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Searching for answers to the ‘boy crisis’
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Shanghai No. 8 Middle School and King’s School in Sydney have signed an agreement to become brother schools. Timothy Hawkes, headmaster of King’s School, shares some of his views on education for boys.
The two schools will share “best practices” in education and tackle the problem of socially inept and underachieving Chinese schoolboys — a phenomenon dubbed the “boy crisis.”
Q: Do you think the boy crisis is a universal problem? And what are its causes?
A: I hate to say this is as a generalization, but certainly there is evidence to suggest the issue of the relative underperformance by boys to girls is found in more than one county, one continent or one culture.
I think one of the problems is that the current method of exams tends to favor the female brain more than the male brain. A lot of the existing measures of academic ability are highly dependent on language and writing, and these are traditionally the skills where girls are often better than boys.
In my own culture, teenage girls, in general, speak about 21,000 words a day, while the average for boys of a similar age is only about 7,000. Boys don’t exercise language skills as much as girls because many boys are visual learners who are good at reading maps and engineering drawings.
Boys don’t perform well usually because they are made to fit the curriculum and they get bored. Boys often have natural creativity, but they cannot unleash it in a dull curriculum.
Q: What can be done to help boys perform better?
A: Restructuring the current method of exams would be one thing. Also, we have to realize that there are many types of intelligence, like math, literacy and interpersonal intelligence. What we should do is to have exams that test all kinds of intelligence rather than just literacy intelligence.
We also tell boys they have to face the challenges of a new world. Boys have natural skills, like fighting, which prepared them for hunting and protecting their families when people lived in primitive times. But in this modern age, a different set of skills is required of men, and they need to understand the new skills so they can function more effectively in society. For example, some need to learn that providing for their families nowadays can mean tapping keys on a keyboard.
Most boys become aggressive as they grow up. In my country, we say these boys have a “V8 body but an L-plate mind.” They are like drivers who have a powerful car but learner brains. What we need to do is help boys understand why they feel so aggressive and sexually stimulated and tell them how to control and handle impulsive behavior.
Another good way is to introduce competition to encourage boys to gain skills and strive to be stronger.
Q: What special teaching methods for boys do you use at your school?
A: There are many great tricks to teaching boys. Boys love action-based learning, just like girls like literacy-based learning. So, we use verbs such as “run” and other action words in the lessons.
Secondly, boys perform better if you divide a big task into smaller tasks. For example, when you assign a 5,000-word essay, you need to tell them how to break down the essay into introduction, main body and conclusion.
Boys often need softer chairs and natural lighting because they are more easily distracted. Boys tend to respond better to lower voices and they need more thinking time. Boys love modern technologies, so you can use them to spur interest.
Last but not least, we have a “boys to men” life skill program for 15-year-olds. We teach boys cooking, ironing, buying and servicing a car, and financial management. We also bring mothers in to tell boys what qualities women are looking in a lifelong partner. Often boys are surprised to hear that having muscles is not as important to women as having a kind heart and a faithful nature.
Q: What’s the gender ratio of teachers at your school?
A: We aim for 50-50 at the junior school level, and 70 percent are male teachers at senior school.
Q: What are your suggestions in dealing with the “boy crisis?”
A: One of many problems in Australia, China and the world at large is that we have too many so-called four-year schools that prepare students just for the next four years, or simply for university. They are manifestly betraying students just to get them into colleges, and they add very little value to the students on the way there.
In my opinion, we need 80-year schools, and King’s is trying to be a school like that to teach boys to be good husbands, effective fathers, morally upright, energetic and creative members of the work force and inspirational leaders.
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