Saturday, November 21, 2009
The boys, weaker sex at school, by Marie-Êve Marineau
Save the boys!, Jean-Louis Auduc, part but not against the law-thread Go Girls! (Seuil, 1992) and What's New in girls? (Nathan, 2007), sociologists Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet.
If social inequalities in access to education are now questioned and give rise to the establishment of public policies, there is another divide largely ignored. Yet again, the numbers are overwhelming: boys and girls are not equal in class. Of the 150 000 young people leaving without any qualifications in the education system in which the media often tell us, we do not say that over 100 000 are boys. From elementary school, boys show a delay in the acquisition of reading and writing and clog structures for students in difficulty or perpetrators of violent behavior. The sexual divide is often more significant than the social divide in the analysis of school careers. The traditional studies, developed in terms of economic inequality and cultural, must evolve to a place in this disturbing reality. School failure has a sex. Claiming to solve this societal problem without taking into account one of its main features is illusory.
A bad score that continues from primary to tertiary, as seven out of ten women have a tank or a diploma postbac, against six out of ten men. According to 2008-2009 figures from the Ministry of Education, girls are 31% to get one as good or very good bac S (which do not attract the scientists, but strong), against 24% of boys.
Why such a difference and such a failure? "The girls, or poorly recognized in the house, have over-invested in the school and they are recognized, the author explains, deputy director of the IUFM Paris-XII Val de Marne at Creteil. Conversely, boys are often found in their family but they live in an identity crisis at school. (...) The belief of their superiority confronts the boys to insoluble contradictions do not result in a superior intellectual girls in their class."
We note immediately that the obvious physical precocity of girls do not seem to have touched the author as a possible explanation for the difference in results between boys and girls, nor the fact that the school promotes attitudes traditionally "female": listening and obedience.
Results for author: The boys are taken to devalue the academic knowledge and to rebel against the school. The spiral of failure is initiated. She checks into the direction where the girls are under-represented in the so-called short courses (CAP, BEP, Bac STI, bac pro, etc..) However, they are overrepresented in higher education, except networks of excellence, where boys fro before them.
Indeed, despite the best educational pathways, girls less often than they choose the channels of the elite. This situation is linked to a "cultural atavism" that prevents "shake the boundaries of male and female within the family" by the author. Recall that, according to other authors, it is simply a strategy to choose careers that allow maternity and employment (by avoiding areas where knowledge quickly becomes obsolete). According to a study (March 2009) of the National Fund for Family Allowances, two thirds of parenting and household work based on women.
The author's family - one that students and the one reproduced - there she is, the great fault ... "The professional discrimination no longer find their roots in the institutional inequalities, whether at school or in the laws, but in private homes and consciences," writes the author. Discrimination based on traditional images of both sexes who have strong repercussions on the education of each other. It does not, however, how the struggle for adequate fight against these stereotypes would solve the problems of boys!
The author argues that the fact of less verbally and physically stimulate the boys (which wants stronger) has a direct influence on language acquisition slower in male children. And therefore their education. One wonders which conveys stereotypes here.
Many boys "do not rise forever the stereotype that often embodies the parenting that verbal communication is a skill largely female," says Jean-Louis Auduc. In contrast, the image of women portrayed in some circles "to help girls develop the ability to listen and order which will be an asset to the school." And in society? This is all the more true as we descend the social ladder, and ultimately more damaging to boys from disadvantaged backgrounds. Kings home, they are disallowed in school, where, according to the author, the macho mentality places them in a position of rebels, therefore refusal and failure. In short, if the boys are not doing it because boys are not educated as girls.
How to overcome this situation? For the author, struggling against the macho stereotypes and limiting mixed paradoxically, the author proposes that does not mean campaigning for the return of single-sex classes, but questioned "the appropriateness of some activities where to better manage the entire class, boys and girls are separated.
Worst case for Le Monde but not unrealistic: it is also conceivable that the gender gap will decrease with the continued rise of girls. By dint of closer social positions of the boys, they also adopt the codes and develop turn perverse aspects still own stereotypes of sex "safe". But would it be a victory for them?
This is the portrait of the painful adjustment to male school that this essay focuses. These include social and cultural reasons that predispose boys to fail and girls to succeed in order to propose concrete solutions to this problem collectively.
Source : Le Monde and the publisher
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Labels: Children, Education, Marie-Êve Marineau
# posted by Francis Chartrand @ 11:34 AM 
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