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posted by Scott on Monday January 22, @03:29PM
from the education dept.
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Not PC submitted some excerpts from the article, How exams are fixed in favour of girls from The Spectator: "Girls are doing better than boys in exams, but that does not mean that they are brighter, says Madsen Pirie. What has happened is that exams have been feminised - and so has the country...Only five years ago, men gained 1,800 more first-class honours degrees than women. The number of women with firsts has trebled in a decade, with women now leading the field in 12 of the 17 subject areas, including medicine, law and business. Partly, they gain more of the firsts because there are more of them. They make up 55 per cent of the university population, and gain more of all qualifications. There is, nonetheless, a clear trend running through education...Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves what sort of society we are producing if we feminise the entry qualification into its leadership positions. Will it still produce penicillin and hovercraft? Or will it just produce civil servants?"
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Strangely, I have a mixed reaction to this article, and part of it is due to its following on the heels of the piece on Eco-Masculism.
First, I was amused by the reactions of the so-called "experts" to the phenomenon of boys losing grounds to girls on British exams. I've said it before, but it bears repeating: notice that when girls were doing poorly, the problem was the system, society, the schools, or the exams. When boys are doing poorly, the problem is the boys themselves. And people wonder why I have a low opinion of psychologists / sociologists. Sheesh.
However, I have another reaction, in part fuelled by thoughts about Eco-Masculism: perhaps what we want now in the history of the world are a bunch of uninspired, unimaginative civil servants running things? In the past we have valued risk and innovation; perhaps it is more ecologically sound to now value the lawyers, civil servants, and administrators who slow everything down? Of course, one could argue that risk and innovation would develop new "greener" products that could save our world... who knows.
One last thing: I'm sure that feminists will howl over this piece, spitting and snarling that the writer considers women to be dull, unimaginative civil servants. They'll trot out all sorts of examples of female scientists and inventors. Of course, they will have entirely missed the logic of the piece (logic not being one of feminists' strong points): the new tests favour methodical, detail-oriented people over big-picture, risk-taking people; the fact that more women fall into the former category than the latter does not mean that there are no risk-oriented, big-picture women and no methodical, detail-oriented men (as it happens I would fall into the latter category). So the question becomes more one of "what kind of thinking do we want to reward" rather than "what sex do we want to reward."
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