Gender in education

Whether or not we believe that boys and girls should be treated the same way, do they
behave the same way in the classroom ?

Statistics from around the world reveal a similar pattern - that when girls
are given a chance to go to school they do better than the boys. Learning in a
typical schoolroom comes more naturally to girls, and they find the feminized
teaching environment far more to their taste. Girls pay attention, boys fidget. The
modern classroom favours (in the US it requires) a non-competitive approach, 5
which girls like, and relies heavily on verbal skills, which deploy the girls'
natural strengths. Girls, too, are better organized; their schoolwork is usually
neatly written and submitted on time, while boys are more likely to turn in
careless work. Boys, as we have already seen, have a shorter attention span,
which may be because of their lower boredom threshold, and without imaginative 10
teaching they often begin to misbehave. This is hardly surprising. Boys are
naturally more active, aggressive and restless and so need more control. Informal
lessons do not work with most boys. They feel they are being let off the leash and
use the freedom to make mischief.
In the early school years girls do far better than boys in every subject. They 15
learn to talk, read and write earlier than the boys, and current teaching methods
make it even harder for the boys to catch up. Why? Because the male's more natural
skills are spatial, while the girl's are verbal. Boys are better at simple manual
tracking tasks, at hand-eye co-ordination and at three-dimensional puzzles,
talents that are rarely appreciated in the classroom. Girls talk to their toys and the 20
boys deconstruct them, but most teaching ignores a boy's spatial skills and depends
on the verbal skills at which a girl excels.
These are, of course, average differences with vast overlaps between girls and
boys - some boys will have high verbal attainments and some girls will show high
spatial skills -but there is very little overlap at the extreme ends of the distribution 25
curves. As always with statistics these observed differences do not predict individual
performance, but they do foretell the likelihood that a girl or boy will behave in a
certain manner. Thus we can be reasonably sure that most girls will perform better
on tests of verbal fluency or on solving anagrams and, indeed, girls do outperform
boys by a huge margin on such tests. Throughout the world girls are better at this 30
sort of test than boys.

from Why Men Don’t Iron Anne & Bill Moir (1998)

© David Ripley, Inthinking

www.englishb-inthinking.co.uk