The struggle to help boys learn

Article here. Excerpt:

'After all these years, we are still stuck. We still can't agree on where to start. The feminist approach wants to blame boys for many problems in school. Boys are noisy, they play up, annoy teachers and stop good kids from learning. Any time we draw attention to boys' difficulties in school, these people raise objections. Which boys do we mean? Are we imagining that all boys are the same? Why aren't we focusing on girls? Are we misogynistic? Don't men have all the advantages anyway? This approach I call "put up a straw man and then knock him down". It's often favoured by people who want to preserve the status quo. Meanwhile, the arch-male approach wants to champion boys at all costs and blame feminism for all men's ills. It sounds a bit like "Now in my day..." Neither of these approaches will get us far.

Look at some facts about boys from various parts of the world. First, in the UK, boys are excluded from schools three times more often than girls. Afro-Caribbean boys are the group most excluded. Second, American boys are drawn into football because they want to be masculine at all cost; but we hear that US football players are at great risk of high blood pressure and suffer horrific rates of concussion. Third, a conference at Montego Bay, Jamaica heard a few years ago about boys leaving school far too early. And this was happening right around the Caribbean. Fourth, boys in the UK are reported as having a manic desire for a body with a 'six-pack' and big muscles. And boys I speak to in Australia complain that what they hear too often is "sit down, shut up, write this down". Everywhere we look, boys are squashed into a narrow idea of what it means to be male. And that doesn't have much to do with school as they know it.'