Schoolboys do relaxation exercises in an all boys class at the government-run Shanghai Number Eight High School. Shanghai, whose school system produces the world's top test-scorers, has launched China's first all-boys high school program with an eye on elite overseas institutions like Eton. Source: AFP
SHANGHAI: Teenage boys in a Shanghai school are on the front line of
teaching reform after the world's top-scoring education system
introduced male-only classes over worries they are lagging girls.
Rows
of white-shirted boys are put through their paces as they are called up
individually to complete a chemical formula by teacher Shen Huimin, who
hopes that a switch to male-only classes will help them overcome their
reticence.
"We give boys a chance to change," she said.
The
Shanghai school system topped the Organisation for Economic
Co-Operation and Development's (OECD) worldwide assessment tests of
15-year-olds in 2009, the most recent available, ahead of Korea,
Finland, Hong Kong and Singapore.
But even so officials are
concerned that some male students may be slower than their female
counterparts in development and certain academic areas, such as
language, and the shift towards single sex classes aims to boost boys'
confidence.
Girls do better than boys in secondary school across the developed world, an OECD report found.
A prominent Chinese educator, Sun Yunxiao, found the
proportion of boys classed among the top scholars in the country's
"gaokao" university entrance exams plunged from 66.2 percent to 39.7
percent between 1999 and 2008.
Across the developed world, girls
do better than boys in secondary school, the OECD's Programme for
International Student Assessment (PISA) found in a 2009 report on the
educational performances of 15-year-olds.
"There are significant
gender differences in educational outcomes," it said, adding that high
school graduation rates across the OECD were 87 percent for girls but
only 79 percent for boys.
In response, Shanghai's elite Number
Eight High School is halfway through the initial year of an experiment,
putting 60 boys into two classes of their own - a quarter of its
first-year students - and teaching them with a special curriculum.
Schoolboys solve a math problem in an all boys class at the government-run Shanghai Number Eight High School in Shanghai.
"This is a big breakthrough," said principal Lu Qisheng. "There's lots of hope - hope that boys will grow up better.
"Boys
when they are young do not spend enough time studying," he explained.
"Boys' maturity, especially for language and showing self-control, lags
behind girls."
-- "We lack confidence" -
China shut most
same-sex schools after the Communist Party came to power in 1949, and
the only all-boys junior high schools in the country are privately run.
The number of male students scoring top marks in China's university entrance exams has plunged from 66 per cent to 49 per cent
Shanghai
does have an all-girls state-run high school, the former McTyeire
School for Girls, which marked its 120th anniversary last year and
counts the three Soong sisters - Qing-ling, Ai-ling and Mei-ling - among
its former pupils.
Between them they married two leaders and an
industrialist. Qing-ling married Sun Yat-sen, the first President of the
Republic of China, while Mei-ling wed Chiang Kai-shek, who would also
later become president.
Student Li Zhongyang, 15, said he felt
less shy about answering questions in his all-boys class, but drew hoots
of laughter from his fellows by suggesting an absence of girls let them
concentrate more on study.
"We lack confidence," he said. "The
teachers like girls, who answer more questions in class. This programme
lets us realise we are not worse than girls."
It is something of a
contrast to males' traditionally dominant roles in Chinese culture, but
principal Lu said the programme "doesn't have much relationship to
equality in society".
The scheme was launched after China's
government called for more "diversification" in educational choices
within the state system.
A Peking University professor has called
for an even bolder reform, suggesting in September that boys should
start school one or two years later than girls.
"The Chinese education system needs to improve and allow various education methods," Wu Bihu said on his microblog. Now Lu hopes to create China's first all-boys school one day.
"Ten or twenty years ago, there was no need for an all-boys class - just put everyone together," he said.
In
an increasingly aspirational society, he added, some families saw the
new programme as having connotations of top overseas private schools,
and so promising an advantage in the highly competitive gaokao.
"The parents know: England has Eton," he said. - AFP