Is education biased against boys?

silverharp

I was looking at an Economist article on this, the article was pants but the comments were interesting, It looks like in a lot of Western countries that education is tweaked in favour of girls and boys are losing interest, at the top end boys will do fine , its the ones in the middle and low end that will take the brunt of this.

The comments are probably more related to secondary and are not particular comments about Ireland, but is it an issue?

Boys and girls are equally smart, and they used to get equally good results (on average). But not now.
Once the progressive/feminist generation took over the Education Dept and took over teacher-training, boys started dropping. In Australia, boys final year results dropped by 7% in as many years. 1% per year. That should have set off the alarm bells, and it did. And now the results by gender are a secret. (citation: Look up the Bureau of statistics "Educational Attainment: Gender differences in educational achievement, 1998")
Now, two-thirds of uni students are girls! 'Cause they do better at school.. Isn't that discrimination?
Removing explicit teaching techniques, stripping clear assessments and competition. Removing discipline and teacher-directed learning. Removing rods and phonics made sure boys would do worse... all made sure boys would suffer and dislike school.
And then pouring in communicative and collaborative techniques and other fads. Removing tests and replacing them with continuous assessment all made sure girls enjoy school more, and do better.
Put in simple, average/typical/normative/archetypal terms, girls enjoy talking, boys enjoy doing... and all these educational changes replace "Doing" and getting a "Result" with "Talking" and "Sharing".
Boys can match girls thinking, but not talking. Girls are more verbally advanced than boys. Boys thrive with explicit teaching and clear competition. Without it, school is 'boring'.
Are your sons are struggling, while your daughters are loving school?
It is not your child's fault - it's our 'progressive' education system!
(P.S. Note how this article blames the victim? It implies that it is boys own fault... because they don't read and play on computers... ever thought that this is because school has been made 'boring' for boys? They have stripped out the fun things and boys end up finding other occupations for their intelligence.

I wonder why it took so long for people to notice. This has been going on for decades. We have reshaped the system for educating children to emphasize the natural skills of girls and reduced the aspects of that education which capitalized on the skills of boys. Boys are test takers and on the spot innovators and Girls are homework doers and organizers and planners. Now a boy can have a 95 average on quizzes and exams but still get a D because he hasn't passed in the homework. It is teaching boys that they aren't smart and not capable.
We would benefit from a system that taught boys to their strengths and taught girls to their strengths.

"Boys still score somewhat better at maths, and in science the genders are roughly equal. But when it comes to the students who really struggle, the difference is stark: boys are 50% more likely than girls to fall short of basic standards in all three areas."

I note that you fail to mention the logical implication of this: that the best boys must be better than the best girls for roughly equal averages to result.

Generally speaking, I think that a rarely appreciated reason for boys' underperformance is that in today's world, there are more interesting - and important - things to learn for boys than the interpretation of 18th century poems. When I went to high school some 20 years ago, my overall grades were always lower than my written examination results, because teachers somewhat self-servingly (maybe understandably) tended to punish students for lack of interest and participation in their classes (which I found boring), for lack of submission, etc.

We played a lot of computer games in the afternoons (which are generally free for high school students in Germany), and although parents and teachers mostly thought it's a waste of time, looking back I think I learned much more playing games than (sleeping) in school - about computers, strategy, and about learning itself.

Is it coincidence that girls, who were more diligent with their homework, almost completely missed out on the IT revolution? They claim they are fighting against a glass ceiling - but maybe boys' more playful approach to learning simply proved superior in today's world.

But of course, women are far from giving up. Their new approach is to promote laws to force companies to hire more women and pay them better. Will this strategy be more successful, in the long term?

If women stopped lying to themselves and understood the real reasons why men are more successful (at the top end), and also why men who fail tend to fail more destructively than women (in most countries male suicide and homelessness rates are a multiple of female rates), true progress might be achieved, finally.

The superior educational outcomes for females, in the UK at least, has been manufactured. To name just three of the long-term trends in British education that have all but ensured the decline in the educational attainment of boys:

* Female-dominated primary education: Almost all pre-secondary school teachers are female. Studies have shown that they bias education in favour of girls, marking their work higher and rewarding traits like neatness and punctuality. From their first classroom experiences, boys at once pick up that school is a feminised environment designed to reward girls.

* Female-friendly curriculum: Everything from choice of English literature texts through to the basis of worked examples in mathematics have been reshaped to be appealing to the female mind. Reading comprehension focuses on empathy and emotional topics, all of which bore most boys to tears. Mathematics is no longer contextualised with examples from engineering or the world of making things. Science has had all dangerous experiments removed and dissection eliminated. The classroom has become a tedious and uninteresting environment for young male minds.

* Low-pressure, long-scale assessment methods: The rise of coursework has finally been arrested, but its introduction was greatly advantageous to girls who prefer to work consistently over long periods without the intense short bursts of high-pressure work favoured by boys. Modular assessment was a further blow to boys, as it again favoured female learning patterns and penalised boys for their preference for working under pressure for a single moment of high-stakes terminal examination.

In short, it is ridiculous to suggest that we have only just realised some intrinsic truth about girls being inherently more academic than boys. Rather, we have completely reshaped the educational landscape to favour women, and are unsurprisingly seeing a massive swing in educational outcomes towards females.

Insect Overlord

That sounds like rubbish to me, to be honest. I can't see any truth in it at all. It's all based on simplistic, stereotypical beliefs about gender roles.

byhookorbycrook

Is it coincidence that girls, who were more diligent with their homework, almost completely missed out on the IT revolution?

If women stopped lying to themselves and understood the real reasons why men are more successful (at the top end)

Mathematics is no longer contextualised with examples from engineering or the world of making things. The implication being only boys can be engineers??

What a load of gender stereotyping. Hilarious!

silverharp

byhookorbycrook wrote: »

Is it coincidence that girls, who were more diligent with their homework, almost completely missed out on the IT revolution?

If women stopped lying to themselves and understood the real reasons why men are more successful (at the top end)

Mathematics is no longer contextualised with examples from engineering or the world of making things. The implication being only boys can be engineers??

What a load of gender stereotyping. Hilarious!

nit picking aside are there any underlying trends worth noting or problems that boys are facing in schools? it pops up in countries like the US where Christina Hoff Sommers is a well known advocate for boys and the fact that education has become hostile to boys in certain ways

byhookorbycrook

Hostile is what way?At primary level, boys' schools get more favourable treatment in the allocation of Learning Support teachers, for example.

echo beach

It is unfortunate for both boys and girls that teaching has become such a feminised profession. A better balance of male and female teachers would provide a wider range of role models for all. I know of several schools where the only male teacher is the principal. That sends its own message. Women haven't taken over the world, or the education system, yet.

Boys are at a disadvantage when leaving school because their brains tend to develop at a different rate so they are a year or two behind the girls at that stage in terms of functions like being able to plan ahead and foresee the likely consequences of their actions. This has lead to the suggestion that they may make poor choices regarding courses and career paths but now that there are opportunities to change and nobody is tied to a 'job for life' it isn't that big a deal.

zeffabelli

byhookorbycrook wrote: »

Is it coincidence that girls, who were more diligent with their homework, almost completely missed out on the IT revolution?

If women stopped lying to themselves and understood the real reasons why men are more successful (at the top end)

Mathematics is no longer contextualised with examples from engineering or the world of making things. The implication being only boys can be engineers??

What a load of gender stereotyping. Hilarious!

The implication is that school is still analogue and boys are digital.

The second implication is that education is behind and not creating individuals for the demands of contemporary work force. And that is WHY men are more successful at work even if women have more degrees.

zeffabelli

byhookorbycrook wrote: »

Hostile is what way?At primary level, boys' schools get more favourable treatment in the allocation of Learning Support teachers, for example.

Getting stupid notes home about stupid things, like turning the water bottle into a gun, fidgeting, and not asking politely for a piece of paper from one of the girls, being told writing sentences about Minecraft is inappropriate.