School Grades And Other Resources: The “Failing Boys” Discourse Revisited

Abstract

Worry about the poor school achievement of boys is one of the current travelling discourses that is repeated in one country after another. One of the assumptions that is taken for granted is that school achievement, as it is displayed in school grades, has dramatic effects on young people's paths to further education, the labour market or society at large. It has also been taken for granted that these effects are the same for young men and for young women.

I challenge this assumption drawing on the educational paths of a several young people living in Helsinki, following them from the age of 13 to 20–24. I discuss how they themselves construct their lives within the positions that are available, how they interpret their achievements and failures, and what resources they use. I suggest that some resources are gendered. I argue that for young men in the current Finnish educational and political context, school grades are not as important as for young women. This paper draws from an ethnographically grounded longitudinal life history study called Tracing Transitions—Follow‐up Study of Post‐Sixteen Students.

Notes

1. This is an interesting change in the discourse: gender was more or less a mute category in the 1980s when feminist researchers pointed to the girls' disadvantage (e.g., Lahelma 1992; see Lahelma & Öhrn 2003).

2. This was a project of the Academy of Finland, directed by Tuula Gordon.

3. We worked together with Janet Holland, who conducted similar studies in two schools in London (e.g., Gordon et al. 2000).

4. I have conducted this study as a part of the larger research projects that I also direct: “Inclusion and Exclusion in Educational Processes” (Academy of Finland and University of Helsinki, 2001–2004), and “Learning to be citizens—ethnographic and life historical perspectives” (Academy of Finland 2005–2008).

5. That is the current situation in Finland, and one of the reasons that the length of time to complete an education lengthens—which worries the educational authorities. State benefits do not the cover cost of living, and young people generally cannot or do not want to count on their parents' help, neither to live with them very long (Lahelma & Gordon 2003). Study loans are risky because of the rather uncertain prospects for employment and good salaries.

6. I will give a brief introduction to the Finnish school system. After comprehensive school (7–15 years), a good half of young people, 57% of whom are female, choose an upper secondary school, which has a focus on academic subjects and finishes with the matriculation examination. Most of the rest go to vocational schools which last for 1–3 years. Polytechnics take students both after upper secondary school and after vocational schools. Entrance examinations for the most popular fields of the universities are very selective, and young people often apply several times. There are rather small female majorities in universities and polytechnics, whilst gender segregation in fields of education is significant.

7. The current system in many universities and fields divides candidates into two quotas: 1) for students with the best grades on the matriculation examination, both it and the points achieved at the entrance examination are counted; 2) for students with lower grades on the matriculation examination, only points achieved at the entrance examination are counted. In some of the most competitive fields, for example law and social sciences, there are so many candidates whose grades at the matriculation examination are outstanding that they fill the first quota, and candidates with only excellent grades are in the second quota, which means that they compete from the same starting point as students with poor achievement.