Masculinity Achievement

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Masculinity norms have identified achievement as something which can be attained by independent working and through competition, this results in boys being less likely to seek help, ask for support, or to collaborate with others, things that are crucial for effective learning. Moreover, academic success has been increasingly labelled as something feminine, and being ‘clever’ as an absence of a boy’s masculinity. Boys who do their best at school and attain higher grades accordingly, are perceived as ‘effeminate’ by their peers, and are consequently being bullied. The different ‘social’ and ‘learning’ environment in schools produce contradicting masculinities, which often results in boys having to choose between doing good at school or being…show more content…
It has been suggested that parental involvement in a boys schooling declines during the years, whereas that of girls stays the same. Moreover, it was found that the lower reading skills of boys in primary schools is related to less parent involvement and lower reading expectations towards boys, especially among parents with lower socio-economic status. As previously mentioned, data has suggested that parents generally have lower academic expectations towards boys than girls. Combining all these potential differences in parental involvement and perceptions with the widespread gender gap in academic achievement, it could be suggested that parents’ are lowering the bars for boys or holding them back. This could be another explanation of why boys entry kindergarten delayed, or when they re-entry it, which is the choice of the parents. Moreover, considering that the perception of parents and teachers on boys seem to be quite aligned, parents might be more inclined to agree with the teacher, when it comes to retaining their child in primary school or even high…show more content…
When in the mid-1990s a ‘moral panic’ emerged because of the discovery of the gender gap between boys and girls in academic achievement, multiple interpretations and strategies for closing the gap emerged. One of them was the ‘new lad’ culture, which put the blame of boys’ underachievement on the lack of good male role models, and on female teachers and even girls in general. The empirical research for this, however, is quite contrasting. In some studies, the effect of male role models for boys and female role models for girls in education have shown little support for this claim, children did not show better attainments nor better attitudes toward school when being taught by someone of their own gender. Other similar researches did find rather strong correlations between the shared gender of the teacher and better academic performances, for both girls and boys, but the relationship was confined to some particular subjects and sometimes even certain age groups. Even though some might interpret this as a need for single-sex education, it could also be interpreted as a lack of understanding of and interaction with the other sex. Not only would a transformation to single-sex education be problematic in the sense that it could have an even more detrimental long-term

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