Disconnects in Education: Women and Boys

The following are the 3 parts of a series, plus a related article, by Juan Miguel Luz (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 26-28 November 2007):

System-wide solutions needed, not band-aids
Teachers subsidizing pupils’ needs
Larger number of boys than girls drop out by Grade 5
Pockets of hope for Muslim schoolchildren

I've linked in the past to quite a few articles by and about Luz, a former DepEd undersecretary, because I support his cause and the articles make sense. These new articles are no exception. I do have a problem, however, with the following:

When boys and girls grow up, they will tend toward marriage. Given today’s economy and lifestyle, chances are both husband and wife will have to work. Given the likelihood that the wife has a better or more complete education, chances are she will have a more steady and better paying job.

Our society, however, is male-oriented. We recognize the husband as the head of household even if the wife may be the real breadwinner. How will these two realities square? I fear that in many cases, there will be underlying tensions that will result in increasing problems of domestic violence and spousal abuse.

Thus, it is important to keep boys in school to give them a chance at finishing, moving on to college, and/or getting jobs that provide adequate pay and fulfillment.

I suspect feminists will have something to say about the author's gender bias, but the way I see it, if boys don't want to go to school, that's their problem. I am a man who has worked in fields dominated by women (i.e., banking, teaching, librarianship), and I say that women deserve whatever they've achieved because they worked for it. I can still remember how awed I was at some of my colleagues who juggled so many tasks at work and at home, and still managed to stay beautiful. And all their husbands did was worry about going to work.

Encouraging girls to go to school in the past may have been justified, but only because girls were previously discouraged from going to school. Well, it's not the same situation with the boys today. If the boys decide not to go to school and become wife-beaters, my guess is that the women will, by then, be more than educated enough to deal with boys.