Selling out our boys

The bottom line is they aren't interested in a fair go for boys and girls but, rather, in using education to provide a leg up to girls they perceive as being unfairly treated in our patriarchal society. Ironically, this was the position promoted by a former Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Susan Halliday, who, in a submission to a boys' education inquiry, argued against boys as a group being given specialised attention. She exhorted the inquiry to look at the position of males and females in society generally and "not artificially limit their consideration to the few years at school in which girls enjoy comparative opportunities to boys".

That's the mentality driving the feminists running our education departments. Over the past forty years they have defeated every effort to get boys' results onto the public agenda, derailed policy efforts put in place following various boys' education inquiries and kept a firm lid on results that could be used to expose the plight of boys. Just look at these recent examples of government authorities doing the bidding of the feminists by ignoring the failure of boys:

• A Productivity Commission report on educational equity failed to include any gender-specific data on literacy gaps.

• The Australian Education Research Organisation's (ACER) report on student writing deficits which failed to include the highly unequal outcomes for boys despite the NAPLAN data showing massive gaps in literary results.

• A Grattan Institute exploration of gender gaps which prioritized girls trailing in maths while ignoring literacy gaps disadvantaging boys.

• The Federal government STEM Equity Monitor aimed at boosting girls' participation in maths and STEM. There are no equivalent datasets or incentives tracking boys' aspirations or underperformance in humanities or literacy-heavy subjects.

Oh yes, the ideologues are firmly in control and every educational organisation toes the line. We are told by academics that it's "a career ending move" for a PhD student to tackle why boys are dropping out from school or failing in record numbers. The data is there to start asking the right questions, but no one dares touch it.

The cowardly compliance of our entire education sector makes me despair. Surely some of these people are parents of sons. How can they sell out generation after generation of innocent boys? The education system's cruel bias is on display for anyone who cares to look. What's missing is the courage to act.

I'm just back from some time in Canberra, lobbying the few members of parliament prepared to speak up for men and boys. These are grim times with Labor firmly back in power, supported by the vile, anti-male Greens. Once again, femocrats are rubbing their hands in glee, finding fresh ways to promote girls' education and ignoring the plight of boys.

That's been the pattern for nearly the last forty years, ever since Bob Hawke's government in 1986 launched the National Policy for the Education of Girls in Australian Schools setting the spotlight firmly on girls' achievement. The government coffers poured out support, including millions for gender equity in curriculum reform- which had nothing to do with equity, of course, but rather trying to get girls to beat boys in everything, particularly maths and science subjects. Boys only featured when their behaviour interfered with girls' progress, with a new emphasis on sexual harassment.

They threw over three million to schools to encourage them to get girls into top courses and poured money into the Girls in Maths and Science project; the STEM Equity Monitor; and program after program aimed at boosting the achievement of girls.

I was writing for our major newspapers at the time, reporting on growing disquiet in the community as parents noticed all the high achievers were suddenly girls. A mother from Cooma sent me newspaper cuttings from her children's school speech days. "Twenty years ago, you would find a mix of boys and girls but now they are all girls. What's happened to the boys?" she asked.

It took over a decade and a change of government for any attempt to answer that question. When the Howard government set up a parliamentary inquiry, it was flooded with submissions from concerned parents and teachers. The resulting report: Boys: Getting it Right - made it clear education departments were getting it very, very wrong.

"How could education have got so out of kilter? How could so many educational professionals fail to recognise the emergence of a serious problem of alienation and disengagement from education of so many boys?" asked the Deputy Chair of the parliamentary inquiry, Rod Sawford, when he presented the report to parliament.

The report came up with various initiatives to try to address boys' educational needs - targeted literacy programs, teacher training and revisions to the Gender Equity Framework to prioritize boys. But dealing with eight Labor education ministers at the state level proved a major obstacle and, when Howard lost power, any interest in boys' education returned to the back burner.