The school system has negatively affected my education, and that of my friends

TerriChris · 2012-04-14T01:48:19+00:00

~80% of teachers in high schools in the US are women. ~90% of elementory teachers are women.

When the boys go home to single mothers the experience is simiar..a lack of male leadership.

rg4yrxkiyv · 2012-04-14T04:24:59+00:00

I'm guessing the lack of roughhousing comes from the fact that everyone is so sue happy. If anyone's precious baby gets hurt at school, then it is not kids being kids, but the teacher's/school's fault.

epsteinbarr · 2012-04-14T06:17:42+00:00

Call it barbaric, but boys need roughhousing. It is part of their genetic programming.

People need it. How can women benefit from being confined? and how can men be the only ones getting hindered by it? Passivity is dangerous because it encourages inaction and that leads to a stagnant society.

mikesteane · 2012-04-14T09:16:04+00:00

The purpose of school is, and always has been, to control people. After 10 decades of continuous innovation, school systems still have not worked out how to teach foreign languages even though the Catholic Church has been having consistent success in this area for 1500 years. Schools still cannot teach arithmetic even though any unschooled Third World Trader can master it. Are they failing? No education is not the goal of schools. With all the changes that have taken place, a few things remain consistent: the ringing of bells to tell students when to salivate, the calling of registers, the grading of students, the wearing of uniforms.

marieelaine03 · 2012-04-14T14:31:46+00:00

Im a female lurker who enjoys reading this subreddit. I find it extremely interesting to read about men's rights.

I normally don't post, but this time I felt inclined to.

I understand your point of view that boys need rough-housing. I could appreciate that that is an important part of boys growing up. But why do you feel a school is a place that should provide it? Why not rough-house with your friends after school? Why not rough-house with your male brothers and cousins?

I just don't see how a school, a place that provides a place to learn, would need to make sure boys are allowed to rough-house! And there might be a very thin line between rough-housing between two friends and actual physical bullying... How would the school know when rough-housing ends and when bullying starts?

I'm studying to be an elementary school teacher and just don't see how I'd be able to allow two boys to wrestle and push each other around. Just my thought :)

Cartesian_Duelist · 2012-04-14T17:00:07+00:00

To explain this phenomena is quite difficult, but I'll try to.

Women are socialized more into valuing 'nurturing' types of occupations and fields. These are very much the 'default' fields to go into if you do not have much aptness, much like dime-a-dozen business degrees are sought after by men. But what is considered 'nurturing', or rather what has been sold to these women, pretty much amounts to to 'nurturing girls'. They want emotional intimacy, the reverence that comes with parental surrogacy, the thoughtful and sweet words of kids, etc. Very cliched but understandable wishes, and girls often can fulfill these wishes. Socialized or not, this is the truth.

What happens, however, is that they get often get a wrench thrown into the mix: boys. Loud, boisterous boys who have been encouraged to roughhouse, talk back, joke, swear, express rage and hostility. Often, boys of my generation and younger are raised in single parent homes, where they feel isolated, resentful, and without a path to follow, so the traits formerly stated are often amplified and the negative effects exacerbated. I remember girls who acted like this earning the scorn of many teachers as well, often with an added layer of dislike, as they were not fulfilling their feminine roles. Often, they smoked, and I had the hots for them ;)

Women have not typically been taught how to deal with this type of behaviour, and many teachers do not go into the field with a zest for teaching students, but rather, as a default career. But as this--boys--was not what they thought they signed up for, so they often just want to subjugate the outward display of this behaviour, rather than work with the boys in the class, focus them, and get them interested in the material. It's simply not their prerogative.

I felt very much the same way with my own female teachers. I always felt like I was being controlled, walking on eggshells as to not piss the teacher off. Expected to sit down, be quiet, be totally respectful of people, even when they spouted off ideas I thought were ridiculous. I was also good at it, and a favourite of several female teachers, because I put on a good show. On the educational front, I often was just being 'taught at' rather taught to. Often, there was no application involved, no technical skill or challenge, and school was often just an exercise of rote memorization of the ideas and thoughts of textbooks and the teacher herself. We were expected to follow rules deontologically, and there was definitely more of a focus on testing and grades, rather than actual learning and creativity. The amount of sheet work and busywork (ugh title pages) I received from female teachers was at least three times higher than the amount received from male teachers. I got ridiculously good grades in grade school and fair grades in high school (I generally skipped half of the semester) because I became excellent at gaming this system with little effort.

Male teachers, on the other hand, go into the field with the world against them, and this will often lead to a different tier of teacher. Many men go into the field with the objective of alleviating the above problems, as well, so they are able and willing to help the children that are otherwise left behind. I felt comfortable around male teachers, and always enjoyed school when they were at the helm of the classrooms. They were engaging, thoughtful, playful, and allowed me to see education as not a chore, but an actual experience.

Of course, these types of teachers are not exclusively male, it's just that they often shine through because the system is stacked against them, and only those willing to go through it to help and mentor children usually stick around. One of my favourite teachers was a woman. She was willing to make fun of students, challenge them on their idiocy, be direct, and threw chairs at me when I fell asleep at class. I credit her with instilling me with a sense of skepticism that is very much a part of my identity today, as an adult male.

Today, women become and have been teachers at hugely disproportionate rates since the 1960s. What we are seeing with the educational system is the women who went into the field as a career now in administrative roles, and often it's the women with heavy authoritarian mindsets and styles who expect grades and nothing more out of their students, so there are increasingly educational measures enforced that greatly exacerbate the above problems. This is leading to these good teachers leaving the profession (something nearly unheard of until quite recently, especially here in Canada), and leaving those teachers who are willing to just teach for the test and make schooling as sterile and uninviting as possible, especially for boys. There was a program in Toronto, a type of fast-track math program that was shown to be incredibly beneficial to boys, as it was very direct, that had a big push to be implemented in schools, but the school board fought against it tooth and nail.

Basically, what this rant is about is that the school system is completely tailored towards girls. And I know that this subreddit already gets enough of issues like this, but I am just looking for anyone who is willing to listen. I am sick and tired of this unfairness, and I can already see it getting worse for my younger brothers who I have blazed the trail for. They are having more wack feminist teachers then I have, and I am only seeing a downhill curve from here.

My own younger sister is 17 now, but I remember her math books from when she was 13, and they were simply ridiculous. They were beginning to start BEDMAS and algebra, but they conflated it so much with this strange 'input-output machine' concept that simply confused me as a grown man. Her questions were also almost exclusively word problems. Now, by word problems, I mean problems that were not simply communication questions that required application, but quite literally:

"If two times X equals fifty plus two-hundred and ten, what is the value of X? "

There is simply no need for this type of nonsense, and I know boys have a doubly hard time with these types of questions.

FascistOrigami · 2012-04-14T06:14:59+00:00

Every boy needs a male role model. It's one of the primary reasons I have become so strongly interested in Mens Rights advocacy. This society is making it harder and harder for boys to grow up to be men.

I say this as a gay guy whose first decade of sex and dating could be characterized as an attempt to find adequate male mentoring to make up for the lack of it growing up as a child.

rightsbot · 2012-04-14T01:06:17+00:00

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ThePigman · 2012-04-14T12:10:05+00:00

It's worse than you think - female teachers are giving you lower marks than they give girls for the same standard of work...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/female-teachers-accused-of-giving-boys-lower-marks-6943937.html

Narniamon · 2012-04-14T17:27:18+00:00

Cherry Hill?

SeedsOfDoubt · 2012-04-14T19:43:40+00:00

As a man studying to be a teacher, I think you should consider doing the same.

memymineown · 2012-04-14T01:17:51+00:00

[permanently deleted]

Title	The school system has negatively affected my education, and that of my friends
Author	Narniamon
Upvotes	1
Comments	21
Date	April 14, 2012 1:04 AM UTC (14 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/s8uyd/the_school_system_has_negatively_affected_my/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/the-school-system-has-negatively-affected-my.1024009 https://theredarchive.com/post/1024009

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