The very rapid transformation of schools from environments dominated by men and boys to majority-female institutions has left many scratching their heads. Why are boys, despite higher test scores and better performance at the highest levels of the sciences and arts, more likely to fail, drop out or avoid school altogether? In feminist quarters there is a sense of triumph about the situation, but many mothers and concerned women cannot figure out what might be the problem. Men, unfortunately, seem largely to have given up trying or stopped caring about this serious problem — serious because male rejection of the institutions that provide a path to upward mobility will undoubtedly have destabilizing effects in the future.
Of course, I am among those who agree that higher education is oversold, and not really necessary for many of the people who attend. Perhaps up to half of the young men and women in college would do just as well – if not better – by choosing a trade. There is no reason a two-year degree following high school cannot provide the training necessary to enter the job market, and if high school itself did a better job of teaching the classics we would have graduates with a perfectly acceptable liberal arts education, with no need to take university classes to round them out.
However, what is really killing boys in school is not that it is forced on them so much as it is the culture surrounding school — higher education in particular. As we all know, school is largely about socializing children and youths so that they get along tolerably well. In a mixed gender environment, socializing is naturally very different from what it is in a gender segregated environment, and controlling one’s conduct becomes more of a priority. When boys and girls are in close proximity, boys must adjust their behavior in a number of ways. First, they must learn to be physically gentle, which is more difficult for young children than it may seem to us. Next, they must learn to be gentle in words and speech, and finally they must learn to repress their sexuality. To maintain harmony in mixed gender environments, all three are necessary, and they take a higher priority than actual hard learning.
So it appears that instead of the “three Rs,” we now have docility, flattery and restraint, none of which plays to male strengths. A number of boys, whether they are intelligent or not, will have a very difficult time following the new code of educational institutions, because it is not in their nature to repress their bodies or minds. Girls, on the other hand, are much better at acting nice and behaving “properly.” Unfortunately, this carries over into higher education, and has begun to pervade society as a whole.
In higher education, the stifling gag of political correctness evolved directly out of this enforced socialization that begins in grade school. The male student is exected to sit there and listen obediently while men in general are trashed and women portrayed as victims of nasty boys at every turn in life. If the male student speaks out or objects – even if on logically reasonable grounds – he is targeted as an example of what is wrong with men, and will be punished for doing so through lower grades. There is no defense for the male student against such actions. A boy whose inquisitive, honest male nature cannot be repressed may find school to be a very hostile place. He had best just learn to keep his mouth shut and soldier on without grumbling about the situation (yes, even grumbling will draw the jaundiced eye of a feminist professor).
Now, what we find in higher education is an environment dominated by a feminine sense of propriety to which men must learn to suborn their nature or, failing that, leave. Those young men who do well are in the minority, and only represent one side of a spectrum of male behavior, just as women who do well in math and science only represent one side of a spectrum of female accomplishment. The majority of young men find the environment of higher education to be unbearable, and so they avoid it.
What this all really comes down to is that men are by their nature radically honest — we don’t understand why we can’t tell a woman that she ought to lose a few pounds or ask her her age, we just know through social conditioning that we “can’t do that.” Unfortunately, searching for the truth in higher education has taken the back seat to the concerns of sensitivity and ego-boosting. Men are forced to flatter and stroke all around them or, if they can’t, to shut up. For many young men, this is nearly impossible, and for most it is too much to ask. Those who will do best are men with a natural ability to prevaricate and flatter, while those who may “get by” are those who are naturally quiet, although this problem must take quite a toll on the quiet boys, who must endure the entire charade in mute frustration.
The solution is a return to gender-segregated places in schools where boys can be their true selves. Remove the enforced repression and replace it with discipline, and boys will thrive. It cannot be emphasized enough that discipline is fundamentally different from repression. Discipline is what gets one through the tough job, and is readily understood when explained to boys of a certain level of intellectual maturity. Repression only gives boys and men a confused sense of hopelessness and alienates them. Learning can and should allow the full spectrum of male expression, but we may simply have to accept that this cannot be achieved in mixed-sex environments.
The above problem extends far beyond the realm of education, but to keep this post from getting too long I’ll save that discussion for another time.
3 responses so far ↓
1 AnonymousGhost // Apr 30, 2009 at 6:59 pm
I would hardly be the first to make the observation that the more things change, the more they stay the same. To our headstrong sisters who have had the notion of equality drummed into them from before the time they could even talk for themselves, I wonder how many of them are starting now to pause for thought, take a few deep breaths, look about them and realise that they are no more equal today than they have ever been. The only thing that has changed is outward appearance.
Over the last two or three years I have read numerous accounts of history from women purporting to support Feminism, and there is a common theme in their thinking that I have never seen them seriously challenge – and it is not that difficult to identify as logically unsound. Indeed, as soon as this line of thinking is pursued, the claims made by Feminism, both those alluding to its justice and to their creed’s historical progress, can no longer be sustained.
The fault lies in imagining that since the range of tasks and activities open to women has demonstrably changed from one period to another, then it follows that woman’s standing with regard to men has also altered. No such conclusion can be assured.
Take, for example, the fact that women can now vote, whereas at an earlier time, they could not. It is Feminist gospel that the winning of the vote was significant and that those women active in gaining it were champions of the women’s cause. Or as another example, once women were not allowed to own land, now they are. Until very recently, women were so rare in senior company and political positions that for all practical purposes, it was a man’s realm only. More germane to your posting – women were not admitted to universities, now they make up more than half the students. As you say, the entire education system is now geared toward feminine behaviours.
All of these ‘changes’ in the status of women might seem to the casual observer as evidence of woman’s advancement – but it isn’t necessarily so. I would argue that there is another principle at work that explains all of these apparent advances in woman’s status, but instead suggests their real status relative to men hasn’t changed at all. By way of illustration, look at a few of the common Feminist milestones of progress.
Firstly, the woman’s right to vote. At the time female suffrage was granted, universal suffrage for men in most countries had only been operating for a very short time, and in some countries not at all. Voting for leaders is in itself a very new innovation. Most societies preceding democracies had a chief/king figure who was served by a small body of men who were the authorities over all others, men and women alike. As primitive as we might like to think of this, even this form of civic organisation was advanced compared to its predecessors and had taken millenia to evolve.
Secondly, a woman’s right to own land. Not that long ago, land couldn’t be bought and sold. The standard method for acquiring land until very recently had been to seize it off someone else. The land belonged to you only for as long as you could defend it (any of the native people’s in the countries of today’s Anglosphere would be well aware of this). A very small number of men owned land because they were militarily able to fight and defend it. No-one else had a look in. The super-structure required to support the buying and selling of land today, like modern democracy, was thousands of years in the making.
The same is true for universities. There were no such things in ancient Greece or Rome – the closest thing to them were the academies that the wealthy and scholastic by nature pioneered. The first universities were built in Europe by the church, principally to train the clergy. Likewise for modern business – although commerce has gone on since well before the times of the Greeks, it has been a slow evolution and the businessmen of the past had none of the things we now take for granted – banking systems, convenient currencies and credit facilities, stable consistent law, insurance, etc.
Our history has been one of each of these remarkable institutions being hewn out of nothing and molded into what they are today after centuries of conflict, learning and evolution. In all these evolutions, those who pioneered were exposed to great danger and the loss of life and limb at a moment’s notice. In the shaping of governments, churches and universities, in the drawing up of borders and their defence, in the trial of new lines of commerce – and the discovery of the Americas was part of this endeavour – bold men exposed themselves to enormous risk and many suffered awful consequences for their efforts.
Everything that women now share in was once nothing. It became something through the ingenuity, perseverance, sweat and blood of men. Over time, men developed practices and protocols that made life easier for those that followed until eventually, women could do what only men had done before them. The job had become safe, the outcome reliably predictable. And once the women entered, the men were driven out.
More recently we have seen this same process at work. I can remember less than 15 years ago when the Internet was so young that nobody had heard of it except for a handful of enthusiastic men. Only 10 years ago, being a frequent Internet user was considered ‘geeky’ and numerous articles appeared in the main-stream media denouncing young men for this anti-social behaviour. Those infamous ‘studies’ showed that men were spending much more time on this new time-wasting technology than women were, but many reports were made of how when women used the net, they did so far more intelligently and practically than men. As soon as social networking and music appeared, women piled in and this flavour of commentary disappeared. Now it would be unthinkable to imply in any way that the Internet isn’t really for women.
So there it is. Eager, adventurous men create new endeavours hitherto unimaginable, and eventually shape them into something that can be safely tamed. Eventually, at some point women will see that they can now do it – they will demand that they do it, the men will cede it to them, and slowly move on. The process repeats. This is the dynamic of progress.
No theory is worth much if it doesn’t serve a predictive role, so what does this theory of the inequality of the sexes foresee for the future?
First up, it advises all young men seeking to make a living to avoid all industries in which women are making headway – they will eventually drive you out and the pay will drop. The women will ultimately be made redundant themselves by better technology. Go where the men are, and where those men are shunned by women (if women are calling these men ‘dweebs’, ‘dorks’ or ‘nerds’, it’s because they haven’t yet figured out what these men have already cottoned on to, so the women are sticking with other men that they still associate with safety and wealth by older standards of judgement). Current promising areas are robotics, nano-technology, gaming and emerging sports.
Secondly, it predicts the decline of the following into low-paid commoditised service industries: general practice of medicine, women’s health, law, established education, politics and traditional men’s sports.
As always, women are flocking to established safety, and pushing men into uncertainty and danger in the process. Just as we were sent off to be slaughtered when our shores were threatened, we are now being sent off to invent and develop new enterprises out of thin air, or perish. Once we’ve succeeded, and proceduralised these new undiscovered industries, the women will once again demand our places in them, kick us out and push us off into the void.
2 novaseeker // Apr 30, 2009 at 7:58 pm
Your post reflects many observations I’ve had as well, but twists them in a particularly interesting and insightful way, Welmer.
I think there’s a good bit of evidence that boys and girls actually learn differently. This begins in the early grades and kindergarten. Boys do better when they learn by doing, while girls tend to be better served by learning in a more “traditionally academic” way. Of course the boys change as they mature, and are quite capable of doing well in academic settings, but what is happening to our boys is that the enthusiasm for learning and satisfying their curiosity is drying up even in the early grades – as a result, they are falling behind the girls, and staying behind them in academic performance, because they begin, even in the early grades, to associate it with girls, and as something that doesn’t “fit” with themselves or other boys.
Coupled with this are the things you cite – which reinforce this. The social “code” of the classroom, as you say, is “docility, flattery and restraint”. Most of this works against boys, who are generally boisterous and rambunctious when compared to most girls, on average. The tendency in classrooms to enforce sitting still, restricting touching or physical contact between the kids (boys as young as 6 have been accused by zealous feminist teachers of sexual assault for playing tag with girls – heck when I was a boy we had a game called “RCK”, Run, Catch, and Kiss, that boys and girls would play with each other … my how the world has changed), even as early as pre-school “circle time”, just puts an outrageous expectation on boys to behave like girls do – they don’t and many of them can’t, and yet they are blamed for it, when in fact they are just being normal boys. And so they act out. They develop “discipline problems”, because the schools force them to behave in ways that are unnatural for boys. They begin to hate school, which they see as a restrictive prison that feels unnatural to them, rather than as an exciting, fun place where they do interesting things and learn by doing them – as is the normal way for boys. As you say, the code is forced on them, but they are given no outlets to express their natural “boyness” and are instead stuck in a classroom world that is molded around the sensibilities of girls.
As you quite rightly point out, the issue here is not discipline. Boys do need discipline. Being disciplined is a critical aspect to being a successful, mature man. But discipline is not repression of their natural boyness. If their natural energy, boisterousness and so in suppressed – which it often is in today’s schools – the results is that boys tune out from learning, and seek out other outlets for that young masculine energy. People are quick to blame video games, because many boys and young men escape into them to find a pseudo-masculine space. But the rise of video games is directly related to the decline of other kinds of masculine play. When I was a boy in the late 70s before entering HS in 1981, I went out “to play”. Almost every day. It was free play. We played games like “guns” or “storm the base” or “cops and robbers”. Sometimes we played sports together – not on organized teams, but simply pick up games of whiffle ball or street hockey or something like that. In doing this, several things happened to us: we burned off our excess energy (which is abundant in boys), we bonded with other young males by DOING things with them (the way we bond, whereas women tend to bond by talking with each other), and we had readily available activities that allowed us to behave in boyish/masculine ways with each other while being free and creative.
All of that has disappeared from our childhood culture. I hate to say it, but the childhood culture in general has become more feminized. When I was growing up, the girls would generally visit each other in their houses – more like the current institution of “play dates”. The boys had free play – with girls, too sometimes, but most often not. Now, our boys have no free play. There is no place for them to bond with other boys, or to act out on boyish/masculine behaviors. So, yes, now that we have cooped them up in their houses, or confined sports to organized leagues, they turn to video games to have some kind of outlet for masculinity. It is a troublesome outlet, because it is a pseudo-reality, and it detaches boys both from physical activity and physical reality (as it does with some young men as well) – which serves to drive them further away from being interested in their studies … but it’s a direct result of the feminization of childhood for boys, and the complete eradication of the kinds of free play that let boys thrive.
Your comments on higher education are also sound. I remember well how alienated I was in college in the 80s at the feminist nonsense that was being spouted at me, at the hatred of me just because of my race and sex. It was a wake-up call. I was strong enough intellectually to get through it all intact, but not everyone is.
I have been for some time a strong advocate of single sex education, and I think you are spot on to recommend it. I think boys and girls are very different, they learn differently, and they exist in different social worlds. I think if we want to do our best for our girls and boys alike, we would be best served by separating them. If we did that, we would also increase, I believe, the number of male teachers – a number which has dwindled to almost nothing today due to the general paranoia around having men around children in general, particularly female children. Boys need these men in their lives, especially at a time when so many of them have been separated from their fathers. We can expect, however, that women will not support this change, sadly. A recent article in The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/education/11gender.html) about this described the reaction of Kim Gandy, the head of NOW as saying: “separate classrooms reinforce gender stereotypes. “A boy who has never been beaten by a girl on an algebra test could have some major problems having a female supervisor,” she said.” Basically what she said was that we need to teach boys to accept that girls are simply smarter and better than they are, and that most of them will be subordinate to women in life in the near future – a kind of thinly veiled reference to a female supremacist future. Of course we can expect such nonsense from NOW – why would we expect that the leading feminist organization would care one whit about what is happening to boys in our schools. Yet, resistance is there, even though the idea is sound, for boys and girls alike. They are worried that changing the current regime in the schools would work against achievement by girls, but the obvious way around that is single sex education – yet they reject that, too, because essentially they want the schools to indoctrinate boys in feminist ideology, and in the idea that females are “their betters”, and they know that they will get much less of that in an all-boys’ school.
These are important issues, Welmer, and it’s good to see such clear thinking on them. As you say, this is the top of an iceberg of related issues. I think we should both focus on addressing some of these issues in our blogs, and bounce ideas around. It can only eventually help our young men and boys in the end.
3 Eman // May 14, 2009 at 12:02 am
Thread you might like – http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/013174.html
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