Superfluousness Of Boys In Education Summary

This article written by Judith Gill and Karen Starr highlights the history of gender reform in the Australian education system and the backlashes associated with it. The main debate which is being discussed in this article is that of disadvantaged boys. After a long time of feminists fighting for equal rights of girls in Australian schools, the Boys in Education lobbyists are fighting for increased attention to be given to boys in schools. Gill and Starr don’t believe that the boys are disadvantaged and have written this paper to demonstrate the superfluousness of the Boys in Education lobby and the lack of necessity for their demands.

As an introduction the authors outline the causes feminists have been fighting for girls to gain equal rights in schools. These fights were necessary
Gill and Starr use a sarcastic undertone whilst describing the goals, strategies and research of the lobby; Most notably the Boys in Education lobby’s stance on the Theory of Gender. The lobbyists describe the boys in their research in a very ‘boys will be boys’ manner. That is to say that all boys are the way they are because of biology and only biology itself is to blame for their behaviour and schooling failures. This goes against the beliefs of feminist arguments which side on the constructed gender theory that acknowledges biology in the most minimum form while attributing behaviour or personality to the dynamic social construction of gender. In ignoring the social construct of gender, the lobbyists are not fully understanding the position of the boys and furthermore reinforcing a gender stereo type of all boys. The questions should be ‘which boys?’ and, in order to explore the reasons of these specific boys’ behaviours, it is necessary for the lobbyists to look beyond the biological make up of