Feminists

[Kuya]

pussification

What am i saying.

By the way, Darus, explain yourself more.

[Kuya]

Let me recap; we have one person saying that boys do worse in school because they have no male role models and they can't be taught by women, which is what he's saying but he has not explained why, and the other tells us that boys are being "pussified" (turned into women) and this is why they're doing worse in school.

Ask me why feminazis exist.

[Darus Grey]

What am i saying.

By the way, Darus, explain yourself more.

Progressive Ed’s War on Boys by Janet Daley, City Journal Winter 1999

Just the first article I found explains the premise well, there's several books on the subject and lots of other web articles/journals you can read.

Basically our current education methods are very biased towards females.

[Kuya]

Biased towards females because females make the majority of teachers?

lol it calls it progressive education, LOL

[Seraph]

It's well established that males do better when they're in competition with each other, and removing that element from schools horribly biases them in favor of females almost to the point of active discrimination.

Early in my schooling, I did quite terrible until after years of failed motivation my father figured out the best motivational tool ever: trying to get me to beat the smartest girl in the class (she always had the highest grades for most of my early school career). Nothing directly confrontational or violent, just a nice bar to set myself to, and plenty of private snickers when I was successful.

Once schoolwork was made into a 'game' I had a reason to care. I went from Bs and Cs to straight As. Previous to this, yelling, punishment, and other popular motivational styles failed because it was less work to listen to the bitching instead of trying harder. Parents always eventually get tired, schoolwork never seems to quit...

Take it with a grain of salt, but I would definately agree with direct competition being a catalyst for male success. From a young boys perspective, if you aren't trying to beat the other kids, why should you really care?

[Darus Grey]

Biased towards females because females make the majority of teachers?

lol it calls it progressive education, LOL

Did you read it? It has nothing to do with who the teachers are unless you want to make the argument that it's mostly women in school administration(I have no idea if that's true), who make and enforce these education policies.

It's the education policies that de-emphasize the positive qualities of males and even actively supress them in many cases.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/01242008...oys_321868.htm
http://www.campbell-kibler.com/Gender_Wars.htm
Seriously dozens of sources just googling.

The book: The war against boys by Christina Hoff Sommers

Can't link paid journals or I would =/

[Metah]

The better question is why do so many people seem to care who is better?

Is it really such a big question that many people want to be better than other people, or even the best? Come on.

The better point is, she is just 'smarter' than you. It's not that women are smarter than men or men are smarter than women. People look at this shit totally wrong.

If they both graduated at the top of their classes using different methods, how is she "just 'smarter'" than him? It seems that she is better at memorization and data recollection, while he is better at problem solving. So, please make it clear how she is just smarter than him, on their individual terms, based on the information he has given you.

[Kuya]

Did you read it? It has nothing to do with who the teachers are unless you want to make the argument that it's mostly women in school administration(I have no idea if that's true), who make and enforce these education policies.

It's the education policies that de-emphasize the positive qualities of males and even actively supress them in many cases.

I want to hear you say this, because this is what the link you posted is alluding to. Do you, in any way believe that the education system we have no is in any way liberal? Do you honestly believe that the system promotes intellectualism and does not enforce gender norms?

This stuff stinks of the whole "the liberal media!!" horseshit the Republicans use to be divisive, as from where i'm standing the educational system is extremely traditional in its structure. I want to hear you defend this position, not some ridiculous article from some dolt.

[Darus Grey]

I want to hear you say this, because this is what the link you posted is alluding to. Do you, in any way believe that the education system we have no is in any way liberal? Do you honestly believe that the system promotes intellectualism and does not enforce gender norms?

This stuff stinks of the whole "the liberal media!!" horseshit the Republicans use to be divisive, as from where i'm standing the educational system is extremely traditional in its structure. I want to hear you defend this position, not some ridiculous article from some dolt.

wtf?

[Seraph]

If they both graduated at the top of their classes using different methods, how is she "just 'smarter'" than him? It seems that she is better at memorization and data recollection, while he is better at problem solving. So, please make it clear how she is just smarter than him, on their individual terms, based on the information he has given you.

That's just my point. Besides trying to build a perfect standardized test, how do you really figure out who is 'smarter', or even worse, who is 'better'? Have you measured intelligence, or have you just measured who takes tests better? /shrug

I'm not saying people shouldn't try to better themselves, I'm just saying that this concept of 'measured human worth' is extremely difficult or even impossible to properly define. It sure seems like many people on both sides of the gender divide are trying like hell to shift it in their direction though.

[Kuya]

wtf?

Let me be more expressive:

One key reason why girls are doing strikingly better than boys is that teachers, in accordance with progressivist ideology, now judge schoolwork in a way that rewards enthusiasm and personal involvement more than objective knowledge and accuracy. I don't mean to suggest that girls are not good at the more objective forms of learning—only that they are particularly good, much better than boys, at identifying with imaginative others and seeking to please. Girls of all classes become tractable and cooperative at a younger age than boys, partly because they are able to empathize with others at an earlier age. By the age of four or five, little girls can play together with minimal supervision. They make rules and follow them, adopt compatible roles, and reach mutually accepted agreements by using verbal skills and adult impersonation. Perfectly normal boys of the same age will rampage into anarchy without adult intervention. Having had only daughters myself, I can remember how the most civilized girls' party could be reduced to chaos by the presence of a single boy—who invariably seemed to possess none of the girls' moral inhibitions or rational self-control.

As a parent, what shocks me most is the self-imposed ideological blindness: the failure of basic psychological perception. Even for a non-professional, observing a room full of young children of both sexes at play is an instant education in the differences between them—and the inevitable educational consequences of those differences. While most girls are likely to be motivated by a desire for approval and their own standards of social responsibility, competitiveness seems to come as naturally to most boys as cooperation and conscientiousness do to girls, and boys seem to need a reliable ladder of progress and explicit rewards to channel their competitiveness and keep them going. What used to provide such a framework was classroom competition and traditional structured academic tasks, with their ever-increasing, ever-challenging levels of mastery.

By deriding competition and working hard to strengthen individual self-confidence (which girls often lack), schools have loaded the system very heavily in favor of female achievement and male failure. What has been systematically dismantled is just the kind of externally imposed structure and clear discipline, both behavioral and intellectual, that boys require. This was, of course, part of an explicitly feminist program: the reordering of educational priorities and methodology so that they were not "biased" against female values has been a deliberate objective of progressive educational philosophy. School is now designed to be most helpful to the self-disciplined and self-motivating—which, during childhood and adolescence, largely means girls.

What the fuck is this shit?

[Seraph]

Let me be more expressive:

<Quotes.>

What the fuck is this shit?

I agree with your thoughts on all but one of your bolded quotes. What is so incorrect about this:

...competitiveness seems to come as naturally to most boys as cooperation and conscientiousness do to girls, and boys seem to need a reliable ladder of progress and explicit rewards to channel their competitiveness and keep them going.

I have literally lived this quote firsthand.

[Beckwin]

the question is how much of that competitiveness vs. cooperation is actually natural or is more the product of reinforced gender roles in a society.

[Kuya]

I agree with your thoughts on all but one of your bolded quotes. What is so incorrect about this:



I have literally lived this quote firsthand.

Mostly the single part that makes it clear we're dealing with someone who does not understand gender. The word natural pretty much left that person without any legitimacy. If you think gender is natural, as in innate, then i got a bail out plan to sell you.

Also: ITT: feminist conspiracy theory

[Charla]

What, you didn't notice? Allowing competition encourages bullying, and we can't have that, now can we? So we discourage competition and instead give points for effort and class participation. Apparently that's unnatural for a boy.

edit: I realize that it's an undecided question how much of the difference is the result of biological factors, but I seem to remember the general consensus is that at least some of that difference is in fact biological. What's more, even if it was solely the result of "reinforced gender roles", that's more or less immaterial to the point of the article. Now, if you're saying that a gender role-based difference is inherently less immutable, and therefore that attempting to overcome it is not misguided, futile or unproductive, that could be a reasonable argument.

[Darus Grey]

You guya(especially Kuya) are reading way to much into a single article that I randomly linked(with the explicit statement that I was doing such). There's lots of articles, lot's of books, and lots of journal entries on the subject.

Apparently I'm part of the liberal elite media machine now! or some other crockery.

Seriously, ad hominem ftw.

[Kuya]

The argument is enticing if you see the differences between boys and girls in this context to be natural, therefore it would be wrong to enforce a specific form of teaching that clearly benefits one gender but harms another when trying to teach both, however if the gender roles are in fact plastic, then it can't just argue that this fictional progressive education is misguided when what really isn't adapting to the potentially more efficient form of education is the constructed gender norm itself, which we seem to assume is inherently positive for no real reason. To clarify, if gender is malleable then it can also be argued that the way we structure gender is also the problem with boys falling behind. If women's gender has changed even a little, but men's has not, then who really has the problem?

Not to mention i question the argument that we even have a real progressive education system, especially so when Finland's educational system is decidedly more progressive yet it also produces the best results.

Apparently I'm part of the liberal elite media machine now! or some other crockery.

Actually, i was saying that the article gave the impression that there was some sort of liberal conspiracy by the schools to screw over boys.

[Metah]

the question is how much of that competitiveness vs. cooperation is actually natural or is more the product of reinforced gender roles in a society.

Don't the reinforced gender roles come from the natural instincts people overall have? There are exceptions to every rule, but I don't think its a foolish thing to say something like this:

In the first societies that formed from our ancestors, where they had no influences other than the ones they created themselves, they would group themselves according to similar traits. A more cooperative and a more competitive group would form in this specific example. More females would fall into the former than the latter in humans, and as time progressed, these groups would remain and continue through the generations, because they are based on a natural affinity that the people in a group overall have.

So, when you finally come many and many thousands of years later to our current society, these groups and the traits assigned to them still remain because of the original natural traits that the people exhibited. And even though we are much more advanced than the people of the first societies, the ghosts of their influence -still- affect us through all of this time. Why? Because it is natural at least on a very basic level.

So for the competitiveness vs. cooperation question, I don't beleive it is entirely wrong to say that part of the gender roles society enforces are based on the natural traits that genders originally exhibited, that still exist in part today.

What does this mean? It means that the distinction isn't so clear cut.

[Charla]

Even something plastic can be prohibitively difficult to modify, especially if an opposing force (namely the continuous reinforcement of the gender roles in question) is still acting on the system.

[Kuya]

And one of the institutions in this system is the educational system, therefore how is education progressive when it also helps reinforce these stereotypes?

So, when you finally come many and many thousands of years later to our current society, these groups and the traits assigned to them still remain because of the original natural traits that the people exhibited. And even though we are much more advanced than the people of the first societies, the ghosts of their influence -still- affect us through all of this time. Why? Because it is natural at least on a very basic level.

So for the competitiveness vs. cooperation question, I don't beleive it is entirely wrong to say that part of the gender roles society enforces are based on the natural traits that genders originally exhibited, that still exist in part today.

What does this mean? It means that the distinction isn't so clear cut.

Gender is not something you inherent from ancestors long past. Different societies organize their genders differently and within different context. What is generally believed to happen is that we have physical differences and social constructs are tacked onto these differences distorting their real value according to what human associations require at the time. A strong factor that determines how gender is organized or contextualized is the type of work that a society requires of its constituents.