Boys are no longer educated, they are emasculated

A boy given neither work nor rough play nor a hard man to imitate will never get there.

Boys are struggling in literacy, completion, and behaviour. It is no secret. In March 2026 Education Minister Jason Clare opened an inquiry into the gap and noted that at least one in three Year 9 boys could not read to the Naplan baseline. A Queensland University of Technology study of 71,955 NSW public-school students found exclusions peaked in Year 9, with boys twice as likely as girls to be excluded once, and more than ten times as likely to be excluded sixteen times or more. Homeschooling is rising. In NSW, boys now slightly outnumber girls.

Almost any man could tell you that age 14 was probably his most internally challenging.

Emasculation is the antithesis of education. Yet here we are. Many of the mothers of young boys I have spoken to are fed up with the education system. The default response from the system is suspension and exclusion. For a system that lauds its focus on inclusiveness, it is excluding boys to the detriment of our nation.

In the Morning Double Shot newsletter, Terry Barnes wrote:

Who would want to be a boy these days? We have raised a nation of squibs, and confident, masculine boys and young men are deemed by the chattering classes to be misogynistic and toxic. Yet boys have fallen behind girls when it comes to educational progress, and society favours girls generally. Michael de Percy has written another personal piece exploring what it means to be a boy now, and what it was to be a boy when he was. I disagree with him on one thing though: corporal punishment in schools should be brought back: it was the best deterrent of bad behaviour since the atomic bomb.

My latest in The Spectator Australia, Boys are no longer educated, they are emasculated.