Several readers have sent me this article from the Mail Online regarding “naughty” boy sterotypes:

The belief that girls are brainier and better behaved is holding boys back at school, research suggests. A study of British pupils found that, from a young age, children think girls are academically superior. And, what’s more, they believe that adults think so too…. And by the age of seven, boys shared the belief that they were naughtier and did less well at school. Follow-up questions showed the children thought that adults had similar expectations. The second part of the study found that stereotypes seemed to be holding boys back…

Study co-author Dr Robbie Sutton said: ‘Our study suggests that by counteracting the stereotypes in the classroom – wherever they might have come from originally – we can help boys do better.’

This reminds me of the study I found on girls taking over at college. In it the researchers state:

One source of the persistent female advantage in K–12 school performance

and the new female lead in college attainment is the higher incidence of behavioral

problems (or lower level of noncognitive skills) among boys. Boys have a much

higher incidence than do girls of school disciplinary and behavior problems, and spend far fewer hours doing homework (Jacob, 2002). Controlling for these

noncognitive behavioral factors can explain virtually the entire female advantage in

college attendance for the high school graduating class of 1992, after adjusting for

family background, test scores, and high school achievement. Similarly, our own

analysis of the 1979 and 1997 NLSY samples shows that teenage boys, both in the

early 1980s and late 1990s, had a higher (self-reported) incidence of arrests and

school suspension than teenage girls and that controls for such measures of

behavioral problems signiﬁcantly attenuate the female college advantage. Boys

have two to three times the rate of Attention Deﬁcit Hyperactivity Disorder

(ADHD) than girls and much higher rates of criminal activity (Cuffe, Moore, and

McKeown, 2003; Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2004). Boys are also much more

likely than girls to be placed in special education programs.12 The source of boys’

higher incidence of behavioral problems is an area of active research and could be

due to their later maturation as well as their higher rates of impatience (Silverman,

2003). Women are now the majority of undergraduates and those receiving a bachelor degree.

So boys are basically being graded on their behavior, not their merit. They have different styles of doing homework and don’t sit still in class. Teachers often hate this and reward girls for their conformity to their rules and penalize boys for their non-conformity and behavior. Teachers can no longer discipline in school, and the only punishment is often suspension. I wonder how the lack of discipline has played a role in teacher’s using grading, perhaps subconsciously to punish boys.

More importantly, I wonder how many bureaucrats and teachers, and even parents are using 7-year old boys as targets of revenge for something they perceive was done to girls so many years ago. In my opinion, to use innocent children as a means of revenge for past grievances is child abuse. Too bad there is no government agency that gives a damn that a concerted effort to abuse boys is taking place in Western culture. Boys are being cheated out of higher education. Some will do well despite no college degree and others will flounder. Either way, it doesn’t bode well for our culture or say much about our supposedly “egalitarian” society. As George Orwell said, “…some animals are more equal than others.” In our education system, this seems to be the case.