“Typical boy,” sighed the mother, rolling her eyes and smiling with rueful resignation.

She was talking about her 10-year-old son who is in the same primary class as my younger daughter. We were standing at the school gate, waiting for the afternoon bell.

The mother was despairing, lovingly, over her boy’s waywardness. Increasingly, she finds him impossibly bolshy and rebellious. He won’t tidy his room, won’t do his homework, won’t read books. He is so naughty and disobedient at school that she repeatedly gets called in to discuss his behaviour with the head teacher.

Among the mothers I meet every day at the school gate, such unruliness is routinely explained, passed off, even justified with the words “typical boy”. That always sounds to me like a sentence of doom. Why do we so readily and complacently equate boyhood with unsocial behaviour and an ineducable frame of mind? Is it fanciful to see a connection between that outlook and the lad in the dock, with shades of the prison house closing upon him?

Boys themselves seem to take the standard stereotype of boyhood as an excuse for animal barbarism. One day while I was helping out at the school as a supervisor in the playground, I found a boy rolling, fully-clothed, on the filthy ground.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked.

“Because I’m a boy,” he answered.

“Does that mean you have to behave like an idiot?” I said.

Gormlessness has not always been the only model for a typical boyhood. The twentieth-century’s Nigel Molesworth and Just William may have set the mould for the twenty-first century’s Horrid Henry; but it was allowable in my shorts-clad boyhood to have both muddy knees and a paperback in your pocket. A boy in the 1950s would not be embarrassed to be good at school. I enjoyed cricket and football and conkers and bikes; but I also liked books, singing in the choir, acting in school plays and kissing girls (where are you now Margaret Claydon?)

As Frank Furedi recently argued in the Telegraph, it is preposterous to presume that boys share a genetic predisposition which ensures they don’t/won’t read. When he was a little boy in the 1980s, my own son was engrossed in his Hardy Boys adventures as much as he was with Batman on the telly. Described by his teachers as "morally and intellectually, the star of his year" at secondary school, he also played rugby, was captain of the athletics team and was awarded colours for drama. When he recently moved into a new flat, that man, now in his 30s, found that he needed 22 metres of shelving for all his books. Typical boy?

Neither he nor I grew up in a home where it was expected or allowed that, by reason of his genitals, a boy acquired an automatic pass to be cheeky to his parents and teachers; or to fail to tie up his shoe-laces; or to neglect his homework.

Children often play the part expected of them Credit: Alamy

What is at the heart of this discrepancy? Is it class? Wealth? The education of parents? Social predispositions and prejudices over gender? Fatherless boys (the woman at the gate is a single mother)? The absence of men from the teaching profession in primary schools? Or all of the above?

"The widespread notion of the “typical boy” as an ineducable savage plays into the wider social and political reality" Neil Lyndon

The evidence is unmistakably mounting that something is profoundly amiss in our treatment and approach to the upbringing of boys, especially poor boys. Just this week, we read that 29pc of white working class boys don’t do A-levels. This followed an Institute for Fiscal Studies report that “ School leavers from white British backgrounds are less likely to go to university than peers from ethnic minorities”. Last week, it was announced that “wealthy Scottish pupils are now seven times more likely to get top Highers than those from poorer homes”.

My own guess is that the widespread notion of the “typical boy” as an ineducable savage plays into this evident wider social and political reality. And I am afraid that barbarian view of boyhood is shared and approved - however unconsciously - by many mothers and women primary school teachers. In their minds, it would appear that the model pupil in our gynocentric education system is a girl.

She actually lives in our house.

Our younger daughter, 10, gets herself ready for school every morning without any help except when she asks me to put her hair in a pony-tail. Without prompting, she makes her own bed, prepares her school bag, remembers to pin on her house badge and even cleans her own shoes (the only child of either sex in my experience who routinely does that job). As soon as she arrives home from school and hangs up her coat, she starts her homework. Never once has she been in trouble at school. Never once has she been late. Never has she tried to bunk off with a fake cold. Her teacher tells us she is “fabulous” and “a dream pupil”.

Would anybody give equal encouragement to a “typical boy”?