Africa-Press – Mauritius. Girls are far better than boys – so indicate exam results. Shame on the boys! The trend continues. When the CPE results were out, I said that our girls are doing far better than our boys.
Now that the School Certificate results are out, the trend is maintained. The girls have done far better than the boys. The results disclose that 82.17% of girls have got through successfully whereas the boys have lagged far behind their sisters.
Only 73.27% of the boys have passed their School Certificate examination. Everybody knows that, for cultural and historical reasons, boys are given a preferential treatment over their sisters.
This is a widely accepted custom and changing the system will take a long time. First of all, the cultural system must be reviewed. But this is not easy to do.
Those who head the socio-cultural organisations are, most of them, very conservative in their attitude. Besides, the attitude of mothers in the country should be taken into consideration to start with.
Mothers look after the children of the family, and they usually have a soft spot for the boys as compared to the girls. Yet in spite of several constraints, girls are still doing better than boys in matters of education. Therefore, society must have another look at our culture and how we treat our girls and boys.
To start with, boys and girls are children with the same rights, so why are they treated differently by the parents? All parents know that girls put in some extra effort in whatever they undertake and that is why they succeed in their examinations.
Besides the girls themselves seem to concur that their brothers be given a different and better treatment than themselves. This is so because their mothers have always instilled in their minds that boys are the ones who have to carry on the burden of the family later on.
This might have been very true in the past when the rightful place of the woman was the kitchen. But this is not so anymore. Girls have proved again and again that that they are better than the boys in practically all spheres with the possible exception of physical games.
The days boys are allowed to and even asked to watch television while girls are busy in the kitchen helping the mother prepare the dinner and later on serve the boys and other menfolk before having their own dinner should come to an end.
It is high time for such a change. Or why not think of a reversal of the roles that have until now been ascribed to girls and boys? We shall then see how the boys will progress in the educational field.
Maybe hard work in one field will lead to hard word in other fields as well. Can we get the collaboration of the mothers and also of society in general? I am not sure.
Maybe in the past there was some obscure reason to discriminate between the boys and the girls. Scholarships were reserved so many for the boys and so many for the girls.
This should be done away with. Both the boys and the girls are our children, we should consider them only as our children. Let the best be given the scholarships whether they are boys or girls. If most of the scholarships go to the girls, what is the harm?
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