'Sit down, shut up': how schools are failing boys and what we can do

In 2002 an Australian House of Representatives Standing Committee produced the Report Boys: Getting it Right . Since then, there has been academic debate, much of it with little understanding and a lot of suspicion of boys. And we are still wrestling with the problems emphasised in academic articles and the media.

Why are many boys doing relatively poorly in schools, and education overall?

The question of masculinity lies at the heart of the issue. Boys feel they must be masculine at all costs . The penalties for not being tough enough are usually ridicule, threats or actual violence, and social exclusion. Bullying has always been a problem, and now we are seeing boys (and girls) bullied and the scene vividly displayed for all to see on Facebook or similar, with disastrous results for any boy even a little unsure of himself:

As this author said in 'Bullying Goes Viral without a Solution', a newspaper article in The Age in 2011:

An overweight boy is picked on by a smaller boy. The younger boy keeps hitting the other boy until the victim lashes out, picking up his attacker and throwing him onto the ground. The incident at a Mount Druitt school ''went viral'' this week, appearing on websites and TV talk shows around the world.

One wonders who wins from this unpleasant publicity. Not the school, and not the boys involved. Boys are afraid of being afraid and so they are often pushed into a tough but acceptable masculinity. This was made clear in an interview with Mark*, a boy at Greenslopes School in Sydney

Q: What are the rules of being a boy in Australia?

A: Boys need a tough image. Boys can't do lots of stuff. You can't show emotions. They have to win. They have to have the last laugh. Those are the rules of any schoolyard.

Wy are boys underachieving?

Many boys are under-achieving. Not just academically, but right across the school, in and out of classrooms. We are not simply talking about exam results, but engagement in the life of the school as a whole. Nobody seems to be able to explain satisfactorily what happened from 1990 onwards to assist girls, on average, to do better than boys and improve this performance year after year. Nor to explain why boys have begun to do so poorly, relative to girls.

The gender divide holds true in many circumstances: it seems true from the evidence that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander girls achieve better in literacy tests than Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander boys. And it does seem from other evidence that gender, class and race compound each other, so that girls from wealthier Anglo-Australian homes do better than working-class Anglo-Australian boys.

Boys from some ethnic groups also do well as a general rule. When I looked at exam results for one course in New South Wales, ethnic differences were stark.

Some reasons commentators have offered for the decline in boys' participation, behaviour and academic success are as follows:

1. The declining number of male teachers, especially in primary schools , most of all in state schools.
2. Increasing assessment methods that inadvertently favour girls (such as ongoing assessment rather than exams)
3. The move away from factual learning and the increasing tendency for teachers to ask questions starting with 'Explain...' and 'Discuss...'
4. The feminisation of learning and public discourse. Book supplements feature many articles by women, book shows in the media are hosted by women, and we hear constantly about women writing about feminist this and that. Family conferences and writers' festivals have an emphasis on women. You might think there would be room for men somewhere to discuss issues relevant to men. Yet when topics like fatherhood or even male circumcision or men's sexual challenges are discussed, they are discussed by- women. This week I saw an article in Reading Australia for teachers about how to teach feminism in the classroom, using The Female Eunuch as a starting-point. Great idea. Where are the articles showing teachers how to teach thoughtfully about being a man?
5. Boys want to be active and they want to be outdoors. They don't want teachers talking at them. Yet trips away from school are difficult for teachers, with forms to be filled out and numerous checks done. Sometimes it's hard to get the necessary gender balance in supervision on outdoor visits. And so boys sit still most of the day. The result is much drudge-work, as one British boy wrote: I will continue to do my best, no matter how pointless the task is.

Boys struggle with English

English comes up time and again as a problem for boys in terms of how much they read, how much they write and the quality and neatness of their work (or lack of it). Working-class boys are usually noticed as having problems in English. Rural boys and dark-skinned boys are mentioned by others as especially challenged .

The world of feelings and emotions presents a real challenge to boys who are not yet confident about their masculinity. And this is one of the results. This is a real conversation in a real school, all too typical of adolescent males' attitudes:

Teacher : Look at this poem.

Student: I don't want to. It's gay.

T: How is it gay? Does it walk down Oxford Street holding hands with other poems?

S: I don't know. It's just gay.

T: It's about a man wanting a woman to love him.

S: See? Gay.

What do boys say about school?

I've spoken with and surveyed boys at a wide range of schools. Let's listen to what they say:

Feelings about school in general

Boys feel that on the whole school is something to be endured, rather than enjoyed. There were echoes of the principal in another school who said "A boy sits in school all day thinking of the game of footy he will play at 3.30". They thought school was a bit fairer to girls. Boys have a keen sense that sometimes, school isn't fair to them.

Better classroom learning

Boys don't want to sit at desks and be talked at. They resent it and they drift off, lost in a "sea of blahs", as Rowe said. Some teachers seem to be putting up slabs of text on PowerPoint and talking over it. Probably the boys end up copying what they see. One witty boy called this Death by PowerPoint. It is unpleasantly common in talks and conferences. Ironically, this is done even when some educators are telling teachers how to improve boys' learning! Teachers talk and talk (we all do!) and aren't effective sometimes in sussing out who understands the work.

Boys don't feel school is something for them. It's something awful which they can't escape from. Nor do they want to be seen as swots, nor as teacher's pets. They want to be treated as mature, creative and thoughtful, but classrooms trap them into passive and resentful objects of what teachers will do to them.

Q What are your first thoughts waking up on a school day?

This question got blunt answers. Some examples in one school were:

Oh my God

Teachers will be disappointed with me

I'm not wanting to go

One Kangaroo Bay boy said he hoped that maybe there'd been an explosion or some disaster and there wouldn't be any school today.

It's easy to see a consensus here. In the words of boys, it's "sit down, shut up, write this down" .

What boys liked about school

In an earlier study this author did in four schools, boys said they felt school was mostly a complete waste of time. School was valued by many because it meant playing sport and being with your mates. In the present surveys, some positives emerged. Common answers in one school were:

• relevance
• sport
• hands-on learning
• class conversation

Conclusions

It's easy to draw some of these threads together. Relevance and active learning are strongly preferred by all the boys surveyed. School is far too passive for most of them. Boys are not good listeners and yet teacher talk is usually the default mode. Why does it have to be so?

It's not so much that boys are failing: schools are failing many of the boys. Boys should be asked about how they want to learn. If the school wants them to learn, it will have to listen. School is meant to be for pupils' benefit; it should not be there for teachers to do as they wish. When asked for advice on this matter, my first suggestions are: talk less. And let the students do more. We need more adventure, more hands-on learning and maybe some creative chaos. Classrooms must not become sit-stilleries. Things must change if schools are to stop failing many boys in most countries across the western world.