The Globe and Mail’s recent Future of Education series tackled different aspects of today’s education system and offered a prognosis for the future. A common theme seemed to be the substandard performance of boys in all areas. Shockingly, this now includes the sciences, an area in which boys have traditionally scored quite well.

Canadian schools are truly at a crossroads. On the one hand, ministries in provinces such as Alberta and Ontario (two reasonably well-scoring ones) have pioneered some of the most innovative forms of instructional practices, student assessment and curriculums. But they still hold themselves accountable to some form of standardized tests.

This is out of sync with the approaches being developed in the modern classroom – and thus, not surprisingly, shows declining markers in numeracy, literacy and other subjects. The answer lies not in the test results, but perhaps in the faulty nature of the assessment tool itself.

Boys may never do well on standardized tests. What the best research is showing us is that boys thrive when they can figure out their way around a problem, often in a small group. The most impactful learning seems to be a juxtaposition of processes, where information is unpacked by a combination of natural curiosity, critical thinking and group interaction.

Boys are also kinesthetic by nature – so learning often comes with movement such as swinging feet, tapping and fidgeting. Large class sizes of 25 or more students and one teacher result in restricting student participation and movement, and threaten to become a place of “zoning out” for boys, where underachievement becomes the norm. While these structures remain in too many places, why are we surprised at the test results?

In Canada, we are remarkably attuned to the forces that stand to truly shape the future of education. We are increasingly prompted by the brain science behind learning. Educators are more accepting now of what it takes to retain learner curiosity, and to generate lessons that students will remember – regardless of there being a term test. Students are grouped in classes to facilitate co-operative learning, the sharing of ideas and the generating of what is so much coveted by schools and employers of the future: creativity.

For boys in particular, we now recognize the need for patience with their emerging language skills and listening skills, their love of non-fiction and graphic novels, their kinesthetic processes and their need to physically manipulate objects while learning. Perhaps the argument is for single gender schools – the future will tell. Most certainly, the argument will always be for smaller class sizes, the provision of appropriate learning environments and a response to boys’ learning habits.

And finally, the future of assessment itself has yet to be worked out. Insofar as we are attuning our schools to a more sophisticated understanding of the learning process, it appears we have a way to go before state-generated assessment practices reflect these new approaches. All the moms, dads and educational stakeholders who need to see students outperform global superstars such as their counterparts in South Korea, Finland and Singapore (or at least come close to them) before we’ll call it all successful, remain misguided.

Boys and their habitual underperformance might be the best proof of this. Measurement of one student against the next, or one province against the next, is not the way of the future, in this hemisphere at least. Fewer students today seem to thrive on being measured individually. Students – boys included – want to learn. They are not lacking in motivation as some seem to suggest. Our best teachers know this.

Until the measurement tools themselves evolve to match today’s best (and boy friendly) classrooms, we may just be getting results that reflect the loss of the old authoritarian school structures that used to keep boys in line and perhaps somewhat performing (albeit, we’ve never measured just how effective any of it was over the long term – many of this generation’s adults admit to remembering virtually nothing from their formal schooling).

Perhaps today’s boys, their penchant for learning differently and how we respond to it, will itself be the best indicator of how the future of education stands to evolve.

Nick Szymanis is the director of curriculum at the Sterling Hall School, an independent day school in Toronto for boys JK to Grade 8.