Three years ago – almost to the day – I did a TEDx talk in which I set out a vision for a new form of representative politics. It’s aged pretty well, I think – in 2025, the case for rethinking politics grows stronger by the nanosecond.
Anyway, I digress. That day, I shared the stage with many brilliant people – including Lewis Wedlock, a young researcher from Bristol who spoke about The Crisis of Masculinity. I was impressed with Lewis and I added him to my ever-growing list of people I’d love to interview on the Rethinking Education podcast.
Lewis shot to the top of that list when, along with almost everybody else on the planet, I watched the Netflix drama ‘Adolescence’ – and witnessed the remarkable impact it has had on the wider culture, sparking conversations about incels, emojis, internet safety, misogyny and ‘toxic masculinity’.
The extent to which this problem affects / is affected by education was brought into sharp relief last week by a poll which found that one-third of teachers had witnessed misogynistic behaviour from pupils at their school in the previous week - and that 40% of teachers felt ill-equipped to respond to such conduct.
The moral panic caused by Adolescence, including the Prime Minister’s strange suggestion that this 4-hour drama should be shown in schools, called to mind Sir Humphrey’s politicians’ syllogism from Yes Minister (“Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it.”)
Lewis Wedlock has been thinking about this stuff for almost a decade now – working with boys and young men to understand their views and to facilitate conversations about masculinity, misogyny and much else. Lewis has a book coming out in June called Masculinities in Schools. In short, Lewis is an excellent person to listen to if you want to hear someone talking sense about such thorny issues as these.
So I was thrilled to finally sit down with Lewis for a long-overdue conversation, in which we discussed ‘Adolescence’, patriarchy, problematic superheroes, masculinities (and why the plural), misogyny and much more. Of note is a formative moment when Lewis was giving an assembly to a group of Year 9 and 10 boys, when he briefly flashed up an image of Andrew Tate - and the boys gave Tate a standing ovation.
This episode illustrates brilliantly why I’m so grateful to now co-host the podcast with (The Real) David Cameron, who brings a great deal of depth and humanity to these conversations.
In my next post, I’ll explore my reflections on this conversation with Lewis and the question of what we should do about the rampant misogyny in schools, alongside many other issues children and young people are wrestling with in the internet age.
For now, I hope you find this conversation as illuminating as David and I did.
Enjoy! And let me know what you think!
Oh, and #belessbatman
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