I have been watching this for years.
Long before I became a school principal. Long before I had a staff of my own or a student body to lead. I was watching it as a child in primary school, sitting in a classroom where the girl at the top of the class was always ahead of me. First position, every term, without fail. I was always second. To a girl.
I did not think much of it then. Children rarely analyse patterns; they simply live inside them.
But last week, at a graduation ceremony, the pattern showed up again. Awards after awards. Academic distinctions, behavioural commendations, leadership recognitions. And in case after case, rising to the podium: female students. The head girl stood out in particular, not just in title, but in the sweep of recognition that surrounded her name.
It was not that the boys were absent. They were there. They were clapping, getting some awards too. But they were not, by and large, winning.
The Question That Followed Us Into Lunch
The keynote speaker at the ceremony was not an educator. He came from the financial sector, a world of interviews, hiring decisions, and performance reviews. And when we sat down together after the ceremony, he brought the question with him to the table.
“I am not one of you,” he said, looking around at the school leaders gathered for lunch. “You invited me here to speak, and I’ve come from outside your world. But I have observed something today that I have also been observing in my workplace for years. The girls who come to our interviews are better prepared. More composed. More ready. And I am wondering: what is going on with our boys?”
He was not attacking anyone. He was genuinely perplexed. And he was right to be.
I listened as the conversation moved around the table. Then I offered what I had concluded, not as a researcher with data, but as an educator with decades of observation and a hypothesis I have been quietly testing in my own mind.
My Hypothesis
Boys are not less intelligent. Let me be clear about that from the outset. This is not a conversation about capability.
It is a conversation about attention.
When you look at who spends the most time studying, who finishes assignments first, who reads ahead, you will more often find girls. And when you look at who is on the football field at every available hour, who is behind a screen playing games long past a reasonable hour, who is consistently pulling his focus away from academics towards everything that is not a textbook, you will more often find boys.
Girls, in many cases, are simply more present to the reason they were sent to school.
Boys accommodate more distractions during their formative years. And those distractions compound over time.
By the time I got to senior secondary school and began to take my studies seriously, the best I could manage was fourth position. Third was a boy. First and second? Girls. The valedictorian? A girl.
This is not a complaint. It is data.
But Here Is What We Miss
And this is the part of the conversation I do not want us to rush past.
The boys on that field are learning something.
The boy who refuses to stop playing until he reaches the next level of that video game, who fails fifteen times, walks away, comes back the next morning and tries again, is developing something the classroom does not always teach. Tenacity. Resilience. The stubborn refusal to accept failure as a final verdict.
The boy on the football pitch, dribbling past defenders, reading the movement of teammates, adjusting his strategy in real time, is learning collaboration, spatial reasoning, pressure management, and the instinct to push through resistance towards a goal.
These are not trivial skills. These are, in many cases, exactly the skills that build businesses, lead teams, and sustain careers through difficulty.
The girl who graduates first in her class has learnt that sustained effort produces results, and that is a true and valuable lesson. But she has also, in some cases, learnt that someone else will always grade her work and hand her the reward. The teacher marks the paper. The examiner awards the certificate. The grade appears. The system is predictable.
Life, especially in entrepreneurship and leadership, is not predictable. Nobody is coming to grade your effort and hand you the result. You dribble to the goalpost, and only then, if the ball crosses the line, does the goal count.
The field teaches that. The game teaches that. In ways the classroom sometimes does not.
A Word to Nigerian Parents
I want to speak directly to parents here, because this conversation cannot stay in the staffroom.
Many Nigerian parents (and I say this with deep respect, because I understand where it comes from) have been conditioned to treat academics as the only legitimate activity for a child. Everything else is a distraction. Football? “Go and read your book.” Drawing? “That one cannot feed you.” Time spent on the field, on a team, in a creative pursuit? Tolerated at best. Quietly resented at worst.
This instinct comes from love. It comes from sacrifice. It comes from parents who know how hard life is and who desperately want to give their children an advantage. And for a long time, the certificate was that advantage.
But the world our children are entering has shifted. Certificates are necessary, but they are no longer sufficient. Employers like the gentleman at our lunch table are sitting across from graduate after graduate with excellent grades, and they are asking: can this person think on their feet? Can they handle rejection? Do they know how to work with others under pressure? Have they ever failed at something and come back for more?
Those questions are not answered by a result slip.
They are answered by years of being on a team that lost and showing up for training the following Saturday. By spending an evening trying to beat a level on a game and learning that persistence, not talent alone, determines the outcome. By picking up an instrument or a paintbrush and discovering that mastery is a process, not an event.
When we strip all of that away in the name of academic focus, we are not giving our children an advantage. We are handing them half an education.
So Where Does That Leave Us?
Not in opposition to each other. That is the wrong conclusion.
The answer is not to tell our daughters to play more football and study less. And the answer is not to take the controller from our sons and chain them to a desk.
The answer is balance, and the intentional teaching of balance, because balance is not instinctive. It has to be cultivated, modelled, and protected.
Our boys need boundaries around their distractions, not the elimination of them. An hour on the field teaches teamwork. Three hours on the field at the expense of revision teaches avoidance. A video game that stretches patience and problem-solving is valuable. Five hours of it after midnight is self-sabotage. The difference is not the activity. The difference is the proportion.
And when a boy learns to time himself, to say, “I have one hour, and then I must return to my books,” he is not just managing recreation. He is learning prioritisation, self-regulation, and the discipline of finishing. Those are also the skills that build successful lives.
Equally, our girls need to learn that the grade is not always coming. That some environments require you to push for the outcome rather than wait for it to be assigned. That confidence in rooms without a formal marking scheme is a skill worth developing early.
As parents and educators, our job is to hold both truths at once, and to raise children who can hold both as well.
The Children We Are Raising Towards
What we ultimately want, for our sons and our daughters, is someone who can do the work and go for the goal. Someone who studies with discipline and competes with grit. Someone who earns the qualification and then pushes the door open without waiting to be invited through it.
That person is not built only in classrooms. And that person is not built only on playing fields.
That person is built in both, and in the intentional space between them where a parent or a teacher says: “You need this, and you need that, and I am going to help you hold both.”
The girls dominating graduation stages across our schools are doing something right. We should celebrate them without qualification.
But the question the keynote speaker raised at that lunch table is still sitting with me.
Where are the boys?
And more importantly, what are we, parents and educators together, going to do about it?
