Editorial | Men and education

Haldane Davies, president of the University of the Commonwealth Caribbean (UCC), did not tell Jamaicans anything they might not have assumed about his own institution, or higher education in general: that there is a yawning gender gap in favour of women.

Of the 774 students who graduated from UCC with diplomas and degrees on Sunday, 624, or nearly 81 per cent, were women. In the class of 2021, women accounted for 80 per cent of the 587 graduates. The year before that, they were 77 per cent out of 396 graduates.

UCC is not unique in this respect. Of the nearly 18,000 students enrolled at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, over two-thirds are women. Enrolment at the University of Technology (UTech), with its approximately 12,000 students, is similarly skewed towards women. The same thing applies at teachers’ training colleges and other areas of tertiary education.

It is not that the tertiary institutions deliberately keep males out. Rather, too few boys matriculate to higher education.

“Men, we must do better!” Professor Davies declared on Sunday.

FAR MORE EFFORT

It is a sentiment that this newspaper shares. Except, how exactly it is to be achieved will require far more effort than spirited exhortations or ministerial observations about the need for efforts to bring boys up. For while the longer-term effects of the failure of Jamaica’s system is especially obvious at university graduation ceremonies like the one on Sunday, the genesis of this crisis is much earlier – and deep. Put another way, while the problem of education cuts across gender, it is more fundamentally a crisis among Jamaica’s boys, which starts to become very apparent by the time they end primary school. Its solution demands interventions from several quarters – at schools, in communities, and in homes.

Take the results of this year’s Primary Exit Profile (PEP) exams, which children (age around 11 or 12) sit at grade six to determine their readiness for secondary education and the high schools to which they are streamed. Started in 2019, PEP has a greater focus on analytical thinking than its predecessor, the Grade Six Achievement Test. The test scores were better this year than for the earlier PEP exams.

However, in the foundational subjects, language arts and mathematics, 60 per cent and 57 per cent, respectively, of the more than 36,000 students who did the exams were deemed to be proficient or highly proficient in the subjects. Conversely, 43 per cent in maths or 40 per cent in language arts have significant catching up to do if they are to start high school with the appropriate foundation to absorb the learning they will be offered.

Notably, of the students who were proficient in language arts, approximately 62 per cent were girls. In mathematics, girls accounted for 54 per cent of those who made the cut. Girls also did better than boys in most other subjects – a performance that generally persists in high school, where girls drop out at around half the rate of boys and generally do better in the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate exams.

PAY ATTENTION

Clearly, in implementing the recommendations of the Orlando Patterson Commission on transforming Jamaica’s education system, along with everything else, the authorities have to pay attention to this reality. Without understating the underperformance of girls, the system has to recognise the acute problems with boys. Among other issues, the experts have to address how pubescent boys learn, especially in the social context of Jamaica.

But fixing the problem cannot happen only in the classroom with skilled pedagogy. The socialisation of boys and in their communities will be an important part of the mix.

Writing in this newspaper about crime and gang recruitment half a dozen years ago, The University of the West Indies social anthropologist Herbert Gayle argued that too many Jamaican boys were, unwittingly perhaps, being prepared for gangs in how they were socialised.

Boys, he said, were three times as likely as girls to be brutally beaten at home. Up to that time, they represented up to 95 per cent of children who were killed in Jamaica, and were more likely to be killed than women and girls combined.

Additionally, they were three times more likely than girls to be constantly hungry and undernourished; suffered more neglect by their fathers; they were expected to, and dropped out of school when the family faced economic crisis; and they were more quickly sent to reform homes than girls. Further, up to a quarter of all working-class or inner-city-dwelling boys hustled on the streets.

We suspect that most of these figures would have changed only marginally since 2017. In some cases they might have even worsened.

Fixing these issues is a necessary part of fixing the problem to which Professor Davies drew attention on Sunday. And that, along with improved outcomes in education, is part of the solution to Jamaica’s problem of crime and gang violence, the latter which accounts for nearly 70 per cent of the island’s homicides.

One of Dr Gayle’s observations, worthy of note in this context, is that boys who stay in school were nine times less likely to be recruited into gangs than those who drop out. The message is clear.