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October 28, 2006
Experiments In Sexism
Says Kevin Drum, on single-sex public high schools:
As with so many issues in education, my first reaction is that experimentation is a good thing. Give it a try and see how it works. If it turns out as badly as Brad suggests, we can always kill it later.
I'm concerned that Brad Plumer is right, and that the goal of the experiment isn't going to be test scores going up or girls becoming scientists. What the authorities in some parts of Louisiana seem to want from single-sex education is character education designed to generate aggressive boys and meek, submissive girls. The Happy Feminist had the goods on this issue a while ago, when she described the theorizing behind some of their single-sex education proposals.
As Amanda said, "the guidelines are so ludicriously opposed to actually educating girls that they suggest that junior high school girls “learn” math by counting petals on flowers, while boys are being taught actual algebra."
47. Mr. Murphy explained that the approaches the Southside Junior High School would utilize were based on the work of Leonard Sax and Michael Gurian, two popular writers on gender differences...
58. In Why Gender Matters, Dr. Sax explains that because of sex differences in the brain, girls need real world applications to understand math, while boys naturally understand math theory. For instance, girls understand number theory better when they can count flower petals or segments of artichokes to make the theory concrete.
This part filled me with a special horror:
62. In Why Gender Matters, Dr. Sax explains that "anomalous males" -- boys who like to read, who don't enjoy competitive sports or rough-and-tumble play, and who don't have a lot of close male friends -- should be firmly disciplined, should spend as much time as possible with "normal males," and should be made to play competitive sports.
And so they will make high school an absolute hell for the smart nerdy boys who will write the software and develop the medicines of the future. Apart from the fact that I had a lot of close male friends with whom I played Magic a lot, I was more or less a paradigm "anomalous male." So was my friend Peter, now a physics grad student at MIT who has been awarded patents on photonic crystals. (I designed a really good blue-white Meekstone deck for him, I'll have you know.) The same for a lot of my male friends at Harvard, who are now populating the math, physics, and computer science graduate departments of the world. Plans like this would be a disaster for smart people of both genders.
Read Happy for more of this stuff. The idea of the states as laboratories in which you should conduct a bunch of experiments, from which wise leaders will pick the strategies that work and set aside the ones that don't, requires the leaders to be right about what counts as successful experiments. But if people out in the states see the perpetuation of ancient and terrible gender roles as a criterion of success, they may evaluate educational policies on that basis, and not on whether they turn out more capable students.
October 28, 2006 | Permalink
Comments
Plans like this would be a disaster for smart people of both genders.
There's little reason to believe that the Lousiana project is even remotely concerned with cultivating or encouraging smart people of either sex, or developing capable students except insofar as "capable" means "well-behaved drones." Traditionally, smart people are more likely to leave rural areas precisely because their high school years were hell for them, or stay and become embittered... there's a reason that the stereotypical small-town drunk is often remembered as the smartest kid in school, if you think about it.
Posted by: latts | Oct 28, 2006 1:38:43 PM
Dr. Sax explains that "anomalous males" -- boys who like to read, who don't enjoy competitive sports or rough-and-tumble play, and who don't have a lot of close male friends -- should be firmly disciplined, should spend as much time as possible with "normal males," and should be made to play competitive sports.
*jawdrop*
Over at Bradford Plumer's, I commented that I thought this plan sounded like 'Remedial Gender Roles 101', and now I know that that is precisely what it is.
Posted by: NBarnes | Oct 28, 2006 4:41:27 PM
I would sometimes like to cut Dixie off in a "federalism" experiment that would allow them to develop into sexist, superstitious barbarians.
Unfortunately, they make pretty decent soldiers.
Not Red and Blue, but Morlocks and Eloi.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Oct 28, 2006 5:23:08 PM
We really don't need that many soldiers. As long as we can tacnuke along the border, we're good to go. And with prevailing N, NW winds, that'll work.
Posted by: Barry | Oct 28, 2006 8:08:01 PM
Unfortunately, they make pretty decent soldiers.
Don't drink the southern Revisionist Kool-Aid. The south didn't lose despite having such brilliant generals and brave, gallant soldiers. They lost because their army was full of people stupid enough to think that owning another human being is a right guaranteed by God.
Posted by: Stephen | Oct 28, 2006 11:21:06 PM
what if the kid wants this option?
Posted by: jello | Oct 29, 2006 12:00:22 PM
They lost because their army was full of people stupid enough to think that owning another human being is a right guaranteed by God.
As an Ohio born, Union-loving Yankee, I can emphatically and comfortably say, "Stephen, that is the dumbest thing I have read in quie a while."
Good Lawd!!
Posted by: Keith G | Oct 29, 2006 12:27:12 PM
The idea of the states as laboratories in which you should conduct a bunch of experiments, from which wise leaders will pick the strategies that work and set aside the ones that don't, requires the leaders to be right about what counts as successful experiments.
In this case, it also assumes that children are appropriate guinea pigs and that those permanently scarred and brainwashed by such "experiments" are expendable. Even children are individuals whose rights are sacrosanct from government intrusion and hocus pocus.
Posted by: Dean | Oct 29, 2006 5:32:51 PM
Thanks, Keith G! What a helpful and informative comment. I especially like how you take care to explain yourself.
Southern soldiers were fighting for a "way of life" that was dead the whole world over. They were a mass of relatively poor whites, few who actually owned slaves, who fought for the interests of a privileged few. Whites that spent their days toiling in the cotton fields took up arms to protect their betters' use of slave labor because they believed that only blacks could stand the harsh conditions of the southern US climate.
There. Is that better? Or do you have another completely useless comment to add?
Posted by: Stephen | Oct 30, 2006 7:18:53 AM
Stephen, what do you see as the connection between what you're saying about southern whites and why they lost the war? I think the more usual analyses involve things like that they were outmanned and lacked the industrial/economic base to sustain the war. I've never heard an analysis based on the idea that they were stupid, or believed in slavery, or that they had less reason to be committed to their cause (if that's what you're getting at).
Posted by: Sanpete | Oct 30, 2006 12:29:41 PM
Stephen hates the South so much that he likes to attribute some 'justice' to the losing of the war rather than the actual facts.
Posted by: Fred Jones | Oct 30, 2006 1:42:48 PM
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