The man who addressed more than 2,000 teachers and administrators Wednesday has extraordinary credentials.

Dr. Ben Carson is the pediatric neurosurgery director at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. He is internationally-known for his work in separating conjoined twins. The author of three books, Carson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom - the nation’s highest civilian award - from President Bush earlier this year.

In an education summit sponsored by community businesses and organizations and coordinated through Public Education Partners (PEP), Carson spoke to educators from the Aiken School District, USC Aiken and Aiken Technical College.

In a real way, Carson credits his success to the poverty he experienced as a child, because it “put a fire in my belly” to move beyond it. His mother, one of 24 children, married at 13. She later divorced her husband, a bigamist. There was never any money for anything. When Sonya Carson took Carson and his brother into grocery stores in Detroit, the boys would ask to get a penny candy. But they saw such pain in their mom’s eyes that they stopped asking.

Teachers helped Carson in very real important ways when he was growing up. But his young, remarkable mother made the difference for him. Sonya Carson worked a number of domestic jobs to keep from going on welfare. In those homes, she noticed that education was valued, that the families spent time reading.

Carson’s mother proceeded to turn the television off and made her sons check out library books. They had to give her written reports, not realizing that their mom, with a third-grade education, couldn’t read.

“After a number of weeks, I started to enjoy reading,” Carson said. “We lived in a horrible environment, but I could go anyplace with books. I learned how Booker T. Washington was born a slave. It was illegal for him to read, but he taught himself and ended up as an advisor to presidents. Through reading, I could have complete control of my life.”

By then, no book was safe from Carson’s hands. He had thought he was dumb and his classmates thought so too. One day his fifth-grade science teacher asked the class to identify an obsidian rock. Carson not only did so, he began to describe its characteristics in detail. The teacher was delighted and said so, and Carson realized he was no dummy. He had gotten the answers from a book.

In his inner city junior high school where most kids weren’t interested in school, teachers were thrilled when Carson sought them out. He excelled in band and got a scholarship to the prestigious Interlochen summer arts camp; his music teacher urged not to go, fearful his prize student would forego his academic efforts. He joined the ROTC in high school and the instructor made it possible for Carson to attain the rank of colonel in record time and receive an appointment to West Point.

Carson turned down the appointment and enrolled at Yale University. Still another teacher helped him land a summer job at Ford Motor Company to have some spending money for college.

“Teachers are dream managers,” Carson said. “They can tell you why you can do something, not why you can’t.”

He frets that China is producing 392,000 engineers a year and the U.S. is providing just 60,000 annually, of which 40 percent are foreigners. America has to change this equation, has to build up the intellectual firepower needed to succeed. In the 21st century, Carson said, it’s hard for teachers to keep up with keep up with ever-changing information and technology so they can inspire their children to go into a variety of career paths.

“We have to start thinking of teachers as educational quarterbacks,” said Carson, “who can draw from other sectors and develop contacts to the guy who invented the catalytic converter and to provide the kind of tools that will get kids excited.”

But educating the next generation in a technological society is not a turf war, he said. It’s a job for business, industry, higher education. Everybody has to be involved with it.”

Following Carson’s speech, a short PEP video aired. Each time a scene from a county school hit the screen, teachers from that school cheered — much like a pep rally, as Aiken Superintendent Dr. Beth Everitt said.

“Isn’t it great to be here with everybody,” she said. “We’ve received an inspiring message of hope and determination. To our teachers, principals and staffs, this was all for you and shows how much (the business community) appreciates your hard work and what you do for children.”

Redcliffe Elementary School teacher Denise Broome called Carson’s speech “a great way to start the year, It was inspiring and showed me why I became a teacher,” she said. “I had stayed home with my children and volunteered in the schools, where I saw the impact the teachers were making on my children. I wanted the opportunity to make that kind of impact.”

Source: Aiken Standard, SC
http://www.aikenstandard.com/0814-ben-carson

Glasgow schools have long had the poorest levels of academic attainment in Scotland. The gap has been particularly difficult to bridge because so many of the city’s school draw their pupils from some of the most deprived areas, while the leafy suburbs tend to be outside the city boundary. Yet it is all the more important for children from disadvantaged backgrounds to achieve their full potential in school.

The news that children in both primary and secondary schools in Glasgow have reached the highest levels of attainment in the “three Rs” since the 5-14 assessment tests began is welcome, but a long overdue step towards closing the gap with other areas. There is a disturbingly long way to go: in the first two years of secondary school, 40% are still failing to reach the required standard in reading and maths and 50% are below the standard in writing. That is unacceptable, whatever hurdles have to be overcome. Other local authorities with their own problems of deprivation, such as Inverclyde, achieve a high pass rate in English and maths at Standard Grade and Higher, compared with similar areas.

However, improved results in Glasgow primary schools as a result of the zero-tolerance approach to poor literacy and numeracy which has seen specialist teams of experienced staff training teachers and supporting parents as well as teaching pupils, suggest that teaching methods make a considerable difference. These include giving “booster” lessons to pupils struggling at primary school and extra lessons in reading, writing and maths at the expense of other subjects to pupils who are behind by the time they reach secondary school. That tried-and-tested reading method, synthetic phonics, has also been adopted with impressive results, following success in two other local authorities with previously low attainment levels. Pleasing as this is, it is hardly rocket science and will cause many a time-served teacher and weary employer to shake their greying heads over how a country which prided itself on pioneering mass education ever came to tolerate such low standards.

That improvements are evident so soon after the new blitz on literacy should spur further efforts. Resources are always scarce in education, but surely cannot be better spent than on achieving basic skills. The earlier such intervention is made the better, a child who is unable to decode the written word or understand basic arithmetic will become more and more frustrated, miserable and unable to learn. Education is the key to success, and people who reach adulthood without learning to read, write and count competently and confidently have their lives blighted.

Source: The Herald, UK
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/editorial/display.var.2422085.0.Three_Rs_are_the_key.php

Just one in 50 teachers of the youngest schoolchildren in England is male, figures revealed.

Only 2% of staff in nursery and reception classes - teaching under-fives - are men, Department for Children, Schools and Families figures show.

Critics say men are deterred from working with young children because of the idea that it is women’s work, the low wages and fears they may be branded paedophiles, the Daily Telegraph reports.

Anastasia de Waal, head of family and education at the think-tank Civitas, told the newspaper: “It is very important for children, particularly young ones, to see men as teachers.

“Seeing men as role models is very important.

“The idea that men are afraid of being seen as paedophiles is very serious. Obviously we want to protect children but we don’t want to get to the stage where we are harming them because they dont see any men in schools.”

A Department for Children, Schools and Families spokesman said: “Male childcare workers act as positive role models for children, which is why we launched a campaign to attract more men to the sector last year.

“The campaign challenges the stereotypical view that childcare is a woman’s role.

“Also, several of our recent early learning partnerships projects focused specifically on engaging fathers in their children’s early learning and our Children’s Plan called on all public services to take account of the needs of both parents.”

Source: The Press Association
http://ukpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5jtHGZzALO6_KynChwlehtUDnc3fg

Standards of spelling among university students are now so bad that lecturers are being urged to turn a blind eye to mistakes.

Many undergraduates misspell basic words such as “their”, “speech” or even “Wednesday” in essays, it is claimed.

First year students are the worst offenders, despite already spending at least 13 years in the education system.

Standards have deteriorated to such an extent that one leading academic has been forced to ignore common errors altogether.

Dr Ken Smith, a senior lecturer in criminology at Bucks New University, said “atrocious” spelling was rife among new undergraduates, with many failing to apply basic rules, such as “i before e, except after c“. The words “weird”, “seize”, “leisure” and “neighbour” are regularly misspelt by students, he said.

The comments come amid growing fears that many sixth-formers are leaving school lacking basic skills.

Some universities have already extended courses by a year to give weak students extra tuition in core subjects that they failed to pick up in the classroom.

Last year, another academic claimed that British undergraduates had a poorer grasp of English than some foreign students.

Dr Bernard Lamb, a reader in genetics at Imperial College London, said those from Singapore and Brunei made fewer mistakes in their work, despite speaking English as a second language. Many British students appear to have been through school without mastering basic rules of grammar and punctuation, or having their errors corrected, he said.

Writing in Times Higher Education magazine, Dr Smith said mistakes were now so common that academics should simply accept them as “variants”.

“Teaching a large first-year course at a British university, I am fed up with correcting my students’ atrocious spelling,” he said. “But why must we suffer? Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I’ve got a better idea. University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell.”

He lists 10 words which are most regularly misspelt by students, including “February”, “ignore”, “truly” and “queue”.

“I could go on and add another 10 words that are commonly misspelt - the word ‘misspelt’ itself of course, and all those others that break the ‘i’ before ‘e’ rule - but I think I have made my point,” he said.

Jack Bovill, chairman of The Spelling Society, said: “All the data suggests that there are more and more students at university level whose spelling is not up to scratch. Universities are even finding they have masters-level students who cannot spell.”

Top ten misspellings

Argument Arguement

February Febuary

Wednesday Wensday

Ignore Ignor

Occurred Occured

Opportunity Opertunity

Queue Que

Speech Speach

Their Thier

Truly Truely

Twelfth Twelth

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2510704/University-students-cannot-spell.html

We soon will experience the most important time in the entire school year for children: the first two weeks. What happens during this critical period pretty much determines how the rest of the year will go.

When children return to school after the summer break, their perceptions about school and themselves as learners are mostly uncertain. It’s a new year with new teachers, new books, new classes, new schedules and new friends. All of these new things come with the hope that this year could be different and better than all previous years.

That uncertainty in students’ perceptions continues only until teachers administer the first quizzes and tests near the end of the second week of school. When teachers assign grades to those first quizzes, the grades put students into categories. And getting out of a category is really difficult.

Students who receive a C on that first math quiz, for example, begin to see themselves as C students. Their uncertainty suddenly becomes fixed, and they accept the idea that they are likely to earn Cs in math for the rest of the school year.

When the second quiz or test occurs, they expect to receive another C. When they do, it reinforces their perception. Similarly, if they receive a failing grade on that first quiz, they think all following grades will be the same.

But if they succeed on that first quiz and receive a high grade, that, too, is their perception of all that might follow.

This means that teachers must do everything they can to ensure students’ success in the first two weeks. And not fake success, but success in something challenging. The key to motivating students rests with that success. Students persist in activities at which they experience success, and they avoid activities at which they are not successful or believe they cannot be successful.

This is the reason that truancy and attendance problems rarely occur during the first two weeks of the school year. They begin to occur after the first graded quizzes and tests. In students’ minds, the grades they receive on these first quizzes establish their likelihood of future success. And why come to school if there is so little chance of doing well?

Parents, too, must be genuinely involved in their children’s education during the first two weeks. Routines established at home in this critical period profoundly affect the likelihood of success.

Daily conversations about school activities help children recognize that their parents value success in school. Providing a quiet place for children to work on school assignments and limiting the time they spend watching TV or playing on computers further increase chances for success. Checking with teachers to make sure children are well prepared and ready to succeed also can help.

Successful experiences during the first two weeks of school do not guarantee success for the entire year. But they are a powerful and perhaps essential step in that direction.

Teachers and parents need to take advantage of this critical time and use it well. It can make all the difference.

Source: Kentucky.com, KY
http://www.kentucky.com/589/story/478728.html

The secret to the academic success of many Asian students starts in the home, with a study of schoolchildren suggesting a regular homework routine carries benefits into the classroom.

The research examined the study habits of three groups of Year 3 students and found that Chinese children spent more time on their homework, completed more work and did it on a more regular basis than Anglo or Pacific Island students.

The study by University of Western Sydney researchers and the NSW Education Department challenges the myth that Chinese students perform better at school because of a cultural disposition to study.

“There has been inadequate attention given to the ways educational attainment is founded on embodied capacities, such as productive stillness and quiet, which are crucial to sustained attention and application in intellectual endeavour,” the report says.

Cathy Garde, a Year 3 teacher at Berala Public School in Sydney’s west, agreed that less attention was paid in recent years to the practicalities of learning, and training young bodies to sit still.

“I often have to start the year teaching the kids work habits, the capability to sit down and focus,” she said. “Some children struggle to control themselves. They don’t have any self-discipline. You get children who come into the classroom and start walking around the room in the middle of a task.”

The report, Cultural Practices and Learning, involved interviews with parents, teachers and 36 students in six Sydney schools, as well as classroom observation.

The study found that 56per cent of the Chinese students spent more than one hour a night on their homework, compared with 24per cent of Anglo children and 35per cent of Pacific Islander students.

But the study says the time spent on homework was not as important as the study routine.

A greater proportion of Chinese students, 40per cent, did homework in their bedroom or study at a desk compared with 13per cent of Anglo students and 25per cent of Islander children, who tended to do their homework sitting on their bed.

Source: The Australian, Australia
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24115399-2702,00.html

Three years after the president of Harvard, Lawrence H. Summers, got into trouble for questioning women’s “intrinsic aptitude” for science and engineering — and 16 years after the talking Barbie doll proclaimed that “math class is tough” — a study paid for by the National Science Foundation has found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests.

Although boys in high school performed better than girls in math 20 years ago, the researchers found, that is no longer the case. The reason, they said, is simple: Girls used to take fewer advanced math courses than boys, but now they are taking just as many.

“Now that enrollment in advanced math courses is equalized, we don’t see gender differences in test performance,” said Marcia C. Linn of the University of California, Berkeley, a co-author of the study. “But people are surprised by these findings, which suggests to me that the stereotypes are still there.”

The findings, reported in the July 25 issue of Science magazine, are based on math scores from seven million students in 10 states, tested in accordance with the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The researchers looked at the average of the test scores of all students, the performance of the most gifted children and the ability to solve complex math problems. They found, in every category, that girls did as well as boys. (To their dismay, the researchers found that the tests in the 10 states did not include a single question requiring complex problem-solving, forcing them to use a national assessment test for that portion of their research.)

Janet Hyde, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led the study, said the persistent stereotypes about girls and math had taken a toll.

“The stereotype that boys do better at math is still held widely by teachers and parents,” Dr. Hyde said. “And teachers and parents guide girls, giving them advice about what courses to take, what careers to pursue. I still hear anecdotes about guidance counselors steering girls away from engineering, telling them they won’t be able to do the math.”

Girls are still underrepresented in high school physics classes and, as noted by Dr. Summers, who resigned in 2006, in the highest levels of physics, chemistry and engineering, which require advanced math skills.

The study also analyzed the gender gap on the math section of the SAT. Rather than proving boys’ superior talent for math, the study found, the difference is probably attributable to a skewed pool of test takers. The SAT is taken primarily by seniors bound for college, and since more girls than boys go to college, about 100,000 more girls than boys take the test, including lower-achieving girls who bring down the girls’ average score.

On the ACT, another college entrance test, the study said, the gender gap in math scores disappeared in Colorado and Illinois after the states began requiring all students to take the test.

Source: New York Times, United States
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/25/education/25math.html?ref=us

On the face of it, Luke Burton is a shining example of how someone from an economically disadvantaged background can succeed in education. His mum at one time was working in a chip shop and doing three other jobs to make ends meet, he didn’t go to a high achieving school and, by his own admission, he messed around in class more than he should have done.
Yet at 24 he is training to be an actuary with a big firm in London, has a maths degree from Oxford and an MA - the first graduate in his family. Why is it that some young people seem inoculated against less advantaged beginnings while others don’t? New UK and US studies are pointing the finger ever more clearly at particular kinds of parenting and home environments that do the trick. But the big money still doesn’t go into parenting education, despite research that proves it can be an enormous force for change. Yet stark facts suggest more finance for parenting education would be money well spent.

Attainment gap

Sizeable gaps in school readiness exist in the UK despite universal nursery education for three- and four-year-olds; in the US half the eventual gap in attainment between children from less advantaged and more advantaged homes exists when the child starts school. Here a bright but poor child can be overtaken in test results by a less bright child from an affluent home by age seven.

In England, poor children among the top performers in tests at 11 are much more likely to have lost that critical advantage by the time they take their GCSEs. All the money Labour has poured into the education system since 1997 has failed to increase the tiny numbers of young people from the lowest socio-economic groups getting into university. So why do Burton and others like him do so well?

Scratch the surface of Burton’s “disadvantage” and you soon start to see answers. He comes from Clevedon in Somerset and is the eldest of three. His father was a mechanic and his parents split up when he was small. Money was tight. His mum, Wendy Doig, had gone to what she describes as a “rubbish school - a Grange Hill type of school” where the idea of university was never considered, and she was seen as “posh” as she went on to work in an office rather than get pregnant or work in the local sausage factory.

But she chose to do part-time jobs rather than work full-time because she wanted to be in when the children came home from school. She also wanted money to pay for the Montessori nursery a friend told her was good. For Burton she feels that was a turning point. “Of all my children he was the most difficult to steer. It worried me how determined he was. I thought he was going to do something brilliant or terrible. I could see his strengths and the potential for disaster.

“I spent a lot of my time trying to find things to interest Luke. His playgroup lacked structure and it made him hyperactive. Joining Montessori was pretty key. That’s when the maths got off the ground.”

Burton remembers a male primary school teacher who told him he had potential and to stop mucking around. He remembers parents proud when he did well but who didn’t put him under pressure. He found it harder to respect teachers once he got to secondary school because there was less time to build relationships with them, but he does remember a maths teacher who took it as a given that he was going to university.

Burton’s mum remarried when he was 11, so he went to live with his dad for more freedom. His stepfather’s mother spotted a newspaper story about the Sutton Trust summer school at Oxford University for youngsters from families with no tradition of university. It was held at Magdalen College. “I thought: ‘This is quite nice. I’d like to come here.’ I didn’t know what other universities were like so it was not a big deal. It didn’t cross my mind that I wouldn’t get in once I’d decided to go.”

Doig says her own parents had been easy and supportive but she also read books on parenting to help her when the children were small.

Home learning

And it is that mindful attention to parenting style and home learning which is shown to be vital in a spin-off study from Europe’s largest piece of longitudinal research in this area - Effective Provision of Preschool Primary and Secondary Education (EPPSE) - which for more than 10 years has been following the educational development of 3,000 children from the age of three for the government .

The study has proved that high-quality preschool can ameliorate the effects of social disadvantage and break the cycle of deprivation, but it needs to be coupled with a good home-learning environment.

This is backed by unpublished research carried out for the Equalities Review by Iram Siraj-Blatchford, professor of early childhood education at the Institute of Education in London and a principal investigator for EPPSE, with 24 of the families whose children were succeeding against the odds in their education. Half were on free school meals, more than half were living with a lone parent, and four out of five were living in deprived areas.

In-depth interviews uncovered strong evidence of an adult or adults in the child’s life taking parenting seriously and valuing education either in the immediate or wider family or the child’s wider community, such as a religious community.

She believes the shift towards sending reading books home with children, which began in earnest in the 1980s, may be having an effect now those children are parents. In the interviews, it is clear that parents and their children think success at school is down to working hard and concentrating on what is said in class; when they hit difficulties they are not deterred. By contrast, the children from poor home-learning environments put school success down to ability and feel helpless in the face of lessons they find hard.

The crucial importance of the home is also pointed out by a new study, which has documented income related gaps in areas such as literacy, numeracy and behaviour. It shows between one-third and half of these differences are the result of parenting style and home-learning environment. But it is a particular kind of parenting, described as “sensitive and responsive”, that works.

The research is based on data from 19,000 UK and 10,000 US children born in 2000 and 2001 analysed by Jane Waldfogel, professor of social work and public affairs at Columbia University in New York, and Liz Washbrook, a research associate at Bristol University’s Centre for Market and Public Organisation on secondment to Columbia. The analysis was delivered to a private summit on social mobility and education policy organised by the Sutton Trust and the Carnegie Foundation in New York in June. Ed Miliband, minister for the Cabinet Office, who leads the government’s efforts to tackle social exclusion, was one of the leading politicians and education figures who attended.

Detailed observation of children in the US part of the study found parenting style having the biggest impact on school readiness gaps between low-income and middle-income children, accounting for 19% of the gap in maths, 21% of the literacy gap and a massive third of the gap in language. Sensitive and responsive parenting had the biggest positive effect. Observational data was not available from the UK.

Waldfogel says sensitive and responsive parents are able to provide “warm, supportive and nurturing parenting” and can respond to a child’s changing needs. Experience of parenting received as a child may affect responses to your children as may personal temperament and stress, she says.

Parenting programmes can and do help. Sure Start has been found to improve effective parenting and the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) announced last week that it was extending the pilot of the Family Nurse Partnership, which works with vulnerable young women expecting their first child. Early signs suggest improved aspirations among the mothers after an intensive visiting programme from nurses who work with them from pregnancy until the child’s second birthday, advising on healthier lifestyles, baby and childcare, and planning life goals.

Positive changes

Another successful and rapidly spreading UK scheme is the Peers Early Education Partnership (Peep), which has been proved to boost cognition and self esteem in pre-school children by promoting parents’ and carers’ awareness of very early learning and development, and supporting adults in their relationships with the children.

Peep programmes are delivered mainly in children’s centres but are gradually being taken direct to vulnerable parents in their homes. But the programme remains a charity rather than mainstream provision. The government is spending £1bn on its ambitious 10-year Children’s Plan to ensure a better deal for children - including making sure 90% of them are ready to learn when they go to school - but education in providing a good home-learning environment currently doesn’t figure in it.

Last week it was revealed that an 18-month government initiative aimed at helping parents of young children from disadvantaged families become effective supporters of their children as learners was successful in making positive changes to parents’ behaviour. The Early Learning Partnership Programme, funded by the DCSF and undertaken by researchers from Oxford University’s departments of education and social policy and social work, aimed to support parents in socially disadvantaged areas across England.

It brought together the main agencies in the voluntary sector working with the parents of children aged between one and three but, because it was only funded for 18 months, it could not show whether it made differences to children’s long-term learning.

One good piece of news came last week when the DCSF announced £12m in backing for the Centre for Excellence and Outcomes in Children and Young People’s Services, which will gather and analyse information about what works in tackling a range of issues linked to child wellbeing.

This kind of work can’t come a moment too soon. Parenting is harder to influence, but without it good pre-schools and schools can only go so far - and it could take decades for the most disadvantaged to catch up.

Parental dos and don’ts

Sensitive and responsive parenting is about tuning into what your child needs from moment to moment, and adapting your behaviour.

Your child gets a new toy
Do watch how the child responds to the toy and let him/her explore it alone if he/she seems to want to
Don’t automatically show your child how it all works

A father bounces a child on his knee to cheer her up
Do watch for cues that the child is enjoying herself
Don’t carry on if the child cries. Think about what else she might need and experiment with meeting those needs, for example feeding or cuddling

Source: guardian.co.uk, UK
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2290865,00.html

Students are being taught maths at the most superficial level by teachers rushing to pass on the basic skills while shying away from complex ideas.

In yet another example of children being failed by national school curriculums, a special report for the state leaders finds maths teaching is failing students by setting the bar too low.

The National Numeracy Review report, released to The Weekend Australian, criticises the national benchmarks in maths, which assess students against minimum standards rather than requiring a desirable proficiency.

“The implication (is) that minimum standards are good enough, at least for some students,” says the report on numeracy commissioned by the Council of Australian Governments. “All students and their families, however, have a right to expect high-quality - not minimum - numeracy outcomes from their schooling.”

The review committee, chaired by the former head of the NSW Board of Studies Gordon Stanley, says the time spent teaching maths in classrooms has decreased over the past decade, yet students are expected to learn about a greater number of mathematical concepts.

“Curriculum emphases and assessment regimes should be explicitly designed to discourage a reliance upon superficial and low-level proficiency,” the report says. It recommends phasing out the streaming of students according to their ability, citing research that says it has little effect on achievement.

“It does produce gains in attainment for higher-achieving students at the expense of lower-attaining students,” it says.

The report recommends that all teachers, regardless of their intended speciality, be trained as numeracy teachers and maths be taught across all subjects.

The report says primary school students should spend five hours a week and high school students four hours a week on maths and numeracy, including time spent learning maths in other subjects.

The report also suggests introducing specialist maths teachers to work shoulder-to-shoulder with other teachers, particularly those without specialist training in maths teaching.

Source: Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24006438-663,00.html

If you were an energetic nine-year-old boy who loved school, did your best but also loved charging about, trying to beat your friends at every game possible, imagine the hell of our currrent state school system where ball games are banned from the playground in case someone gets hurt, there is no outside play in bad weather and you are constantly in trouble for being too competitive because winning is not what it’s about. And, worse, Jamie Oliver fruit smoothies have replaced sponge pudding in your school dinner, so you’re starving by two o’clock.

Sue Palmer is a former head teacher, literacy adviser and the author of 21st Century Boys. She says it is a biological necessity that boys run about, take risks, swing off things and compete with each other to develop properly. “If they can’t, a lot of them find it impossible to sit still, focus on a book or wield a pencil,” she says, “so their behaviour is considered ‘difficult’, they get into trouble and tumble into a cycle of school failure.”

Boys are three times as likely as girls to need extra help with reading at primary school, and 75 per cent of children supposedly suffering from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) are male. “We are losing boys at a rate of knots, particularly in literacy,” Palmer says, “because at some point in the past 30 years, masculinity became an embarrassment.”

Research by Simon Baron-Cohen, a respected Cambridge professor, that began as an investigation into autism, puts a solid case for biological male/female differences in the brain, with boys tending to be “systematisers” and girls “empathisers”. This explains why boys generally are less keen on reading and comprehension, and lag behind girls in literacy. A lot of boys find it easier to explain the workings of a watch than to discuss how a character in a story is feeling. “But now,” says Palmer, “apart from the very bright ones, boys aren’t even doing better at maths and science.”

Some people blame this nosedive, first noticed in the mid-Nineties, on the “feminisation” of education - too many women teachers, girl-friendly classroom environments and modular exam systems that suit girls’ study skills but disadvantage risk-takers. “Geniuses are much more likely to be male,” Palmer says, “but if you don’t tick the right boxes, you fail.”

There are seven times as many women primary school teachers as men, but Christine Skelton, Professor of Gender Equality in Education at Birmingham University, argues that there have always been far more female teachers than male. “Obviously there are some women who understand active boys, and some men who don’t, just as there are energetic girls and inactive boys,” she says.

The current generation of teachers, though, were born and raised in an atmosphere dominated by women’s liberation and “non-gender-specific” education that began in the Seventies. Barbies were banned, most protagonists in books were female and there was no tolerance of war or superhero play. As a head teacher, Palmer remembers making her reception teacher remove all the cloakroom pegs that depicted tractors for boys and bunnies for girls.

“The belief was that you were shaped by your environment, and it was the teacher’s responsibility to ‘socialise’ boys away from their natural inclinations and to encourage girls to study traditionally male subjects such as physics and technology,” she says.

Palmer would never deny that some of it was absolutely necessary - but with movements such as Reclaim the Night, Greenham Common and Gay Pride, groups that offered an alternative perspective to the traditionally dominant male view taking centre stage, masculinity became suspect. “I really think,” she says, “that the almighty cock-up of the sisterhood in the Seventies was that we believed we could turn boys into girls.”

Palmer says that most women are not natural risk-takers, so for teachers who have not helped to bring up brothers and who don’t have sons, boys’ behaviour can be frightening. “Play-fighting, for example, reaches a peak at age 7 or 8 but is not actually aggressive,” she says. “It’s social - it’s the way boys get to know each other and see how the other one ticks. A lot of women teachers are horrified when I suggest that they should let boys get on with fighting and shouting because eventually they’ll come out the other side and start negotiating.”

Another problem for boys seeking adventure is that, because we live in an increasingly risk-averse society, children are rarely allowed to play unsupervised. When did you last see a group of boys climbing a tree?

“There is a rational fear of increased traffic but also an irrational fear of stranger danger, fanned by media reporting of child abduction,” says Palmer. “Parents are worried about being considered irresponsible, so they never let their children out of their sight.” And because we are not used to seeing boys playing outside, when we do it feels hostile even when what is going on is not particularly boisterous.

Dan Travis, a sports coach, argues that it is very important for boys to muck about on their own. “Coaching is formal and necessary but should only take up 20 per cent of the time they play,” he says. “The informal 80 per cent is where most of the learning and practising occurs - away from adult supervision.”

Travis is running a campaign to bring competition back to school sport. “The Sport for All ethos took hold in the Seventies and never let go,” he says. “Games are only about inclusion, with no winners allowed.” This is disastrous for boys, who need to compete to establish their place in the hierarchy, which is how they organise their friendships and something that they understand from nursery age onwards. It is also bad for sport. Palmer adds that “self-esteem” arrived from America and now no child is allowed to “lose” at anything.

Palmer is not suggesting that boys should be allowed to behave in any way they want. What we need, she says, is to celebrate what makes them boys and help them to understand the things that don’t come naturally to them. That means getting them outside more, particularly as space gets squeezed in urban schools. “Not letting boys be boys is not only detrimental to them but also to girls, many of whom become overcompliant with what is considered ‘good’ behaviour and could do with a shove outdoors to take more risks,” she says. “I certainly wish that had happened to me.”

Palmer is especially enthusiastic about the few “outdoor nurseries” that we have in this country, and about the Scandinavian system that puts off formal learning until the age of 7 or 8, concentrating instead on playing outside and the development of social skills.

In the ideal Palmer world, everyone would go to a Scandinavian-style school. What we are doing instead is bringing in the Early Years Foundation Stage, a new government framework that becomes law in September. It says that by the age of 5 children should be writing sentences, some of which are punctuated. “That would be impressive for a seven-year-old,” says Palmer. “So rather than tackling the imbalance in the way that we have treated boys for too long, we are going to make them sit still and learn even younger. I’d call that little short of state-sponsored child abuse.”

21st Century Boys will be published by Orion in early 2009

Source: Times Online, UK
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article4288100.ece