Nelson Mandela once said "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." This quote highlights the importance of education, but are we paying enough attention to how our educational system work? There are countless of examples of the flaws of the educational system, but since tomorrow is International Men's Day, we will be focusing on educational bias against boys.

There are multiple of ways the system fails men, but first of all we have to point out the inequalities in education. Girls outrank boys when it comes to GPA in every level. To quote a times article on this

For 100 years, according to the data that included students from 30 countries, girls have been outperforming boys in all of their classes — reading, language and math and science. And they’ve been doing it throughout their academic careers, from elementary school to high school.

Now this in and of itself does not mean there is bias in the system. It could simply mean boys aren't not as engaged, don't try as hard and aren't as responsible. However, if boys are less engaged and don't do as well in a system build specifically to teach them and educate them, is the system really working as good as it should be?

Not only this, there has been documented cases of the teacher's biases affecting both boys and girls. In all fairness there is significant evidence that girls scored lower on the TIMMS high school physics test. This is usually caused by gender stereotypes. However, when it comes to this, boys are usually overlooked or observed as the ones who benefitted from these biases. To quote the Atlantic on this,

In the view that has prevailed in American education over the past decade, boys are resented, both as the unfairly privileged sex and as obstacles on the path to gender justice for girls.

However, is this really true? To quote the same article,

The research commonly cited to support claims of male privilege and male sinfulness is riddled with errors. Almost none of it has been published in peer-reviewed professional journals. Some of the data turn out to be mysteriously missing. A review of the facts shows boys, not girls, on the weak side of an education gender gap.

Boys are more likely to drop out of High School and get lower grades in every industrialized country on Earth. At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of students in college, an all-time high, with men making up the other 40.5%. Is something pulling men back? This isn't only about enrollment, but completion too. For example, in 2012 57% of bachelor's degrees went to women and only 43% of them went to men.

The issue is not only academic, but with the attitude towards boys. Some teachers do not believe boys can do better than girls in academic, and others believe boys are worse when it comes to many issues such as behavior. This results in unfair punishment towards boys. To quote a research paper on this topic,

Teachers may form generalized expectations that girls are better than boys at school (e.g., Jones & Myhill, 2004). Boys may infer these sentiments about teachers’ expectations (e.g., Hartley & Sutton, 2013). Also, boys in general—but especially African American and Latino boys—are subject to disproportionate rates of disciplinary action for school misbehavior

Today, get significantly higher scores in GCSEs, but it hasn't always been that way. Boys an girls used to have similar test scores until 1988 when O-level system was scrapped and replaced by the GCSE system. The GCSE system allowed teacher assessments to affect grades. Teachers are humans and they come with their own bias. In more than 60 countries girls receive higher marks than boys for the same ability according to an OECD report. Girls are also more represented in student government, in honor societies, on school newspapers, and in debating clubs according to the Atlantic. According to the independent, there are also "slight bias" towards boys when it comes to the teacher assessments, according to England’s exam regulator.

With all of this evidence, is it time we rethink how we treat people, specially boys, in our educational system?