Thursday, March 8, 2012
Feminist columnist throws 17-yr.old male co-ed under the bus for a speech
There is a kind of woman unpopular with men.She is Controlling Woman.
Just say, "She doesn't like this one bad habit" to your male friends and they roll their eyes, shake their head in agreement, as in, "I know just what you're talking about!"
From when do Controlling Women come. I always wondered and now I know. Heather Mallick, probably forty-something writes a column for the Toronto Star. She wrote a piece throwing Paul Gomille under the bus for a speech he is alleged to have delivered at Archbishop Dennis O'Connor Catholic High School in Ajax.
In his speech, Gomille is alleged to have discerned between those girls he likes and those he dislikes, something every male in history has talked about with other males. Winning his approval are: the silent ones, the intelligent ones, the one's that don't talk about people behind their backs, the ones that guys don't flock to in droves, the ones that don't dress in revealing clothing...According to Ms Mallick, his principal, Donna Modeste told him to skip that section when he delivered the speech.
She allegedly approved this line: Attractiveness doesn't come from wearing the latest fashion, and it doesn't come from being scantily clad in public, or putting on makeup, of having a pretty face, or a nice body. No. Real attractiveness comes from having a certain dignity. (Ms Mallick calls that sentence, "Slutwalker Starter in Miniature" in an obviously controlling and patronizing tone.
Gomille allegedly did not obey the principal, and for passing out his speech (dubbed by Ms Mallick, "Dress Down to Win Me as a Boyfriend") in the cafeteria, he was suspended for two days, a decision Ms Mallick lauds: and this is what I like about the Catholic system--they don't worry about popularity. Students will obey. High praise to Modeste.
Next Ms Mallick proceeds to ridicule Gomille's own attire, dressed in dark pants, a grey hoodie and navy jacket, dresses like all teenage boys, nondescriptly and then in his Star photo against a grey Ajax sky, he looks like a disembodied head. Shockingly, and ironically, Mallick then patronizes him again, He looks perfectly pleasant...At 17,. I would have gone out with him, right up until he told me my dress was too revealing, at which point I would have run away, as girls will, and this well-intentioned young man will learn that. (Sorry, Ms Mallick, Gomille likes 'the silent ones, the intelligent ones and the one's who don't dress in revealing clothing'..so he would never have selected you, in the first place!)
After mentioning Gomille's sister's character assessment of her brother, Mallick mounts her bully pulpit:
Females from age 2 to 92 speak as one: We do not care to hear male opinions on our clothes unless it's 'You look fabulous is that. Radiant. Wow. When we ask you does the sweater works with the scarf, the word we want to hear is "yes." And then, frankly, we'll change the sweater. If he's a Controlling Man who says it's too tight or uses the phrases "no wife of mine will..." we detach....
(Truth be told, this is far from the truth. Many women far less filled with venom than Ms Mallick are far less anxious to join the Mallick "army" of Controlling Patronizing, Condescending Women.)
Mallick concludes her piece with:
Gomille may be 17 but he sounds 102 and we hear from males like him all our lives. They're correctors, judges, buzzkills. Mothers sound like this too, for different reasons. "You're going out like that, Cyndi Ahmadinejad? Over my dead body!"
Mallick continues: There is a worrying prescriptiveness in Gomille's unasked-for definition of how his fellow students should dress. We women are half the world. In the workplace men and women stand side-by-side and are gradually learning to to accommodate each other's differences.
Isn't it strange that a feminist columnist can pour such invective all over a 17-year old male student for a speech, and if a male columnist poured a similar invective over a 17-year-old female student who wrote a speech containing the sentiments and phrases contained in Mallick's piece (or Gomille's speech for that matter), there would be hell to pay.
When did females acquire immunity from unsolicited (and by the way, not far off the mark!) criticism?
Was there some opening of the skies and another set of tablets tossed down, granting immunity to all women, if and when any male attempts to point a finger at what most adults would call "immodest" dress, and that's in the most polite circles.
SLUTWALKS say much more about the women walking than they do about any suggestion of patronizing and prescriptive attitudes among males.
This piece of invective by Mallick directed at Gomille should require a retraction, and an apology, and the Gomille speech, in its entirety, deserves to be published in the Toronto Star. If I were Gomille's parent, I would also pull him out of Archbishop Dennis O'Connor High School, and find a school where his views can be aired, debated and discussed, perhaps at a school assembly where both teachers and students can demonstrate a maturity and a respect for "the other" that is completly outside the possible with Ms Mallick. That might, just might, lend some light and leven to the discussion about teen attire.
Congratulations for your courage, your maturity and your clarity, Paul Gomille. We can only hope that Ms Mallick's rant gives you an even larger podium than you would otherwise have enjoyed.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Literature could be key to getting men "in touch with feelings"
In the movie, The Descendents, Matt King, played by George Clooney, screams at his comatose wife in her hospital room, his anger that she believed he "was out of touch with his feelings and needed to go into therapy," as part of releasing his tension, fear and anxiety at confronting her extremely critical condition, resulting from a speed boating accident off one of Hawaii's islands. Apparently, their marriage had not been going well, and one of the themes of the movie focuses on her affair with a real estate salesman, as her statement in defiance of her desert-like marriage. King, a real estate lawyer, and trustee of his family's large holding on one of the islands, has been "emotionally absent" from the marriage, busy in his professional career, and not "there" for his wife and two daughters.
The explosion by "King," surprisingly in the hospital room, presumably in intensive care (she was in a private room), will echo around the North American continent at least for the next several months, as men project their own resentment, anger, possibly fear and even defiance at the reduction of the stereotype of "out of touch" with emotions, almost as an offense under the "Successful Marriage Act" a mythical document apparently written by the millions of women who wish to see their male partners as "more like them."
Learning about the emotions that one experiences and thereby articulating their identity, their strength, their roots and the potency of their implications, especially within a relationship, is not one of the skills that North America males have picked up along the way to their medical, legal, accounting, engineering or even theological degrees. Nor is it something that most, if not all, of those professions considers really important in growing and developing into what the marketplace of conventionality considers a "success". How many deals, the size of those deals, the complexity of those deals and the skill with which one can wear many hats, seemingly simultaneously, without losing focus or concentration on any open file, are much more important. In fact, in a male world, dominated as it has been with competition, with will, with endurance and with externals like the name on the hood of the car in the driveway, the number on the house and the number of square feet behind the number, the size of the pool and the number of trips to the exotic places on the globe...these are some of the ways by which the men have been trained and conditioned, much like "seals" (take that as part of the Marines, in the U.S. or merely as part of the aquarium shows that dot the continent). They have, many of them, captained their football and/or basketball and/or baseball teams, dated the cheerleaders in their high schools, gone to the "right" parties, been admitted to the better colleges, where the carved out what we used to call B.M.O.C. (Big Man on Campus) profiles in sports, politics, debating, journalism or even entrepreneur competitions. The nerds in their classes frequented the computer or the science labs, and made their 'marks' with experiments, professor alliances, and high grades. They were taught to "do" and to "be-a-success" however they could achieve that benchmark.
Relationships, for the BMOC's, usually came without much effort, without much competition and with little or no comparison to other males, with respect to the "being in touch with their feelings" co-efficient of those relationships.
For the most part, their fathers "were not in touch with their feelings" either, having clawed their way up the proverbial ladder to a career of their own, civilian or military, based, once again on accomplishments. They rested secure on the size of the investment portfolio, the number of college graduates among their offspring, the relative "calmness" of their spouses compared to other men of their generation and of their profession and geography. The fathers generally believed that "feelings" were for the women to explore; they generally despised reading Shakespeare, as it was both "archaic" language and the portrayal of complex emotions, often tragic, of both genders, and they merely "put up" with the pain while enduring those weeks or months, for which they learned the basic plot structures, a few literary definitions and possibly some potentially different twists and turns to the plot lines. They did not integrate those emotions from the literature into their own conversations, believing that to do so would emasculate them in front of their peers.
With the rise (and some would argue fall) of feminism, in its several faces, new standards of what constitutes a "healthy male" have been defined by women, with the support of other women, yet without the universal acceptance and support of their male partners. "Evolved" men were the standard in the nineties; the rise of psychotherapy as women sought refuge in the offices of these practitioners, generated an encyclopedia of new terms for new anxieties, irritations, pains and even both neuroses and psychoses, much of the new information provided by female clients/patients, depending on the background of the treating practitioner.
Women, for example, on The View on ABC television, would state publicly, they would prefer to go on a date with a gay male, because they would know that he was not interested in taking the relationship "further" (a code word for "into the sexual"). Women, it seemed, were more interested in the development of their own careers than in the potential of a mutual relationship with an unevolved male.
Telling their male partners, both personally and publicly en masse, that "you need to go into therapy" will generate precisely the kind of resistance to such an experience that is the opposite of what those female partners wanted. And that resistance will be enhanced by a judicial system that "sentences" men to psycho-therapy as a result of their "acting out" in the marriage. Court-prescribed "anger management" for example is based on the notion that male anger is destructive, dangerous and requiring elimination, through finding words to express those feelings, with which men are out of touch, rather than smashing a wall, or worse, a woman's face.
However, did you know that the definition of "depression" for example, in the DSM-4 comes exclusively from female patients/clients and that it might be possible that a man is experiencing severe depression when he smashes that wall. Yet, such a possibility is not inside the professional lexicon of the psychiatric encyclopedia of definitions.
Women withdraw their affections and their sexual availability without incurring the wrath of the courts, because there is no physical evidence of injury. When men respond, physically and in appropriately, they are immediately charged with assault and often convicted by the bruises, blood, or witnesses to the event that triggered the violence.
Learning to talk about emotions, while difficult and especially threatening to men (as one doctor put it in conversation) "Women do it so much better!" as if the whole idea were another competition, will not come readily, easily, fluently and comfortably, unless and until the intellectual and pragmatic components of health come to include respect for one's inner life, one's spiritual health, one's capacity to cope with the various tragedies and traumas that accompany every human biography. And that will only evolve as men and women together, seek to understand that emotions have historic roots in events long forgotten, but deeply and permanently remembered in one's psyche, stored there because, when the events occurred, they were so painful that we could not cope, we were too young, too overwhelmed, and too naive...and only later, when we encounter a similar or a trigger incident, do they come tumbling out of some hidden closet and scatter themselves all over the floor of our consciousness. And we then have little choice but to confront both the trigger and the deep emotional connection to the trauma in the first place.
And this, while complex and appearing a waste of time, is really the only route to healing, both the current tension and the root of the emotional definition of the current event. And only if and when men come to "see" and they will never do that out of either fear or force, whether medical or legal, that they can unpack their histories, safely with a partner whose understands just how difficult this process is, at first, for their male partner and who takes his hand and walks slowly and deliberately through the darkness and out into the light at the end of the tunnel. And it will take more than one such chapter, in every life and relationship, because we are all fraught with memories of pain, often the projections of similarly insecure parents, teachers or supervisors, that we just could not adjust to at the time of their judgements, and we buried them 'for future reference' hoping that time would never come.
So, thanks to the writer of the novel, on which The Descendents is based, and thanks to George Clooney, for delivering this line with such power and conviction, in the hope that other men will come to their own awakening, without having to do it in a hospital room with a dying, unconscious wife, who had already emotionally departed an "empty" marriage.
The explosion by "King," surprisingly in the hospital room, presumably in intensive care (she was in a private room), will echo around the North American continent at least for the next several months, as men project their own resentment, anger, possibly fear and even defiance at the reduction of the stereotype of "out of touch" with emotions, almost as an offense under the "Successful Marriage Act" a mythical document apparently written by the millions of women who wish to see their male partners as "more like them."
Learning about the emotions that one experiences and thereby articulating their identity, their strength, their roots and the potency of their implications, especially within a relationship, is not one of the skills that North America males have picked up along the way to their medical, legal, accounting, engineering or even theological degrees. Nor is it something that most, if not all, of those professions considers really important in growing and developing into what the marketplace of conventionality considers a "success". How many deals, the size of those deals, the complexity of those deals and the skill with which one can wear many hats, seemingly simultaneously, without losing focus or concentration on any open file, are much more important. In fact, in a male world, dominated as it has been with competition, with will, with endurance and with externals like the name on the hood of the car in the driveway, the number on the house and the number of square feet behind the number, the size of the pool and the number of trips to the exotic places on the globe...these are some of the ways by which the men have been trained and conditioned, much like "seals" (take that as part of the Marines, in the U.S. or merely as part of the aquarium shows that dot the continent). They have, many of them, captained their football and/or basketball and/or baseball teams, dated the cheerleaders in their high schools, gone to the "right" parties, been admitted to the better colleges, where the carved out what we used to call B.M.O.C. (Big Man on Campus) profiles in sports, politics, debating, journalism or even entrepreneur competitions. The nerds in their classes frequented the computer or the science labs, and made their 'marks' with experiments, professor alliances, and high grades. They were taught to "do" and to "be-a-success" however they could achieve that benchmark.
Relationships, for the BMOC's, usually came without much effort, without much competition and with little or no comparison to other males, with respect to the "being in touch with their feelings" co-efficient of those relationships.
For the most part, their fathers "were not in touch with their feelings" either, having clawed their way up the proverbial ladder to a career of their own, civilian or military, based, once again on accomplishments. They rested secure on the size of the investment portfolio, the number of college graduates among their offspring, the relative "calmness" of their spouses compared to other men of their generation and of their profession and geography. The fathers generally believed that "feelings" were for the women to explore; they generally despised reading Shakespeare, as it was both "archaic" language and the portrayal of complex emotions, often tragic, of both genders, and they merely "put up" with the pain while enduring those weeks or months, for which they learned the basic plot structures, a few literary definitions and possibly some potentially different twists and turns to the plot lines. They did not integrate those emotions from the literature into their own conversations, believing that to do so would emasculate them in front of their peers.
With the rise (and some would argue fall) of feminism, in its several faces, new standards of what constitutes a "healthy male" have been defined by women, with the support of other women, yet without the universal acceptance and support of their male partners. "Evolved" men were the standard in the nineties; the rise of psychotherapy as women sought refuge in the offices of these practitioners, generated an encyclopedia of new terms for new anxieties, irritations, pains and even both neuroses and psychoses, much of the new information provided by female clients/patients, depending on the background of the treating practitioner.
Women, for example, on The View on ABC television, would state publicly, they would prefer to go on a date with a gay male, because they would know that he was not interested in taking the relationship "further" (a code word for "into the sexual"). Women, it seemed, were more interested in the development of their own careers than in the potential of a mutual relationship with an unevolved male.
Telling their male partners, both personally and publicly en masse, that "you need to go into therapy" will generate precisely the kind of resistance to such an experience that is the opposite of what those female partners wanted. And that resistance will be enhanced by a judicial system that "sentences" men to psycho-therapy as a result of their "acting out" in the marriage. Court-prescribed "anger management" for example is based on the notion that male anger is destructive, dangerous and requiring elimination, through finding words to express those feelings, with which men are out of touch, rather than smashing a wall, or worse, a woman's face.
However, did you know that the definition of "depression" for example, in the DSM-4 comes exclusively from female patients/clients and that it might be possible that a man is experiencing severe depression when he smashes that wall. Yet, such a possibility is not inside the professional lexicon of the psychiatric encyclopedia of definitions.
Women withdraw their affections and their sexual availability without incurring the wrath of the courts, because there is no physical evidence of injury. When men respond, physically and in appropriately, they are immediately charged with assault and often convicted by the bruises, blood, or witnesses to the event that triggered the violence.
Learning to talk about emotions, while difficult and especially threatening to men (as one doctor put it in conversation) "Women do it so much better!" as if the whole idea were another competition, will not come readily, easily, fluently and comfortably, unless and until the intellectual and pragmatic components of health come to include respect for one's inner life, one's spiritual health, one's capacity to cope with the various tragedies and traumas that accompany every human biography. And that will only evolve as men and women together, seek to understand that emotions have historic roots in events long forgotten, but deeply and permanently remembered in one's psyche, stored there because, when the events occurred, they were so painful that we could not cope, we were too young, too overwhelmed, and too naive...and only later, when we encounter a similar or a trigger incident, do they come tumbling out of some hidden closet and scatter themselves all over the floor of our consciousness. And we then have little choice but to confront both the trigger and the deep emotional connection to the trauma in the first place.
And this, while complex and appearing a waste of time, is really the only route to healing, both the current tension and the root of the emotional definition of the current event. And only if and when men come to "see" and they will never do that out of either fear or force, whether medical or legal, that they can unpack their histories, safely with a partner whose understands just how difficult this process is, at first, for their male partner and who takes his hand and walks slowly and deliberately through the darkness and out into the light at the end of the tunnel. And it will take more than one such chapter, in every life and relationship, because we are all fraught with memories of pain, often the projections of similarly insecure parents, teachers or supervisors, that we just could not adjust to at the time of their judgements, and we buried them 'for future reference' hoping that time would never come.
So, thanks to the writer of the novel, on which The Descendents is based, and thanks to George Clooney, for delivering this line with such power and conviction, in the hope that other men will come to their own awakening, without having to do it in a hospital room with a dying, unconscious wife, who had already emotionally departed an "empty" marriage.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
U.S. Researchers demonstrate high costs of drop-outs
By Henry M. Levin and Cecilia E. Rouse, New York Times, January 25, 2012
Henry M. Levin is a professor of economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Cecilia E. Rouse, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, was a member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2011.
In 1970, the United States had the world’s highest rate of high school and college graduation. Today, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we’ve slipped to No. 21 in high school completion and No. 15 in college completion, as other countries surpassed us in the quality of their primary and secondary education.
Only 7 of 10 ninth graders today will get high school diplomas. A decade after the No Child Left Behind law mandated efforts to reduce the racial gap, about 80 percent of white and Asian students graduate from high school, compared with only 55 percent of blacks and Hispanics.
Like President Obama, many reformers focus their dropout prevention efforts on high schoolers; replacing large high schools with smaller learning communities where poor students can get individualized instruction from dedicated teachers has been shown to be effective. Rigorous evidence gathered over decades suggests that some of the most promising approaches need to start even earlier: preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds, who are fed and taught in small groups, followed up with home visits by teachers and with group meetings of parents; reducing class size in the early grades; and increasing teacher salaries from kindergarten through 12th grade.
These programs sound expensive — some Americans probably think that preventing 1.3 million students from dropping out of high school each year can’t be done — but in fact the costs of inaction are far greater.
High school completion is, of course, the most significant requirement for entering college. While our economic competitors are rapidly increasing graduation rates at both levels, we continue to fall behind. Educated workers are the basis of economic growth — they are especially critical as sources of innovation and productivity given the pace and nature of technological progress.
If we could reduce the current number of dropouts by just half, we would yield almost 700,000 new graduates a year, and it would more than pay for itself. Studies show that the typical high school graduate will obtain higher employment and earnings — an astonishing 50 percent to 100 percent increase in lifetime income — and will be less likely to draw on public money for health care and welfare and less likely to be involved in the criminal justice system. Further, because of the increased income, the typical graduate will contribute more in tax revenues over his lifetime than if he’d dropped out.
When the costs of investment to produce a new graduate are taken into account, there is a return of $1.45 to $3.55 for every dollar of investment, depending upon the educational intervention strategy. Under this estimate, each new graduate confers a net benefit to taxpayers of about $127,000 over the graduate’s lifetime. This is a benefit to the public of nearly $90 billion for each year of success in reducing the number of high school dropouts by 700,000 — or something close to $1 trillion after 11 years. That’s real money — and a reason both liberals and conservatives should rally behind dropout prevention as an element of economic recovery, leaving aside the ethical dimensions of educating our young people.
Some might argue that these estimates are too large, that the relationships among the time-tested interventions, high school graduation rates and adult outcomes have not been proved yet on a large scale. Those are important considerations, but the evidence cannot be denied: increased education does, indeed, improve skill levels and help individuals to lead healthier and more productive lives. And despite the high unemployment rate today, we have every reason to believe that many of these new graduates would find work — our history is filled with sustained periods of economic growth when increasing numbers of young people obtained more schooling and received large economic benefits as a result.
Of course, there are other strategies for improving educational attainment — researchers learn more every day about which are effective and which are not. But even with what we know, a failure to substantially reduce the numbers of high school dropouts is demonstrably penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Proven educational strategies to increase high school completion, like high-quality preschool, provide returns to the taxpayer that are as much as three and a half times their cost. Investing our public dollars wisely to reduce the number of high school dropouts must be a central part of any strategy to raise long-run economic growth, reduce inequality and return fiscal health to our federal, state and local governments.
Setting goals like 700,000 additional graduates, and demonstrating the investment return of $1.45 to $3.55 for every dollar invested in keeping kids in school, and positing $127,000 of graduate contribution to state coffers and an accumulative $90 billion for each year of increasing the number of graduates by 700,000, or $90 billion over eleven years....all worthy and credible figures and projections.
However, while the economy is sputtering and has been for at last the last four years, and while No Child Left Behind was always nothing more than a "teach-to-the-test" cover of the politicians' asses, and not a visionary educational approach, and while reducing the number of drop-outs, and increasing the number of graduates is and always will be a good thing to do, nevertheless:--
Henry M. Levin is a professor of economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Cecilia E. Rouse, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, was a member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2011.
In 1970, the United States had the world’s highest rate of high school and college graduation. Today, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we’ve slipped to No. 21 in high school completion and No. 15 in college completion, as other countries surpassed us in the quality of their primary and secondary education.
Only 7 of 10 ninth graders today will get high school diplomas. A decade after the No Child Left Behind law mandated efforts to reduce the racial gap, about 80 percent of white and Asian students graduate from high school, compared with only 55 percent of blacks and Hispanics.
Like President Obama, many reformers focus their dropout prevention efforts on high schoolers; replacing large high schools with smaller learning communities where poor students can get individualized instruction from dedicated teachers has been shown to be effective. Rigorous evidence gathered over decades suggests that some of the most promising approaches need to start even earlier: preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds, who are fed and taught in small groups, followed up with home visits by teachers and with group meetings of parents; reducing class size in the early grades; and increasing teacher salaries from kindergarten through 12th grade.
These programs sound expensive — some Americans probably think that preventing 1.3 million students from dropping out of high school each year can’t be done — but in fact the costs of inaction are far greater.
High school completion is, of course, the most significant requirement for entering college. While our economic competitors are rapidly increasing graduation rates at both levels, we continue to fall behind. Educated workers are the basis of economic growth — they are especially critical as sources of innovation and productivity given the pace and nature of technological progress.
If we could reduce the current number of dropouts by just half, we would yield almost 700,000 new graduates a year, and it would more than pay for itself. Studies show that the typical high school graduate will obtain higher employment and earnings — an astonishing 50 percent to 100 percent increase in lifetime income — and will be less likely to draw on public money for health care and welfare and less likely to be involved in the criminal justice system. Further, because of the increased income, the typical graduate will contribute more in tax revenues over his lifetime than if he’d dropped out.
When the costs of investment to produce a new graduate are taken into account, there is a return of $1.45 to $3.55 for every dollar of investment, depending upon the educational intervention strategy. Under this estimate, each new graduate confers a net benefit to taxpayers of about $127,000 over the graduate’s lifetime. This is a benefit to the public of nearly $90 billion for each year of success in reducing the number of high school dropouts by 700,000 — or something close to $1 trillion after 11 years. That’s real money — and a reason both liberals and conservatives should rally behind dropout prevention as an element of economic recovery, leaving aside the ethical dimensions of educating our young people.
Some might argue that these estimates are too large, that the relationships among the time-tested interventions, high school graduation rates and adult outcomes have not been proved yet on a large scale. Those are important considerations, but the evidence cannot be denied: increased education does, indeed, improve skill levels and help individuals to lead healthier and more productive lives. And despite the high unemployment rate today, we have every reason to believe that many of these new graduates would find work — our history is filled with sustained periods of economic growth when increasing numbers of young people obtained more schooling and received large economic benefits as a result.
Of course, there are other strategies for improving educational attainment — researchers learn more every day about which are effective and which are not. But even with what we know, a failure to substantially reduce the numbers of high school dropouts is demonstrably penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Proven educational strategies to increase high school completion, like high-quality preschool, provide returns to the taxpayer that are as much as three and a half times their cost. Investing our public dollars wisely to reduce the number of high school dropouts must be a central part of any strategy to raise long-run economic growth, reduce inequality and return fiscal health to our federal, state and local governments.
Setting goals like 700,000 additional graduates, and demonstrating the investment return of $1.45 to $3.55 for every dollar invested in keeping kids in school, and positing $127,000 of graduate contribution to state coffers and an accumulative $90 billion for each year of increasing the number of graduates by 700,000, or $90 billion over eleven years....all worthy and credible figures and projections.
However, while the economy is sputtering and has been for at last the last four years, and while No Child Left Behind was always nothing more than a "teach-to-the-test" cover of the politicians' asses, and not a visionary educational approach, and while reducing the number of drop-outs, and increasing the number of graduates is and always will be a good thing to do, nevertheless:--
- learning generates much more that dollars, for both the graduate and the state
- learning generates many more options within the graduates perspective on whatever life or career situation presents itself
- learning also generates a much more demanding and imaginative culture through which, we can only hope, politicians will have to account to both more and more penetrating questions from more sources...generating a far more interactive and accountable and thereby responsible society
- learning also stimulates the imagination, if done successfully, thereby providing the essential foundation for a society and a culture seeking to shed the "ingenuity gap" which plagues North American culture, on both sides of the border, although it is more serious in Canada..
Monday, December 12, 2011
Manipulating numbers: in faculty ratios, and in entry requirements to university...needs reversing
I had the opportunity to discuss the issues faced by male adolescents in Ontario secondary schools this weekend with a retired teacher from an Ottawa high school.
He made two significant points:
With respect to #1 above, it is long overdue that the male-female ratio among secondary school instructors and administrators be re-calibrated, to achieve a ratio much closer to the 50-50 balance that could be considered optimum.
With respect to #2 above, the universities would do everyone, themselves, the culture and the professions a large favour if they were to return to a standard entry requirement for male and female students, in all faculties. Otherwise, we will experience more situations similar to the North York General Hospital who searched for more than two years for a teaching practitioner in family medicine who was male, without success. Many veterinarian clinics are now staffed by women who refuse to make "house calls" to sick large farm animals. That is another professional gap that will likely grow.
In both instances, what may have been an appropriate idea at its inception has now served its purpose, and needs, in both cases, to be rectified. And where is the public push-back to come from?
He made two significant points:
- When the Ontario Ministry of education began the initiative to level the ratio of faculty numbers between males and females, they instructed the Human Resources departments of the boards of education to comb the personnel files of prospective women, those who were already qualified and those who were working on their qualifications to positions of leadership and responsibility, and phone those likely prospects with a "nudge" of encouragement to inspire their application both to the studies and to the application for such positions. However, as with most government programs, once started, rarely stopped, and when the 50-50 ratio of male and female instructors was achieved, the program continued, until now the ratio is more like 80-20, female to male. As a former Guidance Counsellor, he had observed the spectre of a grade nine boy, attempting to separate from his mother, under the 80-20 ratio, and facing 7 female instructors of his 8 subject teachers.
- The second point he made concerned the admission requirements for engineering students in such universities as Queen's. In another attempt to encourage female applicants, the entry requirements were lowered, for example, to a 75% average at graduation for females, while for males the entry requirements remained at 85%. It did not take long for the male students, naturally, to catch on to what they were facing and withdraw from the competition, leaving the classroom spaces to the women, and consequently also the professional graduates.
With respect to #1 above, it is long overdue that the male-female ratio among secondary school instructors and administrators be re-calibrated, to achieve a ratio much closer to the 50-50 balance that could be considered optimum.
With respect to #2 above, the universities would do everyone, themselves, the culture and the professions a large favour if they were to return to a standard entry requirement for male and female students, in all faculties. Otherwise, we will experience more situations similar to the North York General Hospital who searched for more than two years for a teaching practitioner in family medicine who was male, without success. Many veterinarian clinics are now staffed by women who refuse to make "house calls" to sick large farm animals. That is another professional gap that will likely grow.
In both instances, what may have been an appropriate idea at its inception has now served its purpose, and needs, in both cases, to be rectified. And where is the public push-back to come from?
Monday, November 28, 2011
Canadian Boys lag behind girls in literacy,reading and now science: PCAP Report
By Kat Hammar, Globe and Mail, November 28, 2011
Canada’s report card on schools will be handed out to the provinces Monday, revealing mixed marks for Quebec and growing struggles in science and reading for boys across the country.
Once every three years, the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program, or PCAP, measures the reading, math and science proficiency of Grade 8 students in every province and the Yukon. Though the latest results are strong overall, when pulled apart, they identify weak spots for Canadian schools.
The results, taken from a random sampling of 32,000 students in 2010, also show that boys, who have lagged behind their female classmates on literacy tests for decades, are now also behind in reading and, for the first time, science. Math scores between the sexes were tied.
“We’re used to seeing boys having a disadvantage in reading but not necessarily in the other domains,” said Andrew Parkin, Director General of the Council of Ministers of Education. “The report is good for sending up little flares for the provinces. I think that boys in science can be seen as one of those flares.”
The reason for the achievement gap between the sexes is the subject of debate, but academics and educators have blamed video games, attention deficit disorder and the feminization of the education sector.
School districts in Toronto and Edmonton are looking to single-sex education to help close the gap, aiming to tailor the classroom to boys by making it more active, choosing reading materials that align with boys’ interest, and including more male role models in the curriculum.
Boys behind girls in literacy, now reading and for the first time in science...and reasons cited include:
Let's add to the list above of possible contributing factors to this slide: the role played by money and the greed of many of the best and brightest male minds over the last generation at least. Remember, it was Lee Iacocca while president of Chrysler, in 1986, who could not recruit male graduates for the auto industry, and who received a letter from the presidents of Yale and Harvard. In effect these letters were "mea culpa" letters by those university presidents for "teaching the wrong values to their students" meaning that the pursuit of wealth for its own sake had replaced "making a contribution to society" while earning an income.
This problem of falling male grades did not start in the last year or two. It goes back a long way and unless and until the politically correct imposed silence on the issue of feminization of education is lifited, the education establishment will not aggressively approach the issue.
It is not a slam on women teachers, principals or even board members to say that men are different, wired differently, learn differently, have different ambitions, different cultural attitudes, different cultural language and differenty cultural archetypes through which they see the world. And to say all of that is not to excuse inappropriate or violent or crude or offensive behaviour, attitudes or socialization.
The ratio of male to female teachers has fallen disproportionately.
The culture of schools generatlly has tipped in favour of women both in leadership roles and in mentoring and in cultural acceptance of selective behaviours.
And "making nice" about these issues, will not permit nor initiate substantive change.
Parents of male students need to consider membership on school councils. Parents of male students need to ask for reports on the culture of the school, documenting the rates of detentions, suspensions, withdrawals and drop-outs between male and female students. They need to ask about hiring practices, and the need to hire more male teachers, more male principals, and more male superintendents.
They need to petition the Colleges of Education and their provincial members of the various parliaments to examine the issue of male student performance and its implications. The provinces and the federal government need to put some research money into graduate studies in education, around the world, to determine the best practices for male student success and by incorpotating those "best practices" set goals for reversing the trends documented in these latest set of testing instruments.
Canada’s report card on schools will be handed out to the provinces Monday, revealing mixed marks for Quebec and growing struggles in science and reading for boys across the country.
Once every three years, the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program, or PCAP, measures the reading, math and science proficiency of Grade 8 students in every province and the Yukon. Though the latest results are strong overall, when pulled apart, they identify weak spots for Canadian schools.
The results, taken from a random sampling of 32,000 students in 2010, also show that boys, who have lagged behind their female classmates on literacy tests for decades, are now also behind in reading and, for the first time, science. Math scores between the sexes were tied.
“We’re used to seeing boys having a disadvantage in reading but not necessarily in the other domains,” said Andrew Parkin, Director General of the Council of Ministers of Education. “The report is good for sending up little flares for the provinces. I think that boys in science can be seen as one of those flares.”
The reason for the achievement gap between the sexes is the subject of debate, but academics and educators have blamed video games, attention deficit disorder and the feminization of the education sector.
School districts in Toronto and Edmonton are looking to single-sex education to help close the gap, aiming to tailor the classroom to boys by making it more active, choosing reading materials that align with boys’ interest, and including more male role models in the curriculum.
Boys behind girls in literacy, now reading and for the first time in science...and reasons cited include:
- video games
- attention deficit disorder
- feminization of the education sector
Let's add to the list above of possible contributing factors to this slide: the role played by money and the greed of many of the best and brightest male minds over the last generation at least. Remember, it was Lee Iacocca while president of Chrysler, in 1986, who could not recruit male graduates for the auto industry, and who received a letter from the presidents of Yale and Harvard. In effect these letters were "mea culpa" letters by those university presidents for "teaching the wrong values to their students" meaning that the pursuit of wealth for its own sake had replaced "making a contribution to society" while earning an income.
This problem of falling male grades did not start in the last year or two. It goes back a long way and unless and until the politically correct imposed silence on the issue of feminization of education is lifited, the education establishment will not aggressively approach the issue.
It is not a slam on women teachers, principals or even board members to say that men are different, wired differently, learn differently, have different ambitions, different cultural attitudes, different cultural language and differenty cultural archetypes through which they see the world. And to say all of that is not to excuse inappropriate or violent or crude or offensive behaviour, attitudes or socialization.
The ratio of male to female teachers has fallen disproportionately.
The culture of schools generatlly has tipped in favour of women both in leadership roles and in mentoring and in cultural acceptance of selective behaviours.
And "making nice" about these issues, will not permit nor initiate substantive change.
Parents of male students need to consider membership on school councils. Parents of male students need to ask for reports on the culture of the school, documenting the rates of detentions, suspensions, withdrawals and drop-outs between male and female students. They need to ask about hiring practices, and the need to hire more male teachers, more male principals, and more male superintendents.
They need to petition the Colleges of Education and their provincial members of the various parliaments to examine the issue of male student performance and its implications. The provinces and the federal government need to put some research money into graduate studies in education, around the world, to determine the best practices for male student success and by incorpotating those "best practices" set goals for reversing the trends documented in these latest set of testing instruments.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Roots of "mancession," --narcissism and alienation among young men
By Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail, November 10, 2011
There’s a young man I know called Ben, whose story has become familiar. Ben is 24. He finished high school, but university was not for him. He’s bounced through a lot of low-paid jobs in retail and fast food, with spells of unemployment in between. Nothing has quite caught on, and he has no plan for his life. Like many twentysomethings, he can’t afford to live on his own, so he’s moved back in with his mother. It’s not clear – least of all to him – how he’ll establish himself as an independent adult.
The recession has been particularly hard on guys like Ben. Even so, he’s luckier than many. In Canada, the jobless rate for young adults is a relatively low 14 per cent. Across the European Union, the jobless rate is more than 20 per cent. In the U.S., the jobless rate for high-school-educated men between 20 and 24 – Ben’s generation – has reached 22.4 per cent. That’s more than double what it was four years ago. The situation of young American blacks is much worse. In Illinois, for example, only about 25 per cent of young black male adults have a job. And this time, nobody, anywhere, expects the job market to pick up any time soon.
Despite what the Occupy movement says, the biggest economic challenge we face today is not income inequality, greedy corporations, Wall Street corruption or the concentration of wealth among the top 1 per cent. It’s the increasing failure of young men with high-school degrees or less to latch on to the world of work.
Young men without work aren’t just an economic problem. They’re a huge social problem. “We’re at risk of having a generation of young males who aren’t well-connected to the labour market and who don’t feel strong ownership of community or society because they haven’t benefited from it,” Ralph Catalano, a professor of public health at the University of California at Berkeley, told The Wall Street Journal.
Young men without work are trapped in a twilight world of failure to achieve adulthood. They don’t move out and they don’t get married (although they’re increasingly likely to have kids). In the U.S., four out of 10 men between 18 and 30 are living with their parents. In Britain, it’s five out of 10. In Italy, it’s eight out of 10 (although that also reflects the extraordinary attachment of Italian parents to their grown-up kids).
But young men who live at home also have less incentive to find work. The longer they go without work, the dimmer their prospects become. And the more likely they are to drink, do drugs and develop other habits that will make them even less employable.
There’s a reason this downturn has been called the “mancession.” Jobs in manufacturing and construction have dried up, while employment in female-friendly fields such as health care has stayed steady or even grown. But something else is going wrong. A lot of young men seem to have given up. In an age when having a university degree matters more than ever, large numbers have gone AWOL from higher education. Even the ones who have degrees face higher unemployment than women do, a British study found. Bahram Bekhradnia, the director of a British think tank on higher education, blamed the men’s underachievement on complacency and “general hopelessness.”
Psychology professor Jean Twenge, the author of Generation Me, also thinks behavioural factors are holding young people back. She argues that an epidemic of narcissism has created millions of young adults who think they don’t have to work or study hard because they’re already smart. “It’s delusional thinking,” she told a conference of psychologists in Australia.
Joblessness is not the same as poverty. It’s worse. There’s lots of evidence to show that the scars of joblessness can last a lifetime. And fixing the problem will be very hard, because the problem is not simply economic. It’s also structural and social. We’ll need more than an economic upturn to reconnect a lot of our young men to work. But it matters more than we think – because without work, there’s no path to manhood.
A mancession?
General hopelessness?
An epidemic of narcissism?
Complacency?
AWOL from higher education?
There is simply no doubting the statistical data. Men are in profound difficulty, and as a result, the society itself faces an increasing and potentially insurmoutable problem.
But the story does not start with the useful data to which Ms Wente refers.
It goes farther back to young boys looking for mentors, models and supportive coaches. Of course, we make much of the honourable few who serve in that capacity. But there are so few, compared to the need.
There is a culture, at home and in the elementary schools, for starters, that favours female children and students. The last fifty years have seen a triumph of feminism, and a resulting demographic swing in professions like teaching toward women practitioners. Schools have become the domain of women, both in the front of the classroom and in the principal's office. Male students are "necessary evil" making disturbances when they should be quiet; rough-housing when they are supposed to be solving problems, doing math, learning history, or even playing organized games.
Male students far too often replace "school" and the many potential opportunities for socializing, learning and growth with some high-tech gaming device, preferring a virtual reality to one with people many of whom find his "gender" second class, to put it mildly. Too many boys are put on ritalin because they are diagnosed with ADHD, and need "more control." Too many boys are sent to the office for discipline because they are bored, alienated from the compliant-dependent school culture which is much more suited to compliant female students.
Reading and writing, both involving skills in which girls develop earlier and more easily, and it would seem naturally, are relegated, in the boys vernacular to "girl" subjects. Math and science, formerly an arena in which boys could hold their own, with interest, motivation, curiosity and some inherent skill, are now less attractive because, for one reason, the "game-boy" is more complex than most school science experiments.
If the early signs of what a boy considers "the establishment" are more supportive and encouraging of female students, and if his home life lacks a male figure, where does he go for male fraternity, collegiality and even just hanging out.
He has no trouble finding other males his age who are equally "turned off", tuned-out, seeking the comfort of their own "victim" (without ever condescnding to that word) and school work is the last thing he thinks about when the school day ends.
So while we are diagnosing the societal symptoms of what is now called a "mancession": a recession based almost exclusively on males without work, the fork in the road was taken many years before the unemployment numbers were gathered.
Our faculties of education, and our school boards and our principals associations and our colleges of teachers and our teachers' unions have to step up to the plate, and they will only do so if and when the epidemic of men withdrawing from the society reaches proportions where the public demands an affirmative action recruiting program to recruit male teachers for elementary schools, and for secondary schools and when teachers federations demand gender equality for men when hiring for positions of responsibility, and when curriculum designers ask boys what and how they would commit to learn, in order to qualify for seats in universities and colleges now either unfilled or filled by women, and thereby take their place as willing participants in a society that so trashes the current stereotypes of masculinity that almost every television ad contains another dumb, sexually driven, and socially inept male figure, not to mention the billions of dollars being generated by programs like The Big Bang Theory, in which highly educated males demonstrate their almost total estrangement from society and the female gender, with whom they are constantly trying to connect.
To overcome the potential tragedy of the impending mancession, we will need a commitment from all sectors in the society to recognize the blind spots in our vision of equality, in our modelling of respect and tolerance for both genders and a receptive culture for masculine and feminine qualities in all humans, celebrating the androyny bestowed on all of us by nature.
That will take generations....and we really don't have that long!
There’s a young man I know called Ben, whose story has become familiar. Ben is 24. He finished high school, but university was not for him. He’s bounced through a lot of low-paid jobs in retail and fast food, with spells of unemployment in between. Nothing has quite caught on, and he has no plan for his life. Like many twentysomethings, he can’t afford to live on his own, so he’s moved back in with his mother. It’s not clear – least of all to him – how he’ll establish himself as an independent adult.
The recession has been particularly hard on guys like Ben. Even so, he’s luckier than many. In Canada, the jobless rate for young adults is a relatively low 14 per cent. Across the European Union, the jobless rate is more than 20 per cent. In the U.S., the jobless rate for high-school-educated men between 20 and 24 – Ben’s generation – has reached 22.4 per cent. That’s more than double what it was four years ago. The situation of young American blacks is much worse. In Illinois, for example, only about 25 per cent of young black male adults have a job. And this time, nobody, anywhere, expects the job market to pick up any time soon.
Despite what the Occupy movement says, the biggest economic challenge we face today is not income inequality, greedy corporations, Wall Street corruption or the concentration of wealth among the top 1 per cent. It’s the increasing failure of young men with high-school degrees or less to latch on to the world of work.
Young men without work aren’t just an economic problem. They’re a huge social problem. “We’re at risk of having a generation of young males who aren’t well-connected to the labour market and who don’t feel strong ownership of community or society because they haven’t benefited from it,” Ralph Catalano, a professor of public health at the University of California at Berkeley, told The Wall Street Journal.
Young men without work are trapped in a twilight world of failure to achieve adulthood. They don’t move out and they don’t get married (although they’re increasingly likely to have kids). In the U.S., four out of 10 men between 18 and 30 are living with their parents. In Britain, it’s five out of 10. In Italy, it’s eight out of 10 (although that also reflects the extraordinary attachment of Italian parents to their grown-up kids).
But young men who live at home also have less incentive to find work. The longer they go without work, the dimmer their prospects become. And the more likely they are to drink, do drugs and develop other habits that will make them even less employable.
There’s a reason this downturn has been called the “mancession.” Jobs in manufacturing and construction have dried up, while employment in female-friendly fields such as health care has stayed steady or even grown. But something else is going wrong. A lot of young men seem to have given up. In an age when having a university degree matters more than ever, large numbers have gone AWOL from higher education. Even the ones who have degrees face higher unemployment than women do, a British study found. Bahram Bekhradnia, the director of a British think tank on higher education, blamed the men’s underachievement on complacency and “general hopelessness.”
Psychology professor Jean Twenge, the author of Generation Me, also thinks behavioural factors are holding young people back. She argues that an epidemic of narcissism has created millions of young adults who think they don’t have to work or study hard because they’re already smart. “It’s delusional thinking,” she told a conference of psychologists in Australia.
Joblessness is not the same as poverty. It’s worse. There’s lots of evidence to show that the scars of joblessness can last a lifetime. And fixing the problem will be very hard, because the problem is not simply economic. It’s also structural and social. We’ll need more than an economic upturn to reconnect a lot of our young men to work. But it matters more than we think – because without work, there’s no path to manhood.
A mancession?
General hopelessness?
An epidemic of narcissism?
Complacency?
AWOL from higher education?
There is simply no doubting the statistical data. Men are in profound difficulty, and as a result, the society itself faces an increasing and potentially insurmoutable problem.
But the story does not start with the useful data to which Ms Wente refers.
It goes farther back to young boys looking for mentors, models and supportive coaches. Of course, we make much of the honourable few who serve in that capacity. But there are so few, compared to the need.
There is a culture, at home and in the elementary schools, for starters, that favours female children and students. The last fifty years have seen a triumph of feminism, and a resulting demographic swing in professions like teaching toward women practitioners. Schools have become the domain of women, both in the front of the classroom and in the principal's office. Male students are "necessary evil" making disturbances when they should be quiet; rough-housing when they are supposed to be solving problems, doing math, learning history, or even playing organized games.
Male students far too often replace "school" and the many potential opportunities for socializing, learning and growth with some high-tech gaming device, preferring a virtual reality to one with people many of whom find his "gender" second class, to put it mildly. Too many boys are put on ritalin because they are diagnosed with ADHD, and need "more control." Too many boys are sent to the office for discipline because they are bored, alienated from the compliant-dependent school culture which is much more suited to compliant female students.
Reading and writing, both involving skills in which girls develop earlier and more easily, and it would seem naturally, are relegated, in the boys vernacular to "girl" subjects. Math and science, formerly an arena in which boys could hold their own, with interest, motivation, curiosity and some inherent skill, are now less attractive because, for one reason, the "game-boy" is more complex than most school science experiments.
If the early signs of what a boy considers "the establishment" are more supportive and encouraging of female students, and if his home life lacks a male figure, where does he go for male fraternity, collegiality and even just hanging out.
He has no trouble finding other males his age who are equally "turned off", tuned-out, seeking the comfort of their own "victim" (without ever condescnding to that word) and school work is the last thing he thinks about when the school day ends.
So while we are diagnosing the societal symptoms of what is now called a "mancession": a recession based almost exclusively on males without work, the fork in the road was taken many years before the unemployment numbers were gathered.
Our faculties of education, and our school boards and our principals associations and our colleges of teachers and our teachers' unions have to step up to the plate, and they will only do so if and when the epidemic of men withdrawing from the society reaches proportions where the public demands an affirmative action recruiting program to recruit male teachers for elementary schools, and for secondary schools and when teachers federations demand gender equality for men when hiring for positions of responsibility, and when curriculum designers ask boys what and how they would commit to learn, in order to qualify for seats in universities and colleges now either unfilled or filled by women, and thereby take their place as willing participants in a society that so trashes the current stereotypes of masculinity that almost every television ad contains another dumb, sexually driven, and socially inept male figure, not to mention the billions of dollars being generated by programs like The Big Bang Theory, in which highly educated males demonstrate their almost total estrangement from society and the female gender, with whom they are constantly trying to connect.
To overcome the potential tragedy of the impending mancession, we will need a commitment from all sectors in the society to recognize the blind spots in our vision of equality, in our modelling of respect and tolerance for both genders and a receptive culture for masculine and feminine qualities in all humans, celebrating the androyny bestowed on all of us by nature.
That will take generations....and we really don't have that long!
Sunday, November 6, 2011
To all Canadian males 16-25: challenge yourself to achieve your potential
By Kate Bolick, The Atlantic, November 6, 2011
Over the past half century, women have steadily gained on—and are in some ways surpassing—men in education and employment. From 1970 (seven years after the Equal Pay Act was passed) to 2007, women’s earnings grew by 44 percent, compared with 6 percent for men. In 2008, women still earned just 77 cents to the male dollar—but that figure doesn’t account for the difference in hours worked, or the fact that women tend to choose lower-paying fields like nursing or education. A 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found that the women actually earned 8 percent more than the men. Women are also more likely than men to go to college: in 2010, 55 percent of all college graduates ages 25 to 29 were female.
By themselves, the cultural and technological advances that have made my stance on childbearing plausible would be enough to reshape our understanding of the modern family—but, unfortunately, they happen to be dovetailing with another set of developments that can be summed up as: the deterioration of the male condition. As Hanna Rosin laid out in these pages last year (“The End of Men,” July/August 2010), men have been rapidly declining—in income, in educational attainment, and in future employment prospects—relative to women. As of last year, women held 51.4 percent of all managerial and professional positions, up from 26 percent in 1980. Today women outnumber men not only in college but in graduate school; they earned 60 percent of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded in 2010, and men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma. ...
But while the rise of women has been good for everyone, the decline of males has obviously been bad news for men—and bad news for marriage. For all the changes the institution has undergone, American women as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be “marriageable” men—those who are better educated and earn more than they do. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity. Even as women have seen their range of options broaden in recent years—for instance, expanding the kind of men it’s culturally acceptable to be with, and making it okay not to marry at all—the new scarcity disrupts what economists call the “marriage market” in a way that in fact narrows the available choices, making a good man harder to find than ever. At the rate things are going, the next generation’s pool of good men will be significantly smaller....
(T)ake 1940s Russia, which lost some 20 million men and 7 million women to World War II. In order to replenish the population, the state instituted an aggressive pro-natalist policy to support single mothers. Mie Nakachi, a historian at Hokkaido University, in Japan, has outlined its components: mothers were given generous subsidies and often put up in special sanatoria during pregnancy and childbirth; the state day-care system expanded to cover most children from infancy; and penalties were brandished for anyone who perpetuated the stigma against conceiving out of wedlock. In 1944, a new Family Law was passed, which essentially freed men from responsibility for illegitimate children; in effect, the state took on the role of “husband.” As a result of this policy—and of the general dearth of males—men moved at will from house to house, where they were expected to do nothing and were treated like kings; a generation of children were raised without reliable fathers, and women became the “responsible” gender. This family pattern was felt for decades after the war.
Indeed, Siberia today is suffering such an acute “man shortage” (due in part to massive rates of alcoholism) that both men and women have lobbied the Russian parliament to legalize polygamy. In 2009, The Guardian cited Russian politicians’ claims that polygamy would provide husbands for “10 million lonely women.” In endorsing polygamy, these women, particularly those in remote rural areas without running water, may be less concerned with loneliness than with something more pragmatic: help with the chores. Caroline Humphrey, a Cambridge University anthropologist who has studied the region, said women supporters believed the legalization of polygamy would be a “godsend,” giving them “rights to a man’s financial and physical support, legitimacy for their children, and rights to state benefits.”
While the Bolick piece focuses on the future of marriage and coupling, there are serious implications for men in the numbers. And those implications apply to Canadian males between 16 and 25...We cannot afford a lost generation!
Why, for example, are men not attending university in greater numbers, to acquire what most people, including the academic researchers, agree is one of the best ways to, if not guarantee then certainly to access, healthy and rewarding employment, access to health care, and not incidentally enhanced access to the most qualified and most interesting women in your town or city?
Rather than withdrawing into a cocoon of resentment about the economy and job losses especially among men, and rather than acceding to the stereotype of males as "dead beats" or "playboys", neither of which are attractive to healthy women looking for a mate, why not hit the books, or the desktop, depending on where and how you do your homework in grade and secondary school, aim for the best marks you can achieve, seek the support and coaching from your favourite teacher and crack the vault by opening the scholarship and bursary money available to see that your education does not stop prematurely.
If senior males suffer from Erectile Dysfunction (sometimes known as premature ejaculation) why should younger men suffer from premature elimination from the brain development pool?
That may sound like a flippant question but the implications are very serious.
Getting a quality education, in a field in which you as a male are interested, may be the most significant decision of your first quarter century. By taking such a decision, you rebuild the reputation of men on the North American continent, a reputation badly in need of shoring up. By taking such a decision, you also invest, not only in your own intellectual, social and cultural development, (and income-earning potential) but in the enhanced potential for your children, and your family. A university or college grad is far more likely to witness his children enrol in post-secondary school, and also to graduate from those schools. And that is no small accomplishment.
It may be true that high school culture is not "your cup of tea" especially with all the rules and regulations imposed without much logic other than the need of the system to keep control. It may also be true that your gameboy and/or your I-Pad, are far more interesting and more fun and more attractive than your algebra equation, or your chemistry experiment, and it may seem difficult, if not nigh on impossible, for you to make the connections between macy of the shards of information and light and the larger picture of your professional career, and the development of your highest potential.
However, we need each of you, each male in the 16-22 age range, to climb on the seemingly horseless wagon that bears the address (University/College of X) without the kind of cynicism and resentful withdrawal that accompanies what looks like alienation from the system, and separation from the public culture of corporate greed and job losses, and female empowerment, and broken marriages and families...and jump into the challenge that is obtaining first an undergraduate and then a graduate degree in your choice of discipline.
If playing a sport is your best expression, then go at it with vigour, including both finding an outstanding coach and a team mate whose mentorship you can share. Search all the best schools where your sport is being played. Search the best coaches and the best lecturers in the academic discipline of your interest.
Say "YES" to your commitment to your self, and forget about the late nights, and the term tests and the essays and exams that will accompany your decision. Keep your eye fixed on completing that degree, and the admittedly only potential (not guaranteed) access it will give you to a job in your field and demonstrate to your friends and family that your goal is worth pursuing.
You do not have to be a "type A" personality nor do you have to be a "nerd" nor do you have to be a "genius" to enter the most challenging academic stream of your capacity to learn....you just have to believe that your fullest development is more important that a million oilsands for the recovery of the energy within.
If Canada is not a nation of "intellectual, cultural and social" developers, and merely a developers of technology for the extraction of heavy oil, and soft and hard lumber, and expensive minerals, then we will have sacrificed our most precious resource, our human resource on the altar of profit, greed and reductionism.
And, while young women are, or seem to be, committed to their own full development, and men are loath to compete with the same women they may seek to date (wisely) it is time to reverse the image of attempting to compete with the female cohorts of your graduating class.
Your competition is not the narrow one of "besting" the women in your class; your competiton is to "best" the best of the young men and women from every major country in the world, where your next generations peers and intellectual mentors will come from. Whether they speak Mandarin, or Hindi, or Farsi, or German, or Norwegian...we need a huge cadre of well-education Canadian male brains connected to their bodies and their imaginations and their highest ideals and best angels and so do your children and your grandchildren.
And, while, as Red Green says, "We are all in this together, we are also counting on you!"
No one has been hurt more by the arrival of the post-industrial economy than the stubbornly large pool of men without higher education. An analysis by Michael Greenstone, an economist at MIT, reveals that, after accounting for inflation, male median wages have fallen by 32 percent since their peak in 1973, once you account for the men who have stopped working altogether. The Great Recession accelerated this imbalance. Nearly three-quarters of the 7.5 million jobs lost in the depths of the recession were lost by men, making 2010 the first time in American history that women made up the majority of the workforce. Men have since then regained a small portion of the positions they’d lost—but they remain in a deep hole, and most of the jobs that are least likely ever to come back are in traditionally male-dominated sectors, like manufacturing and construction.
Over the past half century, women have steadily gained on—and are in some ways surpassing—men in education and employment. From 1970 (seven years after the Equal Pay Act was passed) to 2007, women’s earnings grew by 44 percent, compared with 6 percent for men. In 2008, women still earned just 77 cents to the male dollar—but that figure doesn’t account for the difference in hours worked, or the fact that women tend to choose lower-paying fields like nursing or education. A 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found that the women actually earned 8 percent more than the men. Women are also more likely than men to go to college: in 2010, 55 percent of all college graduates ages 25 to 29 were female.
By themselves, the cultural and technological advances that have made my stance on childbearing plausible would be enough to reshape our understanding of the modern family—but, unfortunately, they happen to be dovetailing with another set of developments that can be summed up as: the deterioration of the male condition. As Hanna Rosin laid out in these pages last year (“The End of Men,” July/August 2010), men have been rapidly declining—in income, in educational attainment, and in future employment prospects—relative to women. As of last year, women held 51.4 percent of all managerial and professional positions, up from 26 percent in 1980. Today women outnumber men not only in college but in graduate school; they earned 60 percent of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded in 2010, and men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma. ...
But while the rise of women has been good for everyone, the decline of males has obviously been bad news for men—and bad news for marriage. For all the changes the institution has undergone, American women as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be “marriageable” men—those who are better educated and earn more than they do. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity. Even as women have seen their range of options broaden in recent years—for instance, expanding the kind of men it’s culturally acceptable to be with, and making it okay not to marry at all—the new scarcity disrupts what economists call the “marriage market” in a way that in fact narrows the available choices, making a good man harder to find than ever. At the rate things are going, the next generation’s pool of good men will be significantly smaller....
(T)ake 1940s Russia, which lost some 20 million men and 7 million women to World War II. In order to replenish the population, the state instituted an aggressive pro-natalist policy to support single mothers. Mie Nakachi, a historian at Hokkaido University, in Japan, has outlined its components: mothers were given generous subsidies and often put up in special sanatoria during pregnancy and childbirth; the state day-care system expanded to cover most children from infancy; and penalties were brandished for anyone who perpetuated the stigma against conceiving out of wedlock. In 1944, a new Family Law was passed, which essentially freed men from responsibility for illegitimate children; in effect, the state took on the role of “husband.” As a result of this policy—and of the general dearth of males—men moved at will from house to house, where they were expected to do nothing and were treated like kings; a generation of children were raised without reliable fathers, and women became the “responsible” gender. This family pattern was felt for decades after the war.
Indeed, Siberia today is suffering such an acute “man shortage” (due in part to massive rates of alcoholism) that both men and women have lobbied the Russian parliament to legalize polygamy. In 2009, The Guardian cited Russian politicians’ claims that polygamy would provide husbands for “10 million lonely women.” In endorsing polygamy, these women, particularly those in remote rural areas without running water, may be less concerned with loneliness than with something more pragmatic: help with the chores. Caroline Humphrey, a Cambridge University anthropologist who has studied the region, said women supporters believed the legalization of polygamy would be a “godsend,” giving them “rights to a man’s financial and physical support, legitimacy for their children, and rights to state benefits.”
While the Bolick piece focuses on the future of marriage and coupling, there are serious implications for men in the numbers. And those implications apply to Canadian males between 16 and 25...We cannot afford a lost generation!
Why, for example, are men not attending university in greater numbers, to acquire what most people, including the academic researchers, agree is one of the best ways to, if not guarantee then certainly to access, healthy and rewarding employment, access to health care, and not incidentally enhanced access to the most qualified and most interesting women in your town or city?
Rather than withdrawing into a cocoon of resentment about the economy and job losses especially among men, and rather than acceding to the stereotype of males as "dead beats" or "playboys", neither of which are attractive to healthy women looking for a mate, why not hit the books, or the desktop, depending on where and how you do your homework in grade and secondary school, aim for the best marks you can achieve, seek the support and coaching from your favourite teacher and crack the vault by opening the scholarship and bursary money available to see that your education does not stop prematurely.
If senior males suffer from Erectile Dysfunction (sometimes known as premature ejaculation) why should younger men suffer from premature elimination from the brain development pool?
That may sound like a flippant question but the implications are very serious.
Getting a quality education, in a field in which you as a male are interested, may be the most significant decision of your first quarter century. By taking such a decision, you rebuild the reputation of men on the North American continent, a reputation badly in need of shoring up. By taking such a decision, you also invest, not only in your own intellectual, social and cultural development, (and income-earning potential) but in the enhanced potential for your children, and your family. A university or college grad is far more likely to witness his children enrol in post-secondary school, and also to graduate from those schools. And that is no small accomplishment.
It may be true that high school culture is not "your cup of tea" especially with all the rules and regulations imposed without much logic other than the need of the system to keep control. It may also be true that your gameboy and/or your I-Pad, are far more interesting and more fun and more attractive than your algebra equation, or your chemistry experiment, and it may seem difficult, if not nigh on impossible, for you to make the connections between macy of the shards of information and light and the larger picture of your professional career, and the development of your highest potential.
However, we need each of you, each male in the 16-22 age range, to climb on the seemingly horseless wagon that bears the address (University/College of X) without the kind of cynicism and resentful withdrawal that accompanies what looks like alienation from the system, and separation from the public culture of corporate greed and job losses, and female empowerment, and broken marriages and families...and jump into the challenge that is obtaining first an undergraduate and then a graduate degree in your choice of discipline.
If playing a sport is your best expression, then go at it with vigour, including both finding an outstanding coach and a team mate whose mentorship you can share. Search all the best schools where your sport is being played. Search the best coaches and the best lecturers in the academic discipline of your interest.
Say "YES" to your commitment to your self, and forget about the late nights, and the term tests and the essays and exams that will accompany your decision. Keep your eye fixed on completing that degree, and the admittedly only potential (not guaranteed) access it will give you to a job in your field and demonstrate to your friends and family that your goal is worth pursuing.
You do not have to be a "type A" personality nor do you have to be a "nerd" nor do you have to be a "genius" to enter the most challenging academic stream of your capacity to learn....you just have to believe that your fullest development is more important that a million oilsands for the recovery of the energy within.
If Canada is not a nation of "intellectual, cultural and social" developers, and merely a developers of technology for the extraction of heavy oil, and soft and hard lumber, and expensive minerals, then we will have sacrificed our most precious resource, our human resource on the altar of profit, greed and reductionism.
And, while young women are, or seem to be, committed to their own full development, and men are loath to compete with the same women they may seek to date (wisely) it is time to reverse the image of attempting to compete with the female cohorts of your graduating class.
Your competition is not the narrow one of "besting" the women in your class; your competiton is to "best" the best of the young men and women from every major country in the world, where your next generations peers and intellectual mentors will come from. Whether they speak Mandarin, or Hindi, or Farsi, or German, or Norwegian...we need a huge cadre of well-education Canadian male brains connected to their bodies and their imaginations and their highest ideals and best angels and so do your children and your grandchildren.
And, while, as Red Green says, "We are all in this together, we are also counting on you!"
No one has been hurt more by the arrival of the post-industrial economy than the stubbornly large pool of men without higher education. An analysis by Michael Greenstone, an economist at MIT, reveals that, after accounting for inflation, male median wages have fallen by 32 percent since their peak in 1973, once you account for the men who have stopped working altogether. The Great Recession accelerated this imbalance. Nearly three-quarters of the 7.5 million jobs lost in the depths of the recession were lost by men, making 2010 the first time in American history that women made up the majority of the workforce. Men have since then regained a small portion of the positions they’d lost—but they remain in a deep hole, and most of the jobs that are least likely ever to come back are in traditionally male-dominated sectors, like manufacturing and construction.
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