And for all these reasons, for all the ways in which they are Not Girls, the educational establishment condemns them. Shame on the establishment!
This is from today's Times:
Girls already have a well-established educational lead over boys by the time they start school, a study claims.
The study of 15,000 UK children suggests girls are two months ahead of boys in tests of verbal, non-verbal and visual skills by the age of five.
What a pile of poo. This is the kind of nonsense you arrive at when you start measuring and testing as if it was ever going to give you anything than the most irrelevant results.
Go back to your Aesop. The Hare and the Tortoise, anyone? Is it possible, just possible, that children might make progress at different rates? Might we allow that that possibility is just strong enough to mean that making such idiotic pronouncements might be, oh, I don't know, a really, really Bad Idea? Isn't what matters where they are when they leave education and go out into the world to take over from their elders. Anything before is just a stepping stone on the way, and means nothing. Kids I teach are astonished to find that in France the first really meaningful tests the kids have to take is their Baccalaureat, the equivalent of our A levels. Are they worse off for that? I doubt it.
Boys are being taught, systematically, that they're rubbish compared with girls. Casual statements are lobbed around in the media and in conversation which enhance this effect and start from the presumption of boys' inferiority. In the media the words 'boys' and 'problem' share space in many a sentence. Whether it's their lack of educational achievement, their impregnating of girls, their violence, and God knows what else, they have journalists shaking their heads sadly. When there is a problem with girls, it's often because they are starting to be like boys; chiefly in the area of violence. I don't know when people started saying as a follow-up statement to an anecdote about some way in which a boy has failed "But then he's a boy," or "But that's boys for you." And in front of the boy. As if boyhood was some nasty condition.
Okay, so here's my analysis of the problem, illustrated with personal experience.
When my boy was three he went to pre-school for the first time. He was not ready for school; had he been living in Hannover or Bordeaux he'd have been playing at home with play dough and finger paints for another four years. He was, apparently, a source of exasperation because he couldn't sit still during circle time, and often fidgeted or even rolled over, disturbing other children. The rule in circle time was that children should sit still with their hands in their laps. Several of the boys couldn't do this and this was a problem. I'd just like to reiterate that they were three years old. Now perhaps this is a daft idea, but if none of the boys were able to sit still, and they were a) not learning and b) disturbing the girls, perhaps it might bave been worth looking again at the expectations to see if they were reasonable. It may be heresy to say it, but boys are different from girls. They tend to be more kinesthenic learners, and like to learn by exploration and trying and doing. They are, particularly at three or four years of age, not terribly good at sitting down and having somebody, however well-meaning, talk at them. So here we are: by the time they have their photo taken in their new school togs and stroll through the gates for the first time, they are disadvantaged by the school's expectations. Education has been well and truly feminised, and particularly early years education. A few years later government bodies, panicked by falling educational standards, took the decision to start formal education earlier, and children of four started being 'encouraged' (dragooned) to write letters and numbers. Talk about setting up half the class for failure!
The there's the matter of tests per se. As a massive generalisation I would say that there are about half children who see tests as an opportunity to shine, and half who either don't care what people think of them or are driven to bed-wetting by the whole idea. My boy hates being tested. He always underperforms in tests. Now that he's coming up to 11+ time, I am dealing with this problem with a technique known to psychologist, I think, as 'flooding'. Which means that I am making him do tests until they are coming out of his ears. When he sits the papers he will be so familiar with them it will mean nothing to him. I hate doing it to him and he's having a lot of choccy bars to compensate for this burden. But I'm a teacher. I'm in the know.
All through school my boy has been a problem. Because he's distractable and impulsive and wants to run around or handle things or take things apart to find out how they work, and otherwise difficult, a succession of teachers have told me what a problem he is, and barely mentioned what his achievements have been. And last year Mr Kelly came into our lives as Son's Year 5 teacher. Mr Kelly totally gets my boy; thinks he's incredibly bright, imaginative, sparky and thoughtful. (Oh, and by the way he's still rather easily distracted and his writing is a stream of consciousness with few gaps and almost no punctuation between his beautifully chosen words. But that'll come...) And Son has taken off in achievement. He gets home and can't wait to do his homework well. He does it standing and leaning on a table as his feet dance beneath. Because that's who he is.
And in all these tests he's been doing, I've discovered that his Non Verbal Reasoning score, the one that's supposed to measure raw intelligence, is extremely high. Go figure, as they say. I am totally confident that he will go out into the world as a fantastic young man with brains and a lateral approach to things and an ability to do whatever he wants to do. Unless, of course, people keep telling him that because he's a boy/adolescent/man he's not as good as the female sitting next to him.
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