One Rule For One...

I just don't get what the government is up to sometimes. There is this huge campaign afoot to improve educational standards for boys, to combat the fact that girls do better at school than boys. So now we're desperately hiring male teachers to act as role models. And complaining that won't be enough and some other measures may be "needed". Apparently the difference is 14% by age 14 (14% of what I don't know but anyway). But there are reasons why girls outperform boys. Girls are better behaved, they spend more hours doing homework, they fight less - right through life, look at the prison population, it's mostly men. And I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything to monitor what happens to boys in school, to check if we're failing to push them as hard as we are the girls. But... BUT...

Why is it that whenever it's men outperforming the response is "it must be a baby thing", "girls just aren't good at this stuff". When women are outperforming it's cause for immediate policy change. If boys need role models in school, don't women need role models in boardrooms, in churches, in Hollywood?

What I need to know is why aren't all these terrible outperforming girls getting the best jobs when they leave school?

I also am horrified by the suggestion, from the recent Department for Children report on the subject that "there was no case for introducing boy-friendly teaching methods because anything that was likely to improve boys' grades would also improve girls' results. This would then perpetuate the gender gap, the report argued."

...that's right - let's not improve our education system because it would only help those pesky girls as much as it helps the boys! What next - lets stop girls going to school on Mondays and Tuesdays and when they do go to class, lets ban them from taking pens and pencils and making notes. That'll sort out the gender gap.

The truth is what we have to do is make sure all kids are given the same excellent opportunities to learn and encouraged to take them up. Our education system falls well short of that mark right now. That should be the focus of the DoC and government policy. Urgh!