Boys are bad, aren’t they? Cheeky little monsters, by all accounts; rule-breakers, mischief-makers and lovable rogues who drive their parents mad. And no, that’s not my view. It’s just the potted version of an afternoon clothes shopping for my son, which turned out to be a depressing lesson in how many retailers encourage little boys to see themselves.

“Little Rebel” says one T-shirt; “Troublemaker” screams another. Or for the kid who hasn’t already got the memo that mucking around is so much more fun than coming top of the class, why not a Fat Face top emblazoned “Better a bad day snowboarding than a good day at school”.

Mothers of daughters have rightly forced retailers to rethink the pink, princessy clothes marketed at them; but if pigeonholing girls as pretty and passive seems unhealthy, then portraying their little brothers as miniature dropouts in the making isn’t much better. The supermarket clothing range George at Asda offers little girls a cute sweatshirt saying “Dream big, fly high” and boys a top saying “Trouble is my middle name”. Fly low, little guys, for your role in life is to annoy people. Perhaps what the “Pink Stinks” campaign against overly girly stereotypes needs is a “Screw Blue” counterpart for their little brothers.

Poor white boys can find defiant male role models suggesting that school isn’t necessarily everything

It’s ridiculous, of course, to blame boys’ ongoing underachievement at school simply on the messages sent out by their clothes, music, reality TV, computer games or any other aspect of pop culture. These are just the most visible expressions of an aggressive anti-intellectualism – bullying clever kids as dorks, championing loud pigheadedness over reasoned argument – forming the background hum to boys’ lives. Small boys somehow internalise the message that reading is more of a “girl thing” before they’ve left primary school, although it’s one of the most powerful indicators of educational success around; by their teens, the idea that swotting makes you unpopular is widespread. But dumb is dangerous. Stupid hurts. Why would we encourage this for our sons?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘At primary school they break your heart, because they’re so eager yet so ill-adapted to a world of sitting still, concentrating and doing what you’re told.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

This Saturday is International Men’s Day – doubtless to the surprise of those who complain every International Women’s Day that men need something similar, without bothering to establish that they already have it – and so this week MPs duly debated the challenges now facing boys and men, in a session probably no more sparsely attended than the average Thursday afternoon session.

Not all boys, of course; as Theresa May pointed out on becoming prime minister, in Britain it’s poor white boys who lag behind. They’re now the group least likely to attend university, leapfrogged not just by girls but boys from ethnic minority backgrounds – which suggests the problem isn’t biological but cultural. Of course we’ve known this for decades, just as we’ve long known how to identify individual boys at risk.

You can spot them even in reception class: physically confident – itching to play outside, first to the top of the climbing frame – but verbally limited, balking at instructions, quick to anger and unable to control impulses.

White working-class boys are ill served by UK education system | Letters Read more

At four years old they break your heart, because they’re so eager yet so ill-adapted to a world of sitting still, concentrating and doing what they’re told. But at 14, compensating for what they don’t know or can’t do by throwing their weight around, they’re rather less adorable. And while a generation ago life still treated academically underachieving boys relatively kindly, it doesn’t now. How some men struggle to adapt to that is arguably the story of our times.

In Hull recently, conducting interviews that invariably circled back to the collapse of the city’s fishing industry, I kept hearing the same thing: that one painful legacy of the boom years was a culture of not valuing education. Why sweat it, when you could quit school and find decently paid work on the docks?

And since passing exams hadn’t been necessary to make a living, families hadn’t prized education much. Then the fishing industry folded, leaving unskilled men stranded; and long after the jobs had gone, ingrained assumptions about school persisted.

The rage against the elite now convulsing politics on both sides of the Atlantic seems at least partly a rage against the better educated, those swots who still have prospects – and who, as luck would have it, tend to be disproportionately female, better off, and increasingly not white.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Arron Banks ‘gleefully describes himself as having been expelled from school before going on to a successful business career’. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA

The fallacy that “they” are taking all our jobs remains a fallacy, given there’s no fixed number of jobs and that mass entry to the workplace, first of women and then of migrants, helped expand the economy and create more openings. But “they” certainly look disproportionately well placed for future jobs.

Girls now outstrip boys from primary school to degree level, while the number of ethnic minority students at top universities has doubled since 1995, according to a report published today by the thinktank Policy Exchange. Competition has never been so ferocious for poor white boys, but still they can find defiant male role models suggesting that school isn’t necessarily everything.

Simon Cowell, who left Dover College at 16, said recently that he’d be happy for his toddler son to follow suit, having personally found school “tedious, monotonous, too many rules”. In his EU referendum memoir Bad Boys of Brexit, the erstwhile Ukip donor Arron Banks gleefully describes himself as having been expelled from school before going on to a successful business career.

Turning your back on education may indeed work for a tiny handful, but it’s worth pointing out that both Cowell and Banks were privately schooled for at least part of their childhood, and that back in the 70s and 80s the world was a more forgiving place for unqualified school leavers – especially if, as in Cowell’s case, your dad was a music industry executive able to give you a job.

These days professions that once took school leavers are demanding graduates instead, automation is destroying not just unskilled but semi-skilled jobs, and funding for the evening classes that once allowed school dropouts to catch up in adulthood is shrinking.

We should be throwing the kitchen sink at engaging boys’ attention in school by whatever means possible, but also stressing the payback available in later life for knuckling down now. Some boys (not to mention girls) are indeed bored witless in school – but it sure beats a lifetime of being bored in low-paid, insecure jobs because you can’t move into anything more interesting.

And while it’s healthy to worry about raising female aspirations or what Hillary Clinton’s defeat taught little girls, we hear too little about raising male ones – or about teaching boys that, with all due respect to Donald Trump, success doesn’t usually fall into the laps of those who didn’t do the homework.

Boys need role models who don’t seek to glamorise slacking, winging it or sneering at the smart kids; who make it look cool to stretch yourself at school, and can tap into their competitive instincts. But above all they need grown men to champion them not by lashing out at girls, but cheerfully equipping boys to compete. Boys aren’t born bad. So for heaven’s sake, let’s not push them that way.