With the percentage of Canadian young men completing secondary schooling showing a general decline in recent years, Chinook's Edge teachers are being encouraged to help reverse the trend by working with boys at the grade school level.
During the Oct. 28 District Professional Development Day at Olds High School, teachers and administrators were given a keynote address by Dr. Ian Brown on the topic of unmotivated boys and underachieving young men.
Titled “Boys Adrift”, the address touched on factors that may be contributing to a decline in the long-term academic success of young men.
Those factors include the increased use of video games, changes in classroom decorum at the grade school level, and the presence of environmental toxins in food packaging, he said.
Video games may be reducing the motivation of boys by creating a “displacement effect from the real world”, he said.
Recent surveys indicate that more than 50 per cent of Grade 7 boys are spending 42 hours or more a week in front of video and TV screens (outside school), compared with 26 per cent of Grade 7 girls, he said.
Playing video games for more than six hours a week can create a “negative correlation with academic achievement”, he said.
Asking questions in class has become “unmasculine and uncool for boys,” he said.
“Sometimes it's OK to be smart if you're a boy and sometimes it's OK to get good grades if you are a boy, as long as you don't try and as long as you don't care about it,” he said. “It's different for athletics but not so for academics.
“If we look at who is getting good grades, who are in the academic clubs, who are the valedictorians, who's on the school newspapers and yearbook, it's female dominated very heavily. Girls read and boys don't for leisure.”
The secondary school dropout rate in Canada is now 10.3 per cent for boys, a rate that has increased steadily over the past 20 years, he said.
Toxics such as polyethylene terephthalate and bisphenal, found in food packaging and elsewhere, may be negatively impacting boys' physical development, leading in turn to attention problems, he said.
Dr. Brown said solutions for improving scholastic success for boys may include curtailing video game usage, increasing mentoring as part of teaching, promoting action-oriented activities as part of learning, considering setting up boys-only classrooms, and promoting a correlation between masculinity and educational success.
