Regular reader Frederick often likes to send me “grist for the mill”, as it were, and last week sent me this Telegraph article: White working-class boys becoming an underclass. In one of those periodic reminders that the UK and America are very different indeed, the paper reports:
White teenagers are less likely to go to university than school-leavers from other ethnic groups - even with the same A-level results, according to official figures.
The gap is widest among male teenagers from poor backgrounds, raising fresh fears that working class boys are becoming the education “underclass” in England.
According to a Government report, just over one-in-20 white boys from poor homes goes on to university.
This compares to 66 per cent of Indian girls and 65 per cent of young women from Chinese families.
The full report is here, in a PDF file.
The causes of “male under-achievement” are many and complex, and this study does not concern itself much with them. But it does seem clear that whatever the matrix of influences that lead young men to underperform their female peers, feminism is unlikely to be one of them. The study notes that even among recent immigrant groups in Britain, groups in which it can be safely assumed that the Western model of liberal feminism has not yet been fully accepted, girls outperform boys:
Overall, 58 per cent of men from Indian backgrounds and 66 per cent of women go on to university. Among Chinese families, 60 per cent of boys and 65 per cent of women go to university.
Anti-feminist voices, under the guise of concern about the well-being of young men, suggest that contemporary pedagogy doesn’t meet the needs of boys, who aren’t suited to long periods of concentration. The underlying racism of that charge becomes apparent very quickly when one looks at the much-stronger performance of boys from, say, Indian or Chinese descent. For a very long time, white European men have questioned the masculinity of Asian men, seeing the latter as somehow more effeminate. When we posit the ability to concentrate and “do school well” as essentially a feminine trait, then bigotry and anti-feminism collude to explain why so many East and Southeast Asian lads are doing so much better than their white male counterparts. The implication is that Chinese and Indian males are “more like girls” than “real” (white) boys.
I do think we see a performance gap between boys and girls in many places in the Western world. Much of that gap is attributable, I think, to a kind of masculine anti-intellectualism that has developed in response to the relatively recent success of young women in school. In both British and American society we define masculinity as, first and foremost, the absence of feminine characteristics. “No sissy stuff” is the first rule of Western manhood. As long as girls were systematically excluded from education, boys showed great aptitude for intellectually rigorous activity. Once girls began to be admitted to the same schools as boys, and began to demostrate the same intellectual abilities, the life of the mind lost its exclusive masculine cachet.
Boys can sit still. Look at any group of young Marines on the parade ground; paying attention is something well within the range of masculine capabilities. “Boys can’t concentrate as well as girls” needs to go the way of “girls can’t understand science as well as boys”, discarded as a vile myth that shortchanges the full range of human potential with which each and every one of us is born.
The real problem, as I see it, is a culture of “masculine anti-intellectualism” that seems increasingly rife among certain sub-groups of young men. Young men, particularly in Britain perhaps young working-class white men, are more likely than their sisters to see little practical need for education. Too many of these young men under-estimate the value of education, and over-estimate their ability to “make do” on their own, perhaps by doing “a little of this, a little of that.” Many of these lads are filled with ambition, but with little sense of how vital formal education actually is to realizing that ambition. And too many of these young men are eager for a perverse kind of masculine distinctiveness with which to assuage their own anxieties. Dropping out of school to work gives them that masculine distinctiveness, particularly as school is no longer (as it once was) an exclusively male province.
Does everyone need a formal university education? Perhaps not. But I do lament the unwillingness of many boys to buckle down and work. Knowing that earlier generations of the be-penised and the be-Y-chromosomed were able to master complex material and learn by rote, I don’t accept that men as a rule can’t thrive as well as women in the contemporary educational model. The problem is a lack of strong male role models who value education, the problem is a culture that emphasizes to young men that anything of real importance lies in an arena from which women are largely excluded.
Hugo,
“Knowing that earlier generations of the be-penised and the be-Y-chromosomed were able to master complex material and learn by rote, I don’t accept that men as a rule can’t thrive as well as women in the contemporary educational model. The problem is a lack of strong male role models who value education, the problem is a culture that emphasizes to young men that anything of real importance lies in an arena from which women are largely excluded.”
I think you’re on to something here. Masculinity is logically defined to some extent by what’s not feminine. Young men are certainly the most vulnerable to asserting their masculinity as they are the most interested and the least able yet to mate but still want women (who are interested in masculinity/male also in part because it’s different from femininity/female) to see their peacock tail. If there’s nothing left in this world that only men can do, if there are no characteristics, nothing in the world, possibly outside of actual wars/fighting, then, clearly, this is - and will become more so - a very real problem.
Women can give birth, and as every anthropologist will tell you, that renders men somewhat less important in the natural order of things. Most indiginous cultures thus came up with some stuff that only men were allowed to do that was culturally as important as the giving birth bit was to the survival of the community.
There’s nothing left of it? There’s nothing left of it. We disenchanted the world and now men are only peripheral. We do need new role models for masculinity. We do need stuff that only men/males can do that define what’s masculine that’s socially beneficial.
Any ideas?
Apart from that - I tried to post my reply to your vegan philosophy post yesterday. The system said it was submitted, but it never appeared, and never said it was in moderation. Did it go through? If not, I’ll repost it.
Let’s remember that the British system (or for that matter, a lot of European postsecondary educational systems) are VERY DIFFERENT from the American system. Not everybody goes to university because university is restricted to academic study. This means that any “practical” subjects (with the exception of business and law) are simply not taught there; sometimes, even engineering is taught at so-called technical colleges that are not part of the academic university system. The job done in the U.S. by community colleges is done in Europe by vocational schools. In other words, you can’t really compare access to the British university system with access to the American university system, simply because both systems focus on vastly different areas of postsec education.
Agreed, Charlotte, except that we are seeing comparable rates of decline among male participation in virtually all areas of academic study in both countries — all the more interesting given the huge cultural differences between the educational philosophies in both systems.
Oh, and Sam, it didn’t end up in my spam folder — retry it with careful attention to the possibility of words that might get flagged.
SamSeaborn: I think you’re making some really interesting statements here about the nature of heterosexual desire. Your thesis, as I’ve understood it (feel free to correct me), is that there need to be some culturally defined, exclusively masculine domains in order to: a) make men necessary (since men can’t give birth) and b) keep men and women interesting to each other, based on the premise that straight people are attracted to the opposite sex primarily via the allure of the different.
On the first premise: I don’t see why men or women need to be specifically culturally “necessary” as men and women. I can give birth, yes — but most of my identity, my sense of myself as useful, comes from other things, like my relationships with friends and my family, and my talents and skills. I don’t feel like my relationship with my parents is in any diminished by the fact that the same relationship is open to my brother, nor is my ability to write less important because males are also permitted to write.
And about the second idea. I think this is an area where queer relationship models can be really useful for straight folks. As a lesbian, I feel sexual attraction and build healthy relationships with people without the cache of different sex roles. I don’t think this ability is unique to homo- and bisexual people — there is no reason why a man and woman can’t form a bond based on nothing more than mutual attraction and fondness, just two people connecting honestly. Other humans are plenty different enough from oneself to be attractive without different sex roles.
Women can give birth, and as every anthropologist will tell you, that renders men somewhat less important in the natural order of things.
If only the ability to get pregnant was something I could share with men. If it was a job I could hand over to my husband, I’d be all over that. I think I’m slighty an anti-mother in that I want a kid, but I have no patience with the idea of being pregnant. When women go on about the beauty of pregnancy and wanting to feel a baby growing in them, it’s like an alien language to me.
SamSeaborn, your post sort of implies that anything a woman can do, men find beneath them, or something that they don’t want any part of. Is there a need for something that only men can do? I understand that *I* might not understand this point of view, given that I have that built-in ability to bear children, but it seems to me that part of remedying what you’ve identified is to teach young men that things that women do are well-suited for men, too. This involves things like not making fun of male nurses (if only more men could be encouraged to consider nursing, maybe the nursing shortage could end).
In fact, nursing is a great example that proves that just because women dominate a field doesn’t mean that men aren’t needed there - there just aren’t enough nurses to go around when it’s limited to one gender. Men would be every bit as valued there as women. The message to give young boys in all activities should be, “Yeah, women do that, but society can’t function unless you participate, too.”
Sam, the last thing we need is more “stuff that only males can do.” We know that while maleness and femaleness are biological realities, “masculine” and “feminine” are cultural constructs. The idea that identity is defined and reinforced through difference is a disastrous one. Would we say “Whites need things that only whites can do?”
The answer lies in our willingness to love our sons as we love our daughters, with tenderness and affection as well as with rough-housing. The answer lies in our willingness to see our boys as being as precious and vulnerable as their sisters, and as capable of self-restraint and self-discipline. Our sons are suffering not from an absence of masculine role models but from an absence of role models who show how to be happy and open and gentle and at peace with oneself and the world while walking around with male plumbing.
“Strong male role model” does not equal “Traditonal masculine role model.” The former, to me, are those strong enough to break down the stereotypes of what men can and can’t do. What we need are men whose self-concept isn’t tied to their sense of “not-girlness.”
“Strong male role model” does not equal “Traditonal masculine role model.”
That’s a good distinction. In my mind a “strong man” and a “strong woman” share all the same desireable qualities. I’ve found myself thinking that some of the men I’ve dated simply aren’t strong men, and when I think about it more, the “unmanly” behavior they exhibited are things I wouldn’t tolerate in a woman either - it’s just weak character overall, not anything gender-specific.
It would be very valuable to get rid of the idea that the stereotypical female qualities that we admire are, in fact, “female” and instead are just “admirable.” A man who can communicate and talk about what he’s feeling - that’s not feminine, that’s just essential to any healthy relationship. A woman who’s incapable of communicating and holds all her feelings inside isn’t suddenly “manly” - she’s just not going to have much luck forming bonds with other people.
Actually, Hugo, we don’t know that masculine and feminine are cultural constructs. We are required to pretend to believe it in certain classes or risk failing.
In other classes, having to do with real science, it’s different.
One of the reasons men are not going to college is that college is not as necessary for men who can get into (in several senses) physical trades.
I once visited a laborers’ union hall and, while waiting for my appointment, perused the posters on the walls. They were advertisements for classes on various kinds of machinery. Pumps, generators, compressors, air hammers, all the kind of thing which takes brains and concentration to learn, which will turn around and bite you if you don’t concentrate every mortal minute. And not bad money to start. The future might look like eventually owning your own business.
How much are you paying the guys to fix your plumbing? Last time a guy came out, we discussed how he and his daughter ride both western and dressage. Own their own horses, they do, and the land to go with it.
Look at major corporations advertising for new hires. They want a college degree and you start out in sales. Not a lot of people think that’s a good idea.
If boys and girls equally can sit still and concentrate from the earliest years, why are so many boys being medicated into passivity? Are they being ruined by the patriarchy by the ripe old age of six?
A coworker of mine, who is a male nurse in the Army Reserves, said that he stopped working as a nurse in the civilian sphere due to the prejudice against male nurses. Most men will tolerate intimate medical care from a male nurse, even though most prefer a female nurse. Most women will ask for a female nurse when told that a male nurse will be caring for them.
Head nurses wanting to keep patients calm and happy, reassign the male nurses from providing the nursing care. What ends up happening is that the male nurses end up being assigned mostly tasks requiring physical strength (lifting patients, dealing with drunks, etc.) and do not get assigned the tasks that utilize their medical knowledge and their caring skills.
Doing a quick Google search, I notice there has been a lot of research done by feminist on the shortage of male nurses due to prejudice.
Hugo, your attribution of the different academic performances of white British boys versus students of Chinese and Indian descent to a racist/sexist stereotype is a straw man. Frankly, I’d not heard it before (though admittedly I may just not have been in a place to hear it, I don’t doubt that it may be one factor). It leaves out potential differences between those groups other than their exposure to stereotypes, such as if there is something inherently different in the case of immigrant families in general or diaspora immigrant families in particular that promotes upward mobility through educational attainment; or in the selection of immigrants on the part of national immigration authorities, to cite two possibilities. The US experience with successful and high-achieving immigrants over the last century (most of whom were not Asian over the whole course of that period) might be revealing. And nonetheless, as you pointed out, whatever the cause, even the Chinese and Indian British students still show a significant difference in matriculation rates between girls and boys.
On the subject of your example about Marines and their training (appreciate the shout-out, if that’s what it was), as long as we’re talking about standards of pedagogy (or androgogy as such), that example, which I assume that you offer as a successful model for instruction of young men, suggests a very different model of training and instruction than is practiced in contemporary education. There’s a standard of discipline, both from the chain of command and from fellow Marines, and a totality that far exceeds anything that would be countenanced in education. The positive role model is assumed, as leadership in the Marine Corps is always held to be “by example” and promotions and assignment of leadership billets is determined in the largest measure by that standard. While a good deal of Marine life is standing or sitting still waiting for something to happen, it’s counterbalanced by much important that is not. I’m not expecting to see any confidence courses, full-contact martial arts testing, or squad-level immediate action drills on the schoolyard anytime soon. And all of this occurs in the context of a service that is 93% male, and in which recruit training is completely sex-segregated. Even with that, when it comes to classroom instruction, junior Marines still often enough have a rough time staying awake (granted this is often as much due to physical rigors and sleep-deprivation as anything), enough so that there’s a common vulgar expression describing such Marines’ nodding off, which I won’t repeat, but that you can find in this Wikipedia entry under the B’s.
As to your conclusions, on the question of role models, I agree with you. Of course, the question is, from whence will they come? I’m not expecting to see any fall from the sky or sprout from the ground anytime soon. Unless I’m wrong, that would mean that something would have to be done to promote their existence.
As to the second conclusion, the problem of “a culture that emphasizes to young men that anything of real importance lies in an arena from which women are largely excluded”, putting the problem in that way makes for an extreme case. The question could be asked in a lesser form: if it is the case that boys and young men, for whatever reason, will tend to be engaged by and attracted to pursuits that offer them a distinctive place and opportunity to excel specifically in relation to their masculinity. Most people tend to be attracted to pursuits that fit their temperaments and abilities, and which offers them potential for distinctive contribution and social identification (and for those of you who want to raise the case of some males or females not fitting conventional gender expectations, go read this , and realize that I’m not talking about the case of each and every person on the earth). Whether this simply is a problem of cultural messages or is something at least somewhat innate I consider to be an open question, whatever shibboleths others may subscribe to. In any case, the argument for more male role models at least suggests the significance of distinctive identification based on gender, one that, if we really are all products of culture and infinitely teachable, shouldn’t matter in the slightest over the long run (you could change the culture and not have to worry about who the role models are at all).
I do realize that number of men that had been prejudiced against being nurses (or elementary school teachers) is significantly smaller than the number of women that had been prejudiced against being doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientist, and pharmasist. I only brought it up to explain that there was more than “being made fun of” that was causing a shortage of men in nursing.
Just came across the posts on nursing. I’ve wondered if the dearth of male nurses isn’t caused by anything so much as the title “nurse”, which has as one of its other meanings (and I think it’s original meaning, though I’m not sure) a specifically female role (as a wet nurse, or even a dry nurse). I wouldn’t like a job with that title myself. Would things improve if we changed the name, perhaps, to something like “medical assistant”, or “medic”, or something?
B, “Is there a need for something that only men can do? I understand that *I* might not understand this point of view, given that I have that built-in ability to bear children, but it seems to me that part of remedying what you’ve identified is to teach young men that things that women do are well-suited for men, too.” That’s a very interesting question. Speaking only for myself here, I would find rather dismaying and disheartening the idea that a distinctive part of my identity holds no broader social significance whatsoever, and leaves me as nothing more than a perfectly interchangeable part of an undifferentiated and homogeneous social mass. I don’t know if that’s common, but I suspected in a reply to an earlier post that part of the lack of interest and enthusiasm that some late teens and early twentysomethings feel towards higher education, which seems to affect young men more than young women, comes out of the modern absence of attractive alternatives to that path and an unwillingness to live what often appears at that point to be the “Office Space” or “Dilbert” model of an anonymous white-collar worker ant. (It might be noted that worker ants are all female, though the position of male hymenopterans as drones whose sole function in their short lives is reproduction is not terribly appealing either).
I am all in favor of young people going to learn a trade and doing well at it. Both boys and girls could do well to learn plumbing and dry-walling and other skilled trades; it’s unlikely that they will be outsourced as a consequence. I’m proud that the community colleges offer the vocational education that they do.
I don’t think we’re all interchangeable. Acknowledging difference is not the same as acknowledging that those differences have ultimate significance. For example, Barack Obama’s blackneess has tremendous importance culturally to many people. His blackness doesn’t have a significant impact on his capacity to be a president, but it is not incidental to his ability to serve as a role model to young people of African ancestry. Similarly, my maleness doesn’t make me a more or less competent professor, but it does mean that I can serve as a role model for young males who may, for whatever reason, need to see a man in this profession.
Anti-intellectualism is a rampant force in the US and the cause of many of our problems as a country. what you are missing is that you are assuming that woman are less anti-intellectual then men. look at the percentage of people who don’t believe in evolution or believe in horoscopes,esp, psychic’s, etc. being anti-intellectual is far more then a male/female issue.
when i was in grad school, 10 or so years ago i read a lot of research on culture and education. immigrant groups performance tends to fall to level of “average” white students by the second and third generations.
belief in education and the desire to attain some is deeply rooted in class as well as culture. you are making to stark a difference between what is seen as male and female which is also related to regional culture. some men are taking a much interest in traditional female roles such as parenting or going into fields such as nursing. so it is a sub-group of men who are avoiding education.
Would that there had ever been (since the 18th Century, anyway) a time when the life of the mind was considered a suitable life for a “manly man” in the Anglo-American cultural complex, ouside a miniscule subculture of aesthetes and academics. Seriusly, Hugo. I’m as sick as you are of the incessant whining about boys’ underperformance, but does anyone - *anyone* - doubt that if a National Merit Scholarship resulted in the same parents-flushed-with-pride, giddy-cheering-peers and general social cachet as, say, a good pass-interception, there would be any academic underperformance by *anybody?
Hell, I know it’s just personal anecdote, but effete bookworm that I was and am, I was personally ready to chuck it all to go work in a chicken-rendering plant for $10 an hour at 17 (I didn’t) rather than persist in the pointlessness of gaining useless credentials that leave me, 35 years and a master’s degree later, managing the most erudite liquor store in Austin. Doubt very much if I’d've been better off.
Oh, and don’t let’s confuse training/indoc with education.
Except that it’s also defined as better than feminine and tainted if it resembles the feminine. Think about how our culture approves of women taking on traditionally male jobs, male names, male clothes–but the reverse is demeaning and ridiculous to men. It’s not symmetrical.
On the tired old trope of those boys who can’t sit still, the ‘failure of boys’ is supposedly a new trend. What, were six-year-old boys so much more passive and docile fifty years ago? The argument that schools are constructed to oppress energetic boys sells books for Regnery Press, I suppose, but it utterly fails to explain why too-energetic-to-learn hasn’t always been true, particularly before the age of Ritalin.
I thought it was women who were supposed to be anti-intellectualized. The whole “Barbie says ‘Math is hard’” schtick.
Could it be the George W. Bush/Forest Gump “Stupid is as stupid…I mean, stupid people do things that aren’t very intelligent with a box of chocolates” routine has made intelligence anathema to both sexes?
Daisy,
your version of my thoughts is better worded than my own. At least I seem to have managed to get my point across.
“On the first premise: I don’t see why men or women need to be specifically culturally “necessary” as men and women. … most of my identity, my sense of myself as useful, comes from other things.”
I agree that in modern society, life has a lot more to offer to find individual meaning than at any other point of the human phylogenesis. Others may disagree, I believe that. Still, abstracting from this, reproduction clearly is a major point when it comes to the dvelopment of social institutions - otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about this, would we? So if there is an imbalance because one part of humanity is more important than other in this respect I think that is a rather important issue. Men aren’t needed as hunters, men aren’t needed as providers of security (which may well be the origin of the pair-bond as the “social core”), lacking Most men aren’t necessary for reproduction - the sperm/ovary ratio is pretty obvious in this respect. Now I’m not suggesting that most women will immediately stop looking for a paired relationship male partner because the specifically male functions in society are no longer required, but…
here’s a wonderful thread at a feminist blog that I once found that deals with this particular issue - take eg. comments #26, #44, and #59 for a good elaboration of the big BUT - I’m quoting -
http://www.reclusiveleftist.com/2006/05/07/the-origin-of-male-dominance
“But. But (and you know there was one coming), it’s still subtly discombobulating, the sneaking suspicion that this is on the sufference of women, and that one is, to put it most charitably, a luxury good. That males are somehow, in this, fundamentally deficient and expendable, in that they require close association with a woman and her body in order to experience the full range of humanity.”
“And about the second idea. I think this is an area where queer relationship models can be really useful for straight folks. As a lesbian, I feel sexual attraction and build healthy relationships with people without the cache of different sex roles.”
Well, I don’t know, to be honest. Maybe the meaning of “homo” and “hetero” can illuminate this point a little. What are we attracted to sexually anyway? Some people have a think for shoes. Am I attracted to a particular woman because of the female way she acts or just because I like her breasts or shoulders? Are women attracted to males or to men? I think it’s a nice distinction analytically, but usually the two still go together.
So I think roles are crucial, but I can’t say I know. Speaking of gay examples, I remember a post by Hugo in which he described (hope that’s correct) butch lesbian chivalry as a way to celebrate the feminie performance of their partner. So maybe opposites do attract there as well, at least partly.
“SamSeaborn, your post sort of implies that anything a woman can do, men find beneath them, or something that they don’t want any part of.”
That’s not my intention - my intention was - as I think is best explained by the comments I mentioned above - that women have something meaningful *only* women can do, while there seems to be nothing left for men.
“but it seems to me that part of remedying what you’ve identified is to teach young men that things that women do are well-suited for men, too. This involves things like not making fun of male nurses”.
Yeah, sure, I’m all for that. But that’s not what I meant, maybe my reply to Daisy is also a reply to this.
Hugo,
Sam, the last thing we need is more “stuff that only males can do.”
I disagree.
“We know that while maleness and femaleness are biological realities, “masculine” and “feminine” are cultural constructs. The idea that identity is defined and reinforced through difference is a disastrous one. Would we say “Whites need things that only whites can do?””
Well, I’m sorry, identities usually are created through the recognition of difference. The European public was unified more than anything by its opposition to the war in Iraq. You may not like that, fair enough, but difference is a part of identity, as identity always implies knowing what one IS and that implies what one ISN’T. We all have intersectional identities, so there’s not just one dimension of identity and some parts of identity are less salient today as they were before. Saying we don’t need masculinity and feminity as identity giving devices is actually denying them the importance they are usually credited with by proponents “nurture only” theories. Saying we don’t need them implies that biological differences will be sufficient to help people create their sexual identities.
“Strong male role model” does not equal “Traditonal masculine role model.” The former, to me, are those strong enough to break down the stereotypes of what men can and can’t do. What we need are men whose self-concept isn’t tied to their sense of “not-girlness.”
Where did I say traditional masculine role model??? What we need is a role model that helps men succeed in a different world. We need to define what masculinity is in this world. We need to see if we can give human males something that makes them unique as MEN because the WOMEN do have that unique ability.
Rob,
I didn’t find math difficult, especially when I found professors who believed in my abilities and who were also willing to help or assist me when I asked for help. There were many who did not believe in me based solely upon my outward appearance and they let me know through offering unsolicited comments. What I found far more difficult to overcome where oppressive labels and attitudes, especially from people who had power and influence in my life. Sadly, many of these people were women. Sometimes children and adults will live up to other’s labels and negative stereotypes, i.e. “she’s too feminine,” etc.
Intelligent people can lack emotional intelligence–that is to say that one can have a high IQ and be well read, in specific subjects, but lack emotional intelligence, which I believe can greately hinder their success in life and their career, etc. If someone lacks common sense and problem-solving abilities, it is doubtful that they will obtain it through education and schooling, especially if the foundation set by their parents is missing in their formative years. I believe someone else pointed out that weak character overall is not gender-specific.
Hugo,
You may also want to consider the feminization of poverty and as suggested earlier the hightly classist history of Britian. I don’t mean to suggest that U.S. does not have such a history, but that perhaps classism in Britain has been magnifed give history and culture. The film This is England which examines the topics of race class and masulinity in the U.K. may shed some more light on this issue.
Also another issues that seems important to consider is the burden that the construct of masulity presents to men in our society. Spesifically I mean that to be faced with the task of maintaining controll over the phallus, or keeping a stoic dispostion is oppressive. I don’t mean to suggest that men suffer oppression because of the expectaions of their socal role, while women have it easy because they aren’t expected to always be in control or are allowed to show most of their emotions, but that we must always remember that we are all oppressors and that we are all oppressed.
Lastly, while I agree, Hugo, that many young may lack positive non-gender conformist role modles, it seems that more opportunites need to be provided for men to examine their own gender constrution. I know that most of my gender studies classes are filled with women and is seems that the men who do come rarely feel confortable sharing in class. Perhaps more masculity workshops just for men could help this situation.
Poverty is feminized for a number of reasons. One is that a woman who has a baby without being married is pretty much guaranteed to be poor. Men, as has been noted, do not have babies.
The idea that it is necessary to sit behind a desk from age six to age twenty-two in order to be succesful and respectable is brand new. Probably since WW II. My father, who graduated in 1943–great year to graduate–always said a degree shows prospective employers you’re trainable. Period. My education has been far more important to me as a citizen than in my vocation. Ditto my father. Our tech guy has a degree in history from a top-tier university. Claims he hasn’t cracked a history book since he graduated about fifteen years ago. Ruined him, it appears they did.
When you think about how kids have been raised and taught for the last million years, the success, such as it is, of the current education model is astonishing. I don’t see it’s going to get better.
“I’m as sick as you are of the incessant whining about boys’ underperformance, but does anyone - *anyone* - doubt that if a National Merit Scholarship resulted in the same parents-flushed-with-pride, giddy-cheering-peers and general social cachet as, say, a good pass-interception, there would be any academic underperformance by *anybody?”
I doubt it. There would still be academic underperformance, like there is still athletic underperformance with all that public cheering going on. Look at how many more children are out of shape now compared to the past. Just like it takes a lot of dedication, hard work, and natural aptitude to be the “star athlete” that makes that pass interception to win the high school football game; it takes a lot of work to become a National Merit Scholar. My youngest brother was a National Merit Scholar and he put a lot of work and time into becoming one. He ended up getting a full scholarship to UF, where both our father and I had graduated. Our father died shortly after I enlisted in the Army, leaving our Mom to look after my two brothers, who were 6 and 12 at the time.
Using the GI Bill, my Dad was the first to go to college on both sides of the family. Our Mom did not know how to help my brothers with most of the coursework like my Dad did with me. My middle brother, Mike, dropped out of school at 15 and went to work; while my youngest brother, Jimmy, would pester me, when I was on leave, to teach him math and science several years ahead of what they were teaching him at school. When Jimmy would have trouble with concepts in the books that I told him to work through, he would call me for help to explain it to him. I would also encourage him to read the classics, which I had read in English. Our high school did not offer Latin, so Jimmy went to the trouble to teach himself Latin, so he could also read a lot of the classics in the original language. Jimmy put in as much effort in his studies as any of the top athletes did in their athletic endeavors.
I also believe in second chances. My brother, Mike, is a good example of that. About four years after dropping out of school, he enlisted in the Army. He got his GED while in and started taking some community college classes. After getting out, he got his finance degrees at UF and is now a professional working for the state.
I would argue that it is group identification itself that is problematic for the education of children. It doesn’t matter whether there are group differences in ability or talent; it only matters that the teacher understand each individual student’s strengths and weaknesses. A teacher who takes a group approach, whether feminist or anti-feminist or antidisestablishmentarian, is committing malpractice. Students are individuals.
I think it likely, for example, that boys as a group have better math skills than girls as a group, for whatever reason. But that opinion of mine was irrelevant when I was home-schooling my two children, and had a daughter who was strong in math and weak in language arts and a son who was weak in analytical thinking but strong on creative tasks. It was my job to build them up where they were weak and encourage their self-development where they were strong; it was not my job to try and make them “equal” or to try and teach them in the same fashion.
Collectivism is failure.
I think it likely, for example, that boys as a group have better math skills than girls as a group, for whatever reason.
I read an article in Time a while back that tackled this. I have no idea how valid it is, but the study showed that boys are better at learning math at a young age and girls are better at reading at that same age - BUT, over time it levels out, so that as children age, they eventually catch up to each other. The trick is that by the age of 12ish, if you’ve convinced yourself that you suck at something, you’re creating a powerful mental block that makes it really difficult to actually catch up. Not because girls can’t do math, but because so many girls convinced themselves that they can’t before the age where their brains caught up with boys’ (and vice versa when it comes to boys with reading).
Feel free to take that with as many grains of salt as you please, but I thought it was an interesting idea. The proponents of same-sex classrooms championed this study - they said that we need to teach boys and girls differently in order to help all genders learn equally. This, of course, would effectively cut out all individualism that acknowledges that it’s not as easy as dividing people down gender lines - you’d end up with some girls going, “Look, I get the math, I’m not being challenged” and boys saying the same thing in their reading classes.
I thought that those same-sex classroom proponents were being lazy, really. The answer SHOULD be that teachers would identify which students were lagging in an area and A) provide moral support and encouragment to prevent the child from deciding “I can’t do this” and B) tailoring assignments to each child’s strengths and weaknesses. From what I’ve heard about school systems today, this would never fly, but when I was in elementary school two decades ago, we were switching out of our regular classrooms for special math classes based on our abilities, and within each normal classroom, we were divided up into different reading groups and provided with different books appropriate for our reading levels. I wish I could tell you if there was an abundance of one gender in the “high level” groups, but it’s been too long.
I had that experience in my school years too, B. I didn’t notice any particular gender discrepancies.
http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/about/news_info/cbsenior/yr2004/CBS2004Report.pdf
Interestingly, boys have been doing better then girls on the SAT verbal and math scores for nearly 40 years