Boys Set Up to Fail in New System

IS there a crisis in boys' education?  Judged by the recently released parliamentary report, Boys:  Getting it right, the answer is yes.

To quote from the report:

NATIONALLY, girls' results in Year 3 and Year 5 Literacy Benchmark tests are up to five percentage points higher than boys.

THE Year 12 retention rate for girls is between 11 and 12 percentage points higher than it is for boys.

GIRLS' average levels of achievement in a majority of subjects assessed at senior secondary level are higher and the gap in the total has been widening.

MORE than 56 per cent of students in higher education are women.

Why are boys disadvantaged?  The first thing to note, as highlighted in the report, is that the way literacy is taught guarantees failure for many boys.

Until the advent of "whole language" (where children are taught to "look and guess"), literacy was taught in a more structured way associated with a phonics approach.

Whole language is based on the mistaken belief that learning to read and write is as natural as learning to speak and all teachers need to do is to "immerse" children in a rich language environment.  Forgotten is that writing is unnatural and boys, in particular, need to be taught in a methodical way.  A second reason why boys are disadvantaged is the "feminisation" of the curriculum.  During the '80s and '90s, the status quo in schools was attacked by feminists, left-wing academics and teacher unions as "ethnocentric, patriarchal and bourgeois".

Even the way teachers taught changed to favour girls and to disadvantage boys.  Teachers no longer stood at the front of the class and taught, preferring instead to have students work in groups on open-ended tasks.  Competitive assessment disappeared.  Learning relied more and more on strong verbal skills and self-directed learning.

As noted in the report, while there may have been some justification for the above changes, an unintended consequence is that boys come out second best.

This is primarily because boys tend to respond better to structured activity, clearly defined objectives and instructions, short-term challenging tasks and visual, logical and analytical approaches to learning.  They tend not to respond as well as girls to verbal, linguistic approaches.

While not directly related to schools, a third reason why boys are at risk educationally is because of their low self-esteem and often negative self-image.