How to make school better for boys.

jesset77 · 2021-10-05T02:31:01+00:00

My idea on the matter. Something that will fix both "boys fitting in at school" AND "women fitting into careers": stop treating humans like robots.

Robots/automatons/programs/computers are wonderful instruments. They are endlessly patient, they can do repetitive work without getting as easily tired or burned out as human beings, they can to a large extent simply be told what to do and they will do as they are told, and they require very little maintenance or downtime to remain in top condition.

This does not describe human beings, and it harms human beings (and their productivity.. by a lot!) to treat them that way.

Human beings are an unusually intelligent species of animal. We are more impatient than machines, ruled by hormonal drives with logic and reason as tacked on afterthoughts, and live entire complicated lives that the labor we produce represents only a tiny sliver of.

Yet humans can still do far more things than machines can do: such as creating new machines, maintaining them, being ultimately responsible for a given task being completed, creating information for consumption by other humans, companionship and care of other humans, imposing human values upon any given process, etc.

It is true that in modern society humans use machines as tools to get a lot of these jobs done, but said tools act as extensions of human capability.

One of our primary struggles is that powerful people would like to force human labor to act like machines, so that they get the best of both worlds: the increased patience and subservience of a machine with the increased creativity and responsibility of a human.

In school boys frequently have a harder time sitting still and paying attention for long periods of time than girls do, and this basically means that girls are more like patient machines in this context. In the workplace men are more likely to sacrifice everything about their personal life to ensure a stable income than women are, and are less likely to bail on a career due to starting a family, which just means that the men in this context are more willing to emulate machines.

Treating people like machines and putting machine-like expectations upon them is devastatingly harmful to everyone involved (even to the people in charge, little do they realize it) and unfortunately it frequently turns into a gender dispute due to contextual coincidence.

BloomingBrains · 2021-10-04T06:10:41+00:00

As much as I love CHS, I think this one thing she goes a bit too black and white on. Yes, generally speaking, boys and girls do have largely different interests. But not every person is typical of their sex. Take me for example. I am not competitive at all, and creating a competitive atmosphere in the classroom would have annoyed the hell out of me if anything and my grades probably would have suffered. I was quite into the literature assigned as well (it even made me want to major in it), so I'm curious what kind of reading lists she thinks would be more appealing to boys. (More stuff about war and violence and destruction or something? It's hard not to imagine she is stereotyping.) I also enjoyed things like reading quietly or studying something abstract as opposed to "hands on learning". Building something feels like a chore to me, and a lot more boring than studying how that thing works in a textbook. Again, maybe I'm an outlier, maybe not, but either way you can't just ignore the outliers. If you're going to physically segregate classes so that you can teach with different styles, then you'd have to permit some people to actually go with the opposite sex class, but then they aren't really boys and girls classes anymore, and you're just back to mixed gender classes in the first place.

What would be ideal, I think, is teaching classes with a mix of "boys style" and "girls style" (I don't really even like using those terms, but I'm using them anyway in lieu of a better way to say it) would be a better way to do things, so that you can see which specific students respond to what, as well as giving each a chance to see how the other side thinks. Actually, I would take this a step further and say its not so much about catering to boys and girls, but that they should be expertly identifying personality types among students and then targeting education that way. So for example, both boys and girls can be INTJ, and a boy and girl who are both INTJ are going to have a lot more in common with each other than with someone of their same sex who is an ESFP, for example. So then they could be grouped into a class and taught with an analytical style that encourages them to make value judgements about things. (I'm INTJ, so I can really relate to how this would have improved school for me).

Additionally, another reason for boys suffering in school might not actually have to do with the education itself. The effects of male disposability, the empathy gap, hypergamy, etc. start to become noticeable around that age. I remember not doing well in my classes sometimes simply because I didn't put in the effort even though I completely understood the material. I was too preoccupied with feeling like a reject. There were a lot of other boys like me too, but hardly any girls. It seemed like as long as you aren't a horribly ugly girl, you would at least be semi-popular and have lots of friends not to mention boys constantly expressing interest in you. They seemed so much happier and healthier from what I can remember. In that way, I feel as if highschool can be sort of like an exaggerated microcosm of the real world.

I also don't think that the reason construction workers, sewage technicians, oil drillers, etc. are mostly male doesn't JUST have to do with differing interests. Men do the dirtiest, most boring, most dangerous jobs in society because women aren't expected to. If you're a broke man who is unable to do skilled labor, you're expected to pick up a hammer and swing it. You don't have the option of marrying up like women do. That's why office workers are primarily female. A woman down on her luck will always be able to find a cushy, non-physical job. If that weren't the case, you would see female plumbers and truck drivers. (Ok, there are some exceptions I'm sure, but its rare). Point being there is a social safety net, so to speak, that largely gets women out of having to do hard labor.

I do however agree that her idea of having high school kids do apprenticeships in careers that interest them is a fantastic idea. This is probably the closest compromise I can think of to sorting students by personality type.

Title	How to make school better for boys.
Author	Blauwpetje
Upvotes	52
Comments	2
Date	October 3, 2021 5:10 PM UTC (2 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/q0m1pt/how_to_make_school_better_for_boys/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/how-to-make-school-better-for-boys.1077926 https://theredarchive.com/post/1077926