’s College] about two to three weeks ago and as I walked along the corridor I peeped into every class and every single class had a female teacher,” he says.
It intrigued him because when he was a student, a female teacher was a “novelty… and you can imagine during adolescent years all that that implied.”
He is illustrating a point he had begun making about the significance of the absence of male figures in the lives of boys, and how dramatically the situation has turned.
“I grew up being taught largely by men,” says Dr Ian Hypolite, psychiatrist, coach and mentor, making a distinction between male and teacher. “I also remember being strongly influenced by male teachers.”
“I say that to emphasize a growing pattern in society where our young men are no longer coming under the influence of males outside of their households, and in many instances, maybe there is no male in the household. I coach a sport where that is very common.”
Dr Hypolite coaches at the Memphis Pioneers Athletics Club—people will easily connect him to 400m hurdler Jehue Gordon, the gold-medallist—where he meets youngsters from various social circumstances. It has placed him well to observe behaviours, and his training in psychiatry provides him with the tools to analyse what he sees.
“I am not being misogynistic by any means, but I see the necessity for us to function as men, and I’ve seen instances where we’ve had to correct young men and seen their response to a male challenge and it is not always appropriate, and it speaks to the importance of male role models in our society.”
The club is essentially run by men and is more than a running club, he says, as it “has managed to guide well over 40 young people to scholarships in the US worth millions of dollars. We sometimes talk about ourselves as wealth influencing and by that we don’t necessarily earn money, but we provide experiences that are a part of wealth and we emphasize that education is an important part of wealth generation.”
“But even more important is the impact we have in terms of keeping young people off the streets, and imparting our value system on to them and essentially helping them to develop as young men and women. Jehue is now very prominent, but there are so many others apart from Jehue whose lives we’ve impacted upon.”
Agreeing that many studies and anecdotes point to the decline of the young male, he believes that two factors need to be addressed from a societal level.
One is the education system, and the other is the need for social workers. He feels we have possibly erred in the way we pair boys and girls and how we teach them.
“I also want to stress the significance of the absence of male figures in our education process and how that has an impact on young men and how they interact with other young men. I have recognized that young men can no longer readily handle challenges from males in an appropriate manner generally, and invariably, if it is a peer then there is no longer a process of talking things out or arguing things out. It’s a process of acting things out, and if it is a superior they then get cowed. Neither of which is desirable.”
He believes the absence of the male figure is germane to any discussion of saving our youth from self-destruction, and that it is linked to helping them escape limitations imposed by poor social circumstances
“That cycle of poverty generates miscreants,” he says, and it needs to be broken.
“My own feeling is that a major part of our crime thrust has to be the employment of many, many social workers. Everybody is talking about jails and police. I think we need social workers in abundance. We need a lot of social case work that goes into communities and identifies people in need—in emotional need—identifies them and makes recommendations as to how those needs are to be addressed.
“I think then and only then will we break the cycle of crime.”
If we could attract young men back to teaching, it would help at many levels, he thinks. Apart from providing role models up close, with whom they could share their issues, it would also enable them to see education as manly an option as gangster life.
“Education confers on you the ability to reason and to talk things out. The absence of education generates quite the opposite, the tendency to act things out; so there’s one way to settle differences,” he says.
“We’ve also noted the whole question of learning disability among young men and the impact on crime,” he says, noting that a significant proportion of young men who are learning disabled, fall out of the education system because it neither recognizes them, nor has facilities to accommodate or nurture them. It is part of the reason they turn to lifestyles that validate them and give them a sense of worth.
“I’ve never felt inferior to anyone—as a coach, student, professional—and that kind of self-belief was generated by the male mentors I had,” he says.
He grew up under what he describes as poor circumstances, in a family he considers “clearly ambitious.” His father was a tailor, his mother a nursing assistant (both deceased), and he watched his uncles “progress from poverty to degrees.” One obtained his Master’s and was Director of Surveys in Trinidad and Tobago; another was a Roman Catholic priest.
“The interesting thing is that between them there were so many books. I read so many books early in my life that I was not supposed to read. Books that were then considered subversive literature, I was already putting my hands on them by the time I was 15. So there was that element and that emphasis on education even back then when we lived under poor circumstances. So by no means were we well off but I think there was a significant emphasis on education in the household.”
It was education and sport for him—two partners that moulded him for the life he embraced.
“Sport was always in my blood. I grew up in East Port of Spain and I can’t remember doing anything but playing sports. I was recalling the other day how easy it was for 8- and 9-year-olds to pick up themselves, leave home and go and run around the race track, run around the Savannah or go up to the Botanical Gardens and then go back home in the evening, unperturbed. It’s not something that you see happening now.”
It isn’t something you see because people are afraid to let their children out of sight, and indoor life breeds an unhealthy lifestyle, a further stress to all systems.
It’s complicated, and even if Dr Hypolite is right, the question is how to get the absent male to return? |
