The State of Canadian Boyhood—Beyond Literacy to a Holistic Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the new millennium, international interest has developed on the trouble of boys, both in and out of school, with a particular focus on boys’ deficiencies in literacy skills. This interest has prompted research and action plans in Australia, Great Britain, the United States, and to a more regionalized or provincial capacity within Canada, such as in the Toronto District School Board and the province of Ontario. However, in Canada, amidst a popular discourse that underscores the problems facing boys by focusing on literacy, many of the stark and sweeping trends regarding Canadian boys remain obscured. This paper has four major components that are purposely provocative in order to interrogate many widely held assumptions. Firstly, we provide the overall impetus for this paper, background caveats, and the concept of strategic essentialism. Secondly, we introduce a synopsis of several countries’ initiatives to address nationally boys’ problems, and then the prevalent literacy movement seen in the representative province of Ontario, Canada. Thirdly, we produce statistical indicators of school engagement and achievement for Canadian boys as compared to girls, and further patterns regarding their physical and mental health, as an overview of the state of Canadian boyhood. Lastly, we offer several paths for further consideration in Canada, (a) recommending more complex desegregation of the data to understand with more precision which boys are struggling, using an analysis that goes beyond gender to encompass race, class, sexual orientation, disability, and geographical location; (b) offering as an example, an empirical study of adult role models in Canada, and the effects on boys; (c) suggesting a broader social understanding of gender, that is complicit with the boy code; and (d) encouraging movement towards addressing Canadian boys’ issues using the aforementioned trends and recommendations, with not only regional and provincial approaches, but also a national and holistic lens, too. Keywords: strategic essentialism; boys and literacy; boys and mental health; boys and schooling
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".