In my study it was observed that the body of form 6 students in St. George’s College comes from a wide range of households: matrifocal, nuclear, extended, and reconstituted and sibling. The most popular households were matrifocal and nuclear which both contained 33. 33% or 1/3 of the students. This was followed by the extended household which contained 16. 7%, then the reconstituted and sibling who accounted for only 8. 34 % each. This therefore suggests that 66. 66% or 2/3 of the entire sample comes from unstable homes. Of extreme significance, 1/2 of this instability is open to consequences of matrifocailty.
Therefore it can be assessed that matrifocality, according to 0b]. 2, is in fact a contributor to male academic underachievement to a large extent. Students were then allowed to assess their academic performance on a scale of either optimum achievement or underachievement. Only 41. 67% believed that they had attained optimum achievement, thus placing St. George’s College in the Male Academic Underperformance category. Although all the boys did exceptionally well and 41. 67% felt that they did not underperform, upon further examining, 83. % in questions 1 5 and 16 of the questionnaire revealed that they could have performed better at their best performed subjects. According to my definition of underachievement which stated that “fit was failure to perform at their full capacity’, it can be emphatically stated that it is not 58. 33%, but rather 83. 34% of the boys who underachieved at CSEC. This is because students lacked a proper definition of male academic underachievement which thus resulted in the mal-assessment of themselves, or that some students were ironically in denial. Thus it answers 0b]. indicating that the boys in St. George’s College is underachieving toa large extent. Based on the mentioned responses, the students were then asked to determine which factors they felt contributed to male academic underachievement. Here were both matrifocal and non-matrifocal indicators. With reference to the matrifocal factors, at least 44. 4% believed that it was a contributor, as compared to the 41. 66% who felt that non- matrifocal factors such as feminization of the teaching service, as well as the 13. 94% who believed that the two were equally important.
This thus implies that atrifocality is the main contributor of male academic underachievement, and thus it answers 0b]. 2, indicating that matrifocality does contribute to a large extent. Although the respondents indicated other causes of the phenomena such as inconsistent teachers and disstraction, the percentage of matrifocal contributors far outweighed them. With reference to the non matrifocal contributors, the majority of the respondents indicated that the gender of the teacher did not really have any direct impact on them. This accounted for 58. 34%.
They also did not hold the view hat there were too many female teachers at school. However, 58. 34% did admit that many subjects were too” girlyish. ” While this may have been the major belief, 50% of the boys felt that even though the subjects were girlyish, they did possess the patience and discipline that the subjects required, as indicated by Q. 10. While this devalued the effect of matrifocality, it must be mentioned that these boys contrasted school hours or the amount of subjects. This thus implies with conclusive effect that the boys are in truth and in fact undisciplined and impatient.