Sensei

Boys, Biology and Bias

Do yo know where the heart is located?  Yes?  What about the kidneys?  Kind of…  And the pancreas?  The what?

New research has shown that basic anatomy ‘baffles Britons’.  Take the test to find out how ignorant you are .  (I got the first two right.)

At school, I hated biology.  It was a subject for girls, unless you wanted to ‘do medicine’ (which no-one in my school did).

I’ve only ever been interested in learning about anatomy twice in my life.  The first was during a first-aid course I volunteered for at work.  The second was when I started to take martial arts lessons; we had to learn the names of bones and pressure-points.  And that says it all, really, about the male of the species, especially the working-class male, when it comes to education.

It has to have some practical purpose beyond the classroom.  And it has to have some element of danger or excitement.  Take these away, and you get boys with attention problems, discipline issues and unfulfilled potential coming out of our auditory systems (wherever they are).

I mention this in light of yet another report about how men are ‘out performed at university’.  This is not some new thing.  In 2007 there was clear evidence to show that the student gender gap is higher than ever when it comes to university applications.  The government expressed fears then that boys were shunning higher education.

Why is this happening?  One government researcher says, helpfully, “We just don’t know.”  Let us theorise.

(1) Boys are more aggressive than girls, therefore more physically energetic, with shorter attention spans.  Sitting in a classroom, silent and still, for long periods, goes against our grain.  If we are made to do this, we will wander away in our heads, though our bodies remain.

(2) Because boys are more aggressive, we are less likely to take facts ‘on face value’ or just because the teacher said so.  We need reasons, answers to the eternal question ‘Why?’  We never get any.

(3) We find the discipline – or ‘goody-goodyness’ – of constant, term-long course work difficult to maintain.  But this is more and more what modern education demands of us.

(4) We are less inclined than girls to be motivated to work hard in the classroom out of a wish to please the teacher.  Our peers matter more.  And if they don’t study, neither will/can we.

(5) Grades, or bits of paper with a stamp on it (i.e. a certificate) is no motivation to an average boy.  What can you do with a bit of paper?  Except make a paper airplane…

(6) Most teachers, especially at primary school level, are female.  Therefore we have no male role models of academic achievement in the very educational environment in which we find ourselves.

(7) Why is so much – in fact almost all – of education an indoors experience?  What boy wants to be indoors?  Who invented this madness?

(8) The (post)modern, PC, “every-one’s a winner” model of education, that denigrates competition and competitiveness, is clearly biased against males.  Ironically, in this ethos, it is exactly the males who are the losers, as the statistics show.  (When my English cousins informed my brother and I as young boys that at their sports day, everyone had to stop at the finish line and go over it together, we laughed our legs off.  Training for life?  Training for depression!)

(9) Good old ‘health and safety’ has made a muck even of boys games in the playground.  (There is even a home baking ban at school fairs so girls are feeling the risk-averse stretch of the nanny state too.)

I could go on indefinitely, but I like the number nine so I’ll stop now.

I’ll sum it up on one idea.  Modern education is based on the political notion that males and females do or ought to think alike, while science is teaching us that gender differences extend to the very brain.  This has big implications for education and intelligence, as well as for health and disease.

So if you want your boy to be good at biology, teach him kung-fu!

Image credit: pixienicki.

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