Macho Backlash

TAE honestly, succinctly praises women. Especially coming from a field like engineering, which is pointlessly dominated by men. Women are every bit as gifted mentally as men, and in some ways their unique traits, like their ability to invest more wisely than men, their ability to concentrate for longer periods than men, and their ability to multitask better than men all are very helpful traits for an engineer.

With more women graduating college than men in America, and the ratio of graduate students having distinctly swung to women, it is no wonder that more and more women are becoming industry leaders all over the place. TAE believes that by the time my daughter's generation (The Abstracted Daughter turns 3 next month) becomes productive members of society, the number of women in positions of influence will be great enough that the salary gap between men and women will either have disappeared...or flipped in favor of women.

And so TAE has to wonder: what will happen to boys? Early in my career as a blogger, I wrote an article for a friend arguing that elementary schools in America, strapped to No Child Left Behind, had become a very hostile place for little boys to grow up. Less mature than their female counterparts, little boys are forced to fight their nature.
Imagine an evolutionary biologist trying to swallow No Child Left Behind. Human males evolved, basically, to trot across open plains, chasing prey ruminants to exhaustion. Is it any surprise that little boys have a lot of energy, and that they have trouble sitting still? Their adolescence, purely in terms of evolution, is a time when they need to stretch their legs and prepare for a life of hunting. Sit them in the classroom for hours and hours, and recess becomes an even more precious commodity to them. Little girls, on the other hand, would need understandably less exercise to maintain emotional stability, given their adult purpose was less jogging, more walking. Less hunting, more gathering. Less long-distance travel, more long-term child care. Of course little girls succeed better in the classroom when recess is shortened or abolished; they didn't need recess to begin with. TAE remembers recess fondly: us little boys scampered about, running like mad, climbing trees, playing soccer or football, while the little girls stood in circles on the playground and gossiped.
Is it any surprise, armed with this information, that for every girl diagnosed with ADHD in America in the last ten years, there were two boys diagnosed? But I digress.

The point is that in 25 years, it may be us men forced to play the gender card and crying foul.

TAE suggests this problem could be circumvented completely if we started thinking less about equality and started thinking more about educating individuals. And lo and behold, the solution may have been thought up hundreds of years ago: single-gender schools. TAE wonders if in the future, we could realize that segregating classrooms based on gender might actually better educate our children, allowing teachers to specialize in one gender or another, daily schedules could be catered to the emotional and physical needs of that gender, and occasional "overlap time" would allow for genders to interact with one another, so that emotional bonds and key insights could be gained by children. Boys could have active, high-energy classrooms with plenty of time up and moving. Their classes could be more experiential, allowing them to immerse in learning in a way that allowed their frenetic nature to be exploited. Girls, on the other hand, could have calmer classrooms, with more verbal interplay.

TAE doesn't pretend to be a scholar in early childhood development. I may be way off here. But the vanilla, NCLB way that we are trying to educate all our children as though they were an army of clones really, really is failing. But don't worry, they're only America's future!


_