Our endangered boys

MEN OR women? Which of the two are more intelligent? If you solely consider the outcomes of the education sector you might think that women are the more intelligent of the species. This is because, from preschool to university, girls have overtaken boys across the academic spectrum.

With newspaper headlines like "Girls out front," "Boys lagging" or "Girls outperforming boys," for several decades the under-performance of boys has been the main talking point of the media after SEA or CXC results are announced. This gender disparity has also been observed in many other countries.

So, does this suggest that women are more intelligent than men? The simple answer is no. There is overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that men and women do not differ in general intelligence.

So, why are boys not performing as well as girls in education? This has been the subject of enquiry for many researchers, both here and abroad. While several factors were identified, there are three which are most significant, namely, the rate of brain development between boys and girls, boys who are deprived of a father, and the lack of male teachers.

Firstly, it is a scientific fact that girls naturally mature faster than boys both physically and in relation to non-cognitive skills. Girls generally develop skills in planning, organising and impulse control about a year before boys do.

To understand the impact of this factor, author and researcher Richard V Reeves explains that getting schoolwork done "...requires your impulse control to match what psychologists refer to as sensation-seeking...that urge to go and do something more fun, more exciting. And even in the most difficult years of adolescence...girls have a reasonable balance between impulse-control and sensation-seeking but it's a very different story for adolescent boys. They have higher levels of sensation-seeking and... significantly lower levels of impulse-control."

Reeves suggests that in order to compensate for this disadvantage, governments should allow boys to begin school at least one year later than girls.

Boys who are deprived of a father are also placed at a disadvantage in their education. The number of single-parent homes has steadily increased over the last 50 years and in the vast majority of these cases children live with their mothers. Research shows that, unlike girls, boys who are deprived of a father perform lower academically than those whose fathers are involved in their education.

Bestselling author and researcher Dr Warren Farrell aptly says that "the boy crisis resides where dads do not reside." He points out that apart from poorer academic performance, boys whose fathers are not involved in their lives are more likely to suffer from depression, commit suicide, become addicted to video games, drugs or alcohol, or commit crimes. Dr Farrell advocates for governments to implement what he refers to as dad-enriched parenting policies.

The third significant factor which contributes to lower academic performance among boys is the lack of male teachers in the teaching service. In a profession that was once dominated by men, the number of men involved in teaching has staggeringly decreased in the last century. The teacher gender disparity is even more acute at the primary level.

This is cause for serious concern as male teachers are important role models, especially for those boys who do not have a father at home. Male teachers are also known to be more sensitive to the specific challenges of boys in the classroom and tend to be more active and interactive in ways that appeal to boys.

Additionally, there is also some evidence that male teachers help dispel the notion among boys that reading and writing are not for them. Male teachers in subjects like English language arts, which is where boys have fallen far behind girls, can be a game changer, in a similar way that female teachers historically helped girls gradually excel in science and mathematics.

It must be noted that almost nothing mentioned in this treatise has not been said before. TTUTA, other stakeholder organisations and many eminently qualified educators have presented these findings in the past and have offered suggestions.

Subsequently, it begs these questions: Is there a national acknowledgement of a problem and how is the society proposing to address it, and are our social support systems equal to the task of confronting this imbalance?

The social fallout from this disparity has been having serious socio-economic consequences as evidenced by our blue-collar crime statistics. Our boys are becoming an endangered species.