Is American education biased against boys and men?
Welcome to Sex and the State, a newsletter about human connection. To support my life’s work, upgrade to a paid subscription, buy a guide, follow me on OnlyFans, follow me on Twitter, support me on Patreon, or just share this post 🙏
~~~~~
Boys are falling further and further behind girls at all levels of education in the Western world.
Recently, one father DMed me on Twitter to say certain aspects of woke progressivism may be partly to blame.
Below is a lightly edited version of what he wrote:
This is the sort of conversation I can't participate in publicly anymore. A non-negligible faction of progressives are largely interested both in gender role abolition and the demonization of men. The education of young men in progressive circles is effectively misandrist. I live in Oakland so I am at the beating heart at the center of the woke universe. But the valorization of every famous woman or person of color without any acknowledgement of their human failings paired with the focus on the human failings of famous men and especially white men is a real thing in what [my son] learns at school. Definitely a world in which critical gender theory and critical race theory are aggressively applied not as correctives but as framework. And I don't mean that in the capital CRT Critical Race Theory panic way that causes people to outlaw books mentioning slavery. I mean that in a literal critical gender and race theory way (theories that I studied in grad school before they were cool!) in which human history, economics, etc. are best understood as the result of set of unequal power relations across identities and communities.
Also, there's a weird (to me) emphasizing of gender roles in transgenderism that is otherwise largely at odds with the reigning ideology. For me ... I'm for gender role abolition maybe? There isn't a version of a "good man" that is different than a "good person." That said, it's important for us to lift up good people who happen to be men and suggest to young boys (as well as girls) that they should be more like that man.
There’s… a lot to unpack here.
Here’s what I’ll say.
First, there’s a paucity of male role models in education and that is probably not great for boys, all things considered. This is probably especially not-great because negative examples of masculinity vastly outnumber positive ones in popular culture and politics. For every The Rock or Mr. Rodgers there are three J.D. Vances and Kevin Spaceys.
Second, the men in leadership in my public schools didn’t tend to be great models of masculinity. They sure as fuck didn’t model academic prowess. Overwhelmingly sports coaches or former coaches, they tended to be markedly lazier, less curious, and more biased toward athletes than the average teacher or administrator. This probably ain’t it for boy’s academic success.
Third, while there was absolutely nothing even vaguely adjacent to “woke” in my Alabama public school experience, I’m starting to wonder whether there’s something to the idea that schools have gone over-woke and it’s hurting boys.
I would have noticed any wokeness in my experience, as an arch-conservative at the time. The closest thing was one science teacher teaching creationism alongside evolution and me getting the feeling he had taken a side.
So I was really shocked when I started paying attention to the school board recall campaign in SF while living there. At first, I was mainly shocked by how astoundingly stupid everyone on the board seemed to be. Yes, they were over-woke as well. But the stupid really seemed like the main problem to me.
Now, there’s definitely a moral panic over wokeness in education. Teaching that slavery happened (and is still happening) and is and was bad is good, actually. “Woke” is in most ways just a rebranding of “politically correct,” and right-wing leaders are similarly using anti-wokeness to scare people in the middle and dog-whistle to bigots.
But also, especially with what I saw in SF, I don’t doubt that some public schools are engaging in some active misandry.
I’m left with three main questions:
How common is misandry in American education?
How severe is it?
To what extent does it explain boys’ lack of academic achievement relative to girls?
There’s one more thing I want to say about wokeness. I don’t believe unequal power relations across identities and communities is necessarily the best lens through which to understand human history, economics, etc.
I believe it’s an essential lens. I believe it’s a vastly underutilized lens. When you study racism and misogyny empirically along with public attitudes and beliefs, you find the average person vastly, vastly underestimates their severity and ubiquity. How do you square the idea that society is “too woke” with the reality that a majority of white people believe white people have replaced Black people as the primary victims of racial discrimination? The best data shows 1-10% of rape allegations are false. But when asked, the average person estimates that 30% of rape allegations are false. So on and so forth.
Problems occur when you hand an excellent, necessary tool to very stupid people with lots of power.
CRT, at least as defined as focusing on the role of unequal power relations for understanding social phenomena, seems like a good tool. We need to understand bigotry in order to understand this world, because reams of evidence suggests bigotry has had and continues to have a very powerful role in shaping it.
But in the wrong hands, it seems obvious CRT can be used as a weapon to cause great harm. And the wielders don’t even necessarily need to be ill-intended. I’m sure many, if not most, of the people in Oakland public schools valorizing every famous woman or person of color without acknowledging their human failings while focusing on the failings of famous white men are mostly just trying to ameliorate systemic misogyny. But they can cause harm all the same.
So basically, I’m kind of left where I started. I think actually the wokeness may still be a distraction. It seems to me like the real problem is that our schools are largely run by idiots who don’t know how to use the tools at their disposal for good. Even if conservatives managed to actually ban CRT, these same dummies would probably just find a different tool to misuse and I don’t think boys would necessarily be any better off.
I think it’s important to look at the fact that US spending on public education has skyrocketed since 1970 while our outcomes are actually worse today than then. US economic mobility is low and declining, and the public education monopoly is an instrument of class entrenchment. The deciding factor on how good a public school performs is parental involvement. Kids whose families have the wealth and leisure to force teachers to do their jobs get a good education from their public school. Kids without that advantage do not, on average. It’s worth thinking through why girls on average are doing a better job of navigating this incredibly ineffective, inefficient, staid system than boys are. But at the end of the day, public K-12 in the US is a fundamentally broken institution for everyone. And that’s probably upstream of, and more important than, CRT.
Header images come from me putting the headline or some body copy when the headline violates the TOS into OpenAI’s DALL-E. Today’s prompt was “surrealist painting of a boy at school.”
This is an ad! ⬇️ Click on it to support me!
700,000+ Guys read ELEVATOR every damn day
The best eye and brain candy curated from all corners of the web
No news. No politics. No BS.
Just the good stuff
100% Free
There's so much representativeness bias and recency bias here. The following can all be true at once, and in fact I think, with low-to-moderate confidence, probably are all true:
1. most deep-blue-urban-area schools (public and private) are "over-woke," i.e. pushing misandry, simplistic villain narratives, etc to an extent that harms a lot of kids and the broader culture and detracts from traditional educational effectiveness
2. most schools nationwide overall are still "under-woke," i.e. not giving kids a full enough picture of the social impact and severity of racism and misogyny to understand why things are the way they are now
3. most institutional attempts to change (2), however well intentioned, just end up making (1) worse, and conversely attempts to rein in (1) mostly exacerbate (2) instead.
(1) is naturally going to seem like a much bigger problem than it is, and (2) smaller than it is, because
-- (1) affects the chattering classes. It's both the easy and the lucrative thing to report about in the NY Times etc.
-- Relatedly, the community affected by (1) feels like a nation and a culture unto itself, and more so recently as our society grows more polarized and segregated. If all your friends have kids attending over-woke schools it's hard not to feel like it's "everywhere".
-- (1) is new and (2) is not, and we are wired to care more about the new shiny than about the grinding chronic problem.
And (3) happens for some of the same reasons. The people motivated to change (2) aren't really a part of the community affected by (2), and they are bad at persuading the people who are affected. So they use the persuasive leverage they have in order to at least feel they have Accomplished Something, which then goes to exacerbate (1). And similarly the other way around.
Wrt overall US educational effectiveness and cost-effectiveness, my modestly-informed impression is that this is a problem that spans the developing world, so it's not clear there is a proven less-broken model to turn to. We should still try and fix the problem, but it'll need more experimentation and take longer than if we could just do what Country X does instead.