Reply #70: Whine: "And they'll only have babies and stay hooooome"

[Hekate]

The K-12 education system is actually wrapped pretty tightly around boys' developmental needs. (Please note I am speaking of children in the statistical aggregate; there are plenty of exceptions.)

Boys typically start out less verbal than girls, so lots and lots of time is earmarked for making sure they learn how to read, write, and spell competently in the early grades.

However, girls are considered defective for not catching on to math as rapidly or in the same manner as boys do. Requests to modify educational methods on their behalf are brushed aside as feminist demands that will only cost time and money.

Boys typically are more squirmy and antsy when it's time to sit still and listen, so lots of time is allotted to modifying their behavior. Girls are developmentally more able to sit quietly at an earlier age, but rather than being actively rewarded they are simply overlooked while the teacher deals with the boys.

Computer rooms get filled with enthusiastic, jostling boys. Is this because they are inherently more talented than girls, or could it have something to do with the type of learning games installed? Upon investigation, it turns out that the "default student" is male, so the programs are heavily weighted toward competitive and shoot-em-up games. Girls shine when equally intellectually challenging but more "nurturing" and co-operative programs are installed.

Women used to be excluded outright from colleges and universities or admitted in only token numbers, regardless of their academic attainments or potential. With the advent of affirmative action, they have caught up and are now overtaking young men in that regard, despite continuing discrimination (whether conscious or un-) in favor of young men.

And nooooow the backlash. Interesting thing about white males and affirmative action (because it's going to come back to that, isn't it?): in the University of California system, for instance, if all admissions were made entirely and blindly on "merit" it wouldn't be whites who would benefit, it would be Asian-Americans.

Whites who are trying to eliminate all affirmative action programs because of so-called quotas (there are no quotas; they are illegal) are actually making a not-so-subtle demand FOR quotas -- for themselves. The pie can't be divvied up "fairly" because all the pie belongs to them, the white males and their sons, and only secondarily to their daughters, and not at all to everyone else.

Yeah, I know I'm ranting by now. >rant off<

Hekate