Dialogue: Boys' needs must be recognised

Teachers frequently report a big problem in New Zealand education that theorists are reluctant to acknowledge. It is called "boys." For more than a decade now teachers in secondary schools have been finding it particularly hard to motivate male pupils. Teenage boys are taciturn at the best of times but their interest and performance in the classroom has now become dire by all accounts except those commissioned by the Ministry of Education. Another ministry study, reported in the Weekend Herald, has found no problem.

That would be a relief if its reasoning was cogent. But the researchers, Dr Adrienne Alton Lee and Dr Angelique Pratt, seem just to have looked at the statistics and found that ethnicity and socio-economic disparities are more evident than gender when it comes to explaining poor performance. So what? It's not a ranking exercise. The state has grants and programmes for schools to tackle those problems. Schools need answers to the problem of boys, too.

Last year the Education Review Office suggested special efforts might have to be taken to ensure schools met their obligations to boys. The office ventured some possible reasons for the poor performance, noting that just 20 per cent of primary school teachers were male and suggested female teachers might not "fully appreciate the specific needs of boys." But the problem seems to occur equally in boys' high schools with largely male teaching staff. There is clearly something more deeply wrong.

It poses a challenge for educational research that seems not entirely welcome. Last year a ministry comparison of male and female achievement consoled itself with a discovery that male performance had not declined since the late 1980s. "Existing gender differences had been a consistent feature of participation and achievement statistics" since then, it said. Teachers do not doubt it. They know that the problem has been around for that long and still there is nothing done about it.

The findings of Alton Lee and Pratt bring us no closer to action. They conclude that the gender difference lies mainly in literary interest and language. Girls read more books and do better at assimilating information in their early years, though the gap narrows as students get older. It is hard to hear the conclusions of Alton Lee and Pratt without gaining the suspicion that the views the researchers hold may be symptomatic of the real problem.

They apparently see no need for a different style of education for boys. What is good for girls is good for boys, they insist. They seem to think that the problem is "narrow and constraining definitions of masculinity and femininity."

Students and teachers should, they suggest, "deconstruct the ways that language and texts constitute male and female in opposition" and a little later, proposing improvement in boys' study of arts, they say, "the curriculum provides a potential site for deconstructing gender and body through visual representations and through dance." Whatever that gobbledygook means, it sounds like theorists are heading in exactly the wrong direction.

They should at least consider the possibility that education has been "feminised" not so much by the preponderance of women teachers as by the style of teaching these days. In primary school there is an emphasis on personal revelation and sentiment that even young boys may find cloying. Classroom tasks are designed for cooperative work to which girls probably respond better than boys.

Whatever the causes of boys' chronic lassitude may be, the problem should not be seen as a threat to the educational advancement of girls. If the genders respond to different ways of teaching and learning, that has to be acknowledged, without penalising either sex. Girls are making giant strides these days. It is the boys who need help.