Boys falling behind in education
Boys falling behind in education
This is something close to home for me, I have 3 boys, the education system doesn't seem to cater to a lot of boys.
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I've previously read about studies where girls are more likely to be helped by teachers, where boys are more likely to be told "I know you can do it, go and try again". I was reading this in a book arguing the girls were disadvantaged by this bias because boys got to learn better this way where girls basically got told the answer. This study was in younger primary aged kids.
But if we know this happens, what if this becomes a disadvantage in later study? When the work becomes too hard to work out on your own, but the teacher sends you away anyway?
Alternatively, I know many people who trained as teachers but didn't stay because of the politics and general working environment (outside of the kids). What if the teachers who stay are the jaded ones that just don't care anymore?
When almost all teachers are female; almost all librarians are female; almost all children's authors are female. So almost all books available to kids have "hero's" in books that are female. Boys don't engage with the material; this lack of reading engagement has massive knock-on effects for all education. If you can't read well, you can't do anything at school except sports....boys gravitate to sports because the classroom is alienating.
Hmm, I'm not sure about this, ie, the lack of male "heros" in books being responsive for lack of reading engagement. Growing up, I read a lot of female authored books which featured male MCs, such as Enid Blyton's Famous Five, Secret Seven, The Five Find-Outers, and of course, Rowling's Harry Potter series. But there were also plenty of male authored works that I enjoyed too, such as Tolkein's Hobbit, Doyle's Sherlock Holmes series, Dixon's Hardy Boys etc. Not to mention, there were endless comics with male leads to choose from, such as Archie, Richie Rich, Dennis the Menace, and all the superhero comics from DC and Marvel.
Reading was a habbit that was inculcated in me by my parents (mainly my mother, who's still an avid reader till date), and both of them were full-time workers and career driven. We had a lot of books at home, and books were my main friends growing up. Also, I grew up in an era where there weren't many digital distractions. We did have a computer at the time, but it ran DOS and had no internet, so there was little to do there.
I think the lack of reading culture these days is mainly a generational issue - kids these days are spoiled by easy access to smartphones and digital content, which shortens their attention span. Why read a book when you can scroll an endless stream of Tiktok videos? Also, how many households have a plethora of books to choose from these days?
I'm not sure what the solution is though, since even if parents keep a tight lid on brainless digital content, kids would get exposed to it at schools and when hanging out with other kids. I'm not a parent so I can't really comment on this, but I believe some responsibility for encouraging the reading habit still lies with the parents. If I take a look at my sister as an example, who has a couple of young kids, I've seen her buy age-appropriate, physical books for the kids every year, and she actually spends time reading the books with them. It's still too early to tell how the kids will turn out, but I can see her at least trying to inculcate a reading culture in them. How many parents take the time and effort to do that these days?
Hell, how many parents are actually qualified to even raise kids properly these days? With people leading such busy lives, raising kids is a huge deal - which is part of the reason why I don't want to be a parent myself. But I guess many people these days blindly head into relationships without really planning for kids and without asking themselves if they're really truly willing to commit themselves to raising intelligent and responsible kids. It's easy enough to pop out kids, but a mountain of a task to ensure that they turn out alright.
100% the parents need to instill that love of reading early; we don't have a TV at home and our boys love books. We have the Enid Blyton books at home, along with 100's of others. We go to the library at least once a week. There are books everywhere, I read so does my partner....But I fear that our household is abnormal; I don't go to others houses and see books everywhere.
But at schools there needs to be the focus on literacy; currently it just isn't catered to boys. If a boy is interested in tanks and bombs and war and fighting; but all of the books are about magic and the power of friendship and sparkles; is that boy going to think "the library is the place I go to get exciting stories I like"....nope. It is more likely the thought being something like "libraries are for girls".
If your school has a library; go look at the content.
Yes one often missed thing is that teaching used to be a career with a lot more men, to the point you could have called it male dominated.
If we doubled teachers salaries, would we start to see a swing back towards more men?
Maybe; but teaching in NZ is not seen as a prestigious career path.
You would need to up the pay and tackle the view of teachers in wider society.
I'd suggest the low pay is part of why it's not seen as prestigious. Pay teachers like we pay IT workers and I bet that attitude would change within a generation.
I agree; it would fix a bunch of issues.
But it also needs to be competitive; basically only the best get the privilege of teaching the next generation. The qualifications for teachers need to be much higher than they are now; high salary and high entry requirements, with teacher aids to help that require a lower (same as today) qualifications. Similar to the medical system model where there is a surgeon with a bunch of highly qualified helpers.
You couldn't make me go there just for the money. No way am I going to study 3 years just to become a teacher, when I can teach in a world class city like Moscow with only a minor qualification that takes 1 month to get.
Read the Fight Club book if you haven't.
That last part is the real deal here. Somewhere I have an old screen-shot from Trade Me Forum where a guy said he quit teaching because they basically thought he was a pedo or something like that. As a male, you can't dare be too friendly or jokey with any student, male or female, or you'll have to go through some sexual predator prevention programme or something. It will only get worse, and eventually they will roll out this "woke" training nonsense into every profession. Women control all the cosy office jobs and it's always women in HR who push the anti-male crap.
I think the Peter Ellis case did an enormous disservice to the teaching profession as well as the childcare sector.
We all know there was the occasional bad apple and that needed to end, but this was not the right way to go about fixing it.
Crap pay doesn't help of course.