Britain’s lost boys Sonia Sodha

I disagree with boys and men needing their own spaces.
This is what leads to sexism and misogyny.
Afaic the only "spaces" they are entitled to are toilets and changing rooms, and I'm not sure whether boys - as opposed to men - should even be entitled to those!

Girls need fresh air, exercise etc too, I don’t think you can differentiate between kids (or even adults) like that.

Isn’t part of it that women don’t have to put up with shit men like they used to in the past? So if they are abusive/lazy etc then they are more likely to end up isolated sooner or later, whereas in the past some poor woman would have ended up stuck with them. So in a way life is more difficult for men now but that’s a good thing if it means they don’t get away with being arseholes.

Interesting - I guess that's why it's dangerous to try to apply one's own experiences in slightly different circumstances..

@UpsideDownChairs The children who don’t have English as their first language are in many schools the ones who get the best results. They are one of the reasons schools in London do so well, on average.

I only have boys, who have a disinterested father (thank god really, because what he would have taught them about what it means to be a man would have been tragic). Both as different as night and day - interests, strengths, toy choices, fashion choices, attitudes and skills. In fact, if you listed out their qualities and those of their cousins, I think you'd struggle to separate the girls from the boys with any accuracy.

I really don't think it's as simple as the educational system. In my immediate family we cover the whole gamut when it comes to reading - from voracious to only when necessary - although even the one with fairly severe special needs can read sell enough for day to day life - not that any of his issues are dyslexia, which obviously helps.

Daily life now though - audio books rather than reading, youtube tutorials rather than manuals - I think I probably do less reading now than I did in my childhood (beyond 'press here' - basic instructions) - and we do pass that onto our children - my sister didn't read books to her kids, she taught them to ask Alexa. My youngest greatly resents having to read and write because he just has his computer talk to him and types at home.

We know that youngsters aren't great at thinking ahead - is there an element of thinking that it'll all turn out OK, that they can just be a influencer/streamer? That that seems possible in a way that never existed before?

Is there an elephant in the room about non-english as a first language? I know that one of the reasons my youngest was late to read was he was at international schools for the first few years of his education, and those schools were busy getting all the kids speaking enough English to learn together, so reading fell by the wayside - but then why would that affect boys but not girls? Unless parental expectation comes into it again.

Boys need to be allowed to be boys. They need fresh air, exercise, competition, independence, a dad at home to teach them whar it means to be a man. Not cooped up on gaming consoles getting overweight and without any strong guidance. I’m sorry but I do believe boys and girls are different and need different things. I have kids of both sexes and despite raising them exactly the same, same toys, I can see their differences.

I just hope the very reasonable concern over boys' academic struggles and social alienation aren't used to legitimise the penalization of girls. It's only the last few decades that the education system has changed to allow female students to flourish instead of artificially downgrading them (the old 11+ system had quotas I believe) or disadvantaging them by using one-size- fits-all exam-based qualifications (O levels). I've always felt GCSE courses should be evenly split between exam and coursework to give all types of learners a fair chance.

However, it's so easy for those with a misogynistic agenda (obviously I don't mean the wonderful Sonia Sodha) to point at the success of women and girls as the reason for male failure and discontent without ever examining how men could do things differently to help themselves and the next generation.

I said it wasn't that the curriculum suits girls, it's that it suits people who read.

There is nothing wrong with an education curriculum that suits people who read.

What we need is boys reading more. How?

All school-leavers need transferable 'soft' skills to survive - even the boys! So it's not doing them any favours to say that the curriculum is biased in favour of girls, because 'boys don't like reading'.

Gosh, as I write that, I realise that it used to be felt that it wasn't worthwhile teaching girls how to read and write, because they wouldn't need it, and also their brains might explode or their wombs drop out if they were over-taxed with difficult things like literacy🙄
We can't win. A woman's place is in the wrong.

I don’t think so. We all knew who the battered families were and there was no hint of outside involvement. Unless for the Church who said that it was your duty to not resist. Even against a backdrop of hospitalisation and actual death.

But were there really fewer abusive men in the years when a man could leave school with few qualifications and get a well paid, prestigious manual job?

@noblegiraffe Partly this I'm sure. My own step father was functionally illiterate, born in the early 1940s but was a 'country lad', worked on farms, for the forestry commission, etc and later drove hgv wagons. By the time he retired, he struggled with even driving for a living with tacos, paperwork, etc.

Part of me wonders if boys/men don’t like the new reality of life - that they are now supposed to step up and share everything including housework, parenting and paid work. Life is tough and boring and about doing stuff for other people - something women have known for ever.

There are now far fewer well paid jobs manual jobs that can only reasonably be done by men.

They still exist - I don't think many women are competing with men for jobs as labourers on building sites - but whole industries have more ore less vanished.

However, that isn't feminisation, it's mechanisation.

Editing to add: Actually, thinking about it, labourers aren't well paid.

Did they though? Or were there just more jobs and options available for men who had poor literacy skills?

Boys got on fine for generations with mostly female teachers in primary school.

It may be an old-fashioned idea that little children are usually cared for, and taught, by women rather than men, but it seems to have worked OK for boys in the past and kept children safe.

"but it is striking how little we know about what might work in improving boys’ outcomes."

We do know one major thing. 65.4% of boys got a grade 4 or above in English Language GCSE last summer in England compared to 77.1% of girls. That's a massive difference, in comparison it's 72.2% for boys in maths compared to 71.8% of girls.

If you don't get a grade 4 in English (or maths), in the first instance you have to resit in college. It can restrict the college courses you get onto and sixth forms you can get into, so 1/3 of boys have their opportunities reduced quite heavily at 16 compared to 1/4 of girls.

This lack of ability with English feeds into all their other subjects. Where subjects rely heavily on essays, boys do much worse than girls than on subjects like Physics, Chemistry, Business, Economics where there are more calculations and data analysis.

What would be a single key factor in improving general ability with English? Reading.

So when people talk about the education system 'suiting girls more than boys', they mean 'suits people who read' and girls read more than boys.