Une Génération Castrée?

Abstract

PITY THE boys. They have been victimized by the matriarchy of schools, by political correctness, and by feminism itself, and now their self- appointed champions are calling foul. Suddenly, the same crowd that has insisted all along that men's advantages have been earned by merit are discovering systemic discrimination. Men are claiming to have been shortchanged, and they want redress from schools. Yet most of those arguing for boy-friendly tend to avoid any suggestion of a return to patriarchy and male privilege, preferring to speak of fairness and equity for all. Some spokespersons even go so far as to claim that women's success (which is the unvoiced explanation for boys' failure) is unfair to women themselves. Paul Cappon, director general of the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada, recently presented this analysis to the media. Noting that girls are outperforming boys on tests of reading and writing and that more females than males now graduate from Canadian universities, Cappon sympathetically observed that women still carry the greater burden of child care and housework. Asking women to provide most of the in society; that's a lot, he said.1 Cappon's solution to the human capital problem -- more conventionally known to women as the getting-men-to-do-their-share problem -- involves schools rather than society, and for some reason requires no significant adaptation on the part of men. Cappon explains that some experts blame boys' declining school performance on the of education, the result of hiring women teachers to replace retiring male teachers. According to Cappon, Boys in the socialization process will tend to discount the importance of that particular subject area when it's only women teaching it. He added that turns out boys and girls don't necessarily like the same things. Gosh. Just when you think that maybe biology isn't destiny, one of the country's top education bureaucrats tells you otherwise. It seems to me that the journalist missed a great opportunity to test Cappon's suggestion that male teachers are best for boys, especially the proposition that teachers' genders are associated with males' university graduation rates. After all, back (in the good old days) when men made up the great majority of university graduates, didn't women numerically dominate the teaching profession to a substantially greater degree than they do today? Surely the impending return of the 60/40 imbalance favoring women teachers looks like feminization only if the almost 50/50 anomaly of the mid-1980s is misrepresented as the norm. And wasn't it during this same decade of men's increased participation in the profession that girls began to surge ahead? Why is it that Cappon's experts think that, this time around, boys would be the beneficiaries of a greater number of male teachers? The journalist could have addressed other contradictions in Cappon's statements. Isn't it during high school, when the typical student encounters the largest number of male teachers, that the gender-and- achievement gap widens? Would any male teacher, regardless of his professional experience and preparation -- or sexual orientation, for that matter -- produce such salutary effects on all boys? Why is it that the gender-and-achievement gap is restricted to industrialized countries and is nonexistent elsewhere, irrespective of whether a developing country's teaching force is predominantly male or female? Finally, if she were in a particularly wicked mood, the journalist could even have asked Cappon whether it was possible that he had confused the physiology of sex with the social construction of gender. All right. I'll concede that with this last question I may be expecting rather too much insight from a busy journalist -- but we have every right to expect more of it from the likes of Cappon. When those who should know better use ill-informed, illogical, and unchallenged masculinist perspectives to shape the discourse of boys-are-failing- at-school-and-it's-getting-worse, girls and women are put at risk. …