[octopoc]

There's a book on this topic, it's called Boys Adrift, by Dr. Leonard Sax. I highly recommend it. It's been a while since I read it but some of the dynamics he talks about are:

1. The age at which children start school has gradually lowered. This has reached a point where ~80% of boys and ~20% of girls do not have the brain maturity to pay attention (boy brains mature at a different schedule from girl brains). The result is that teachers will group classes with young students into two groups: one that is mentally ready to play the educational games and the other group that can play freestyle. Kids no matter what age are very good at learning who the "dumb" group is, even though teachers never / almost never have a negative attitude towards the group that isn't ready to learn. This causes children to think, "The teacher hates me" which causes them to hate school.

2. Schools tend to have extreme punishments towards any kind of violence, even healthy violence. E.g., banning snowball fights. This also creates an environment that is bad for ~80% of the boys and ~20% of the girls, who want to have fun this way.

3. Even intellectual discussions of violence are frowned on. The author received awards when he was a child for writing a story about a man who was trying to escape East Germany and ended up getting both his legs blown off. Nowadays it's hard to imagine anything other than that child getting detention / the police called on them / counseling / etc. This frowning on discussions of violence again causes harm, but a disproportionate amount of harm is experienced by the boys.

[akomtu]

All this is reasonable if the goal is to create obedient workforce: they must be good at understanding instructions and following them. Any sort of initiative, and violence is a form of initiative, is discouraged. That's also why many girls do much better in schools, but struggle later when initiative is needed.