So boys are "falling behind"?

Apparently boys are not doing as well as girls in the NAPLAN games. (For Upoverites NAPLAN involves a series of tests of academic achievement at various points through your school career.)

It does not surprise me in the slightest if boys are not doing as well as girls in things like spelling, mathematics, reasoning and the like. Why should they? Psychological theory would have us believe the results between them should be about equal - but different. Perhaps the powers-that-be need to look at the tests.

That said I also think we need to look more closely at what we expect of all students. It may be different Elsewhere but there are expectations here in Downunder. If challenged people will likely deny that these expectations are expectations but I believe they do exist. 

Boys, especially teenage boys, are expected to be keen on sport. They are expected to play sport. They are expected to ride mountain bikes and go surfing. In school they are expected to be much more interested in STEM subjects than the arts. They are expected to be "better at maths" and to have better coding skills. They are expected to enjoy science experiments. We might want to say all this is not true, that "not everyone is like that" but the not so subtle reality is different. We don't want boys to be more interested in English, other languages or other arts subjects. Heaven forbid that they might be interested in art or cookery!

I remember someone with whom I went to school. He was a problem in a very small country school. With four year grades in one room there was no time to provide him with a lot of extension work. After some discussion he "skipped" a year...and then another year. He was hopelessly disorganised about his everyday life but he could multiply three figures by three figures "in his head". He could remember the spelling for any word he had come across. There was not a lot of reading material around but he swapped everything he had for everything we had. He had also read the Bible from Genesis to the end and was working his way through a dictionary when we left. 

He later went on to university and became a solicitor but I wonder what would become of him now. He would almost certainly have been pushed, none too gently, into maths of some sort. Would he have been any happier there? I doubt it. My brother and I once spent a happy weekend with him as we tried to work out how to calculate the height of a tree. It was the sort of problem which interested all of us but only because it related to how much ladder we had to build to get to the branch that looked perfect for a tree house. Now, if we were even permitted to embark on such a project, we would probably be introduced to the necessary maths behind such a task. I have long since forgotten what I knew and I am sure he has too. Maths was simply not our "thing". Being able to calculate something does not mean you are necessarily interested in the entire field around it.

No, sport is more important to many. The other likely activity is that of playing computer games. Yes, I know computer games can vary greatly but they are not all chess, Scrabble or Minecraft. Many of them seem to be quite violent, certainly involving killing off your enemies on screen. I know some girls do play the "kill your enemy" type but it is much more likely to be the domain of boys. That they are highly addictive I do not doubt at all because they work on the classic reward theory. There are boys who spend hours each day playing such games. If that sounds unacceptably "sexist" I apologise but I suspect I am right.

If we want to stop boys "lagging behind" then perhaps we need to think a little less about organised sport (and more about physical activity) and severely limit the computer games. We need to provide them with the ability and time to read actual books. We need to show them that art and cookery are acceptable activities. 

I do not think this will happen. There will be a renewed push to "bring them up to standard" with more of the activities in which they are possibly simply not interested.