Society’s expectations of boys must change, educators say

WESTERN BUREAU:

Professor Donovan Campbell, the director of The University of the West Indies’ [UWI] Western Jamaica Campus, believes that the Jamaican society’s expectations of boys and young men must change in order to help them see education as a worthwhile venture.

Campbell outlined that position in an interview with The Gleaner following his keynote address at the Jill Stewart MoBay City Run 2024 scholarship presentation service which was held at the Sandals Montego Bay Resort, in St James on Wednesday.

“As a boy, when you go to class and you study hard, you are sometimes teased that you are behaving like a girl, because there is a certain stigma that is associated with education. I am no expert in social psychology, but to me, there needs to be a radical change in the imagination, in how we define a man,” said Campbell.

“If you even backpedal from university and you go down to the high schools and primary schools, the issue starts there because some of these schools have a streaming system, and if you look in the top streams, how many boys are you going to see? By the time you get up to university level, the number of those who complete CAPE [Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination] and those who achieve five CSECs [Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate] with mathematics and English, they drop,” Campbell continued. “The problem we are seeing at the university level is a reflection of a wider societal problem that needs to be addressed, with the same seriousness we are putting into all of our industries, and with the same investment.”

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Campbell’s observations were shared by Dr Patrick Prendergast, director of the Caribbean School of Media and Communication [CARIMAC], who told The Gleaner that part of the problem lies in the get-rich-quick mentality that some males equate with success.

“This has been a burden on the Jamaican society since the mid-1980s, when we saw within our own university system that there was in fact, at graduation, a slight edge in terms of more males than females, but the trends suggested that we would eventually be where we are, that we would have one male to four females within the education system, especially at the higher end,” said Prendergast. “When we look at the reasons behind some of these issues, and we talk to some of these young men about what they see as success, unfortunately we have not been seeing education, particularly higher education, as the path to that success that they are defining.”

“Young men are moving into anything that will give them an opportunity to make quick money, or to become wealthy overnight. It is a real issue, but my own view on it is that unless we change the way we measure success, we are not going to see men wanting to pursue higher education, because they do not see it as a guaranteed path to success,” added Prendergast.

The issue of boys not seeing education as important goes as far back as 2010, when educators called for a curriculum tailored toward male teachers and the presence of more males in the classroom.

A 2020 UNESCO study revealed that out of all the CSEC examination results for 63,471 Jamaican students from 2016 to 2018, 40.31 per cent of entrants were males compared to 59.69 per cent who were females. The study also cited data from the Planning Institute of Jamaica’s 2019 Economic and Social Survey where 27,178 males enrolled in tertiary education compared to 50,919 females.