Teaching teenage boys how to install a toilet is no small feat.
Chandler Whitney secured enough toilets for each boy in the group and mounted them on rolling platforms to mimic a floor. He drew the various components of a toilet tank on a chalkboard, then demonstrated how to assemble an entire toilet. Once the toilets were hooked up to water, Whitney would let the boys stuff them with paper towels and rocks — and then flush.
“They think it’s hilarious, because they’re boys,” said Whitney, who runs The Foundry in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he teaches boys hands-on and life skills.
In Vicksburg, a city of about 20,000 perched on the bluffs above the Mississippi River, young boys are fighting the odds that are seemingly stacked against them. Nearly 1 in 4 residents live below the poverty line. Just two weeks ago, three teenagers — two of them were 15 years old — were injured in a shooting. Many boys are being raised by single mothers and have family members whose lives have been ravaged with addiction.
“The statistics are really terrible,” said Whitney, who started The Foundry in 2016. “There are so many unfathered boys who are statistically destined for prison or to be killed.”
Whitney, who grew up poor and was raised by a father who struggled with alcoholism, wanted to interrupt the cycle the boys had inherited and help give them a different path by teaching them what he knew well: how to work with their hands.
“When you take a boy like that, and you put a tool in his hand and show him that he can do something, he can manipulate something physical in the world, it’s like a switch gets flipped on,” said Whitney, who is an electrician and taught at a military school. “ It’ll make your hair stand up if you see this happen — it’s like they suddenly get some kind of an idea of what they are supposed to be in this world.”
The motivation problem
If you walk into a morgue and there are five people who are dead by suicide, four will be men, podcaster Scott Galloway likes to say. Men are graduating from high school and college in fewer numbers than women. The “addiction economy” has swallowed up young men: every day, 1 in 8 men turn to pornography, gambling and playing video games. About 1 in 5 young men aged 25–34 are living at home. The term “NEET” — not employed, in education or in training — has increasingly become a shorthand to talk about the crisis of men.
Some argue that the crisis is at least partly fueled by economic changes like the loss of blue-collar jobs that have historically offered men a clear path to work and economic independence. Richard Reeves, author of “Of Boys and Men,” has argued that the disappearance of these traditionally male jobs is a significant part of the problem facing boys and men.
In more rural parts of America, including places like Vicksburg, where around 70% of the population is Black and economic opportunities are scarce, the challenges for young men are even more pronounced.
“Men at the top are still flourishing, but men in general are not, especially if they are Black,” Reeves wrote.
But the changes in the economy don’t explain the problem, argues Leonard Sax, a family physician and author of “Boys Adrift,” which was first published in 2007 and has been updated as a third edition to come out this fall. Sax cites findings from Alaska to argue that high-paying jobs in mining and construction are going unfilled.
“I don’t buy this notion that the switch to a service economy explains the fact that 10 million able-bodied men in the United States are not working and not looking for work,” Sax, who has visited over 500 schools over the years, told the Deseret News.
The core problem, Sax argues, is that boys and young men lack motivation. He lays out six forces that he believes have drained that motivation from boys; among them are schools that are poorly suited to boys, video games, “the devaluation of masculinity,” pornography, artificial intelligence and the manosphere.
The return of trade schools and shop classes in schools is a positive change: “We’ve had 30 years of systematically disrespecting the trades.”
But it’s a small part of the sweeping crisis.
“The bigger part of the problem is that boys are not motivated,” Sax said.
‘Do the job right’
For Connor Ashley, a 14-year-old in Vicksburg who studied at The Foundry, learning to work with his hands has been transformative.
For much of his childhood, his life lacked stability. He was raised by his grandmother, while his father was incarcerated and his mother battled addiction. After his grandparents died, his great-aunt, Rhonda Howard, took custody of Ashley and his younger brother.
“I thought: ‘Oh my gosh, what am I going to do?’” Howard, who is 62, told me. “And then when I found out about The Foundry, it was like an answered prayer.”
Whitney could recognize that Ashley longed for mentorship and help, because he was once in a similar situation as a young man. Whitney grew up poor in Natchez, Mississippi. His father struggled with addiction. “He would not teach me things,” he said. “I’m not sure how capable he would’ve been to teach me.” When he was 16, his parents divorced. “I had to learn to be resourceful — I had to figure out how to keep our vehicles running and how to keep our house warm.”
Under Whitney’s instruction, Ashley learned how to grill, how to identify circuits and voltage, and how to put in an outlet. He learned the basics of plumbing. “They taught everybody, if you’re gonna do the job, do it right,” Ashley said.
When it first launched, The Foundry was so popular in the community that a few years ago, Whitney had to shut it down to figure out how to accommodate more boys. The program serves boys ages 9 to 17 and offers a six-week course — one beginner and one more advanced — in the fall and spring, with rotating workshops. The program has little funding, Whitney said, and runs out of a workshop space that he purchased about 10 years ago. The curriculum includes basic plumbing, electrical and some auto and home maintenance.
Ashley described feeling a sense of accomplishment when he was asked to help install an air conditioning unit. His favorite part of The Foundry classes was building an outlet and a light source with electricity. “Nobody really gets a chance to do stuff like that,” he said. “It takes skill.”
Plus, at The Foundry, Ashley could turn his focus to his work, leaving behind whatever was weighing on him. “This was something that he could do on his own,” Howard said. For his future career, Ashley is considering underwater welding or football.
When I asked Ashley if he felt that the new skills helped build character, he turned my question around: “I think it takes character to build something.”
‘Subdue the earth’
Without some kind of “code,” Galloway has argued, some set of principles to be guided by, young men are bound to drift. Religion, patriotism and even masculinity can function as that code.
For Whitney and his project at The Foundry, that code looks like a combination of Christian values and a responsibility learned through hands-on skills that men can contribute to the community around them.
Whitney, who described himself as a “conservative type of Presbyterian,” has thought a lot about the verse from Genesis where God commands Adam and Eve to “replenish” and “subdue” the Earth.
“We were told to go out and subdue the earth — suddenly I thought of it not as conquering the earth, but learning to build, fix, create and take responsibility.” He felt called to start The Foundry and views it as a ministry.
Although the instructors happen to be Christian, the religious part isn’t mandatory. Some students are Jewish or atheist. “Even if they’re never going to be Christian, it gives them a moral compass. It shows them that living for yourself is no way to live at all,” Whitney said.
Sax offers some advice in his book to keep boys motivated despite the cultural forces working to destabilize and derail them.
“As parents, we have to find ways to restore the bonds across generations,” he wrote. Houses of worship or even competitive sports are places where boys can be mentored.
One way of getting the boys out of the online abyss of the manosphere with figures like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate spreading “toxic misogyny,” he wrote, is to restore romance. “The most effective way to get these young men out of the manosphere is not with feminism, but with chivalry.”
Sax continued, “These boys are hungry for a solid answer to the question, ‘What does it mean to be a real man?’ Here’s what we should tell them: Being a real man means being a good husband, a good father, a good servant to your community and to your nation.”
For Whitney, the hands-on skills he teaches lead to that same larger goal. They’re a vehicle for something deeper — cultivating character and instilling in young men confidence to work hard and offer something to the wider community.
“It’s more of how to be not just a man, but a responsible Christian man,” Whitney said.