Teachers for Supply

Later this month two exhibitions will stir memories of perhaps probably the most rancorous and tragic episode in recent British art history. The Jewish Museum in London and the Pallant House gallery in Chichester will together stage the 1st British retrospective of the work of RB Kitaj since his suicide in 2007. The shows may also offer the primary comprehensive take a look at the artist’s painting on this country since a controversial exhibition on the Tate gallery in 1994 dramatically changed the process the remainder of Kitaj’s life, and his art.

That 1994 show, a landmark for a living painter, became known to Kitaj because the “Tate war”, and letters and documents which have now come to light reveal that the phrase was not an exaggeration. What were planned because the culmination and of entirety of a life’s work proved to be something quite different. On one side of the battlefield back then were the art critics of the British press, who perceived to have lined as much as outdo each other in destroying Kitaj’s claims to attention. And facing them were Kitaj, then 64, and his friends and fellow British painters – Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, Frank Auerbach and others – who, letters now reveal, disagreed among themselves about how this savage and apparently highly personal broadside might best be countered.

The real casualty of this battle, in Kitaj’s eyes, was his beloved wife and muse, Sandra Fisher, who died of a brain aneurysm aged 47, two weeks after his Tate show opened, and whose death the painter blamed directly at the shock of his very public critical humiliation. The fallout from this tragedy resulted in Kitaj’s self-imposed exile from his adoptive London, with his young son, Max, back to America, and to a studio in L. a., where he nurtured an obsessive loathing for particular British critics that involved splenetic death threats and fantasies of violence.

Reading back during the archive of that point, and searching again at many of the work Kitaj made subsequent to the 1994 show – compulsive, defiantly erotic paintings of his late wife, in addition to wild and exacting imaginings of firing squads taking aim at a many-headed Brian Sewell and Andrew Graham-Dixon – these wounds still feel greatly open. MJ Long, the architect, and a pal of the painter for the reason that 1960s, says to me now that “there isn’t any doubt that Kitaj went crazy for some time over it all”. It was Long’s late husband, Colin St John “Sandy” Wilson, who tried to co-ordinate the initial response to the critics from Kitaj’s outraged friends, dispatching letters to Freud and Hockney and remainder, correspondence a good way to be included inside the Pallant House show. It was a frenzy of activity that continued until events took a much bleaker turn with the sudden death of Sandra while Kitaj himself was away in America on the bedside of his mother who was also terminally sick.

In the months that followed, Kitaj’s grief and anger took on an epic quality. “He came to our house that Christmas,” Long recalls “and he was in quite an extreme state. There has been little comfort for him and no way of talking him out of it really.” Kitaj, always an intense and vividly articulate character, who had run away to sea from his home in Cleveland, Ohio at 17 and become a terrific and charismatic fixture inside the London art world from the instant his first solo show had opened in 1963, ranted with a feeling of loss and despair to his closest friends. These included his long-time confidant Philip Roth, who, it kind of feels, partly based the outrageous character of Mickey Sabbath, in his incandescent novel Sabbath’s Theater, at the grief-stricken Kitaj – the book is told within the voice of a furious and confessional puppeteer driven mad by vividly sexual dreams of his lost lover, tortured by an apprehension of impotence and oblivion, by turns contemplating suicide and raging against the dying of the sunshine.

Richard Morphet, who curated the 1994 Tate show, still talks with a level of incredulity and shock at how events drove Kitaj to this type of state. “Nearly two decades on, it’s all still too fresh in my mind,” he told me last week. “The failings still remain crystal clear.” Morphet had known and infrequently worked with Kitaj for almost 30 years by the point of the Tate collaboration, and the retrospective was the fruition of that comradeship.

As a result, Morphet recalls, “I felt the jolt of it almost up to him, i believe.” The strange thing was, he says, that in the first place there have been actually one or two positive reviews of the show. “And the outlet itself was an incredibly euphoric occasion, large numbers of individuals from the art world, and a true sort of confirmation of Kitaj’s dedication through the years. After we went to bed after the party there has been this feeling of delight that he was getting his due for all of that, after which right here morning this extraordinary cascade of vitriol began…”

The reviews, which perceived to grow in ferocity from a pretty hysterical start, went on for several days. “The funny thing about it’s that, though in mine and lots of people’s views the hostility was well excessive and cruel to him as anyone, nevertheless this was clearly what the person writers genuinely believed,” Morphet says. “i feel they were sincere in what they wrote. It was in a technique an unpleasant accident all of them expressed it collectively.”

When Morphet spoke to Kitaj inside the days following the show he was “form of disgusted really, very distressed. He never said it but i suspect this exhibition was what he had always wanted and worked towards his whole life. And the extremity of the outburst against it was as though to claim: this isn’t valid. His whole raison d’etre was trashed.”

The main cause of the critics’ damning verdict at the show, Morphet believes, was what was seen by one as Kitaj’s “pseudo-intellectual bullshit”. Kitaj was an eclectic reader and claimed literary inspiration for far of his work from writers starting from TS Eliot to Franz Kafka to Walter Benjamin. He self-consciously rooted himself in an outsider’s tradition, of Jewish intellectualism, equally passionate about language and image. On the suggestion of Nicholas Serota, the Tate director, Kitaj sought to mirror a number of this erudition in extended captions to his paintings that explained their inspiration and genesis. To most of the critics, who saw Kitaj invading their space, telling them what to think, this gave the impression to be fighting talk. Andrew Graham-Dixon inside the Independent called him an “inveterate name-dropper… The Wandering Jew, the TS Eliot of painting Kitaj seems, instead, to be the Wizard of Oz: a small man with a megaphone held to his lips.”

There was a good deal more on this vein. Protest as they may, critics like nothing greater than giving perceived pretension a valid kicking, within the belief that it lends their very own somewhat esoteric calling a grounded, street-fighting quality. Kitaj, the subtext went, were inquiring for it together with his captions, and got what was coming to him.

Morphet was staggered by this personal aggression. “It’s far ludicrous to indicate that Kitaj was just this arrogant figure. The critics appeared to object to the prominence he gave in his work to his own ideas and personality… as though he were the primary artist to foreground himself!” The curator spent quite a lot of time within the galleries observing the crowds on the show and believed, contrary to critical opinion, “that folks were really gripped by it, and went round at a snail’s pace because they were so engaged not just by these extraordinarily sensual paintings, but additionally by these texts that accompanied them – those captions which caused each of the trouble…”

Rereading those critical pieces now, it does seem, as Morphet argues, that collectively “some line have been crossed”. It was certainly a moment, anyhow, when the critics decided to evaluate the guy up to his work, and both were found wanting. By the factors of our own free-for-all of vicious anonymous blogging and comment, the savaging of Kitaj’s reputation doesn’t seem particularly extreme – but that you must certainly make a controversy for it being years prior to its time, a taste of bile to return. The boundary-breaking was led by Brian Sewell in London’s Evening Standard, who, under a heading “Tales half-told within the name of self-importance” had – given his own bearing – the nerve to conclude that Kitaj was “a vain painter puffed with amour propre, unworthy of a footnote within the history of figurative art”. Tim Hilton, also within the Independent, kicked off with the observation that “Ron Kitaj is an egotist, at his best in interviews…” And on it went.

Sandy Wilson, having written to his friend on the show’s opening to exclaim concerning the fact he was “ready to create what William Blake called ‘Emanations’!” now found himself within the position of attempting to rally support for Kitaj. To this end, Wilson drafted another letter, which might take issue principally with Graham-Dixon: “One is compelled to invite why a critic with reasonable claims to be taken seriously should take pleasure in this sort of bilious assault not just at the work, but additionally more disgracefully at the man himself,” Wilson wrote, and invited the painters Kitaj had christened the “London group” and beyond, so as to add their signatures to his missive. Some were keener than others. Hockney signed up; so did Peter Blake and Leon Kossoff and Michael Andrews; Hodgkin said no; Auerbach, whose work Kitaj had championed, and who was a detailed friend, reluctantly agreed, with the caveat that “governments, ministries, committees, boards can be impressed by numbers, but when there are several signatories to a letter attacking one individual it kind of feels like ganging up”. Lucian Freud likewise counselled, “Though it’s always a good suggestion to put in writing to someone on the way to object, agree, question or ridicule anything they will have said or done (or perhaps to challenge them to a duel or ask them to lunch) i think it truly is pointless to gang up on a 3rd-rate critic after you don’t consider him seriously. As they wisely say in Ireland: what do you predict from a pig but a grunt”

Kitaj himself eventually thought the letter a foul idea, having been told by Wilson that “Every minute you spend deliberating Sewell is a victory for Sewell and a reason for great distress to Sandra.”

His words, to Kitaj’s distracted mind, quickly proved more pointed than anyone can have imagined. Sandra Fisher, a painter herself, have been Kitaj’s soulmate since he met her after the death of his first wife, by suicide, in 1969. Sandra had long been an antidote to his depressive tendencies, friends recalled, bringing her native Californian light to his doubt. She had closely helped him with the retrospective and was, MJ Long recalls, already feeling the tension on the time of the show’s opening. “She really didn’t look well then,” Long recalls. “I remember thinking that the whole lot gave the impression to have taken its toll on her.” Morphet recalls seeing Sandra after the reviews started coming in: “She was very hurt by all of it, but additionally fantastically strong.”

RB Kitaj in Manhattan, 1985. Photograph: Christopher Felver/Corbis

When he was given the inside track of his wife’s death, Kitaj immediately drew the realization that the critics had killed her. “They geared toward me and so they got Sandra instead,” he subsequently claimed, to anyone who would listen. Though he obviously wildly exaggerated any motive at the a part of his detractors, there’s a sliver of medical credence to Kitaj’s belief – recent medical opinion does acknowledge severe stress, and resultant raised blood pressure, as an exacerbating consider aneurysms of the kind that Fisher suffered. The obituary within the Independent noted, without irony: “Her sudden death leaves Kitaj, 15 years her senior, with a ten-year-old son to elevate, just because the suicide of his first wife 25 years ago left him with children aged six and 11, children for whom Sandra Fisher became mother. The fierce antagonism of newspaper critics towards Kitaj’s recent late retrospective – not like the response of an admiring public – made for a stressful last summer for a girl who would be remembered by many for her almost saintly happiness.”

Friends tried to encourage Kitaj to desert the link in his mind between the 2 events, but he was unable or unwilling to. “Your victory over Sewell lies within the work you may have yet to do,” Wilson wrote to him and advised him to read the prayers of Søren Kierkegaard and ask for patience and forbearance.

In the development, Kitaj determined on more direct catharsis. For the Summer Exhibition on the Royal Academy in 1997, in a few of the still lifes and daubs of favourite pets, he submitted an outsized painting entitled The Killer-Critic Assassinated By His Widower, Even, a composition indebted to Manet’s Execution of Maximilian, during which two figures fire bullets into the engorged faces of a hydra-headed monster, whose tongue extends around the picture with the words “yellow press, yellow press, kill, kill, kill” written upon it. (The attached price ticket was £1m.) The painting was displayed next to Sandra Three, the most recent in his ongoing try to conjure his wife’s flesh, and text which announced his departure from Britain.

At the time of the show, Kitaj confessed to at least one journalist: “Never ever believe an artist if he says he doesn’t care what the critics write about him. Every artist cares. Those reviews of my show were by pathetic, sick, meagre hacks. They were about small lives and lousy marriages.” Painting, he noted, had become a way of revenge, a topic which, he claimed, “interests me progressively more”. Richard Dorment, the Telegraph critic numbered among his tormentors, observed that: “Once I ventured to criticise his work until now – years before his wife’s death – Kitaj sent me hate mail so frightening and dangerous that my wife wondered whether we should always turn the letters over to the police.” This time the fears seemed more genuine.

Germaine Greer, judge of that year’s Summer Exhibition, and not a lady to turn away from controversy, awarded the £25,000 prize to Kitaj as something of a farewell gift, while noting that “Sandra Fisher survives in her husband’s work not as a fellow painter, but as Shekhina, the feminine aspect of the deity of the Kabbalah with whom he seeks union. But Fisher was not divine; she was very, very human. Once Fisher died, she lost her independent agency and have become a figment of Kitaj’s relentless imagination…”

It was there, within the Californian years that followed, that Sandra stayed. In L. a., as recently released documents from Kitaj’s archive reveal, his life fell right into a pattern, motivated, because the painting of the later years shows by a hardening of earlier obsessions: into his Jewish identity, the abiding absence of his wife, and his ongoing contempt for his detractors. A small National Gallery show in 2002 prompted Brian Sewell to revisit the sooner criticism, though not in any conciliatory spirit. It had not, he wrote, been “‘a systematic try to cut the painter right down to size’. Critics don’t enter into conspiratorial agreements with one another – they’re much more prone to lick the arses of such panjandrums as Kitaj than take a typical line against them.” He went directly to say that “any embarrassment i believe is on behalf of the institutions that nourish the conceit of this now preposterous obsessive personality, along with his rant and bombast concerning the Jewish Question, and his wife Sandra (a slightly better painter than Kitaj once he had begun his slip into decline).”

In later years, a girl named Tracy Bartley worked as Kitaj’s assistant and sorted him, transcribing the notes he wrote every morning at his favourite cafe – at the morning walk there he would habitually “talk” to Sandra, ask her for guidance – “after which he would return with yellow legal pads, notes, manifestos, an unfinished autobiography” before beginning to paint. Richard Morphet sees on this late work, during which Kitaj often renders himself Lear-like, a white beard in the middle of emptiness or chaos, a lonely figure jam-packed with longing, evidence of “terse, abbreviated, thrilling images, stuffed with awareness of himself”.

In 2004 he made a self-portrait during which he stares wickedly on the viewer, from under a baseball cap, an incarnation of Philip Roth’s leering Mickey Sabbath. The diary entry attached to that portrait reads: “mid Aug 05. Here i’m again, after a year or so, still alive, still an irritant. i’ve got Parkinson’s disease but it’s OK to this point. i like my cane, draw, study, write (in my Coffee Bean [cafe]) each day. The handiest thing about Parkinson’s is my addiction to chocolate fudge sundaes. The worst thing is the medicine. So i do not take it, which drives my neurologists at UCLA nuts. Parkinson’s has no cure. I give myself five years with ‘luck’.”

The painting is included inside the Jewish Museum show, which demands if not rehabilitation of Kitaj’s work – he hasn’t ever disappeared from view – then certainly reappraisal. Morphet believes absolutely that he’s going to take his place alongside the luminaries of the London group: “Freud, Bacon, Auerbach, he certainly belongs in that company.” Kitaj would, doubtless, were compelled to understand if future critics would concur – and maybe amused to notice that his own tormentors could have been careful of what they wished for: in the event that they thought his work was self-absorbed, what were they to do with the generation of Tracey Emin

MJ Long spoke to Kitaj every week or so before his suicide, and recalls how he seemed more depressed than ever by his growing frailty, the debilitations of Parkinson’s, and suggesting he was finding it difficult to color. “It was an awful solution to die, and particularly to grasp that Max would find him,” she says. “But he certainly don’t have desired to go on if he couldn’t work.” Among Kitaj’s last diary entries was one that read “Failure, failure as always”. These new, judicious exhibitions, though, may yet tell other stories.

In a blog in regards to the primary sector’s creative curriculum, assistant headteacher, Adam Webster claimed that innovative approaches to teaching is likely one of the finest tips on how to motivate students.

He writes: “Children desire to learn, but they wish to be engaged too. They decline to be straight-jacketed, shoe-horned, or some other such analogy, into learning in a single particular way, and that they don’t need to be told because there is a test on the end of it (until they get to the purpose where we’ve got taught them that truly that’s the principal reason to benefit anything).”

While numerous readers support an artistic approach, not everyone at the comment thread agreed together with his concept that students like to learn.

Take amateurdramatic, who said: “Children wish to learn That’s a really contentious statement. i’d say maybe 50%. I believe creativity and provoking students and promoting independent learning; however, recent studies have shown that really what makes students successful and inventive is a culture of desirous to learn. Something that is sadly lacking within the UK.”

But is all of it all the way down to the scholars hawtdawg suggested the system can be in charge for apathetic learners, posing the question: “Is it a culture of not eager to learn or a culture of not desirous to study to the test”

So, is it the curriculum it’s putting children off

“I definitely believe there’s a mis-match between what the kids need and what the curriculum delivers,” added amateurdramatic, who went directly to highlight a contemporary study of education the world over which found that a student’s educational life likelihood is most influenced by their attitude to learning and dealing.

But what do you believe How can teachers and schools motivate children to benefit Is the curriculum stifling a keenness for learning Share your thoughts within the comments below.

This content is delivered to you by Guardian Professional. To get articles direct in your inbox, and to access thousands of free resources, sign on to the Guardian Teacher Network here. Searching for your next role See our Guardian jobs for schools site for thousands of the most recent teaching, leadership and support jobs

News thon the skeleton found under a Leicester car park is Richard III has shone a beaming spotlight on England’s last Plantagenet king, killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. So seize the day and harness that enthusiasm within the history classroom and beyond using these news stories, multimedia, teaching resources and recommended websites.

From the the Guardian

Richard III bones found beneath Leicester – video
DNA tests have confirmed that human remains found beneath Grey Friars car park in Leicester belong to Richard II, on this video archaeologists and experts reveal the fantastic discovery.

Richard III skeleton revealed – because it happened
Follow the Richard III discovery because it happened during this live blog that tracks the announcements made on 4 February 2013. There’s some fascinating commentary, links, photos here. Also find Maeve Kennedy’s news report.

It’s like Richard III desired to be found
Screenwriter Philippa Langley, proud Ricardian and creator of the Searching for Richard project, explains her lifelong passion for the monarch.

Richard III’s face reconstructed interactive
Click in the course of the interactive to look how Richard III looked and the way he compares with the final of his line.

King Richard III’s face recreated from skull – video
The facial reconstruction relies on detailed scans of the skull found under the gray Friars council car park in Leicester, now confirmed to be belonging to Richard III who was killed aged 32.

Richard III – a career in clips
The monarch’s most memorable screen portrayals are pulled together on this fascinating number of movies. From Laurence Olivier’s creepy interpretation which defined Richard as evil Crookback (the incredible “Now’s the winter of our discontent…” speech starts eight minutes in) to Ian McKellen’s interpretation of Richard as a fascist.

Why the princes inside the tower are staying six feet under
It’s one of the crucial great mysteries of English history – did Richard III really murder the princes within the tower as his Tudor successors and naturally Shakespeare always alleged We may never discover as Church of britain refuses to permit forensic tests on bones in Westminster Abbey.

Richard III, scoliosis and me
Writer Julie Myerson felt a shiver of empathic pain when she saw the twisted spine of Richard III’s skeleton, being a fellow sufferer of scoliosis, the incapacity that could have caused Richard such a lot pain throughout his adult life.

On the Guardian Teacher Network

Richard III history lesson
Engrossing online lesson on Richard III, aimed toward 11 to fourteen year-olds but can also be tackled by older or younger pupils. By the top of the lesson students will understand the events which brought about Richard III becoming king, comprehend Henry Tudor’s claim to the throne and his subsequent victory over Richard III on the Battle of Bosworth Field. The lesson goes into the shortcoming of evidence that Richard III killed the little princes within the tower.

Archaeological findings pack
This is a great teacher resource pack from the Young Archaeologist’s Club with great ideas of ways to get children to essentially have a look at and record artefacts – including games, tips and worksheets. It is a great introduction ahead of exploring the archaeological dig that brought about the invention of Richard III.

How to make a tussy mussy
This would has been a thoughtful present for Richard III, a different herbal bag held to the nose to beat back plague and other nasties by guarding against bad smells (no germs in those days). Also see the Medieval cures role play.

Shakespearian insults
Poor Richard III was quite the victim of our beloved Bard. This lesson might help students know the way and why. And for inspiration on performing Shakespeare see this resource.

The better of the web

Richard III Society
This group had been working tirelessly since 1924 to secure a more balanced assessment of Richard III. Now the chicken has come home to roost, because the result of the gray Friars excavation surely lead us in direction of cheers to “Good King Richard” Fabulous site, packed packed with info and concepts.

Richard III: The King of the automobile Park
Find out all about C4’s documentary series at the skeleton found under a Leicester car park and watch episodes on 4oD.

University of Leicester
Info from the archaeological department chargeable for the gray Friars excavation revealing the wealth of evidence including radiocarbon dating, DNA and bone analysis and archaeological results confirming the identity of the last Plantagenet king who died greater than 500 years ago.

Bosworth battlefield
You can visit the positioning of the Battle of Bosworth and discover more about where Richard fought for his life and lost his crown. See real objects from the battle of 1485 including cannon balls and the Ricardian Boar Badge. The newest temporary exhibition Richard III: The Making of the parable just opened on 8 February, worth a glance.

Young Archaeologists’ Club
The youth wing of the Archaeology Society is packed filled with archaeology-related fun and games plus numerous info on digs and activities children can become involved in.

This content is delivered to you by Guardian Professional. To get articles direct in your inbox, and to access thousands of free resources, sign in to the Guardian Teacher Network here. Trying to find your next role See our Guardian jobs for schools site for thousands of the most recent teaching, leadership and support jobs

The virtuous Victorian twin sisters who acquired a distinct archive of medieval Jewish documents from Cairo could never have known the real nature of 1 tattered parchment: it’s a magic spell to influence a lady have sex with a guy – his part is to recite it while running round her room naked together with his trousers on his head, while she sleeps.

“Frankly by the point you’re running round her room together with your trousers in your head you’re two-thirds of how there,” curator Ben Outhwaite, who can read the text, observed.

Some might suspect it is also a spell to gather ancient academic rivals, the historic university libraries of Oxford and Cambridge, collaborating for the primary time to elevate £1.2m, and purchase the Lewis-Gibson Genizah archive of virtually 2,000 documents covering 1,000 years of Jewish and Middle East history.

Six years ago American Sarah Thomas became the non-Briton and the primary woman to go Oxford’s Bodleian library. When she called all her staff together and looked forward to co-operation with other academics including Cambridge, there has been an audible hiss. “a decent natured hiss, but a hiss nonetheless.”

Her opposite number at Cambridge, Ann Jarvis, is that institution’s first woman librarian and Irish. “We have now lots in common,” Jarvis said drily “We take to each other.”

The origins in Britain of the gathering, which came from the document store of an ancient synagogue in Cairo, lie inside the historic rivalry between the 2 institutions.

The Scottish twins Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, who spoke 12 languages, inherited a fortune and spent decades exploring the center East by boat, camel and taking walks , including cataloguing the library of St Catherine’s monastery within the Sinai desert.

They bought the primary Genizah documents from a bookdealer in Jerusalem, and alerted their Cambridge friend the coed Solomon Schechter, who hared off to Cairo determined to maintain the gathering out of the clutches of Oxford. He did so well that Cambridge already has 200,000 Genizah documents, and Oxford just 25,000, though together they form the largest collection on earth of the manuscripts.

The two libraries are actually launching their first joint fundraising entice buy greater than 1,700 documents from an identical source, including the earliest known Jewish engagement contract, an eyewitness account of the atrocities of the crusaders in Jerusalem, and a draft in his own messy handwriting of a commentary by the nice 12th-century Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides.

The sisters left their very own archive to the Westminster College in Cambridge, a theological and coaching college that is now selling to fund its development plans.

The spell for trousers on one’s head is among the many magic incantations: there’s, Outhwaite said, no record of it ever working.

On Tuesday, the Daily Mail heralded a work of pseudo-neuroscience so ridiculous that explaining it required inventing a brand new component to the brain – the “central lobe”. To not be outdone, the Guardian then upped the ante, publishing a stereotype-enforcing guide to addressing the gender imbalance in science.

Central to some of the tips offered to encourage girls to take an interest in maths are purported facts about gender differences in behaviour and the developing brain. As an instance, the writer argues that ladies are more aware of colour than boys, so parents of daughters – the objective audience of this piece – should “colour-code toys and blocks for sorting and patterning beginning at an early age”.

But does this argument face up to the evidence The character of gender differences in adult colour vision is controversial, with some peer-reviewed studies pointing to a feminine advantage, others to a male advantage, and yet others indicating no difference. This complexity is mirrored in pre-school children, with girls and boys each showing advantages under different conditions. It distorts current knowledge to claim that ladies are categorically more conscious of colour.

What in regards to the claim that “girls generally begin processing information on the brain’s left, or language, side” and therefore that women “deconstruct math concepts verbally” Existing studies do indicate a slight advantage for girls in acquiring language at a very young age (1-2 years), but – crucially – this difference has been shown to disappear by the age of six. A recent review even concluded that overall sex differences in language ability and language-related brain functions are “not readily identifiable”.

Bafflingly, the recommendations in the article that shouldn’t be specific to girls – such as encouraging puzzles and having children read out loud – are worded as if it is assumed that parents and daughters don’t already do them, or that girls are deficient in puzzle-making and recipe-reading.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a developmental neuroscientist at University College London, points out that finding reliable gender differences in the brain is complicated by individual differences: “There are a lot of girls who are better than boys at maths, for example, and a lot of boys who are better than girls at cooking. Therefore, these generalisations based on gender are unhelpful.”

Two recent books – Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender and Rebecca Jordan-Young’s Brain Storm – rigorously test many assumed sex differences, and find all of them lacking.

Even in cases where gender differences in behaviour or brain function can be shown, where is the evidence that such distinctions can be applied usefully to tailor learning How do we know, for example, that advice such as making “domestic scenario[s] more mathematic and scientific” wouldn’t apply equally to boys As Blakemore puts it, “Making mathematics relevant to everyday life problems (e.g. cooking, supermarket shopping) is a good idea when teaching all children, not just girls.”

Yet where the article touches on such evidence, it remains not only gender-specific, but gender-conformist: “Research shows that as girls get older they retain their mathematical and scientific abilities when applied to domestic scenarios.”

Equally surprising is the recommendation of authoritarian tactics, which tend to backfire when parenting. Never tell your child the answer to anything Make them play with things whether or not they want to Never give her space to express her fears and disappointments The author frames these recommendations as ways to overcome our gender-biased “nurture” rather than “nature”, but it is unclear what nurturing is in this disastrous manifesto.

Finding ways for girls to integrate interests in science and shopping doesn’t work if girls think this is the only way to engage with it. Girls are not a monolithic, pink princess-loving entity that responds uniformly to the same siren calls of colour, shopping and cooking. None of these was present when we were evolving; none of this is universal, hard-wired, or intuitive.

And if so many of these gender-conforming expectations are so harmful to boys’ and girls’ identities, why would we rely at them as a means through which to teach science Dean Burnett has brilliantly pointed out this error by turning the tables with a similar list of recommendations for boys.

We suggest an alternative to pseudoscientific list-making, and that is to identify and address structural inequality in our societies. There are two broad factors that drive our behaviours: our own individual agency, and the institutions around us. While it’s useful to think about ways we can draw more girls into science by integrating it with their existing interests, it is also limiting. For instance, most adult women who hit the glass ceiling are just told to work harder, to be more pro-active, to seek more mentorship, and this can feel exhausting, especially if she already feels like she is doing those things without results. This is because it’s hard to win on agency if you’re not also winning on institution.

The broader societal constraints that lead so few girls to consider themselves “science people” by middle school derive not from whether we push them into science, but what we value in girls as a culture. What gendered representations of science continue to exist in underperforming countries like the US and UK What messages can we send about how we value intelligence and knowledge, about how girls contribute to society And, what would it take to beat these obstacles to supply a more egalitarian learning environment

Just telling parents of daughters to force their children to become scientists, without providing the foundational support of institutional change (or no less than, some institutional navel-gazing), is telling parents to work alone and with the incorrect tools. We’d rather see a scientific option to combating social inequality than another list that tries to inform parents they’re doing something wrong.

Storytelling is fun. But storytelling without evidence, with a loose narrative barely tied consisting of pseudoscientific claims, can only misinform and mislead. Further, by keeping the focal point on claims of differences in how boys and girls learn, we’re missing the wider societal issues which are likely driving girls to underperform in some countries while soundly defeating boys in others. Let’s turn our attention to structural inequality and teach boys and girls that we value them for the infinite, amazing ways they could contribute their intellect, innovation, curiosity and cooperation to society.