I particularly love how commentators on this subject in the msm, both liberal and conservative, ascribe girls’ success in school to some bizarre idea that schools “cater” to girls’ “strengths” and that’s why they do better. “Boys don’t learn the same way, we need to change how we teach!” And I’m like holy crap, girls weren’t even educated en masse in the United States until the middle of the last century. It was all built for boys. Boys outnumbered girls in schools, especially any education past the age of sixteen, hugely. IT WAS ALL BUILT FOR THEM, not much has changed overall about American education since the late 1800s in terms of subject matter (not content), structure of classrooms, who is teaching even. Women dominated as teachers starting from the late 1800s– prior to that males dominated. You know, the dudes who built this system to cater to boys to begin with?
What happened was that girls came into the system and adjusted. And now, in spite of the fact studies show, time and time again, that even female teachers give boys preferential treatment, extra attention, and lots of leeway, boys are falling behind, in their own system, built for them. Yes, the world has changed a lot, and educations should too, but the failure of boys to keep up with girls probably has everything to do with girls being instilled with a sense of responsibility from babyhood, and being controlled in much the same way they were back in the last century, and boys have been instilled with more and more entitlement and a sense of ease– especially white boys, because these same observations don’t apply to Asian children in the same way, or to Black and Hispanic kids in the same way.
Another thing that has happened is whenever girls surpassed boys fifty years ago, they’d change the goalposts so boys could acheive higher, especially in math and the sciences. But in response, girls caught up. They dumbed down the goalposts in areas where girls did better, and I say “dumbed down” because essay writing, for example, used to be a very common testing procedure, but it isn’t anymore, because first grading those things is more time consuming and the system became more about churning out non-thinkers, but secondly because boys didn’t do well at essays and girls excelled. So they dumbed down tests in language and social studies. And yet boys did not catch up in response. And we started failing girls, because you’re supposed to stimulate and educate young minds, and when you dumb it down, well huh, suddenly girls aren’t doing as well as they used to. Funny, that.
I could rant about sexisim and education all day, but I’ll stop now.
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