Lagging boys

Nov 04, 2008 Editorial

One of the striking characteristics of the results that are announced annually, in the various examinations that our children write as they move through our educational system, is the overwhelming dominance of girls in the upper tiers of the success column.

Boys now dominate the bottom rungs of the educational achievement ladder; and, not surprisingly, also dominate the dropout averages. This state of affairs is a complete reversal of what was the norm just a few decades ago.

At that time, it was accepted that intelligence was randomly distributed between the two genders, and the disparity in results was due primarily to the entrenched traditional beliefs that the “place” for girls was in the home and that therefore they did not need to focus on “book learning”.

This traditional outlook was vigorously attacked by all local progressive elements, and the educational potential of our female children were encouraged to blossom.

While there has been no definitive study to explain the drop in the performance of boys (which is evidently absolute, and not just relative), is it possible that this stress on the female gender to rectify the historical anomaly is the cause for the present imbalance?

But this would not explain why girls are suddenly so dominant; unless, in the effort to boost the performance of girls, that of the boys was (and is) neglected.

The Ministry of Education, which has pointed out the problem of “lagging boys”, ought to investigate whether in fact this may be the case.

It is possible that the neglect may not be intentional, but is the consequence of structural factors that have crept into the system. For instance, in most primary schools, there are now so few male teachers that they appear to be an endangered species.

The boys in these schools therefore have very few role models from their gender to follow as far as academic premises are concerned.

Teachers, who are considered as the epitome of learning at that age, are all observed to be females.
From the other end of the teaching continuum, boys are still usually more rambunctious and aggressive than girls, and it is also possible that the female teachers give up on them and focus rather on the more tractable female students.

This hypothesis gains credibility from the observation that the greatest discrepancy between the exam results of the two genders lies in the area of literacy and English language: boys lag way behind girls in these subjects.

Now, while we may still accept that intelligence is randomly distributed between the sexes, it is commonplace, from a scientific point of view nowadays, that females are more “right-brain” oriented, and this implies greater facility with the arts and language.

Are we therefore to accept the new dispensation? Not necessarily, and the reason lies right here with the fact that girls have already matched boys in their performance in Science and Mathematics, which are supposedly “left brain” skills. According to many experts in education, the problem of boys and literacy is sociological, not neurological.

They propose that observed behavioural differences between boys and girls arise from different gender expectations. Conventional conceptions of masculinity, for instance, and the narrow stereotypes associated with it, are restrictive and damaging to both boys and girls, but in different ways.

What needs to be explored is whether in Guyana we have gender biases that define skills such as reading and literature as “not masculine”.

While the ministry has bemoaned the dearth of reading skills in the school populations as a whole, they have not honed in on the differential between the genders, and as a consequence, there have been no intervention programs to rope in boys specifically.

The plummeting educational achievement of boys is associated not only with subsequent unemployment and an impoverished intellectual and social life, but, as we have pointed out before, this reality is not unrelated to the steep rise in criminality among that same demographic.

For these reasons alone, it is critical that the problem of lagging boys be addressed in a systematic way.

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Lagging boys

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