Why Arab schoolboys are getting trounced by girls

MUHAMMAD ADMITSUAE he was not an eager student. The young Emirati says he slept through school, if he turned up at all. When he was 17, desperate teachers arranged for him to spend one day a week in classes put on just for disaffected males. These aimed to raise ambition and to grab him with more practical kinds of schoolwork. Now 20 and completing military service, Muhammad says this last-ditch intervention saved him from flunking. A career as an army officer looks possible. Even training to be a doctor. Perhaps.Muhammad is a graduate of Hands-on-Learning, a modest project aiming to drive down drop-out rates in Ras al Khaimah, one of the scruffier of the seven statelets that make up the United Arab Emirates (). It is but one local effort to solve a sweeping regional problem. Across the Arab world, girls are less likely than boys to be at school. But in the classroom girls vastly outperform their male peers—to a degree unmatched anywhere else in the world. Boys’ shockingly bad school marks are a big drag on Arab economies, as is the continuing oppression of females. Shoddy boys’ schools are turning out insecure young men who are more likely to feel that their livelihoods depend on keeping better-educated women out of work.