'Stop feminising our schools - our boys are suffering'

Overwhelmingly, they do not approve of the feminisation of schools.

oregon dad

Gender neutrality is the SOLUTION, not the problem.

Whoever first said that girls only want to please and not to win obviously doesn't cover girls' athletics, which I do over here in the States. I will certainly agree that boys are being shortchanged by a system that doesn't seem to mind denigrating and vilifying them, but gender neutrality is not the problem. In fact, it's part of the answer: telling boys that it's okay for them to cry and talk about their feelings so that we can get at their problems, rather than make believe that they should all be stoic and "manly" all of the time.

Problem is, society's general idea is: feminized = neutral.

This whole business of standardizing the way schools teach to accommodate how girls think at the expense of how boys think can’t be heading anywhere good. Girls largely are like sheep; schools can easily program them to think along politically correct lines, then, send them off into society like so many clones.

Boys, on the other hand, have a much wider spectrum in-and-around how they process information about the world around them. Some might fair well under this "idealized" (feminized) method of instruction. However, innovative (out-of-the-box) thinking boys can only be harmed by his methodology of teaching. For these boys, feminized schools stifle their creativity until they give-up out of boredom and frustration.

How many potential scientists, inventors, etc. are killed at the starting gate? What might they have discovered or invented later in life had they not been tossed aside? And will strong leaders for our future emerge from this ever increasing pool of cookie-cutter clones? I think not! And who looses? Everyone!

So keep on poisoning our hopes for the future, keep on producing clones, and don’t be surprised if western societies digress back to where they came from or worse!

Enjoy the free ride while it lasts ladies!

Girls aren't doing as well as boys in school (whether this "gap" is real or imagined)? Blame the boys. Fix the schools.

Boys aren't doing as well as girls in school (when the gap can be readily observed in any measure of overall academic outcomes)? Blame the boys. Fix nothing.

Society as a whole delights in blaming men for everything and anything, even when we're talking about something which others are doing to males quite intentionally - such as rigging education to exclude and marginalize men, using its largely imaginary past failure to "address the needs" of women as an excuse. Newsflash - girls were already outscoring boys in school when the AAUW bombshell exploded on the scene back in the 80's. It was boys who were being shortchanged, not girls. And now the problem has been worsened by decades of misandric social engineering.

Here is a solution - stop blaming boys/men and start valuing and respecting gender differences instead of trying to beat them out of children. To do otherwise shortchanges both genders. Boys and girls are different. We learn differently, we think differently, we're motivated differently, but we're all equally valuable. Males and females are in fact complementary, so the unique educational needs of boys and girls are BOTH important. Society has decided that it will only address the needs of girls.

If I'm reading you correctly, you're suggesting that we must all learn and be motivated in the same "gender neutral" ways, so it must be the boys who are the problem. While I can understand your blaming the males in this situation - it is what society does continuously and on every issue, so I can't fault you for doing it, do you see the fault in your reasoning? We're not the same. "Gender neutral" education is a fallacy used to push a females first, females only, misandric agenda at the expense of young males. This is why boys who are falling behind in the feminized public education systems of the western world tend to flourish in boys-only environments. I don't advocate gender neutral education, I advocate gender separate education, where the needs of boys can be addressed just as well as the public system is currently addressing the needs of girls.

Trying to educate girls and boys together simply shortchanges BOTH genders if it's done in a "gender neutral" fashion. Problem is, it ISN'T being done in a gender neutral fashion, and what you're proposing would be detrimental to BOTH genders. Society has decided to focus on the needs of girls, which is fine - their needs are just as important as the needs of boys, but it's failing to provide any way to address the equally legitimate needs of boys. Families shouldn't have to pay for public schools that don't educate their boys properly and then pay extra for private schools for their boys, all because only girls matter in the public system.

For what it's worth, I agree that we need to liberate men from the limitations placed on the range of emotional expressions that society deems "acceptable" from a man. It's part of the same "blame" problem: men are expected to suffer in silence and to serve the needs of society, placing their own needs last - we call it "chivalry" or "manliness", and it's the absolute pinnacle of the sexism men face today. Men should be defining their own roles and setting their own emotional limits for themselves, without regard for the demands of society as a whole.

It really is still 1962 for men. Women claimed that they needed to be liberated from men, which is misandry at its finest because it implies that all men were subjugating all women. I claim that men need to be liberated from the artificial limitations and demands forced on them by a society which does not value masculinity or respect men, and which does everything possible to ensure that men don't respect themselves. Notice that unlike feminists, my claim says nothing about the opposite sex.

But that's not the problem here. Boys and girls learn and are motivated very differently. Schools which cater to females first and only and a society which attempts to denigrate masculinity in its misandric effort to beat gender differences out of children are the problem. We can solve it by providing separate but equal education for boys and girls. As the American experience has shown us, "separate but equal" doesn't work when it's done by race or economic class, but because boys and girls are parts of ALL classes and races and cultures, it will work just fine here.

Newsflash - girls were already outscoring boys in school when the AAUW bombshell exploded on the scene back in the 80's. It was boys who were being shortchanged, not girls. And now the problem has been worsened by decades of misandric social engineering.

Girls have been outscoring boys at least since the beginning of the 20th century. In 1900, for example, the sign of a well educated person was a high school diploma. Girls were far more likely to graduate from high school than boys. While it's true that more young men than young women attended college, college at that time was for the elite (rich) and cannot be used as a measure of educational success for the general population.

Boys have been on the short end of the stick for at least 100 years.

"[Boys'] testosterone and its companion competitive streak need to be acknowledged. If they're ignored, boys get listless and they start retreating into their hoodies and terrorising the rest of us"

I would add: "and then it is determined that boys (and therefore men) are innately more violent, so the schools are feminized even further to curb the boys' 'aggressive tendencies'."

Once a vicious circle like this gets started, it is hard for me to see a way to stop it anytime soon.

-axo