Whilst I tend to agree with the views of others in laying the blame at the foot of feminists, this can be construed as claiming that most female teachers in the system our feminists. As a teacher for over 40 years, I believe that only some female teachers are feminists, most are simply dedicated to getting good results equally for both girls and boys. It is a worry that teaching has become predominately a female occupation, because students are equally represented by boys and girls. It is mostly in the bureaucracy and in the universities where feminists have had this sad influence.

I invite all contributors to dig a little deeper and focus on the vehicle that the feminists and others have used to create the situation that has resulted in an overall decline, a decline that has been particularly damaging and severe for boys. This vehicle is Outcomes Based Education. It has driven education in schools for over 15 years. It has been embraced by academics and bureaucrats and thrust onto schools and teachers who find it impossible to understand and implement. It depresses learning of facts and set pieces of knowledge and encourages group discussions, challenges to accepted norms, and any notion of pass and fail.

To see boys perform to their true potential, and for boys and girls to get more out of their school experiences, we need to remove the vehicle that has been used to cause the problems. Outcomes Based Education needs to be axed and replaced by a syllabus approach which has been traditionally used and through which most readers of the forum gained their education.

If there is to be improvements in the future for boys and, I might say, for girls also, it will come from abolishing OBE in schools. Though I would like to damn feminists, it will be far more effective to remove the vehicle that they and others have used to cause the malaise of boys performance and that is the curse that is called Outcomes Based Education.

Should you wish to know more about OBE, go to http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/author.asp?id=95

enaj,

At least you're honest. We all knew for feminists like yourself the 'struggle' had nothing to do with 'equality' or 'equity' or even more spuriously 'equal opportunity'.

It was all about achieving power and like all ideologues you wanted to achieve power 'by whatever means necessary'. Hence the crazy claims over the years that 99% of women have been raped, that all men perpetrate domestic violence and so on.

At least we know.

"The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils."

--From The Merchant of Venice (V, i, 83-85

Well the feminists have achieved their goal,to subjugate the male ego,and guess what,many don't like what they have achieved.They have been left with loneliness and males who won't communicate; and everyone is the worse off for the exercise.

Who would be a male teacher in todays environment?Our present system is full of lonely ,leftist ,feminists that are still too busy destroying male/female relationships.

Both male and female actually seek common goals of love and understandering,and it takes the co-operation of both sexes to achieve that goal.

A limited view so far on the problems facing students in schools. Blaming feminists is not the answer anymore than any other single cause.

Why not talk about the conversion of education to commodity status and the political drain of funds away from where they are most needed? Is that the fault of feminists?

There are many factors, below is one more. Unfortunately,this one helps feed the 'boys are bad' syndrome....'look, there they are with their shirts hanging out...it's not nice'.

I have found over the years that my children and their friends learn to resent those teachers who are least able to act reasonably, which is more than a few.

It seems that professional development in teaching is a dirty word.

I live in Qld. Here the QTUs most pressing problem is to be allowed to suspend students, or give them detentions, for wearing the wrong coloured socks. 'Big deal' you may think, but to teachers it is a big deal.

Instead of focusing on their classroom responsibilities to deliver a well planned and interesting lesson they prefer to stalk the playgrounds and corridors and pounce on students wearing the wrong gear.

Ed Qld surveyed their teaching staff in 2001. Many of them said 'fix the behaviour management system and the problem will be solved'. Sadly not, according to EQ itself. Fix the literacy problems, or at least begin to recognise them, fix the classroom standards of teachers, and the behaviour alters, said EQ.

It's time for teachers to examine their own behaviour, their reluctance to self-develop, to start treating students as humans, to recognise that the system we have now is a passive education system where 'things' fall onto students, who are not encouraged to take any responsibility for what goes on in schools, and the system of management has barely changed in the last 50 years.

Schools remain largely coercive sausage factories attempting to churn out obedient poodles who have been 'taught' to all think the same, the same as a rather dreary bunch of teachers...but at least they all look smart, or should that be NICE?

It is nonsense to suggest that members of some abstract category feel better about themselves because other members of that category are doing well. A woman who is dying of kidney failure gets no comfort from the statistic that says that women live longer than men. A man who can't pay the rent gets no comfort from noting that most billionaires are men.

By the same token, boys may well be more likely to become CEOs than girls, but that is no consolation at all for boys who feel like failures at school. Girls may, on average, get better school results than boys, but that is no help for the girls who are not learning what they need.

Education must be about helping all individuals to learn, not trying to get the statistics to come out right. We should all celebrate the improvements in girls' education over the last generation - and work for it to continue -, and we should all work for improvements in boys' education now. These silly battle lines between the sexes don't help anyone to learn.