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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33895 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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I think the education-industrial-complex is probably the driver of the vast majority of these gaps. The male experience in school has become increasingly miserable. And their opinions of the opinions of the overwhelmingly female/feminine teacher class is reflecting a rebellion from those views. Whereas school is now the ultimate feminized environment where traditional female status games are the primary ones that are allowed to exist and are directly encouraged by authority figures.

Compounding this, the specific choices men and women make of which area of education they pursue and what economic prospects those have select women to be more burdened by debt.

And women are vastly overrepresented in the "social work" jobs eligible for loan forgiveness, which in retrospect was obviously a "free college for party members" giveaway.

Agree, but that is probably also a subset of the issue I am trying to highlight. School is not fun for boys. Thus, only the high achieving boys, or those with a specific interest elect to continue with it. School for girls is like being in water for fish. They can just kind of mindlessly continue through the system with no real goal. So some major, any major, serves the purpose of them getting an organized sit and talk session.

I mean, the actual reality here is it turns out, women are actually much better at the type of schooling initially dominated by boy's for decades - aka, sit at a desk and listen to a teacher for hours upon hours, which even with whatever changes to pedagogy there have been, still seems to be the prominent way education is done, except maybe now there's a few more computer screens.

It's interesting how there wasn't there criticism of this type of schooling when men were 70% of college students - no, the boys were just told to sit down and listen instead of being given excuses by conservatives.

It's interesting how there wasn't there criticism of this type of schooling when men were 70% of college students

Back when men were 70% of college students, the men who actually made it there were also the kinds of men who were actually high achievers and would benefit from that.

College was far from mandatory for any job- you could quit at Grade 10 (or earlier, in some cases) and still expect to make a reasonably decent living. Men (and women) for whom additional schooling would not help could just... leave, and be a full-fledged adult at 16 (which gives them far greater time to achieve their goals and become more mature). Now we have grade inflation and people now need a college degree to receive government-mandated UBI (i.e. workers employed in the education-managerial complex) because high school graduation rates became a target and thus ceased to be a good measure of graduate competence.

you could quit at Grade 10 (or earlier, in some cases) and still expect to make a reasonably decent living.

My dad did this (in the late 70s) and was able to support a family of five (in the 80s and 90s) on just his single income.

Start making evaluation of students at school track objective measures of learning instead of whether the teacher vibes with the kid, and maybe you'd have a point. As it stands, boys significantly outperform girls on standardized tests, particularly at the top end. It's likely the abandonment of objective standards that students can fairly compete over is a major part of why boys are disengaging (and also explains the collapse of the college wage premium). It's not surprising that when you turn school into a question of who can flatter a teacher and her their biases more that you end up favoring girls.

Boys still score higher than girls on standardized tests and other objective measures. They just do worse when you include subjective assessments of their abilities.

Is homework a subjective measure? IIRC girls, especially teenagers, do a lot better at getting their homework done and turning in assignments on time. Granted, a typical middle school homework assignment is not some tough test of intelligence- it's more like "read a chapter of the book, then write a paragraph of plot summary to prove that you did actually read it." But then, that's what a lot of real-life work assignments are like too- "do what i tell you, get it done, don't complain about being bored."

Except the systems and the goals are completely different. In the old days, yes, the boys were told to sit their asses down and listen, for the period of time that class was. But class was shorter, intermissions longer, and rough play was allowed during the intermissions. In addition, a GOAL of the old system was kicking kids out. A huge attrition rate is desirable because only a small % of people were expected to continue on with school. It would be a waste for Jimmy to keep going to school forever when he's going to work on the farm anyways.

In many ways, the failure of our current system is the lack of attrition, particularly among the girls. But I'd think halving the number of boys currently in university and cutting girls to about that number would be a huge improvement.

But if the system says attrition is bad, it should look at the causes of attrition.

There's lots of arguments you could make there as to the content and framework of education. Things didn't used to be this dominated by administrative minutiae and social games. Men thrive in straightforwardly competitive environments, which used to be provided for in schooling and was specifically de-emphasized through reform.

You can't really deny cultural changes so mainstream that they get Simpsons episodes made about them.

But who cares for this pointless score keeping anyhow. It used to work for men, and now it doesn't. Why and how do we fix it? Mocking them isn't helping answer that question.

This is exactly the sort of reflexive sneering that shows there's no argument to justify your position beyond "haha you have no power to stop us hurting your children, and we do it because it's funny to us".
Nor is there any concern for "fairness", which was just tactical rhetoric until you were in a position to jeer at the kids your policies hurt.
All those arguments about "implicit bias" go right out the window when studies show teachers are biased against a group you want to torture for fun, because your "concerns" about bias were only ever an excuse for power to hurt people.

The experience of interacting with leftists and learning about how they behave has been horrific. Like hearing a voice crying for help in the woods, only to come face to face with a giant spider mimicking human speech to ambush prey.
Is there even any motivation to the entire ideology beyond sheer pointless malice?

As I said last thread, he's doing you the service of taking the mask off. They know what they're going to do, they're going to do it, and if you won't accept their thinly-veiled justifications, they'll just use force; they are in no way scrupulous about that.

Also a huge portion of the college degrees require a big left wing government. Sociology majors need a welfare state. Much of the regulation the government invents requires college educated bureaucrats to enforce. A radical reduction of the state would be an absolute disaster for gender studies majors. Lots of college educated women work in child care and other fields that are built around feminism.

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