There's a book on this topic, it's called Boys Adrift, by Dr. Leonard Sax. I highly recommend it. It's been a while since I read it but some of the dynamics he talks about are:<p>1. The age at which children start school has gradually lowered. This has reached a point where ~80% of boys and ~20% of girls do not have the brain maturity to pay attention (boy brains mature at a different schedule from girl brains). The result is that teachers will group classes with young students into two groups: one that is mentally ready to play the educational games and the other group that can play freestyle. Kids no matter what age are very good at learning who the "dumb" group is, even though teachers never / almost never have a negative attitude towards the group that isn't ready to learn. This causes children to think, "The teacher hates me" which causes them to hate school.<p>2. Schools tend to have extreme punishments towards any kind of violence, even healthy violence. E.g., banning snowball fights. This also creates an environment that is bad for ~80% of the boys and ~20% of the girls, who want to have fun this way.<p>3. Even intellectual discussions of violence are frowned on. The author received awards when he was a child for writing a story about a man who was trying to escape East Germany and ended up getting both his legs blown off. Nowadays it's hard to imagine anything other than that child getting detention / the police called on them / counseling / etc. This frowning on discussions of violence again causes harm, but a disproportionate amount of harm is experienced by the boys.
I don't think there is any commentary, evidence, or proposal hypotheses which could be offered on this subject without attracting accusations of bigotry.<p>Which, actually, is a big part of why this persists.
Boys tend to have more physical energy, and it must be "burned off" to "get the wiggles out". Their recess breaks need to be more intense and supervised so that some don't fall through the cracks. It works, it's just not popular because it requires treating boys different from girls. I'm just the observant messenger.
I thought this paper
<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304746653_Pushed_or_pulled_Girls_and_boys_facing_early_school_leaving_risk_in_Italy" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304746653_Pushed_or...</a>.<p>On the differences of gender dropout in Italy was a very interesting point.
They suggest that it is simply easier for a boy to dropout from High School to get a job than it is for a girl.<p>So when we mention girls do better at school. Perhaps a factor such as incentive may play a role.<p>The paper suggests an uneducated boy will fare better on the job market than an uneducated girl and thus have less incentive to do well at school and drop out earlier.<p>I thought it was an interesting view that deviates from the usual ones<p>I saw one paper that showed gay boys excelled at school on average. But they were clear on that how the data was collected may have affected the outcome.
In US for example, a boy that admits to being gay is more likely to come from a liberal well educated home. And children of well educated parents tend fare better at school.
Knitting socio economics back to the reason for doing well.
Isn't the answer extremely obvious?
Girls grow up faster than boys, while boys have a longer growing period that extends further (or is equal to) than the schooling period.
I'd be interested in seeing an extended study in the general differences between the study progress of girls and boys seperated by school year and age.
There is a direction that should additionally be investigated and that is how schools can be improved. Is it just the curriculum or perhaps also the fact that teaching isn't a highly valued profession anymore.<p>Some people say high achiever should go into the economy, it is only right that they earn more. I think these thoughts don't really come from high achievers.
I’ll venture a guess and say it’s because they’re more comfortable asking for help. They may also be more likely to study in groups. Both of those will be positively correlated with achievement. That’s the most obvious place to look first. Boys are often taught an attitude of self reliance, which in an academic setting is maladaptive.
I'm fine with that, in some walks of life, girls have an advantage. There for sure are many where boys have an advantage, and that doesn't look like it'll change. There will be asymmetry, so there have to be walks of life where girls do better for there to be parity. And that is what equality in real life looks like.
because 90% of teacher are girl!<p>or because since 1980 all the teaching method used by teacher are designed for girl learning style and none are designed for boy learning style!<p>Because there are no incentive for boy to work hard and get good grade because they never receive praise for good work.
Apparently collective bargaining for teachers harms boys' education but not girls'.<p><a href="https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/negative-effects-teacher-collective-bargaining-male-wages" rel="nofollow">https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/negative-ef...</a>
Women want to re-produce. Any intelligent human knows you need to gather resources to care for your child adequately and give them a good life.<p>IMO - This is one of the more obvious answers to this phenomenon