Anyone who’s been to school in the last 50 years will be familiar with it: Girls can do anything! Boys… well, boys can just learn to shut up and sit still.
Since 1972, under the Whitlam government, Australian schools have relentlessly pursued strategies to encourage girls’ achievement in schools. The programs have succeeded beyond a feminist’s wildest dreams. Girls now dominate educational achievement at all levels.
But it hasn’t been a win-win, by any stretch of the imagination. The hyper-focus on girls has seen a concomitant crash in boys’ results. Not that this deterred the feminists who now dominate education bureaucracy — and education itself, where 80% or more of teachers are now female.
Because, as is nearly always the case, what calls for “equity” are really about is revenge.
A letter I received in response to my articles on boys’ education spelt out the feminist goals very clearly.
‘Girls today are far beyond needing equality. They need compensation for 2,000 years of being repressed, mutilated, enslaved, raped, and treated as inferior,’ the hostile reader wrote.
This is not just the view of some random letter-to-the-editor writer, either. It’s the tacit message espoused by education bureaucrats.
Similar sentiments, more tactfully expressed, were published in an article But the Girls Are Doing Brilliantly in a gender equity magazine produced by the Federal Education Department […]
Here we are twenty years later with boys’ education totally off the agenda. The 2019 Alice Springs Education Declaration setting out Australia’s current goals for education didn’t mention ‘boys’ in their entire document.
Most of the data showing how badly boys are slipping behind never sees the light of day. Evidence that is available reveals a dire picture of boys in trouble:
Boys are dropping out of school. For every 17-year-old girl not going to school in 2020 there were 1.5 boys. That trend has been getting worse for the last half-century.
The data for boys is dire, at every level: boys are falling further and further behind in NAPLAN results, in final year results, and at university. Most schools refuse to even publish final year results by gender: those that do, show a clear divide, with girls the obvious winners. The only gender gap feminists never want to talk about is the gender gap between boys and girls at university, which has been steadily widening in favour of girls since 1989.
Let’s be clear: this is not the fault of boys. It’s the deliberately-engineered result of decades of feminist domination of education bureaucracy. The girls are winning all the prizes and the boys are dropping out because that’s what feminist education bureaucrats want.
Over the past two decades, we have seen more and more measures introduced which favour girls’ achievement […]
Bias against boys is now worn as a badge of honour. Look at this Melbourne University academic presenting her research showing boys do better in multi-choice maths exams – which she proudly declares is reason to do away with them.
There’s long been a shift to assessment methods that favour girls, like ongoing assessment rather than exams.
The very structure of classrooms has been designed to benefit girls and punish boys. Boys do best under explicit teaching and a well-ordered classroom with the teacher front and centre. Which is exactly the methods education bureaucrats are doing away with.
Then there is teacher bias. Male teachers are outnumbered nearly 3 to 1 — and female teachers are clearly biased against boys. OECD research has found that female teachers are more likely to mark boys down.
Now boys are doing badly in almost every subject. And what’s the reaction? ‘We say the trouble is with the boys,’ said [Warren Farrell, author of The Boy Crisis].
Spectator Australia
Which is nothing less than we should expect from a feminised, emasculated culture which regards the very concept of masculinity as “toxic”.
No wonder so many parents are looking more and more to home-schooling. Would you trust your son to the clutches of a spiteful, mean-girl bureaucracy, intent on punishing him because their own daddy didn’t love them enough?
