BOYS VERSUS GIRLS - THE GREAT READING DEBATE

BOYS VERSUS GIRLS – AND THE GREAT READING DEBATE.

The debate goes on. Ian Baldwin (Southland Boys High School) looks at the significant difference between the achievement of NZ boys and girls. He identifies this as highlighted by NCEA results, and suggests that “immediacy” in the thinking style of boys makes the NCEA assessment system less applicable for boys than for girls – suggesting that this dynamic – whatever ‘immediacy’ means - has a significant impact on the measurable performance of boys in school.

Joseph Driessen – as reported by John Hartevelt in The Southland Times – nominates parental split, the absence of dads, and the predominance of women as custodial parents, as being a causal factor in the academic gap between boys and girls in NZ schools. He suggests that the absence of dads has a more significant emotional impact on boys than on girls.

It is possible that both factors are significant, but do they really account for the apparent lack of achievement that the critics see in our male students?

Laughton King, educational psychologist, author, lecturer, and life-time dyslexic suggests that there is more to this picture than meets the eye. After a life-time associated with ‘dyslexia’, and with children with learning difficulties, he suggests that we are mistakinly looking for complex explanations to a very basic situation. In his view moves to ‘up-grade’ our education system over the last thirty years have created the very problem we have been trying to solve.

He blames the progressive emphasis on ‘literacy’, and the moves to use written assessment as the prime measure of achievement as the cause of boys apparent lack of achievement. To understand his thinking he says we must look to the nature of the beast – specifically the way boys think.

Science and academic research, he says, have finally caught up with reality, and have confirmed what generations of people have known for thousands of years – that the brains of men and women are wired differently, and are wired to allow us different, and complementary functions. That we are physically different is rudimentary, so it is not too big a stretch of the imagination to allow that we might actually be brain-wired in a similar manner. Simple design-logistics would suggest so, and direct observation would back this up – but somehow the educationists have missed the significance.

It is no longer news that women have a different brain from men. Brain-scanning research revealed years ago that women have eight, separate, identifiable language sites in their brain, and that they use them to advantage. Men on the other hand have only one such site – less identifiable, and less specific – but it is still a functional reality.

Women are wired for language, and use this as a predominating tool of life. Men on the other hand have a brain that is far more orientated to visual/spatial/dextral functions, (hands-on, practical, functional), and typically present a style that reflects this.
However the requirements of our ‘politically correct’ society may be causing our educational assessment systems to lag behind science – and reality. The NCEA results are in themselves a reasonably graphic demonstration of the differences in the male and female brain wiring, which really could be regarded as the two ends of a brain-wiring continuum.


The emphasis and style of educational assessment has changed over the last fifty years. It used to be that girls lagged behind boys in the education system, and in the early 1960s there was a range of education style that young people of both genders could choose. Those less academic, and more practical in nature went to Tech Institute and became Tradesmen. Some College students chose basic academic, others the arts, and still others chose languages - and ended up in Law or Medicine. The girls of the time had similar options and studied ‘home-economics’,‘secretarial skills’, teaching, or nursing – a heavily gender-role orientated education.

This gender stereotyped system needed addressing, and it needed changing, but the change that has been achieved may well be of ‘pendulum-swing’ nature, and now be creating the very difficulties we are seeing at the moment.

Having worked within this system for 35 years, and in particular, having worked with the casualties of the system, Laughton King suggests that although implemented with best intention, the push to literacy, the essence and the measure of modern education, has suited and benefitted the majority of our students, and simultaneously created the difficulties associated with so-called ‘dyslexia’.

Referring back to recent revelations of brain research, and recognition of thinking style, King suggests there would be value in orientainge our education system to cater for all thinking styles, and to move away from a system that accentuates one thinking style as being preferred, and more valid than others.

According to King both the research, and observational evidence indicate that where some people do all their thinking on a verbal basis, others do all theirs on a pictorial basis. These are the two extremes, and most of us fall at some position between the two, effectively being able to think in words, AND in pictures – at least to some degree. Probably few of us have ever stopped to examine the way we think, but as an educational psychologist, and as a ‘dyslexic’ person himself, he sees such an analysis as basic to the work that he does – assisting children who are struggling in our education system.

In clarifying his point, he suggests we could look at cars and their fuel system. Some run on petrol, but a few now run on diesel. If we go to the gas station and fuel up on petrol, not realizing our car is a diesel, then we have problems. But we don’t demand that every car be required to run on petrol, nor test their performance only on petrol, and when the diesel fails to perform on petrol, we don’t blame the car.

He says, change the words and look at children, their style and our schooling system. Some brains, be they male or female, are much more adept at using language as a thinking style. Others may not be quite so adept, but have sufficient skill in this regard to get through the system. Coming back to the analogy of cars, the size of the motor under the bonnet could be significant here, and those with a V8 or even a good-sized 6 cylinder will have definite advantage over those with a smaller power-plant.

That children with a more pictorial, hands-on learning style will grow to be adults who will be better suited to pictorial, hands-on professions or trades is hardly worth debating, and that those who are language orientated will do better in language-based professions.
But what might well be worthy of debate – or at least acknowledgement – is the very questionable current practice of demanding that all students be tested on the basis of language performance.

The implications he says, are enormous. He explains; Student A is a language thinker and aspires to be a journalist – a language-based (talking, reading, writing) task. Student B. is a pictorial thinker and aspires to be an electrician – a hands-on, visual and practical task. All the way through school they both have to sit annual examinations, where their understanding and ability is measured by their ability to read questions, understand their meaning, and write (in language) their answers. One, is in their natural element and can perform freely and easily. The other, like a fish out of water, or like a diesel fuelled with petrol, struggles to decipher the print, to understand the language, to understand the meaning of the question, and then to convert their visual, hands-on skills to a pencil-and-paper rendition.

For all their academic, language-based skills, student A may never be a safe, reliable, nor skilled electrician – the sheer practicalities may be well beyond their capacity. But, with all their hands-on, practical skills, student B. may never be an electrician either – the system will fail him because he is not sufficiently skilled as a reader or writer, and may fail the written aspects of the qualifying exams.

Yes, he may well be offered ‘reader/writer’ assistance – but this person can only read the question, and write his answer - they cant explain, translate or otherwise clarify, nor help him find the right words to explain what he knows so well at finger-tip level. It is still a language-based assessment system, and as such will still disadvantage him. Just more petrol in his diesel tank – and yet another way of telling him that his natural thinking system is not good enough. This he says, is the essence of ‘dyslexia’.

In his view the educational administraters and politicians have moved to ‘fix’ our education system, but have done so by progressively orientating it more and more to a language-based assessment system – inadvertently creating the very problem they are striving to avert.