Why do boys opt out of education? Experts seek answers
You don’t have to go to the University of Belize to know that the higher one climbs on the educational ladder, the greater the preponderance of females. Combine that trend with our daily crime reports, featuring almost entirely young males, and you realise that Belize is faced with a major challenge. And we’re not the only ones … This week education experts from around the region are gathered in Belize City to look for answers. News Five’s Kendra Griffith has the story.
Teen #1
“Some of the boys, they have too many distractions.”
Teen #2
“We lads have a lot to distract us, mainly the lasses of course.”
Teen #3
“Girls are better in school because they are not as much influenced by the violence as boys.”
Kendra Griffith, Reporting
Those were the opinions of young men from Belize, Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago. The videos were produced by UNICEF to explore the issue of boys and education.
This week, UNICEF, in association with CARICOM brought together more than forty participants from all over the Caribbean to discuss why boys are underrepresented in educational institutions and what can be done to reverse the trend.
Barbara Bailey, Dir., Centre for Gender & Dev., UWI Mona, Jamaica
“In all the countries for which we have data, and this come from the CARICOM publication, Men and Women in the Caribbean, enrolment at the primary level as shown by the blue line on the graph favoured males. By the time you get the secondary level, enrolment favours girls and therefore confirms the idea that we have quite a high dropout between the primary level and the secondary level of our male students.”
The trend continues at the tertiary level, but when the mean performance of the two genders was compared, it was found that both boys and girls receive similar scores. So why are the boys dropping out? Professor Barry Chavannes of UWI has a theory.
Barry Chavannes, Dean, Faculty of Social Science, UWI Mona, Jamaica
“They’ve begun to see the rise of other opportunities, other ways that boys can in fact effectively get ahead. We think of sports, we think of arts, we think of well even the drug trade.”
Kendra Griffith
“So education is no longer the primary means of being successful?
Barry Chavannes
“That is right, that is how many boys, not all, but many boys. Too large a minority of them really seem to be perceiving the system. That is what it is all about.”
It is a situation that concerns Belize’s Chief Education Officer Maud Hyde.
Maud Hyde, Chief Education Officer
“It’s fair enough to say that it is more recent. I think it has gradually crept up on us, so we may have overlooked where the concerns really started from. But I think particularly in recent years if you look at the high levels of the education system, particular upper primary and then moving into secondary and tertiary you would notice that the attendance of boys decline as you move higher up into the system.”
According to data from the Statistical Institute of Belize, in 2004-2005 there just under thirty-three thousand boys and little more than thirty thousand, eight hundred girls enrolled in primary school. While only sixty-six percent of the males graduated from that level, seventy-five percent of the girls did.
When it came to secondary school, enrolment that same year was seven thousand eight hundred and thirty-three boys and eight thousand, two hundred and sixty-seven girls. The young women would once again boast higher completion rates with seventy-three point eight percent, while the males came in at just under sixty percent.
But the male-female disparity was the greatest at the tertiary level institutions. In the 2004-2005 school year, junior colleges had nine hundred and ninety young men and fourteen hundred young women. At the University of Belize, there were twice as many women: one thousand, two hundred and forty-two, compared to only seven hundred and eight men.
Hyde is hoping that the seminar can help the Ministry of Education address the disturbing trend.
Maud Hyde
“It will give us an opportunity to look more closely at our own local situation and perhaps be able to learn something from other countries by way of perhaps putting in place some kinds of activities that will help us stem the problem before it gets bigger.”
Rana Flowers, UNICEF Representative, Belize
“The evidence is there, this is a critical moment. We really must start to address the situation of quality in our education system across the board, but with boys in particular in mind because the costs of us not doing something are enormous. In repetition alone, countries in the Caribbean are paying twelve billion U.S. dollars per year in funding repetition.”
According to UNICEF Representative in Belize, Rana Flowers, they plan to have some concrete recommendations by the time the seminar ends on Thursday.
Rana Flowers
“What we are going to do by the end of tomorrow is come up with several actions, and each of the participants is tasked with this, that they will then carry back to their own countries. We have a couple of major CARICOM meetings happening. In March of next year there’s a special meeting on children and then again in the Heads of Government meeting in July of CARICOM and those are moments where we want to see, and this is where CARICOM collaboration with us on this meeting is key, we want to see the policy leaders, the political leaders make a commitment to really doing something different.”
Barry Chavannes
“Yes, it is correctable, that’s right it is correctable. What you have to do is to make education more meaningful to our young males. They need to feel a part of it. They need to feel that they can become men within the education system. In fact, we need to show them that without education they can’t really become men. That is how it has to be framed.”
Kendra Griffith reporting for News Five.
It is worth noting that despite the educational achievements of women they are still less likely to find jobs and continue to receive lower salaries than their male counterparts.
