An interesting report in The Economist: The Weaker Sex

[Terpsichore]

Here is an interesting report from The Economist on why girls are doing better than boys in almost every subject in the school curriculum. It is happening not only here but in many other countries of the developed and indeed much of the developing world.

 

The explanation seems to lie in the following paragraph:

 

"To see why boys and girls fare so differently in the classroom, first look at what they do outside it. The average 15-year-old girl devotes five-and-a-half hours a week to homework, an hour more than the average boy, who spends more time playing video games and trawling the internet. Three-quarters of girls read for pleasure, compared with little more than half of boys. Reading rates are falling everywhere as screens draw eyes from pages, but boys are giving up faster. The OECD found that, among boys who do as much homework as the average girl, the gender gap in reading fell by nearly a quarter."

 

It is not just reading where girls do better but also physical exercise.  As the Victorian schoolmasters used to say mens sana in corpore sano.  They might do better if they were less sniffy about their sisters' ballet classes or at least made an appearance on the cricket pitch or rugger field.

 

Girls in many families are often given greater responsibility than their brothers at an earlier age  with simple domestic tasks in the home.  

 

To correct this imbalance in educational attainment between the sexes we need to make a radical shift in attitudes.

[Lisa O`Brien]

A very interesting article. The bits about reading and exercise were something that for me personally as the sole parent of an 18 year old boy I have noticed throughout the years. As soon as my son was no longer required to read for school he stopped. He still has to read for his college course,but he hasn`t picked up a book for pleasure for,I don`t know how many years. I have to tell white lies to his grandmother in County Mayo that he still does read for pleasure,so she doesn`t worry about him. And as for exercise. What exercise???

[Moomin]

Very irritating to quote statistics but not say what your sample size is etc. The difference between, for example, 3/4 and a 'little over half' could be pretty negligible in a small sample size! For any decent conclusions to be made you'd be looking at sampling in the thousands

[sarahw]

As a parent with 1 of each I feel the education system, at least at primary, is geared to the learning style of girls rather than boys.

 

I suspect the advent of the National curriculum and SATs etc didn't help as schools seem so paralysed by the fear of not meeting targets they don't think outside the box as much as they might.

[sarahw]

I would agree that boys are more prone to screen addiction. My son needs a lot more active management on that front.