What have all those girl students who have just learned they've scored 560 points in their Leaving Certificate in common with the Miss Worlds of a generation ago? This: they all scream through their hands when they get the good news. Then they're mobbed by their companions who've had less good news, all shedding joyous flood-tides of tears, writes Kevin Myers
Why is this? Is it part of their hard-wiring, that the response of young females who have triumphed is to ululate through their fingers, their eyes wide with astonishment, while rivals, blubbering with joy, gather round to celebrate their own relative defeat? Or are these learned responses which can be unlearned as easily as they were acquired, so that girls may learn about their Leaving results with the same indifferent or possibly even sullen composure that is the hallmark of boys?
And can males learn to leap around crying OMIGOD-IDE-DON'T-BELIEEEEVE IT when their results come through, shrieking hysterically through their upraised fingers, before being kissed by a delighted Keith, an ecstatic Conor and a Fergus who is almost concupiscent with joy? (And why would I be tempted to lay about them with a sickle if I saw teenage boys behaving so?)
Inner feelings
But, you might point out, boys don't do so well in their Leaving Certs, so they haven't the reason to celebrate. And anyway - you continue - they're not in touch with their inner feelings the way that girls are. Instead - you insist - they've been diverted by the laddish culture which celebrates non-achievement and derides hard work. Girls, on the other hand - you conclude - are merely reaping the rewards of hard work and application, and all power to them.
One does not have to ponder long about the outcry there'd be if the results were reversed - if boys were achieving up to 12 per cent better results across the board than girls. Uproar from the Council for the Status of Women. Journalists instantly contacting the usual rentaquote chorus of feminists who can always be relied on to yodel some modish mumbo-jumbo about the need for Gender Awareness Programmes, and Syllabus Sensitivity For Females, in our education system.
But just because there hasn't been such a response to the relative failure of boys in Ireland doesn't mean there should be. Britain, being somewhat ahead of us in the melancholy arts of gender equality, is experiencing uproar over the comparable academic failure of its boy students. The education minister there, Margaret Hodge, is embarking on a series of initiatives "to respond to gender differences" which were, she said, "wholly unacceptable".
She promised "single-sex motivational assemblies" and a task force operating with certain high-standard schools "to disseminate good practice". Moreover, she intends to have football club type study centres, operating out of hours, centring on communications technology. And if that doesn't work, the National Health Service will remove teenage boys' testicles.
OK, only the last bit's wrong. The rest of her partly hilarious, partly sinister programme to get boys to catch up with girls is, alas, wholly real, as if exams were so very important. Because success at 18 in an exam is seldom a guide as to what will be happening 20 years later. An exam is a highly unrepresentative test of one's skills, being solitary, non-consultative and non-communicative. Just about the only career which resembles its isolation and time-limitations is journalism.
Solitary frenzies
Almost every other career involves work in teams, social pyramids, interactive clusters, where the abilities to listen, to absorb, to assess, to act, to lead, to delegate, to accept instructions, are completely unrelated to those solitary frenzies in the examination hall. Even those higher forms of academic life, M.A.s and Ph.D.s are relatively communal.
Moreover, exams are extremely conservative forms of personal assessment; they test the student on her or his grasp of an existing body of knowledge. They do not begin to assess the student's ability or desire to probe the envelope of agreed facts and theories. And boys, being restless creatures who are easily bored with rote-learning, are probably more likely to be interested in the sort of abstract or lateral thinking which the examination system is simply incapable of assessing.
Does it matter that exams might be testing the wrong things? Only to a degree. Society has its own way of levelling itself out in time: gender-equality schemes are alchemy by another name, ideological versions of the philosopher's stone.
Incorrigibly different
For male minds remain incorrigibly different from female, as life experience shows. How many female chess grandmasters are there? Even in the traditionally female preserves of the kitchen and the market garden, virtually all technical advances have been male-created. This is true too of women's command over their bodies - medically and cosmetically. Most haute couturiers are men; the technology of women's daily lives is the creation of men, many of whom once no doubt did badly in exams.
Even the sanitary towel is a male invention. Indeed, how many things in the entire history of the world have been invented by a woman or groups of women? And why is that? Infinitely more important than the middle-class ideological folderol of gender-equality is the dismal failure of our working-class schools, many of which might see only the occasional student in an entire generation proceed to third-level education. The Waynes and Sharons see the yearly tables of achievement of the jubilant Jessicas over the sullen Simons, with all that tearful shrieking and group-hugging, and find the whole charade quite grotesque. By God, I agree with them.