Boys X (Estrogen + Emasculation) = (Trades + Military) - Slackers
Hows that for some “Social Chemistry?”
Take a nation of Boys, boil them in feminist stew of estrogen-soaked PC curricula for 12 years, and you end up with kids who are more interested in the trades and military (Good) with a precipitate (remember your chemistry class) of saggy-pantsed slackers.
Add “helicopter parents” into this brew, and you have a massive waste of human potential.
Economists at both the Department of Education and the College Board agree that, to ensure high future earnings, men and women have an equal need for college degrees, and yet only women are getting that message. The numbers are startling. This summer the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University published the results of a study tracking the students who graduated from Boston Public Schools in 2007. Their conclusion: For every 167 females in four-year colleges, there were 100 males.
In theory, the surge in the number of educated women should make up for male shortcomings when we’re looking at the overall prospects for the economy. But men and women are not the same. At the same levels of education, women remain less inclined to roll the dice on risky business start-ups or to grind out careers in isolated tech labs. Revenue generated by women-owned businesses remains less than 5% of all revenue. And while the number of women taking on economically important majors is rising, women still earn only a fifth of the bachelor’s degrees granted in physics, computer science and engineering.
Why males don’t seem to “get” the importance of a college education is a mystery, especially considering the current collapse of jobs that traditionally don’t require post-high-school study. (Even “cash for clunkers” isn’t going to mark the return of car companies as a major employer of uneducated men.) And who could miss the message of the recession, where as many as 80% of the workers laid off have been male?
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In truth, these gender preferences are a sideshow. The real issue is the flagging academic interest among boys, a phenomenon that dates back only about two decades. It’s a new issue to most Americans but hotly debated in countries such as England. So far, nobody has solved the boy mystery, but some countries are years ahead of the U.S. Australia has had some success with literacy-boosting programs for young boys. Until the code gets cracked, there’s a national economic interest in keeping those preferences in place—just for a few more years.
It really isn’t a mystery at all. Who needs “Gender Studies” and cooked up “climate change?” The Australian reading initiative is instructive as well. It’s amazing what happens when you actually teach kids to read.
It’s simple. Take the male-hating bias out of education, and stop using schools to turn the nation into obedient girls, and you might get males to be interested in the life of the mind again. If not, why bother?
You can use the Military to break things and the trades to build things. The rest will live in Mom’s basement playing video games.
December 29th, 2009 at 2:10 am
Influence can be defined as the power exerted over the minds and behavior of others. A power that can affect, persuade and cause changes to someone or something. In order to influence people, you first need to discover what is already influencing them. What makes them tick? What do they care about? We need some leverage to work with when we’re trying to change how people think and behave.