Girls do much better

Reinder Boeve
Translated from Wegener Dagbladen 25 June 2001

After a years-long spurt, girls have made up their arrears in education.
Contrarily, boys achieve worse.

The numbers make this clear: the final classes of the secondary schools had more than girls last year. Since 30 year the number of female students at the university has raised from 20 to 49 percent.

Boys quickly lose ground: they drop-out more often and they more often stay down a class, reports the Department of Education and the National Statistics Office CBS. Six percent of the boys were directed to special classes, while three percent of the girls.

This is an international phenomenon. In the UK and the US a debate is going on how to bridge the gap in education between boys and girls. Separate schools for boys and for girls is one of the options.

Last month, the debate flared up: a language test for eleven-year-olds [...] would be made easier for the boys. Boys read magazines, strips and non-fiction, girls read books, according to research in the UK.