• Public policy advocate and Linnean Medal winner Rohan Pethiyagoda on what’s wrong with boys in Sri Lanka

In Sri Lanka, one third of all boys fail their General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level (GCE O/L) Examination and more than half of those who pass the O/L, fail their GCE Advanced Level (A/L) Examination. Meanwhile, 70% of Sri Lankan boys have failed in their educational pursuits by the time they are 19-years-old. In State universities, most fields are dominated by women. The boys still dominate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), but women dominate the health, education, administration, and literary (HEAL) fields. 

Linnean Medal winner, scientist, conservationist, and public policy advocate Rohan Pethiyagoda discussed the reasons for the alarming statistics that point to boys falling behind, tracing the problem from adolescence to adulthood, learning deficits, and understanding how education ties in with political outcomes, both good and bad. Pethiyagoda was on Kaleidoscope this week, examining the challenges that boys in Sri Lanka face and how both the community and the educational system are to blame for this systemic problem. 

Following are excerpts from the interview:

What exactly is the problem that boys face when it comes to education?

Looking at the statistics, with a third of the boys failing their O/L and half of that number failing their A/L, by the time these boys become adults, two thirds or more of them are failures. This is not right and is a horrible situation. It doesn’t only mean that these boys are not going to university, which in itself is a difficult task in Sri Lanka to get into a State university, but what it means is that these boys carry the stigma of failure even before they have thought of a career. A total of 15% of boys who fail their A/L, fail in all three subjects, which is two and a half times more than girls do. Apart from the failure rate alone, this disparity is something that bothers me. 

What are the possible causes for this gap in educational performance? Why are boys faring worse than girls?

In primary school (during the Grade Five Scholarship Exam), girls and boys do roughly equally well. In adolescence and early adulthood (from ages 12-20), boys seem to fall back. I do believe that it is something to do with adolescent behaviour and the temperament in boys. From the recollections of my boyhood, it’s a very mixed up period, for boys more than for girls. They are in competition with each other, especially for attention. They get more involved in sports, which is something they must excel in because sports’ denote ‘proper men’. They have to think about being attractive to girls. They have lots of energy and need to expend that energy. Sitting in a classroom for four straight hours or more doesn’t cut it. Some do well and lead successful lives but a majority of boys struggle to keep the pace. Therefore, having the same kind of approach to education for both boys and girls is a mistake. We need to think of them as two separate species for the purpose of education, and then tailor-make education to each of these genders.

How have girls taken over HEAL and, in a lesser context, STEM?

In general, boys like maths and tech, while girls are good at working with people and relationships. In this sense, there’s a dichotomy. Boys prefer to go into STEM fields. Girls dominate HEAL fields, especially in the health and education sectors. The job opportunities in education are significant as there are at least 100,000 teachers in the country and about 80% of these teachers are women. Yet we don’t know if boys learn better from men or women but the fact that teaching is so heavily skewed towards women may be disadvantageous to boys. These are unpalatable facts but it needs to be out in the open and attention must be paid to it. 

Where does educational disparity begin to occur in girls and boys? 

Primarily, this happens in adolescence. International literature suggests however that it happens much earlier. Any parent of both a boy and a girl will tell you that girls are more precocious than boys as they’re at least one year ahead of boys in terms of development. It probably starts there. It’s an ‘intelligence’ problem, if you will call it that. We know that on average, boys and girls are equally intelligent. The problem that boys face is their temperament, which also means that they pay less attention. We see this manifesting in attention deficit issues like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and in language learning difficulties like dyslexia, which for example are diagnosed two and a half times more in boys than in girls. Autism is four times higher in boys than in girls. Boys have all of these disadvantages that translate into learning difficulties as they go through childhood.

You’ve noted that biological differences between males and females translate to learning difficulties. What exactly is your rationale?

There’s neuro-physiological evidence that the development of the brain in boys and girls is very different. How this translates into ability is a problem that is yet to be solved. Physiologically, we know that the brains of boys and girls develop on completely different pathways. Recognising that fact means that we should conceive that it is possible, boys and girls need different treatment when it comes to education. We’ve struggled for a century to bring girls on par with boys in education, jobs, opportunities, and marriage worldwide, and we’ve achieved this to a large extent. But, the question that keeps getting asked when we bring up this point is, ‘How is it that we don’t see more female chief executive officers (CEOs)?’ It is not discrimination behind this but rather the fact that women lack the masculine aggressiveness that CEOs exhibit. Psychopaths amongst women are very few, but there are a whole lot of psychopaths amongst male CEOs. It’s a man’s world out there. I don’t like to say it, but it’s true. Simply look at Wall Street. It’s a cut-throat business and women would be out of place because most women are gentle, rational, and thoughtful compared to men.

What can the parents do to make life easier for boys and girls?

Most parents should give more attention to boys. This is not an evidence based data founded fact but rather I suspect that most parents who are economically better placed give extra tuition to their sons to get through the problem. The vast majority of boys living in rural Sri Lanka don’t have this opportunity and they are who we’re talking about. They’re falling behind. 

Boys’ problems are rarely talked about. What are the problems that men and boys face that deserve more airtime?

The majority of our men, two thirds of them, start their lives as failures. University graduation rates in Sri Lanka are 70% for girls and 30% for boys. This translates into influential jobs in every field, but the boys are left behind. Women with jobs and education don’t want to marry layabout men who don’t have good jobs. That causes stress among the boys. Even when I talk to girls in university and ask if they’ve found boyfriends, they respond that there aren’t enough boys in university. This is a common thing and most girls don’t like to have off-campus relationships, preferring on-campus ones. This is bad news for the girls, but it isn’t good news for the boys either. The boys who go to the university tend to be quite bookish and maintaining relationships is not something that they prioritise at that stage of their lives. However, it’s the failures that I worry about. We need to remember this: if you were to go to the Welikada Prison, you’ll notice that 95% of the inmates are men. To those who say that men and women are the same, the question I ask is, ‘Why aren’t there more women in prison?’ Men and women behave very differently; that’s a fact. They don’t deserve the same treatment in all spheres. On the other hand, the men who don’t turn to crime turn to self pity. This translates into much higher suicide rates. These are the deaths of despair. Men turn to suicide, alcoholism, and drug abuse and such issues destroy their lives from within. From both spectrums of this problem, the violent and the non-violent poles, men are in deep trouble. If we don’t address this, it translates into societal and political problems. As an example, in both the cases of Brexit and the election of United States President Donald Trump, education was the predictor of voting habits. People use the ballot as a way of getting even with the system. 

What’s the tie between violence and the lack of education and purpose?

A: If you look at the prisoners in Welikada, 92% of them never graduated high school. There’s obviously a correlation between a lack of education and crime. We need to bear in mind that while children must be educated, education shouldn’t be seen as only a path to university.

This is a deeply misguided thought, because only a fraction of students get into university and the rest of them need to find purpose and work elsewhere. There’s no point in going to school and learning A/L maths if you’re going to be a carpenter. We need to rethink education and the way we’ve funded education. We now have a monolithic system where some bureaucrats decide what children need to learn. If we have a more diverse system where schools have options and are allowed to do things differently, the comparison will show better results. The success of Europe was in having 100 different States competing with each other in the 19th Century as from this sprang a renaissance of ideas which led to the industrial revolution and everything that came with it. Diversity is a good thing; monolithic institutions are not. This monoculture of A/L passes and university graduates is not healthy. 

Could we hope for policy change and what sort of policy change are we looking at?

Policy change won’t come easily. For one, the idea of separate treatment for boys and girls that I’m advocating is toxic in a policy environment. We are universally forced to subscribe to this ideology, this dogma that boys and girls have to be treated equally. I’m arguing against that and I’m not going to be popular for saying it, but someone’s got to say it. Ideally, it is women who should say it. The only British Prime Minister to speak about the predicament of working class boys who are the largest in terms of the population but the lowest demographic in terms of getting into university was Theresa May. She had the courage to speak about it but was shot down because it was an anti-feminist idea. I’m not putting boys on a pedestal here, everyone in society suffers, but the vast majority of men aren’t producing their optimum for society. 

(The writer is the host, director, and co-producer of the weekly digital programme ‘Kaleidoscope with Savithri Rodrigo’ which can be viewed on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. She has over three decades of experience in print, electronic, and social media)