Scarcely Attention to the Arrears of Boys

Reinder Boeve 
Translated from Wegener Dagbladen, 25 June 2001

In contrast with other countries, in the Netherlands is scarcely attention to the growing arrears of boys in comparison with girls. Lauk Woltring, lector at the High School of Amsterdam, and independent counselor in the field of youth care, knows why.

"In the US and the UK, the arrears are worse.  But in the Netherlands, we think too little about boys."

"In the 60s, we have thought that boys got too much attention in comparison with girls. That was not correct. A 70 to 80 percent achieves quite well. But is an official who writes a policy document about problem youth, it often concerns boys."

"Boys are only seen as a nuisance, only in connection to alcohol, drugs or traffic offending."

A possible explanation: an adolescent with a lot of hormones has to cope with his energy.

Additionally, the grow of the body and the development of the brains of boys have a more capricious development than those of girls. Emotional and verbal intelligence of boys are for a long time less in balance than those of girls. This leads to unwise deeds more than to wise words. Biologically, the development of language is much quicker for girls. 

Moreover, boys mostly lack a good example, an adult man who leads the boy, says Woltering. bringing up and education at school is mostly the task of women. Men are often absent and men mostly have no authority. There has something really gone wrong in our culture. The pedagogue does not plea for a gender-specific education. He does plea to make the schools smaller in order to give the boys the opportunity to more personal contact with the teachers, male teachers by preference. 

Boys should receive more physical education, eventually separated from the girls.

"For boys, it is fatal to have to sit seven hours on a desk at school. Their shuffling and looking for diversion causes them to be seen as a nuisance. We better might give them more motion."

Woltering is more than twenty years busy with this subject and he wrote several books about it. However, in education, most attention keeps going to women. At the universities, there are several chairs for gender studies in order to study gender differences in society, politics and economy. In practice, it are women studies. In other countries there are professorships for the study of men, but here these chairs do not exist. Ultimately, this leads to more arrears of boys in education.

That does not alter the fact that the overtaking manoeuvre of girls may be called imposing. Good results of examination and a greatly increased number of female students give witness to it.