*****************************
From The Bulletin [with Newsweek] -- Australia -- June 5, 2001, pp.
25-28. Our thanks to Gilah Leder for providing a xerox copy of the
article and to Bill Margolis (Samoa) who first brought the article to
our attention.
--------------------------------------------------
This is PART I of two parts.
*****************************
It's Time To Get Real About Boys
By Diana Bagnall
-------------
That girls consistently perform better at school than boys is
undisputed. What is controversial is why - with some educators
blaming a feminised curriculum, Diana Bagnall reports on a continuing
class struggle.
-------------
Buried deep in the transcripts of the ongoing national inquiry into
boys' education is this tragi-comic little tale. It comes from one of
Australia's most dogged campaigners for a fair hearing for boys and
men, Newcastle academic Richard Fletcher.
"There was a school in the Hunter [Valley, NSW] where they were
tearing their hair out," Fletcher told the federal parliamentary
committee conducting the inquiry. "The principal told me he and the
deputy tried to figure out stuff about getting boys involved. They
thought, 'What can we do that boys will like?' They decided to get a
cadet corps for the first time.
"They contacted the Army and arranged all the bits and pieces. They
had their first muster, I think they call it, and the deputy came in
and said, 'Come out to the playground, you'd better have a look.' He
went out to the playground - this was the first day for the cadet
corps - and there were 16 girls and two boys. He had tears in his
eyes. I said, 'What did you do?' He said, 'We put the boys at the
front so it didn't look so bad.'"
Everywhere, everyone is tearing their hair out about boys'
disengagement. It's most obvious in their academic performance. In
Australia, in every area of the assessed curriculum, boys are
achieving lower standards than girls. In NSW, boys outnumber girls
two to one in the bottom 10% of Higher School Certificate scores, and
girls outperform boys by up to 11% in the large majority of subjects.
But boys' failure also shows up in juvenile crime statistics, in
youth suicide numbers, in early school-leaving rates, all dominated
by males. "I think what happens is [boys] dissociate themselves, they
disenfranchise themselves, they do not want to be part of what the
mainstream is on about, and we are seen to be the mainstream," Gail
Armstrong, the principal of Queensland's Marsden State High School,
told the boys' education inquiry.
The mainstream in education looks female. Most teachers - around 80%
- are women. In NSW, the number of men in primary teaching has fallen
in the past five years from 37% to 17%. Very few men are training to
be teachers. At the University of Western Sydney, for example, only
3% of early childhood and 14% of primary teaching students are male.
But it's more than just the face of teaching that is female. Some
principals and researchers are beginning to talk of a "feminised"
curriculum, of assessment techniques being "boy-unfriendly", of
teachers being fearful and hostile towards boys and increasingly
defining the "ideal student" as female. Meanwhile, parents and
teachers, desperate to motivate their sons and students, are
floundering in the absence of hands-on guidance and wondering if
boys' failure might not be an unintentional byproduct of girls'
success.
Boys' antagonism towards and disconnection from compulsory schooling
isn't exactly a new phenomenon. Shakespeare had a handle on it: "The
whining schoolboy, with his satchel, And shining morning face, creeps
unwillingly to school" (As You Like It, II. vii). The difference
between then and now is not so much in boys' experience of schooling
as in girls'. In Shakespeare's day - and, in fact, until the
beginning of last century - no one much bothered about sending girls
to school. When girls were eventually allowed an education, the
brightest and most ambitious graduated to became teachers. Teaching
was one of very few careers available to women until the feminist
movement blew the top off society in the 1970s.
When that happened, women were well placed to reshape the education
agenda. They took up cudgels on behalf of girls and campaigned hard
for schools and curricula to recognise and encourage girls'
aspirations and achievements - with spectacular success.
For the past 10 years, girls have dominated the top strata of
school-leaving exam results, and in 2000 made up 56% of students
starting university. No one but the most pig-headed of
traditionalists would turn the clock back. But hang on. What about
the boys?
Feminist argument (and in education, feminist argument holds more
sway than in any other field) has it that boys are doing fine, that
they still win the good jobs and earn more money than girls when they
leave school, so what's there to worry about? Reluctance to trigger
fresh outbursts of feminist anger has effectively crushed debate
about what Tim Hawkes, headmaster of The King's School in Parramatta,
Sydney, calls the "national scandal" of the poor performance of boys
relative to girls in academic tests and exams. The silence is now
breaking.
In his book Boy Oh Boy (Pearson Education), published on June 4,
Hawkes talks scathingly of a "feminisation of the curriculum" and its
consequences for boys. Physics and mathematics, for example, are
having their material rewritten to make them more girl-friendly, he
says.
"No one appears to have noticed that in so doing they may be making
this material boy-unfriendly. When a physics test loses its
distinctive content and merely requires students to write an essay on
the life and times of Sir Isaac Newton, one can be forgiven for
wondering whether all subjects are slowly evolving into an English
exam."
The principal of City Beach High School, Perth, Ian Lillico, told the
parliamentary inquiry that the shift in the modern curriculum towards
open-ended, reflective tasks from closed, structured,
information-dense tasks was the biggest in education. "Many people
would call that an effeminised curriculum because that is the way
girls traditionally learn," he said.
An important British report published in 1999 by the National
Foundation for Educational Research found evidence that girls were
better than boys on average at sequential and analytical approaches
to learning, and suggested the shift towards this style of learning
and retreat from fact-based learning seems to have disadvantaged
boys. Lillico considers the most important finding of his Churchill
Fellowship research into how boys learn to be that boys "don't think
before they act, they do not reflect enough". Our modern curriculum
requires a lot of reflection, he told the inquiry, but it was not
negotiable because it encouraged skills that people would need in the
future. "Those closed structured jobs have changed, and therefore our
curriculum has changed."
Leaving boys, it seems, out in the cold. But need they be?
No, according to Hawkes and the man he engaged a year ago as a
consultant to The King's School, University of Western Sydney
researcher Peter West. West, like Fletcher, has spent many years
paddling in what many of his academic colleagues undoubtedly consider
a backwater, researching maleness. But if that makes West a wet, The
King's School, which has traditionally educated the sons of the
squattocracy, is reputedly anything but wet. So what's happening here?
The men are coming out to fight for the boys, that's what. Not with
the intention of protracting the gender wars. "There's mutualism in
this new cause," writes Hawkes in his foreword to a report by West,
released on May 30 by UWS, on best practice in boys' education. "Some
have gone into print, warning of the 'backlash' and seeking to
dismiss any initiative that might meet the needs of boys as an
inappropriate over-correction. But the needs of boys in schools
should not be sacrificed on the altar of gender equity."
The new cause as Hawkes describes it, is to understand and promote
ways in which boys learn best. If that sounds eminently sensible be
prepared for a surprise. Even suggesting that boys may have different
needs and learning styles from girls appears to be controversial,
hence Hawkes' preemptive strike against the backlash.
Fletcher alluded to what's coming when he told the inquiry that "we
have under-estimated how important the physical is. That goes to the
heart of teaching styles and learning styles..."
Hawkes puts it this way: "We tend to teach in the manner in which we
prefer to learn. Most teachers are female. Their learning styles lean
towards passivity, are heavily literacy-based, and that's entirely
understand-able. But when you have a large number of female teachers
teaching boys, it is entirely possible they are unwittingly teaching
in a style they find effective for them but which is fairly wide of
the mark for where boys are."
Themes that keep reappearing in West's report revolve around boys'
apparently weaker powers of concentration (compared with girls),
their disenchantment with "girlie" things (including reading), their
preference for precise direction and their desire to be active and
outdoors. Girls, on the other hand, are eager to please teachers and
more successful in get-ting teachers onside, are better behaved and
are more enthusiastic about learning.
West suggests there are two possible reasons for this, not
necessarily contradictory. "First, girls have been convinced that
education is the ladder on which they will ascend to success; while
most boys have not been convinced of the same. Second, schools are
more targeted towards girls than they are to boys. If many boys see
schools as a nuisance and a waste of time, that is something
edu-cators need to be concerned about."
But schools can get boys to achieve, if they set their minds to it,
he believes. "Boys' education, like girls' education, can be
transformed if there are people willing to transform daily practices
and routines."
Both he and Hawkes have come up with road-tested ways for getting the
most out of boys at school. West draws on schools' experience in
Britain and the US as well as Australia, and his association with The
King's School provided him with a "laboratory" in which to test some
of the methodology.
His recommendations are practical and, to the lay person at least,
hardly rocket science. None involves setting up a cadet corps, though
the school in the Hunter Valley was on the right track. Boys do best,
he reports, when their learning is action-based, when they have
strong role models and male mentors, when their behaviour is
monitored, when they are given incentives to do well, when their
lessons are structured, and when there's challenge and risk.
He draws heavily on the work of Geoff Hannan, who works out of
Viewforth High School in Kirkaldy, Scotland. Hannan, West reports,
has shown graphically that, as a result of the way they are raised
(girls expected to play with dolls, are cuddled more; boys expected
to do things, to act, to play outside), girls typically grow up as
natural students while boys typically grow up as a boy first and a
poor student second.
The boys in his research typically became more speculative thinkers
with experiential learning styles and were often good at subjects
involving hands-on (industrial arts, for instance) or physical space
(physics). Girls' learning styles were more oriented towards
language, based in an interest in people and relationships, and they
were natural in English, especially novels and poetry.
Hannan feels most teachers inadvertently favour girls in style and
content and has called for a wholesale attack on the idea that
teachers talk for 30 minutes and students write notes for 15 or 20
minutes. He suggests teachers give small, focused tasks rather than
long, unfocused tasks, and for teachers to make much greater use of
relevance and challenge for boys ("Bet I can put 10 of these on the
board before you can write them down"). In Hawkes' opinion (and he's
not afraid to voice it - "I don't for a moment think that everyone
will agree with me but my critics can't deny me my experience"),
teaching boys is all about understanding them. First, boys need
fences. Second, boys will do anything to be accepted by the herd, and
most herds amble at a speed that enables even the slowest to keep up.
Third, boys generally admire strength and teachers who are strong
will be the ones they remember with genuine fondness.
Let's start with boys' need for boundaries. "If the fences are weak
and undefended, the young bulls will break through," he writes.
"Asking them not to lean on the fence is about as useless as playing
the flute and expecting rats to follow. Unless some behavioural
endocrinology is engaged in, such as lopping off a few testicles,
bulls will always test fences. If a fence is weak, as behavioural and
academic fences can be in some child-centred learning environments,
then boys will cross the boundaries of acceptable behaviour.
-"A weak fence tells a boy that 'this particular restriction is not
thought very important by adults I wonder why it's not worth
defending I'll give it a gentle nudge.' If someone has taken the
trouble to run a little persuasive electricity through the fence or
to build a strong fence that will withstand the odd bump from a bull,
the boundaries become both known and respected."
-----------------
PART II TO FOLLOW VERY SOON
***************************************************
--
Jerry P.Becker
Department of Curriculum & Instruction
Southern Illinois University
Carbondale, IL 62901-4610 USA
Phone: (618) 453-4241 [O]
(618) 457-8903 [H]
Fax: (618) 453-4244
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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