Navigating Adolescence Through Music Education: Boys, Gender, and Representation

Unlike leader of the opposition Kemi Badenoch, I watched the hit Netflix show Adolescence last week, which left me with many thoughts and questions.

If you've come across some of my work, you'll (hopefully) encounter a few common threads. I've long held the belief that music education can be a significant factor in helping young people to grow up respecting people of different genders, religions, ethnicities and disabilities. My post on celebrating Black History Month (and other special months) goes into this in a bit more detail, and encourages us to dive deeper than playlists and colourful displays.

...when there are issues that are affecting young people up and down the country, what role can education have in helping young people to navigate through?

While we can debate the specific definitions of 'toxic masculinity' or 'misogyny', it's clear that in recent years, there has been a surge in rhetoric about 'high value men', 'incels' and the perception of a new generation of men who have been 'feminised'. Fuelled in part by blatant transphobia, how boys subsequently see themselves, their roles and duties as they grow into adults, represents growing concern for many educators, politicians, carers and parents.

In a similar but not comparable way, my post on Israel and Palestine attempts to broach this central idea - when there are issues that are affecting young people up and down the country, what role can education (and specifically music education) have in helping young people navigate their own feelings and understandings? How might the proliferation of information give young people the tools to make their own better informed decisions about how to treat the people around them? Recognising these issues, even Netflix, have made Adolescence available for secondary schools in the UK to stream for free, alongside guides and resources created by the charity Tender.

One of the benefits of young people experiencing a wide range of people and ideas in their education, is that they are able to see potential and possibilities. While many education organisations such as ABRSM, RSL, BBC 10 Pieces are becoming more inclusive and diverse, there, as they say, levels to this. It is important for boys to see women and non-binary people in all the roles they see usually see men in, but without critical inquiry, it can be easy for boys not to understand the why's and how's of a woman's music, identity or story.

It is important that the music created by women is valued regardless of it's content. Over the past century, there have been many examples of women in many different genres making music, only for it to be dismissed. Within the classical music world, great work has been done by organisations such as DONNE and Her Ensemble in not only platforming women, but bringing the worlds attention to how the musical output of many women has been undervalued.

Many women who have been added to reading, listening or repertoire lists, have not been engaged with because they address issues surrounding womanhood, but because their music has been deemed of sufficient 'quality' to warrant their inclusion amongst their man counterparts. Ask yourself, in the music that you may have included, how much of it speaks to gender identity in title or lyric? How much of it asks us to question what a composer is trying to say about being a woman (positive or negative) in any given context? It is far easier to talk about the various ways that women have had to fight for rights (that in certain Western countries have been recently taken away) and how society is/was unfair, than trying to engage with the everyday struggles which may help a young boy say, 'Wow, I didn't know that about women' in 2025.

In trying to provide different perspectives for young boys, songs like Woman by Little Simz, Q.U.E.E.N by Janelle Monae and Erykah Badu, Just A Girl by No Doubt, or Shadow Mother by Ella Jarman-Pinto all speak to different understandings and experiences of what it is to be a woman.

Does all music created by women need to have critical discussions about womanhood? Absolutely not. Do we need to tell girls and women that their art needs to wrestle with these themes? No. It is however, is in the absence of discussions about womanhood which can leave young boys exposed to the views of muscular, well groomed, erudite men on the internet with large followings without context or rebuttal.