yduras

I ran across this article on the del.icio.us popular page: How the Schools Shortchange Boys

I was expecting the usual neo-masculist whining about how letting icky gurls be involved in the adult world just ruins everything. And I wasn't wrong. The interesting thing is, much of what he pegs as wrong about the educational system is, in fact, wrong, if not for the reasons he projects. I think the author just has issues with women.

And some of it is just crazy. His first example of how "feminized" the schools are is that a boy was on a discipline list for demanding, during class "Why do we have to do this crap anyway?". Apparently, because the teacher who took offense was female, this is an example of the female insistence on docility oppressing the rational male impulse. I blinked. You mean to tell me, that a hundred years ago, back when everything was right in the world and women knew their place, a boy demanding that in the middle of class wouldn't have gone home with a black-and-blue backside? School classrooms have always been authoritarian places.

And I love this quote

Boys will pin you to the wall like a moth. They want a rational explanation for everything. If unconvinced by your reasons... or if you don't bother to offer any... they slouch contemptuously in their chairs, beat their pencils, or watch the squirrels outside the window. Two days before the paper is due, girls are handing in the finished product in neat vinyl folders with colorful clip-art title pages. It isn't until the boys notice this that the alarm sounds. "Hey, you never told us 'bout a paper! What paper?! I want to see my fucking counselor!"

This just cracks me up. The author attributes the objection to doing stupid things just because you're told to as a masculine trait. It may surprise my readers to discover that I, myself, am female. (I know! My demeanor is so overwhelmingly masculine, many people are surprised.) And yet, I clearly recall nearly failing a few classes in high school because I refused to waste my time on makework. I must secretly be a boy.

Although maybe I am still feminine after all, because I have little sympathy for the boy who mouthed off in class and was surprised to be punished, nor the hypothetical boys who could not be bothered to do assigned work and then complain to the counselor. The lesson here isn't "be a girl", it's "just because its stupid, doesn't mean it's not going to affect my grade." (This extends to the business world as well - how many of us have stupid job goals that nonetheless affect our evaluations and thus our payscale?) I screwed myself out of the National Honor Society with that sort of behavior, and while some of that was the fault of a lousy system, it was also a result of my decision not to play the game.

The author's next example is an educational seminar he had to take wherein they were told to make a lesson plan for a group of mixed ability students. The female teachers actually tried to make a lesson plan and the men stood around and complained it was stupid. The author claims:

The women, all dedicated teachers, understood this, too. But that wasn't the point. Treating people as equals was a social goal well worth pursuing. And we contentious boys were just too dumb to get it.

Maybe what the "contentious boys were too dumb to get" was not that it was a worthwhile assignment but that "just because grouping students that way is stupid doesn't mean that the administration won't give us classes made up that way, and we may as well have a tactic for dealing with it." Lots of things in life suck, and while blind acceptance won't make it suck less, neither will standing around and whining about it.

There is a grain of truth in the complaint about the whole "do it because you're told, not because it makes sense" thing in the schools. Where I differ is in the idea that this is there to make boys more like girls. It's there because they're trying to make everyone into obedient little automatons. If (and this is a big if) girl's respond better to that in the school environment, maybe that has less to do with girls being inherently docile, but the fact that girls get that instruction in other social environments, so at school its just more of the same.

Oh, and hey, I don't exist:

It’s here that the alphabet soup of supposed male dysfunctions begins. And make no mistake: while girls occasionally exhibit symptoms of male-related disorders in this world, females diagnosed with learning disabilities simply don't exist.

Glad to hear it, pal. Now that I don't have Attention Deficit anymore, my life will be tons easier. Thanks!

The article goes on to complain that too many students are places in special education for reasons that are too flimsy. And he's right. Our school system (and society in general) is far too quick to treat any deviation from the norm as a disease and to medicate and institutionalize rather than actually look at individual cases. One of my best friends in grade school was shoved into speech therapy class because the school did not know how to deal with ESL. Another (an excellent writer) was denied access to advanced English classes in high school because she tested too poorly in math. Both were female, despite the author's insistence that this sort of thing only happens to boys (and white boys at that).

This isn't a boys vs girl's battle - this is a forced conformity vs. the individual battle. We feminists didn't do this to you. Why in the world would the people who spent the last hundred years fighting tooth and nail for permission not to be docile little cogs want to impose the same thing onto our daughters and sons? We don't like being told to sit down and shut up any better than you do. Now what do you want to do about it?