The Tribune

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

AS the dust settles from the beginning of the new academic year that hasn’t really begun yet, but should have, and as the results talk is pretty much done, it seems an opportune moment to discuss the failure of many of our students to perform adequately.

We have apparently taught these youngsters well. They have learnt how to value and what to leave out. Maths and English are two areas in which many of our young people underperform badly. But then to say this raises an entirely different matter – what is underperforming?

We often talk about underperforming males, but why do we say they are underperforming?

We argue that boys are dropping out of high school, that they are not graduating if they do stay in school, and that we have too few young men to continue to drive national development.

We know for sure that foreign companies continue to complain about the inadequately educated Bahamian workforce. They find it hard to find employees from the local communities that are able to meet their demands, but yet we tell companies to come in; we give away land and nation to these companies in exchange for a few jobs. How many of these jobs really do go to young Bahamians?

We teach young men that education is really not something they ought to focus on.

They hear time and again, education is for girls. Gone are the days when girls were pulled out of school at the end of junior school and sent out to work in order to support the family, allow brothers to continue their education, and look after the home as well.

Today, more girls than ever are being educated. More girls are graduating from high school, and certainly more girls are graduating from college. It would be logical to see that if more girls than boys finish high school then obviously more girls than boys would graduate from college.

However, when it comes to the work force, there are more men than women employed. How odd! More women than men receive an education, but more men than women get jobs.

Of course the next step is to examine the types of jobs men typically get over the jobs women get. A lot of stereotypically male jobs are in construction and other manual fields, while women’s jobs are in offices and organisations that require academic skills. There are far more women teaching than men.

Looking at the results is however disheartening.

Notwithstanding the gender bias towards men being in non-academic areas, the overall average in English language is a D and in mathematics is an E; these are truly heartache-producing results. However, the Minister of Education seems upbeat about the results, as he said on the news recently.

Only 634 students got four BGCSE subjects including mathematics and English language with C or above, while 961 candidates got five or more BGCSEs with C or above, but I guess they do not necessarily include the core mathematics and English language.

What is even more depressing is that precious few males took book-keeping/accounting or economics; more women in fact took these subjects. These are pretty fundamental subjects if we talk about work-life literacy. We all understand that English language is an unimportant skill to have, but basics such as accounting seem fundamental, no matter how technological the student.

In a recent article in The Jamaica Gleaner (Sunday, September 6, 2015) a similar trend was borne out. Boys do not do well with English. They view English as a soft or “sissy” area, and refuse to take it seriously.

In the Jamaican context:

Statistics from the Ministry of Education show that only 65 per cent of the 26,419 students who actually sat the exam got a passing grade. Approximately 72.5 per cent of the girls who sat the exams received a passing grade in comparison to 54.9 per cent of boys.

But where do they expect to go without the ability to speak to people other than their friends? Again, we seem to teach girls that speaking correctly and being able to write is important; communication is essential for success, but even then they challenge the concept of having to be good at English. Where is the problem? Certainly boys see no importance to the English language, but as Jamaican Minister of Education Ronald Thwaites said:

“Boys want to grow into men who are accomplished and responsible and professional and can earn money and please girls and all those things. What we need to get across to them is that a command of the English language is absolutely essential to do this.”

There is a travesty here. Men from the lower socioeconomic groups do not value education because they are taught not to. They do not value English language because they are indoctrinated into thinking that it is for “sissies”.

Our leaders butcher the English language daily, and most of them are men. The travesty is worsened because many of those cocksure leaders can actually speak English well when it is required of them. Their coarse use of English in public is for the public image, it is showing their male card. Sadly, the image sways the public.

For example, 352 girls took physics versus 301 boys. Some 2,498 girls took mathematics while only 1,952 boys did the same. It is true, we need to reevaluate how we teach and also how we train students, but the focus on failing men is not necessarily quite right.

Boys are not going the academic route for the most part because society insists that they do not need to. Girls, on the other hand, must be competent. Meanwhile, boys are tending to outnumber girls in the skills areas such as mechanics, carpentry and electronics, but there are still too few finishing school.

We still tell men they are soft if they can read and write, which makes little sense to me because even if one is a mechanic, in fact especially if one is a mechanic, one needs to be able to read and count. Cars are run by computers today, so computer literacy and reading are required.

Literacy and numeracy skills are essential to a successful life. What is actually being underscored is a societal attitude that education is for “sissies”.

If you are an educated man, something must be wrong with you. It is obviously then not about failing in school, but more about social attitudes towards gender.

The funny thing is that the middle classes and upper classes are still competent enough in reading and writing to become the doctors and lawyers. While the lower classes are floundering, the former group are excelling.

Is it really about masculinity and femininity or is it about destroying a group of people who do not see the value in education because they are too busy paying attention to attitudes and not to living life?

Education level is already compromised in many schools that are open to the majority of students, to give up on it completely because of social pressure means that they do not take advantage of the mediocre education that they get.

When the country was in its post-emancipation glory, the mercantile group took a hold on the market, but while they may not have opted to go to university in the early days, they certainly emphasised being self-sufficient, and literacy and numeracy were high on their list.

They owned the infrastructure and exploited the masses who needed to access it to survive. Now the same seems to be happening, but we are embracing the “sissying” of education. At the end of the day, the entire society will suffer.

Let’s start talking about the real reasons why so many men and women are being held to socialised gendered norms that imprison them in failure or limit their ability to succeed.

We may be selling education to for-profit groups and cheapening the product through this, but it really boils down to a devastating blow on the lower socioeconomic classes who cannot see the value in being bilingual in English and “Bahamian” but whose upper-class counterparts certainly do.

Let us step back and reevaluate who is really failing and how, and what that failure looks like, and there may be some valuable answers revealed to us.

Gender imprisons those who allow peer-pressure to run their lives.