Boy-majority classrooms are harder to teacher – and it's on all of us to fix it. Image: etorres69.
Boy-majority classrooms in Australia are measurably harder to teach than those with more girls. That's what PISA data released last week reports, and it should make us stop and ask why, rather than reach for someone to blame. I don't think it's the teachers' fault. And I don't think it's solely the boys' fault either. It's a societal problem and it's on all of us to fix it.
Teachers have been telling us about this for years. They've described boys, some as young as six, refusing to take instruction from them, taunting them with sexist "jokes," filming them without consent and treating them with a contempt that's become more explicit and more confident since around 2022, the same period the manosphere went mainstream in classrooms. A national Monash University/ANROWS survey backs this up: 95% of 2,600 teachers surveyed believe some students access manosphere content, 78% have experienced or witnessed gendered violence at school, and one in three, mostly women, are considering leaving because of it.
And yet, we condemn the manosphere with one breath and dismiss those same teachers as "woke" with the next. And many of us reinforce its messages ourselves, in casual conversation, without ever noticing we're doing it. And the whole time, despite this evidence, we expect teachers and girls to show up every day in often toxic and abusive environments and just get on with it.
Here's how we send damaging message to boys. When we say, "boys will be boys," or call abuse "a two-way street," or excuse it as a man who "just snapped," we're telling a boy 'he' couldn't help it. He could. Men who abuse partners are remarkably good at controlling themselves at work, with police, with a boss, everywhere except at home. That's not a man who can't help himself. That's a man who's chosen exactly who and when it's safe to hurt.
When we ask, "what was she wearing" or "had she been drinking," we're telling him the question is what 'she' did, not what he did. Research backs this up too: the more "provocative" a victim's clothing, the more people judge her at fault, though the law says clothing is irrelevant to consent. And in most Australian states, intoxication strengthens the case that no consent existed. It doesn't weaken it.
And when we call a man "a good bloke" or "a pillar of the community" after he's done something terrible, we're telling a boy that who you are elsewhere buys back what you do in private. This isn't hypothetical. In Western Australia this year, a judge took eight character references into account when sentencing a man to five years for raping an intoxicated colleague, accepting that the assault was "out of character."
On a positive note, survivors campaigned against exactly this, and several states have now stripped good character out of sentencing altogether. These survivors did it by telling the truth loudly enough, often enough, that it became harder to ignore than the excuse.
Even "not all men," said reflexively, does the same work at a larger scale. While it's true, and we also know it's not all boys either, it's also beside the point: reaching for this tells boys we protect men's reputation first, rather than calling out the ones who fail.
Boys are absorbing all of this, and it compounds what they hear on the manosphere. A University of Melbourne study last month found one in four boys believe feminism should be resisted with violence, and that these attitudes predict support for violent extremism better than race, religion or politics. Girls as young as 10 are already the most common victims of recorded sexual assault in Australia. And the same hostility that puts them at risk is hurting the boys who carry it: suicide remains the leading cause of death for Australian men aged 15 to 24, and boys who hold the most rigid ideas of what a "real man" looks like are far more likely to have suicidal thoughts nearly every day. Horrifying evidence of the damage to both girls and boys.
None of these messages come from a stranger on a forum. They come from parents, neighbours, coaches, mates, and sometimes judges. That's what makes them so much harder to see than anything an algorithm serves up, and just as costly.
Teachers don't need another debate about whether respectful relationships education belongs in schools. They need backup when harassment gets dressed up as jokes, and leaders willing to defend the curriculum instead of questioning it. Girls need to be heard, protected, and taught what respect actually looks like, not blamed for boys' poor behaviour. And boys deserve better than excuses. They deserve good men willing to show and tell them what a good man is, and to call out the ones who fail.
So no, I don't think this is about teachers, or just about boys. it's also about the rest of us, and what we're willing to keep saying out loud, or behaviours we simply let slide. Support the teachers already carrying this, back the education that counters it, and we might just keep more of our hardworking, dedicated teachers in the classroom.
Helen Adam is Associate Professor in the School of Education at Edith Cowan University and President of the Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA).
The opinion piece 'Boys deserve better than excuses': Why classrooms with more boys are harder to teach was originally published in the Herald Sun.
