This is something close to home for me, I have 3 boys, the education system doesn’t seem to cater to a lot of boys.
I think a lot of folks might overlook how different schooling is now than say when I was a kid in the 80s. Back then, classroom sizes were on average quite a lot smaller than they are now; and perhaps more importantly it was still common to have one parent not working, or only in part-time work.
There are lots of kids growing up nowadays where both parents are working 8+ hour days, and combined with commuting times etc a lot of the daytime opportunity for interactions with parents, discussing what they’re learning, exploring books, nature, whatever just isn’t as available as it was 40-50 years ago.
There is another problem that I don’t think gets enough attention when talking about educational achievement. The article mentions the rise in misogyny in these disaffected boys, but it doesn’t take that to the logical conclusion.
People of lower education and already feeling dejected and isolated are ripe for radicalization; if we continue down this path of failing boys, we will end up in a place where gangs will gain followers easily and as a society we will wring out collective hands and ask “how do we fix this?”.
Highly educated people can be radicalized; but it is much much more difficult to do.
We need boys to feel that education is worth their time, that it has value and that they themselves can see a path to being educated. Maybe it is boys schools and girls schools, that specifically cater to their need at the primary level. Maybe it is different classes in the same schools. Maybe it is another thing entirely, but it has to be something, because if we continue too fail boys the gangs will pick up the disaffected and dejected boys and give them a sense of community and respect. The more boys that we fail the more power the gangs get.
I once saw a post by a “feminist” basically saying that it was good that girls were out performing boys at all levels of education. That girls “deserved” to have the upper hand after centuries of being the under class. But this misses a significant point; like it or not men are physically stronger, more aggressive and if they “have no future” will steal, batter, kill, rape and destroy communities. Large groups of uneducated boys and men are a danger to society at large…we pretty much no longer have convenient wars to thin that particular demographic out.
We need to ensure that boys by and large do well in education, it is not a competition between boys and girls especially at primary school. The upper end of high school and definitely at university there is competition, but by then the students already value education.
I just want to say, as someone who actually is a feminist person, without the scare quotes, it’s much better for society as a whole, and for women, if boys do as well in education as possible.
I too would like to see more research on this (and also a lot more policy attention given to international research which I think is something NZ does badly).
But, I also think this article fudges the issue slightly in the way it suddenly shifts the goalposts from all boys to disadvantaged boys. The gender pay gap is not going away anytime soon. This is partly due to sector pay differences, and most of the trades are still not particularly welcoming for young women (given that, it’s no wonder young women throw themselves into tertiary in such numbers). Middleclass boys by and large are still becoming successful men, as far as I can see.
It wasn’t meant as scare quotes, the person in question called themselves a feminist. I don’t know many, but those I do know want what’s best for all. They are not looking to oppresse men to “get back at them”.
Sounds about right. Most people I (used to) know are feminist at least as an adjective, and want equality and/or equitable outcomes for all.
That post you saw had an outlook that’s pretty weird/radicalized imo. None of us have been alive for centuries (unless we’re counting the undead).
Thanks for the reply.
I am quite passionate about education, I also have 3 young boys so I’m biased toward quality education for boys, that we seem to be failing at.
Yeah, I can understand that. There’s a young boy in my family and I really don’t want him to be disadvantaged by the system.
Not sure what it’s like now, but when I was working I got the impression that the secondary system was setting up some people to fail. We really needed more equitable teaching across deciles.
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I guess that is one way to read that
I just looked for work on Seek and Trade Me and there’s maybe 2 jobs suitable for me, assuming the hours are reasonable. I’d rather die in a ditch in Ukraine than live in a backwater country like NZ. Nobody should pretend we are first world. Look at the poverty here, and the downtrodden fools who work in supermarkets, hardware stores and distribution centres. Being a wigger, acting tough and boasting about made up stories makes you top dog in some industries. NZ is a backwater country and it will never develop into anything that resembles a decent country. In 10 years from now I’ll still be complaining about crappy over-priced rental bedrooms, and jobs that chew through staff every month.
Don’t dismiss supermarket work, I worked in supermarkets for years before I decided to go back to uni and get a degree in what I wanted to do.
Having a job, any job is good. It gives you a schedule and people relying on you, both are good for a sense of purpose, which is what most people are searching for (weather they know it or not). Even if the managers are jerks, which can actually be a boon because it lets you and your underpaid, underappreciated team bond…nothing like a common enemy to come together over.
Having something to do; that is relatively mindless, lets you think about your wants and needs for the future, all the while getting paid. Maybe you decide after a year that this isn’t for you and go and get an apprenticeship and become a plumber or a sparky. Maybe you decide, that actually this is what I want and go into management (and become the jerk). Maybe it takes 2 years, but you will find friends and get paid.
Shaking your fist at the world, will get you no where. Searching for community in the wrong places will just make things worse.
In another post you said
The only thing I’ve done wrong is have the wrong thoughts about the government, that’s not even a criminal record.
What is wrong with that; I think anti-government thoughts all the time; but I also know a bit of history. Democracy is shit, but it is less shit than the other systems we have tried. Having an opinion is what you get as a thinking individual; I would be far more worried about the zealot that agrees with everything the government does. As long as you vote; then you get to complain, simple as that. If you can’t be arsed voting then you are voting for the winner.
I didn’t vote for National or Act; I disagree with most of what they are proposing. But hey, that is what happened so we have to live with it for the next few years.
Rose tinted glasses for the 80s in abundance here. What if boys are fine? What if girls are just doing better? I can tell you bei g a girl in the 80s wasn’t so flash.
Knocked up and abandoned at 16? Too bad, no school.
Dad or mum hurt themselves? You need to stay home and look after them.
Did well in school cert or 6th form? Good news, off to nursing school.
Not at all, I think girls should have all the opportunity to have; and more. But the stats are clear we are failing to educate boys in a major way.
Education is not a zero sum game, everyone can do well. The better everyone does, the better society does.
There is literally no good outcome from having one section of society that is under educated.
“Tomorrow’s Schools”.
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Give an unqualified Board of Trustees governance of the school, even if by proxy of the Principal they hire.
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Underpay teachers: reduce the talent pool of candidates for teachers, reduce the quality of teachers (on average).
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Underfund schools: reduce the quality of teaching resources. Increase class sizes so that the total time a pupil has for one-on-one teaching is effectively zero.
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Reframe curriculum to be more accessible to more pupils. Assume that one curriculum fits all, fail all pupils.
TL;DR: boys are falling behind, down to the same level as everyone else.
I’d agree to teach programming and maths for the minimum wage if they’d let me, but there’s probably some BS requirement like needing a degree or having to pass a police check. The only thing I’ve done wrong is have the wrong thoughts about the government, that’s not even a criminal record. They only want brain-dead degree wielders to teach. If you have any anti-government views and don’t have a degree, might as well stay on the benefit. They don’t like people who engage in wrong-think, even if it’s in their own time. The failed education system is by design, and only a fool would think that Luxon and/or more funding will fix it. The education system is rotten to the core. It needs a complete re-work.
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I’ve previously read about studies where girls are more likely to be helped by teachers, where boys are more likely to be told “I know you can do it, go and try again”. I was reading this in a book arguing the girls were disadvantaged by this bias because boys got to learn better this way where girls basically got told the answer. This study was in younger primary aged kids.
But if we know this happens, what if this becomes a disadvantage in later study? When the work becomes too hard to work out on your own, but the teacher sends you away anyway?
Alternatively, I know many people who trained as teachers but didn’t stay because of the politics and general working environment (outside of the kids). What if the teachers who stay are the jaded ones that just don’t care anymore?
When almost all teachers are female; almost all librarians are female; almost all children’s authors are female. So almost all books available to kids have “hero’s” in books that are female. Boys don’t engage with the material; this lack of reading engagement has massive knock-on effects for all education. If you can’t read well, you can’t do anything at school except sports…boys gravitate to sports because the classroom is alienating.
Yes one often missed thing is that teaching used to be a career with a lot more men, to the point you could have called it male dominated.
If we doubled teachers salaries, would we start to see a swing back towards more men?
Maybe; but teaching in NZ is not seen as a prestigious career path.
You would need to up the pay and tackle the view of teachers in wider society.
I’d suggest the low pay is part of why it’s not seen as prestigious. Pay teachers like we pay IT workers and I bet that attitude would change within a generation.
I agree; it would fix a bunch of issues.
But it also needs to be competitive; basically only the best get the privilege of teaching the next generation. The qualifications for teachers need to be much higher than they are now; high salary and high entry requirements, with teacher aids to help that require a lower (same as today) qualifications. Similar to the medical system model where there is a surgeon with a bunch of highly qualified helpers.
You couldn’t make me go there just for the money. No way am I going to study 3 years just to become a teacher, when I can teach in a world class city like Moscow with only a minor qualification that takes 1 month to get.
Hmm, I’m not sure about this, ie, the lack of male “heros” in books being responsive for lack of reading engagement. Growing up, I read a lot of female authored books which featured male MCs, such as Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, Secret Seven, The Five Find-Outers, and of course, Rowling’s Harry Potter series. But there were also plenty of male authored works that I enjoyed too, such as Tolkein’s Hobbit, Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, Dixon’s Hardy Boys etc. Not to mention, there were endless comics with male leads to choose from, such as Archie, Richie Rich, Dennis the Menace, and all the superhero comics from DC and Marvel.
Reading was a habbit that was inculcated in me by my parents (mainly my mother, who’s still an avid reader till date), and both of them were full-time workers and career driven. We had a lot of books at home, and books were my main friends growing up. Also, I grew up in an era where there weren’t many digital distractions. We did have a computer at the time, but it ran DOS and had no internet, so there was little to do there.
I think the lack of reading culture these days is mainly a generational issue - kids these days are spoiled by easy access to smartphones and digital content, which shortens their attention span. Why read a book when you can scroll an endless stream of Tiktok videos? Also, how many households have a plethora of books to choose from these days?
I’m not sure what the solution is though, since even if parents keep a tight lid on brainless digital content, kids would get exposed to it at schools and when hanging out with other kids. I’m not a parent so I can’t really comment on this, but I believe some responsibility for encouraging the reading habit still lies with the parents. If I take a look at my sister as an example, who has a couple of young kids, I’ve seen her buy age-appropriate, physical books for the kids every year, and she actually spends time reading the books with them. It’s still too early to tell how the kids will turn out, but I can see her at least trying to inculcate a reading culture in them. How many parents take the time and effort to do that these days?
Hell, how many parents are actually qualified to even raise kids properly these days? With people leading such busy lives, raising kids is a huge deal - which is part of the reason why I don’t want to be a parent myself. But I guess many people these days blindly head into relationships without really planning for kids and without asking themselves if they’re really truly willing to commit themselves to raising intelligent and responsible kids. It’s easy enough to pop out kids, but a mountain of a task to ensure that they turn out alright.
100% the parents need to instill that love of reading early; we don’t have a TV at home and our boys love books. We have the Enid Blyton books at home, along with 100’s of others. We go to the library at least once a week. There are books everywhere, I read so does my partner…But I fear that our household is abnormal; I don’t go to others houses and see books everywhere.
But at schools there needs to be the focus on literacy; currently it just isn’t catered to boys. If a boy is interested in tanks and bombs and war and fighting; but all of the books are about magic and the power of friendship and sparkles; is that boy going to think “the library is the place I go to get exciting stories I like”…nope. It is more likely the thought being something like “libraries are for girls”.
If your school has a library; go look at the content.
Read the Fight Club book if you haven’t.
That last part is the real deal here. Somewhere I have an old screen-shot from Trade Me Forum where a guy said he quit teaching because they basically thought he was a pedo or something like that. As a male, you can’t dare be too friendly or jokey with any student, male or female, or you’ll have to go through some sexual predator prevention programme or something. It will only get worse, and eventually they will roll out this “woke” training nonsense into every profession. Women control all the cosy office jobs and it’s always women in HR who push the anti-male crap.
I think the Peter Ellis case did an enormous disservice to the teaching profession as well as the childcare sector.
We all know there was the occasional bad apple and that needed to end, but this was not the right way to go about fixing it.
Crap pay doesn’t help of course.
I dropped out on my 16th birthday and I never completed level 1 NCEA. I asked to do a programming class and showed them a program I had written, but all they could offer me was Microsoft Visual Basic. Which, from my understanding, is stuff like putting a button on the screen, clicking it, and making it say “button clicked” (that was year 12’s programme for 16-17 year olds, but it’s probably more suited to a 10 year old’s level). I wanted to learn pre-uni stuff like ‘c’ and c++ but they didn’t teach that. I don’t think they even taught Python.
The male teacher who I talked to on this matter was really boring and uninspiring. I didn’t see how any of my classes would help me with my plans. The principal and secretary of the school kept on dragging me and my divorced parents into meetings because I was bogging down the school’s stats. They really are just a bunch of useless paper pushers.
I’d like to volunteer to help primary school children or speak in high school assemblies, but it’s impossible to do this, because the government-owned schools don’t give a crap about what’s good for people. Once I tried to sign up for Big Brothers Big Sisters, but the reference checks were impossible for me to pass. I think they wanted 3 people who had known me for 5+ years and it couldn’t be my best mate or family lol. Nobody has really known me closely for 5+ years because I’ve never held a full time job for 12 months. Like the wojak/doomer meme I’m mostly invisible in this society.
The government won’t fix this. What radical change to education could they possibly make? They can tweak a bit of administration, but the rotten core of the education system will remain.
I’d expect at a high school level for any programming course to focus on the fundamentals rather than being particularly worried about any given language.
These days Python would probably be a better choice than Visual Basic; but given how many languages someone working professionally will be exposed to, it doesn’t matter that much. They’re all just different tools and which one you use really comes down to what problem you’re solving.
For late primary / early high school I still think BASIC is a great introductory language; there’s a new 80s style PC - Commander X16 that has a really cool looking BASIC coming with it that also has the advantage of being completely offline so very safe to just give to kids to wail on.
Should’ve done Visual Basic, there’s way more to it than dragging and dropping WinForms controls in the visual designer and writing event handlers to pop up messages when you click a button.
Try writing a Tic Tac Toe game for example.
For learning the basics of programming, it’ll do if it’s the only language on offer. If you ever make it into the industry, you’ll eventually realise that the language doesn’t matter as much as the concepts and you’ll have to learn a bunch of languages anyway
Yeah maybe VB isn’t so bad, it was the lack of inspiration from teachers and lack of role models and advice that ruined it for me.
