‘There is no boy at this age that is cute enough or interesting enough to stop you from getting your education,” Michelle Obama told an audience of girls at the Apollo Theater in Harlem last week.

In an event sponsored by Glamour magazine, the first lady explained that the key to solving world poverty and improving “the plight of our country” is to educate girls.

As is the tendency with people who speak on behalf of Girl Power, Mrs. Obama seems to be confusing the problems of girls like, say Malala, with those in America’s inner cities.

In the developing world it is true that girls are prevented from getting an education. They are too poor, their families need them to carry water to and from their homes, they have no sanitary facilities at school or there are Islamist lunatics trying to kill them or kidnap them when they go to school.

But the girls in America are in an entirely different situation.

In 2013, according to the Current Population Survey, 25- to 34-year-old women were 21 percent more likely to have a college degree than men and 48 percent more likely to have finished graduate school.

While liberals love to talk about the War on Women, it clearly has not affected their educational prospects.

Indeed, it’s not just middle- and upper-class women who seem to be ahead of their male counterparts. Even the most disadvantaged girls are more likely to get an education here than boys from similar circumstances.

Richard Whitmire, author of “Why Boys Fail,” has argued that our discussions about the racial achievement gap and even the effects of poverty on educational attainment have masked the biggest disparities, which are between girls and boys.

In an interview in the magazine Education Next, Whitmire cites a 2009 study by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University that tracked the students who graduated from Boston public schools.

For every 167 women in four-year colleges, there were only 100 men. But poverty wasn’t the problem — all the kids were coming from the same neighborhoods.

“The study found that black females were five percentage points more likely to pursue further study after high school, including community colleges, four-year colleges and technical or vocational schools, than white males,” notes Whitmire.

All of which is to say that girls in America don’t need a pep talk from the first lady anymore than, say, boys do. But there’s nothing wrong with her message. It’s true that if disadvantaged girls in the United States do drop out of school, drama with boys is among the chief distractions.

It’s not just teen pregnancy, which has been falling in recent years. It’s also the fact that teen girls are regularly subject to cultural messages that suggest being smart is not the goal.

And we’re not just talking about silly T-shirts that say “I’m not good at math” or bimbo Barbie dolls.

No. We are forever reaching new levels of the sexualization of girls. And sadly Mrs. Obama has only celebrated the pop icons who are a big part of the problem.

When asked this summer what she would be if she could have a different profession, the first lady said, “I would be Beyoncé . . . Every time I see her, she inspires me, she empowers me, she encourages me to live a healthy lifestyle . . . I’m proud to have my daughter grow up in a world where she has people like [her] to look up to.”

Oh yes, because the real problem is that young girls don’t have enough role models who take off their clothes in front of millions of people and dance in sexually suggestive ways.

If the first lady is really concerned about empowering young women in this country, she would realize that what undercuts their ability to focus on school is a culture that wants to make them grow up too quickly.

In speaking to the girls at Glamour, Mrs. Obama explained, “If I had worried about who liked me and who thought I was cute when I was your age, I wouldn’t be married to the president of the United States.”

Right. Apparently she would have been married to Jay-Z.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.