A while ago, I wrote a post opposing sexual apartheid as the solution proposed to ‘fix’ our educational system.
To recap: the ‘problem’ – as it is presented to us: there are too many female teachers, so the classrooms are geared towards ‘girl learning’ and the boys are falling by the wayside….and the proposed fix is to establish boy-only classrooms or schools, staffed preferably by male teachers, so ‘boy learning’ can take place.
On the surface of it, this sounds like a relatively reasonable solution. One of my wisest readers/commenters, CodeSlinger, thought it might be and said so in the comments. And, we also exchanged a few lively emails on the topic, too… because, frankly, I think segregating boys in schools will do more harm than good.
Don’t misunderstand me, please. I agree that our education system is broken and the way it is failing is more quickly and easily visible when one looks at the ‘statistics’ of our ‘boys’…. but I think these stats are just the tip of the proverbial ice-berg. I propose that ‘our boys’ are the ‘canaries in the mine‘ and that moving them into a ‘canary-only tunnel’ will not help things.
Where to begin….there are so many reasons!
For the sake of the discussion (and to keep this post at least somewhat focused), let’s put aside the facts that:
- Segregation of a specific segment of our population has never, ever, in human history, resulted in ‘a good thing’ (for the segregated segment, that is).
- Some ‘girls’ have more ‘male’ brains and way of thinking/learning than many ‘boys’, and vice versa – and these kids would really become victims in a segregated educational system: not just of not being able to learn in the manner presented, but also through social ostracism of ‘being like the other’ which is so different, it must be segregated. Again, boys would suffer greater damage from being considered ‘effeminate’ or ‘girlie-boys’ than girls would for being considered ‘tom-boys’.
- A segregated system focuses on ‘gender-specific’ subjects (the expert-designed plans even boast of it),necessarily leaving out others, which denies students opportunities bef0re they are even discovered…
- It hides the problem, instead of fixing it.
- It is unconstitutional! And just plain wrong, immoral and ( insert a strong derogatory word of your choice here)!
Instead of re-stating my position, I’d like to quote from an email I sent to ‘CodeSlinger’ when he – quite rightly – pointed out we must do SOMETHING to help ‘our boys’! I wrote:
The only thing that strikes me about this is that it makes you appear a little idealistic: do you think that the very same people who have so successfully and, I think, quite intentionally marginalized boys in the integrated classrooms – and it WILL be the SAME people who will be in charge of the segregated system – do you think they will not use the opportunity the segregated system will provide them to even further damage our sons?The goal is to marginalize anyone who would have the backbone to stand up against ‘the system’. If the boys are segregated, in the name of ‘helping them’, they will be given ‘physical activity’ to help them ‘burn off their energy’, but not the skills to become educated enough to be listened to if they speak out. It will be the beginning of creating an underclass of men: either too whipped to dare stand-up, or effectively indoctrinated to think they are not competent to pay attention to anything beyond sports. It’s their nature, you see….
Can you see what I mean?
Do you not see how ‘segregating’ boys would be an incredibly useful way to ‘weed out’ any who have the backbone to ‘stand up’ for ‘themselves’ or for what they think is ‘right’ – to more effectively marginalize the very people most likely to stand up to an oppressive authority? In a society which is completely reliant on listening to ‘experts’ and pays little heed to self-taught or self-educated individuals, or people who are not academics, this would prevent any such ‘independent voices’ from being given any credence.
There has already been talk that ‘boys’ would likely ‘benefit’ if, from early on, their education were geared towards ‘trades’, because ‘boys’ are ‘better’ with ‘hands-on’ learning than ‘book learning’…
Can you not see how this would be the first step to creating an underclass? As if my point needed further proof, one of CodeSlinger’s own links (in the comments) is to an article which sums up a Dr. Spence’s document, which he prepared for the Toronto school board to engineer these ‘all-boy-learning-environments’:
His vision document calls for a “less is more” approach to goal-setting …
How much more proof do we need that this is – whether by design or error – going to result in raising a generation of boys to be our society’s underclass?
Of course, there will be a group of boys who will be ‘protected’ from this psychological destruction: Muslim boys. They will be the only males in our society who will be insulated from this psychological destruction from kindergarten on – and they will be the only males who will dare to speak up and affect the evolution of our society. But, that is a different story…
Yes, our educational system is broken.
Yes, it is failing boys more than girls.
But we ought not presume that co-incidence implies causality – or, that change for the sake of change will be a good thing! We could make things much, much worse…. and that is a gamble we cannot afford to take. Not with our sons….
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 
November 10, 2009 at 08:08
I wholeheartedly agree with you. The education is system is broken and this is not the way to ‘fix’ it. However, why is it that boys struggle more than girls? Boys used to thrive in this form of education system before women were really equal members.
SOCIETY is failing boys. Not just schools. Feminism was great for girls, but now we need to re-educate boys how to be boys. They haven’t learned to live in this new world yet. I suspect that their fathers haven’t either.
Xanthippa says:
I agree with some of what you say – but not all.
‘Feminism’ is not ‘good’ for girls and women.
I freely concede that during its earliest stages, ‘feminism’ was a form of ‘equalis’ and have no arguments with it. No longer! ‘Feminism’ is not ‘equalism’ any more – it is another form of bigotry and as such it is destructive to the human psyche, male and female alike.
The reason why ‘boys’ are not doing well in school? They are taught self-hate! The ‘white-male-is-the-oppressor’ is being drummed into them from earliest times: any wonder that ‘while males’ don’t feel like achieving? And this is a ‘cultural marxism’ rant: since ‘feminism’ is a symptom of cultural marxism, we are mis-diagnosing the symptom and attempting to treat it instead of getting rid of the root cause.
What we must do is demand – yes, DEMAND – that teachers use many approaches to teaching while in the classroom. That they – the professional educators – must assess the different learning styles of ALL their students and teach accordingly.
And, of course, we must demand that they keep their politics out of our school systems. Which will be difficult, because from the teacher’s unions to the public servants controlling the school boards, our education system is so politicized, it might have to be scrapped altogether. Another symptom: compare the number of bureaucrats vs. teachers (in the classroom) in our public education system….guess whom there is more of!
November 13, 2009 at 16:02
[…] XANTHIPPA SAYS Segregating boys in schools will do more harm than good …. […]
November 16, 2009 at 00:40
Xanthippa:
You raise some very valid points. And as I mull them over, I’m led to consider a word that seems to be cropping up more and more these days…
Obscurantism (from the Latin obscurans, meaning darkening): a policy of deliberate opposition to enlightenment and the spread of knowledge.
But let me start by picking a little nit. Your quote from the Globe and Mail article could use a bit more context. The complete sentence reads:
“His [Spence’s] vision document calls for a ‘less is more’ approach to goal-setting, and lists just three overall priorities for the board: student achievement, parent and community engagement and financial stability.”
Well, what a relief! That seems so reasonable… provided his understanding of “student achievement” is the same as mine.
Sadly, I doubt that it is.
Especially when his context is probably defined by people like Benjamin Bloom, who describes his own 1956 book, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, as “a tool to classify the ways individuals are to act, think or feel as the result of participating in some unit of instruction.”
Read that again, and reflect on the fact that every treacher who stands in front of a class today had to be certified by people who think like that. Including, presumably, Chris Spence.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that we are being distracted with card tricks.
We should spend less effort examining the methods advocated by these people, and stay clearly focused on their goals. And to see those, it’s important to realize that this crisis of education is a world-wide crisis. It isn’t limited to Canada, or North America, or even Western Civilization. It is Global.
This realization was brought home to me when I stumbled across a small repository of papers by the famous Russian mathematician V. I. Arnol’d. In an article in the Russian newspaper, Izvestiya, 17 January 1998, he writes:
“The damage inflicted on Russia by the destruction of fundamental science which is taking place before our eyes can only be compared to the harm caused by the fires of the Inquisition to Spain and Western Civilization as a whole. … The ‘humanization’ of education being planned by the Russian Ministry of Education involves a drastic reduction of the mathematics curriculum and the transfer of the resulting extra class hours to new subjects such as macramé [for girls] and horse breeding [for boys]. … It seems that the Ministry is trying to bring our traditionally good mathematical education down to the level of the mathematical education in the U.S.”
Actually, I copied in the details of the different subjects for boys and girls from his address to the Vatican Pontifical Academy, 26 October 1998, in which he also says:
“The flourishing of mathematics in the last century is at present threatened by the general trend: the suppression of the science and of scientific education, by both society and by governments. The situation is similar to that of the history of the Hellenistic culture, destroyed by the Roman Empire, which was only interested in final results, those useful for military applications, navigation and architecture. The Americanization of the society in most countries, which one observes now, could lead to a similar annihilation of the science and the culture of the present day Humanity.”
So we see that both gender-neutral and gender-specific methods of “dumbing down” are now just as widely used in the Eastern Bloc as they are in the West. And please don’t mistake the repeated reference to Americanization for some kind of anti-American prejudice left over from the cold war. Remember that cultural Marxism is now the foremost American export to the rest of the world. Though it was a German invention, it was perfected at Columbia and Princeton, and is now packaged and sold to the world by Hollywood and Madison Avenue. Come to think of it, the same is true of modern principles of education.
Coincidence? I think not!
Now, the gender bias inherent in Western “progressive” education is very well summarized on this Illinois Loop web page on Gender Bias, but it’s only part of the picture. The Illinois Loop describes itself as “an informal group of about 200 parents, teachers, school board members and others, mostly in the suburbs around Chicago.” And this leads us to another important observation: if you want rational, sensible, practical discussion of education, you have to get it from private sources. The very last place you will ever get it is from the minions of the incestuously intertwined union of big government and big business.
Perhaps the best of the private sources is John Taylor Gatto, who was, several times, voted teacher of the year in New York City and New York State. In an article in Harper’s Magazine, September 2003, entitled Against School, he writes:
“What if there is no ‘problem’ with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would ‘leave no child behind?’ Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?”
Gatto goes on to document the creation of the American public school system, naming its architects and detailing their goals in their own words. For example:
“[Ellwood P.] Cubberley – who was dean of Stanford’s School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and [James Bryant] Conant’s friend and correspondent at Harvard – had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: ‘Our schools are … factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned …. And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.’
“It’s perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we’re upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don’t bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to ‘be careful what you say,’ even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.”
Gatto goes into even more detail in a speech given at the Vermont Homeschooling Conference, entitled A Short Angry History of American Forced Schooling, in which he writes:
“The real purpose of modern schooling was announced by the legendary sociologist Edward Roth in his manifesto of 1906 called Social Control. Your librarian will easily be able to get a copy of this book. In it Roth wrote, (I am quoting) ‘plans are underway to replace family, community and church with propaganda, mass-media and education [of course he meant schooling] … people are only little plastic lumps of dough.’
…
“Schools would serve as ‘instruments of managed evolution, establishing conditions for selective breeding before the masses take things into their own hands’ (now I quoted that from a published essay by Edward Thorndike at Columbia Teacher’s college in 1911).”
He informs us that, to ensure the success of these plans, between 1900 and 1920, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller alone spent more money on education than all government agencies combined! Therefore the public school system is designed to meet the needs of the plutocrats who financed it. And those goals have nothing to do with empowering our children to maximize their personal potentials. Quite the contrary. In short, says Gatto,
“School was a lie from the beginning and continues to be a lie. You hear a great deal of nonsense these days about the need of a high tech economy for a well educated people, but the truth staring you in the face is that it requires no such thing. As our economy is rationalized into automaticity, and globalization, it becomes more and more an interlocking set of subsystems coordinated centrally by mathematical formulae which simply can not accommodate different ways of thinking and knowing. Our profitable system demands radically incomplete customers and workers to make it go. Educated people are its enemies, and so is any nonpragmatic morality.”
So there you have it. I’ve only scratched the surface of Gatto’s articles. Do yourself a favour and read them both from beginning to end. They’re well worth it!
But that still leaves us with the question, what is a parent to do about it?
It seems to me that the system is too well funded and to solidly entrenched to be susceptible to change. So I agree with Gatto:
Mass forced schooling cannot be reformed. It can only be dismantled. And then, hopefully, rebuilt. Or not.
In the meantime, the only answer is to opt out of the public school system entirely. Remember their goals and don’t bother arguing about their methods. Make sure the details they’re trying to distract you with are irrelevant to you and your children. Let them organize their schools any way they like.
Just don’t send your children there!
Xanthippa says:
YES!!!
Let me give you a tiny little example which ‘proves’ your point about schools replacing science with social agenda:
I volunteer at a public school to which my son goes: my motives are multiple, one of them being to be fully aware of the atmosphere and environment at the school, so I can undo the damage later, at home…
A grade 5 teacher (many of his students knew me well from when I helped out in the ESL class for many years) knew of my background in Physics and, science ‘not being his strong suit’, asked me if I could do some practical demonstration (say, an afternoon demo) on the topic of ‘Conservation of Energy’. I was excited!
OK, I thought it would be hard to make hands-on demonstrations of conservation of Energy for the kids to try at their desks, but I figured that if I did a lot of fun little experiments which demonstrate the conservation of momentum (easy to prepare and execute and they REALLY make the concept clear to kids in a very ‘real’ way), I could then bridge it over into the whole Energy thing…. Yes, it’s fudging it a little, and I was aware of that, but I thought the fun factor would engage the kids enough to make them receptive to the deeper science I would then present to them.
So, having worked it out, written it up (estimating times for each setup, experiment, fun and explanation and so on) and was giving it to the teacher, he said: “Oh, no! THAT is not in the curriculum! The science curriculum in Grade 5 is to teach them how to conserve Energy by turning off extra lights, and so on!”
Needless to say, I did not get to do the little afternoon presentation on the conservation of momentum and energy….it taught science, not ideology!
BUT!!!!
I think there is an even deeper problem than that. Yes, all you say is true.
But, there is more – deeper burried, more insidiously destructive to our concept of ‘selves’ and how we relate to the world around us…..something none of the educators, present or past, have (to my highly limited knowledge) touched upon: HOW we organize the very classrooms – splitting kids up from an early age into ‘same-age-peer-groups’ – which prevents a healthy social growth of a child. I plan to rant on that soon…
November 17, 2009 at 19:00
Xanthippa:
Interesting that you should mention that, because it’s one of many interlocking factors that Gatto dissects in great detail. Here’s what his Harper’s article has to say about it:
“Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.”
And just in case one might be tempted to think this is all a big comedy of errors, Gatto shows where the architects of this house of horrors indict themselves with their own publications:
“… [the author of the 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, Alexander] Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book, Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years …”
So, once again, there you have it: proof positive that the damage done to our children is deliberate.
Think about it: David Farragut took command of a captured British warship at the age of 12. Fifty three years later, as an Admiral in the Civil War, at the age of 65, he gave the famous order, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” Why have such men become extinct?
Throughout human history, until quite recently, boys officially became men at the age of 13, but now they still think, feel and act like children at 30. What happened? In his Vermont speech, Gatto explains:
“There isn’t any way to grow up in school, school won’t let you. As I watched it happen, it takes three years to break a kid, three years confined to an environment of emotional neediness, songs, smiles, bright colours, cooperative games, these work much better than angry words and punishment. Constant supplication for attention creates a chemistry whose products are the characteristics of modern school children – whining, treachery, dishonesty, malice, cruelty and similar traits. … Ceaseless competition for attention in the dramatic fishbowl of the classroom, reliably delivers cowardly children.”
And that, of course, ties in to our discussion of John Dietsch.
Anyway, here, once again, are the links to Gatto’s articles:
Against School
A Short Angry History of American Forced Schooling
If you haven’t already read them, read them now!
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