Why Are Middle East Girls Better in School Than Boys? (opens in new tab)

I think this sentence is quite telling: "The separation of students, teachers, and administrators into single-sex public schools may serve cultural and religious purposes, but it seems to create an unintentional ghetto for boys...."

I think single-sex education is the answer here because for girls, it allows them to flourish and grow without the male-dominated Middle Eastern oppression. Girls can grow and learn in an environment that is more free, and open for them. I would be curious to see if this is true in other parts of the world that allow for single-sex education.

> in school, Jordanian girls are crushing their male peers

When males outperform females, everyone concludes the system is biased and we should remove the bias.

When females outperform males, they say things like "This is baffling on the most obvious levels."

Maybe the educational system is biased, favoring how girls learn and behave. Is it hard for people to imagine that systems can benefit girls at the expense of boys, or can they only see the opposite?

If there are biases favoring how girls learn, then they are disadvantaging boys and might consider removing the bias.

The answer seems to be "toxic masculinity".

(Since I had to clarify this last time: the term refers to expressions or expectations of masculinity and masculine behaviour that are toxic, not a claim that masculinity is toxic in and of itself.)

> For one thing, boys’ schools are more violent places, concluded the study

> Boys also reported worse relationships with their male teachers

> male teachers were three times as likely as female teachers to say they were dissatisfied with teaching

> "Most of the problems I face with male teachers is that they want to yell at kids, to humiliate them.”

> The separation of students, teachers, and administrators into single-sex public schools may serve cultural and religious purposes, but it seems to create an unintentional ghetto for boys

> “Boys don’t feel that school can necessarily help them reach manhood.”

> In order to avoid all-female cohorts of students, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman’s only public university, now has two sets of admission criteria: one lower bar for men and one higher bar for women.

(affirmitive action!)

While I've been quote-picking I've noticed that this article is really nicely structured. The first sentence of each paragraph makes a point, then the rest of the paragraph introduces supporting statements.

Wow... I found this article, particularly well written and enjoyable, not favoring the usual (UP WITH WOMEN, DOWN WITH MEN) rhetoric that seems fairly common in some circles on the internet.

The final paragraph is particularly poignant:

"It may be true, as developmental research suggests, that boys tend to be more active and take longer, on average, to learn to control their impulses. But those are challenges that well-trained teachers and informed parents should be able to handle. Boys are not defective; schools are. The fact that boys are struggling around the world means that too many schools are designed with a bias for girls. Too many teachers prefer compliance over competition, quiet diligence over risk-taking, and on average that leads to schools that are more comfortable for girls than for boys in every time zone. But given the world they are inheriting, just as boys need to learn to focus, girls need to learn to take risks.

And neither can thrive in a world where the other is diminished."

> In order to avoid all-female cohorts of students, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman’s only public university, now has two sets of admission criteria: one lower bar for men and one higher bar for women. ... Osman disagrees with this quota system. “It helps to solve a temporary problem, but it has an impact in the long term on students’ confidence and on equality,” he says. “They should have found another way to boost the abilities of boys.”

How is this any different than the increasing discrimination experienced by Asians in Ivy League admissions? I would say that the administrators are just following what the top universities in the world are doing to keep demographics as they would like them.

An American friend of mine worked at a private school there. She said that boys are being raised to be pampered with the expectation in life that they will not need to provide for their family through work and that women are basically slaves.

This was a school of upper class kids and, to me, the attitude I would expect for children of tyrants.

I thought it was well known and shown in the west, splitting boys from girls in classes meant girls were better off and boys were worse off.

Can't find anything to cite(lazy) but have never seen anything that contradicted it.

I just took it as a simple obvious girls temper boys behaviour.

It is an interesting moral issue. Do you let girls be worse off for the common social good?

Seems to be the case with the exception of Israel where the stats are in line with other top developed nations, even more so when controled for demographics.

A better question should be is why men do so relatively poor compared in middle eastern nations.

Same in India, at least the south.

Maybe it’s a good time to talk about the fact that school is largely a waste of time. And that it’s not about being smart but how well do you listen and follow orders. Like it’s insane what sort of garbage I had to waste time on and whenever I brought this up, it was brushed away with “get used to it” or “I don’t like it either but that’s how things are”.

Not to promote gender stereotypes and what not but I wonder if some of these results are due to the fact that’s women seem to be better at communicating and school is very much about communication. I personally would have just preferred being given the time and desk to read the textbook, I don’t need a person to chew it for me.

Education is important, the idea of school in the current format is outdated and retarded. However this is unlikely to change since students have very little power to change things.