UK: Education apartheid: More middle-class families send their sons to private school, but not their daughters

Article here. Excerpt:

There was a time when middle-class families would prioritise their son’s education over their daughter’s. After all, a well-brought-up young lady from a good family could marry well, while her brother would be expected to provide for his own family. It’s a tradition most people would assume had long since died out, yet, as the Daily Mail discovered, many modern parents with limited funds are choosing to buy their boy’s education, while putting their girl through the state system.
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Psychologist Tim Francis says: ‘In the state sector, we have a culture of conformity that does not exist in the private sector. The National Curriculum decrees that all pupils progress at the same level and suppresses individuality and “boisterousness”.

‘The teaching is pitched at the average child - any pupil who doesn’t fit that mould misses out. You need to be a square peg in a square hole to survive the state system. It needs a radical re-think to allow every child, regardless of their sex, to achieve. Parents shouldn’t have to play Russian roulette with their children’s education and choose one sex above the other.' Girls appear to be better equipped to deal with this need for conformity within state education. Boys, however, are falling way behind girls in terms of academic achievement.

Social commentator James Delingpole is much more blunt about what, he believes, is the real reason behind parents favouring sons over daughters.

‘Girls can always marry a rich man,’ he says. ‘If a girl is middle-class and reasonably educated in the state system, the chances are she will marry well anyway.

‘Boys, like it or not, are much more likely to end up earning their family’s crust as the breadwinner. Girls, being more sophisticated, socially adept and devious, are much more capable of negotiating the complexities of the state system than boys. It may not be liberated or politically correct, but it’s true.’

James, who lives in London, has faced this tough choice himself. Unsurprisingly, he chose to send his elder son to a private day school, while his daughter is educated in the state sector.

‘It is still very much a taboo subject, and most parents will do anything rather than admit they are singling out their son,’ he says.

‘But ever since the credit crunch, increasing numbers of middle-class parents are finding themselves in this nightmarish situation.’

James says the decision was made for him because his son was struggling at his state school.

‘My son is bright, but one day he came home from school and said he wished he was more stupid, because he’d get more attention.

‘My feeling is that the state system is woefully geared against boys. Almost all the teachers are female, and a kind of ideological feminisation has crept into the system.

‘Boys aren’t built to sit still and conform in class. They are boisterous - they need to run about and they need to be challenged.

‘Bright girls can be popular, but bright boys are made to feel like geeks and have to conform with the “thick” boys to be ‘‘one of the lads’’. It is a simple fact that the state sector is failing boys.’