Why are teachers failing the narrative for boys, is boy playing incompatible with school

[Leteer]

Does anyone feel like boy play is deeply unsupported and thoroughly discouraged in school up to the point where boys are questioning if play is actually good / encourages boys to question if their hard wired need for play is a bad thing. Isn't this a downward spiral for boys to not support what nature gave them which could in turn affect academic work.

Or 'instinctive' parenting is the internalised, unconscious bias that we all carry around with us, every day, after centuries of socialised sexism and racism?

Our "instincts" are prejudiced

This is what the researchers that actually challenged the original paper said:

"The very low birth weight diagnosis, however, is spread out across 30 individually rare ICD-9 codes (6), so that no indicator for the condition makes it to the list of the 65 most common comorbidities."

"Because most newborns are not diagnosed with any of the health conditions requiring a recording of their weight in the AHCA data, the most common weight classification is “no code” (comprising 91.7 percent of White and 87.4 percent of Black babies)."

It was a flaw in methodology, essentially. It happens in research.

There are two things that arent explored:

Why are Black babies more likely to be born with VLBW?

Why are Black physicians less likely to treat the littlest and sickest babies?

Maybe. But also maybe there are inherent differences. I think we are far more controlled by our biology than we realise. It’s the nature vs nurture controversy and it’s turning out that the nature part is a lot more important than we realised, or wanted to think.

I’m not making some sort of essentialist argument that we should accept all sexism etc so please don’t try to argue on that basis.

I’m simply saying that babies are not blank slates, and it wouldn’t be surprising if the reason parents automatically adapt their behaviour to baby boys or girls might not be the same as teaching girls to be quiet and well behaved. It might be closer to parents using specific tones of voice to babies that many people used to think was silly but which it turns out help babies learn language. Parents who did that for generations weren’t consciously teaching their babies - it’s instinctive. And I think if it’s true that parents respond differently to baby boys and baby girls, we have to consider that maybe that too is instinctive.

And that that is different from actively teaching children how little girls - or boys - “ought to behave in society”. I think we need to be careful about telling parents that their instinctive loving response to their children is wrong.

You’re ignoring my point, which is not “Move along, nothing to see here”, it’s that scientists who admit that they left out data that didn’t fit their narrative (their actual words) are not reliable in anything because they are cherrypicking results to fit a narrative. That’s not research.

There may well be problems, but that study does not show that there is racism, conscious or otherwise, among doctors, leading to black babies dying, which is what they originally said it showed.

Babies are not blank slates, but nor are parents. They bring all their baggage to parenting, and to suggest that baggage is 'instinct' is to accept a lot of harmful behaviour.

Lots of things are "instinct" - they've been developed for survival. That doesn't mean they are needed or desirable in this day and age.

On the baby talk thing, wasn't that only half the story? Yes the tone of voice was important, but so was using full, proper words, not "cutesy" baby talk.

All of this is just half the story - yes, nature will play a role, but it's impossible to separate it from the nurture. And the nurture is the only bit we can control.

And anecdotally, the boys that seem to prefer the rough and tumble are the ones with parents who reinforce gender norms

right, but there ARE studies that show institutional racism in medicine.

Like the difference in maternal mortality between Black and white mothers.

Also - history. Given the way in which Black and ethnic minority people have been treated, many many many times over, the evidence would suggest we should err on the side of caution and assume racism is involved, rather than not?

Where are these actual words?

I don't think the science on this point is settled yet.

"Sight" 🤭

It was in an unpublished draft obtained through FOI:

A researcher who argued that infant mortality is higher for black newborns with white doctors because of racial bias omitted a variable from the paper that “undermines the narrative,” according to the researcher’s internal notes. (…)

The study originally asserted that white babies (also) died less frequently with white doctors.
“White newborns experience 80 deaths per 100,000 births more with a black physician than a white physician, implying a 22% fatality reduction from racial concordance,” an unpublished draft reads.

But the study’s lead author Brad N. Greenwood wrote in the margin: “I’d rather not focus on this. If we’re telling the story from the perspective of saving black infants this undermines the narrative.”

dailycaller.com/2025/03/31/exclusive-researchers-axed-data-point-undermining-narrative-that-white-doctors-are-biased-against-black-babies/

This... doesnt seem like the best source. There are published criticisms of the paper.

So you ask for something and then decide you don’t like the answer. Even though the link includes a screenshot of the actual note.

Seems like you’re another who’s more interested in maintaining the chosen narrative than in accuracy or truth.

Ok. You can lead a horse to water and all that.

That's not the case. I just don't think there is a conspiracy. Research is debunked all the time. Plus, as I said, it raises two key questions.

LOL Now you’re just moving the goalposts!
You asked for the exact quote, and now you’ve been given it you’re trying to move to a different point.

But once a researcher has been shown not to be neutral, nothing in the study is reliable because the only thing you know for sure about the results is that they’ve been cherrypicked to create a narrative, not to be objective.

That's not what other researchers have said about the data. That's not how research works.

Don't know, but in my brief stint in teaching in the late 90s there was a lot of talk of under achievement in boys, and how to make education better for them. Eg pick the sort of books that boys want to read.

GCSEs we're v coursework heavy back then, which allegedly favoured girls.

FFS! More Ridiculous stereotypes that feeds into the Trans bollocks that only exists because of this stupid narrative.

I was a tomboy as a kid and would have been persuaded I was really a boy by some of you who support this nonsense.

My DS on the other hand isn’t sporty or competitive and enjoys music and reading. He’s possibly gay but some might try to persuade him he’s really a girl.
🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️

What a load of rubbish, if anything it’s the other way round. Playgrounds dominated by boys playing football and those who aren’t interested in football forced to hang around the edges lest they get in the way of the all-important football-obsessed boys.

Yup. I had a period where I was adamant I had the brain of a boy trapped in a girl’s body. I tried to disguise myself with clothes and used a male diminutive of my name. All because I kept being told I was girling wrong and getting in trouble for things that were ok for boys but not girls. It was not ok to be the way I was and like the things I did and want the thingsI wanted and do the things I did.Then the logical (in a kid’s view)conclusion followed. Add in a few sexual assaults and I really , really resented being a girl.

The other researchers hadn’t yet discovered that the results were cherrypicked - and that IS how research works: you assume that the researchers were being objective and comment accordingly.

But what happened then was that when people tried to reproduce those results they failed. Someone sent in an FOI request to get ALL the information to work out why there was a discrepancy and lo and behold the reason was that a crucial data point, which radically changed the whole significance of the results, had been deliberately left out.

So those other researchers you mention were being misled. If you went back and asked them now, in light of this later information, their comments might be very different.

Always the boys. Like I said upthread, everything is always geared to making education more accessible to boys. Why aren't boys doing as well as girls? How can we plan lessons so boys are more engaged?

Probably because it doesn't actually matter how well they do at school, because they'll still out earn us.

Well yes, but there's a huge difference between saying that there are SOME traits that are more often associated with one or other sex, and saying that possessing those traits indicate that someone belongs to that sex (gender) or even is partly along a feminising/masculinising spectrum. That's complete nonsense but it's important not to fall into the opposite, equally simplistic, binary trap.

It's much as with physical traits: boys on average are taller than girls, but a tall girl isn't therefore "part boy"! Character traits are the same: even if it's the case that more girls are inherently likely to want to take up "caring" professions like teaching or social work*, that doesn't make a boy who goes into teaching a bit female, or a girl who likes engineering more of a boy. Population data tells us little or nothing about an individual, just about statistical tendencies. But it's not a black and white, "a child is an asexual blank slate" vs "everything is determined by one's sex", stereotypes.

• There's some evidence that this may be the case: studies have shown that girls in more egalitarian societies like Finland are less likely to study STEM subjects at university than girls in more male-oriented societies like Morocco or Iran. It's not clear why that is, but one explanation could be that girls who want to succeed in societies that are unwelcoming to women may feel that maths and physics etc will get them more respect than nursing or languages, whereas girls in societies where women are respected anyway may not feel the need to "prove" their value and may choose the subjects they actually prefer.

Girls considerably outperform boys in Finland too. In fact, they do so in the vast majority of countries (if they’re actually allowed to go to school and continue their education). That’s a point OP and loads of other posters completely refused to engage with.

Are teachers/schools/the system fail boys in Finland too? Sweden? Other Scandinavian countries? China? The US etc.?

Sorry I'm not sure that you've understood my point at all: I don't believe that teachers do "fail" boys. (Or perhaps I haven't understood yours.)

FWIW, I think it would be ridiculous to think that, considering that education systems around the world were basically set up by men for boys, and the idea that boys' more physical behaviour is LESS tolerated now than it was back in the past when children sat for hours in near complete silence is laughable.

All that's happened is that girls generally behave better in schools than boys whether the displinary system is harsh or lax, and their better behaviour is what enables girls to succeed better - as long they are allowed to be in school in the first place.

But that's a point I've already made upthread, and wasn't what I was discussing in the post you replied to.

Yeah that isn't what happened. They explained clearly why the confounding variable was missed (it had 9 different codes).