Wrong. The reality is that girls outperform boys. The way teachers are told to teach and the way subjects are organised best suit the way girls learn and leave boys at the bottom of the class.
The evidence? Take the figures from the recent OECD publication, Education at a Glance 2012. When it comes to reading, one of the basics in education that determines success or failure, girls are well ahead.
And the problem is not just in Australia. The OECD report states: "Girls outperformed boys on the PISA 2009 reading assessment in every OECD country and by 39 points on average, the equivalent of one year of school.''
Not only are girls a year ahead when it comes to reading, they are also more ambitious when it comes to careers and they are more successful in getting into university.
In relation to tertiary entry, the report argues "the gender gap exceeds 20 percentage points in Australia, Denmark, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia and Sweden''.
Australia's literacy and numeracy tests provide more evidence that girls are ahead.
With English skills, the NAPLAN 2011 report concluded "average scale scores are higher for female students than for male students for Australia as a whole and for every jurisdiction. The differences are substantial and consistent, averaging 21 scale points''.
Even when it comes to maths, an area where boys traditionally have done better than girls, the bad news is that boys' results have gone backwards. More girls than boys are achieving at or above the national minimum standard.
Boys are also more likely to have behavioural problems, as measured by suspensions from schools. One Australian report looking at years 7 and 9 shows that the rate for boys, at 10.9 per cent, is almost double that for girls, at 6 per cent.
The reasons boys are going backwards are many. Given the effect of the feminist movement over the past 30 to 40 years, it shouldn't surprise that much of the curriculum and how schools work have been feminised.
In primary schools, the fact that there are so few male teachers means boys lack role models. New-age teaching methods such as open classrooms and teachers acting as facilitators and not authority figures all benefit girls and not boys.
Unlike girls, who are more adaptable, boys need structure and discipline when it comes to how they best learn. Boys need to be told what to do, to have a clear idea of how to do it and to have clear boundaries enforced when it comes to discipline and classroom behaviour.
The way beginning reading is taught in early primary school provides the best example of discrimination against boys. The more traditional method of teaching reading involves phonics and phonemic awareness, where children are taught the relationship between letters, groups of letters and sounds.
The new-age, progressive approach is called whole language, where children are expected to learn how to read as naturally as learning how to talk. When it comes to print, they are told to "look and guess'' and work out the meaning by accompanying pictures or images.
As argued by Byron Harrison, a reading expert from Tasmania who along with Jean Clyde published Reading Through Tears, the whole language approach is guaranteed to disadvantage boys and lead to frustration and failure. And the way schools wrap children in cotton wool and ban physical games also discriminates against boys. As most parents know, boys need to have the freedom to be physical, to let off steam and to challenge others.
The gender police are also wrong to ban boys from wearing superhero costumes to school and from reading action comics and novels because there is too much violence and male aggression.
As child psychologists understand, such an approach is counter-productive because boys need strong male role models to excite their imagination and teach them about resilience, being brave and overcoming adversity.
Prime Minister Gillard's list of disadvantaged groups includes indigenous, working-class, rural and remote and migrant children. It's time to add boys.
Dr Kevin Donnelly is director of the Australian Education Standards Institute.
1 comment:
The answer would be to burn down the public education system and start again, but that won't happen anytime soon, so it's hard to see a near term solution.
That boys' education is suffering is just another result of the mad liberalism that has infected the western world since WW2.
But of course, for the leftists / feminists in charge, the failure of boys' to learn is the desired result.
It is going to be morbidly interesting to see how all this plays out in the future.
Women may gain more university degrees in law, politics, the arts, the soft sciences, medicine, finance, communications and HR and hence more power and influence, but can women build civilization?
Roads, bridges, space-shuttles, satellites, communications networks, sewer / water systems, skyscrapers, subway trains and tunnels, nuclear power plants, oil rigs drilling down five miles to the sea bed.
Amazingly, as it turns out, men and women are different.
The hard sciences, mathematics, engineering; a limited percentage of women can qualify and work in these fields but in general terms, collectively, women could not design, build and maintain these necessary functions and services of a modern society. It takes men.
So these poorly educated boys will just have to keep working in these areas to keep the highly educated, powerful women who lord over them in the modern day comfort they are accustomed.
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