40% male drop-out rate, up to 80% in one school in Quebec

By Sean Gordon, Globe and Mail, September 10, 2010
A shade under 40 per cent of boys in Quebec drop out of high school in their teens, a rate that is among the highest in the Western world, according to statistics compiled by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

No one is entirely sure what it all means.
Some experts hint darkly at a lost generation of boys, others brush aside such dire talk as myth and alarmism. Whatever slant is applied, it's a harrowing reality.
Among the 500 or so students at Pierre-Dupuy, the overall dropout rate is close to 80 per cent, the highest in the province.
“You have to understand that those are pretty crude numbers, we have a very mixed clientele, people with developmental delays, children with autism, kids who study trades, and the regular academic high-school stream,” said Ginette Rioux, the school's principal. “We never say, ‘We're not going to take this or that student.' … Some unfortunately leave us, but we're working hard at keeping them.”
Link these figures with the current debate about the role of neuroscience, that is the "brain differences" between males and females, which is gathering heat, especially in the design of educational opportunities for male students and female students, versus the sociological influences based in male and female archetypes and you have a very complex "stew."
Focussing on only one school, in one extremely complex neighbourhood, in one province, is also merely a song from the canary in the corner of a vast coalmine of male education. A snap-shot, if you will, in a very lengthy movie.
Nevertheless, the movie is starting a) to be filmed deliberately, and b) to be watched and listened to by a growing number of concerned individuals.
While the feminists may certainly have unlocked the lock on the vault of sexual differences, expectations, roles as well as political and cultural histories and futures, and they have, for the most part, done a superb job in their own academic disciplined development, it is long past time for men to begin to look closely at who we are in a new era, who we have been in our many past editions, and who we are likely to become, depending on our cultural expectations.
And education is one of the core stages from which to gather important data.