After years of neglecting the issue due to their politically correct belief that helping men/boys is not acceptable whilst helping girls/women is, the government have just started waking up to the fact that boys’ underachievement at school is a problem not just for those individuals but also for the economy and society. Boys are currently eight years behind girls when it comes to GCSE results and now less boys go to university than girls as stated on a previous post (link).
The Conservatives have already raised the problem of the under achievement of white working class boys through their Social Justice Report published last year (link)
Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, has said that every secondary school should provide a bookshelf full of spy novels (link). He addressed the Fabian Society on this matter on 14th March 2007 (link). However, this is rather glib because there is no acknowledgement or practical support on the fact that boys need systematic teaching using the traditional synthetic phonic method early on in their educational career. As Nick Gibb, the Conservative shadow minister for schools said “… the real issue is teaching them to read in the first place”.
Professor Rhona Johnston of Hull University explains the situation clearly (link).
Much of the blame can be laid at the door of the government who, despite promises, have not imposed setting on schools and, as stated in my previous post (see link in first paragraph), boys need structure and competition rather than the normal module coursework based education system we now have. A good précis of this appears in a Daily Telegraph editorial and subsequent debate (link).
As ever, the ‘Equal’ Opportunities Commission has been silent on the under achievement of boys at school especially when the current system has left so many behind. If girls were under-achieving, they would have been launching campaigns but because it is boys, they are not interested.
The education system has let down boys for at least a decade and it is only now that the issue has become so serious that the government woken up to the problem. Trendy teaching and the move from O-levels to GCSEs have all played their part. However, the underlying problem is the infestation of the ideology of political correctness, where boys/men are placed at the bottom of the pile and the needs of everyone else come first. A generation of boys have been under-educated because of this and the shameful fact is that until now, they have been purposely ignored.
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