Hmm. Yes, if we have classes to encourage girls, why not have classes to encourage boys?

I suspect the vigilantes would ride in to attack any such proposal.

Yes Killarney, it really is getting ridiculous. Primary school teachers did a 2 year teachers college course, & went to work. Even some high school teachers did only a 2 year course. Of course they were better educated at school so had less to learn.

I remember one poor girl from our school who did a home economics course, sent back to our school for her practical teaching, just 20 months after she had been a student. Talk about set up for a discipline problem.

Of course most teachers were the cream of the crop. It was pretty hard to get into university in those days. You needed a scholarship, & most got there with a teachers scholarship. You needed a pretty good pass in a real exam to get one of those. To get a company scholarship in engineering for example, you needed at least 2 honours, & 3 to be sure of getting one some years.

To be sure of get the teachers scholarship you wanted it was wise to have at least one honours & 3 "A" passes, hence all but 2 of us were doing some extra hours in honours courses.

Teaching wasn't a 9 to 3 job back then either. Those who weren't running honours extra curricular courses were generally coaching sporting teams before & after school, & one math teacher did both. We had a brilliant math/science master, who worked his butt off to get some of us up to where we needed to be. I was so glad to hear he had made it to headmaster a few years later. He deserved it.

I agree Hasbeen, unfortunately though, the world around the old school structure has changed dramatically.
You describe an educational institution which was surrounded by a class structure, very English in its views and outcomes.
The recession of the eighties was a catalyst for lengthening the school term for children, effectively by one year. It came at a convenient time for politicians to dodge the fallout from rising youth unemployment, and probably appeared at the time to have merit .

But as an easy fix, it was flogged to death for what it was worth at the time, and is undoubtedly to this day, offering simple fixes for masking otherwise high youth unemployment.
What has effectively nailed this state of affairs into a concrete "forever", is welfare!
The encouragement on all fronts, is for children to remain under parental care until eighteen yo.

Where we see segments of society ignoring the pressure to remain at school is in the Aboriginal communities, where commitment to school is very low. We have a royal commission looking into the side effects of that now in the NT.

The debate we refuse to have in this country, should centre around the loss of industry to Asia, (China in particular). Chinese are not renowned for being slow on the uptake, and have capitalised magnificently on their successes; as that success flows back in our faces, as we Australians watch powerlessly their return to plunder the remaining benefits of what Australia had to offer its own youth, with a chequebook!

Effectively, and particularly for boys, the future in this Country looks bleak. Start up jobs for boys in industry have long ago migrated to Asia: now we must deal with the consequences of those flawed political decisions. There are only so many jobs for the taking in Maccas.