By Herbert Purdy: What is going on in the education of our boys is an abomination. Boys are failing in our schools because they are being failed by an education system that has become dominated by women, their thinking, and their ways: a system that reeks of a political ideology – feminism – that is outrageously favouring girls’ needs and learning styles, and in which boys’ natural boyish boisterousness is being routinely pathologised as deviant behaviour.
Boys in British schools today are being treated as ‘a problem’ because they are boys, and this is entirely due to the feminist anti-male doctrine that informs the entire education system.
For proof of this, we need look no further then recent utterances from Yvette Cooper, one of the leading political feminists (and shadow Home Secretary) who, on Sunday 6 July 2014 said ‘We must educate our sons to save our daughters’. (See my post here.)
Her dismal diatribe amounts to this:
What absolute, utter nonsense. Yvette Cooper is one of the most dangerous women loose in our society today.
As Collins astutely points out, ‘it is generally believed girls do better on coursework’, and worse in exams.3 and, tellingly, he goes on to say:
In the 1970s, the period immediately preceding the emergence of the trend of boys doing badly, it is known that academic standards in education went through the floor. This was largely because of left-wing interventions in the education system that were described at the time as bringing about an ‘egalitarian wilderness’ in their ‘comprehensive education’ system. Comprehensive schools were a wilderness, but they were not egalitarian, as I shall go on to illustrate.
This was a time when co-education became the received ‘wisdom’ of educationalists, who, of course, were almost certainly the products of postmodern, feminist/liberationist thinking. The early women’s liberationists had, by then, colonised the university lecturing profession, and were spreading their ideology from inside the education system. This has been a classic ploy of totalitarian infiltrations for centuries.
Collins points to a chilling echo of Einstein’s aphoristic wisdom about boys needing physical development from a feminist perspective. In the 2009 Higher Education Policy Institute report on boys’ and girls’ participation in higher education,7 he refers to this passage:
It is narrow, ideologically foul nonsense to say that girls are more intelligent and should be favoured in education over boys, so they can ‘get on with ruling the world’. What rational person could even believe such a thing, let alone say it?
What sort of world would we have if this were true? A world in which men were only the plumbers, electricians, labourers – and footballers? Whilst women were the intelligentsia? What craziness is this, where even intelligent(?) female insiders in education seem prepared to give such an idea voice? God help us all if that were to come about, but that is what is on the cards under the relentless feminist heel that has colonised our schools, our universities, and whose ideology has taken over our entire education system, seeking female domination over men and society.
We must take a stand against this, and against those who, without conscience or compassion, are prepared to promote or even acquiesce in a process that amounts to the abuse of our boys. In particular, the mothers of sons need to wake up to the stark reality that the feminist zeitgeist into which many of them have bought is destroying their children’s futures.
Have we completely lost sight of the fact that, unlike women, men are the full-time, whole-of-life workers, who contribute 72% of all income taxes?8 Does the piper no longer have the right to call the tune? The broadly equal gender balance in the workforce belies that fact that men remain the mainstay providers of our national taxation that pays for our defence, our civil peace, our health (and our education!) Are males to be systematically short-changed when they are at their most vulnerable as children by the society to which they are the main contributors? Are men to be dismissed through unalloyed feminist bigotry?
I suggest that, today, boys’ academic education is now more vitally important than ever. Our economy is now undergoing a further economic transition – to a ‘knowledge economy’ – one in which we as a nation will sell our know-how to other nations that are further behind in their economic development than we are. A good example of this is manufacturing technology, the know-how of how to make things. Our production operations skills, honed in two centuries of industrialisation, are the finest in the world. Another is construction technology.
I went to a boys’ grammar school, then, later, to a co-educational grammar school (there was also a girls’ grammar school, all in the same small town) and there is no doubt that the standard of academic achievement was higher in both single-sex schools than in the co-ed one. The reasons for this were manifold, but primarily, each sex of child went through a process of education that suited them and was tailored to their learning styles.
Not only did my Boys’ Grammar achieve higher academic attainment, it did something else. It bred men who were not only educated, but cultured. (There was a faintly monastic air about the boys-only school that simple wasn’t there in the co-ed one.) Art and music were an essential part of the curriculum alongside languages, science and sport. This was a time when true equality of opportunity, not the false equality that feminism passes off, created practical social mobility.
If this madness continues, not only will our future success as a nation be damaged, there will be another price to pay.
And, whilst we’re on with it, what about creating all-male university campuses too? Ones where men can get on with their learning free of the hysteria of anti-rape demonstrations and the indoctrination that they are somehow dangerous to women. Maybe then men can be equal to the women of Newnham, Cambridge?
Then I wonder which sex will be ahead?
Source
Additional:
http://stgeorgewest.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/death-of-west-bill-lind-on-cultural.html
Boys in British schools today are being treated as ‘a problem’ because they are boys, and this is entirely due to the feminist anti-male doctrine that informs the entire education system.For proof of this, we need look no further then recent utterances from Yvette Cooper, one of the leading political feminists (and shadow Home Secretary) who, on Sunday 6 July 2014 said ‘We must educate our sons to save our daughters’. (See my post here.)
Her dismal diatribe amounts to this:
‘No teenage boy should grow up persuaded that abuse is normal, or feeling forced to behave in particular ways to prove their masculinity. For years we have talked about the importance of empowering our daughters, giving them the confidence to challenge abuse and bringing them up as feminists. If we are going to achieve a real-step [sic] change in tackling violence against women, we need our sons growing up as confident feminists too.’ [My emphasis]
What absolute, utter nonsense. Yvette Cooper is one of the most dangerous women loose in our society today.
She is close to the top of the Labour Party, one that was founded on Marxist principles (and whose current leader is Ed Miliband a committed Marxist and son of a firebrand Marxist university lecturer), but which has latterly placed feminism (also a Marxist doctrine) as its primary ideology after neatly sweeoing its overt Marxist credentials under the carpet in the early 1990s1 because it was, frankly, unelectable.
In a recent powerful post, ‘The Trouble with Boys in Education‘, William Collins astutely analysed the causes and effects of what is widely known (but little understood): that boys are under-achieving at school. He unequivocally attributed this to a pronounced and obvious gender bias in favour of girls in our education system.Collins points to data2 which positively prove that the percentage of children who achieved five or more grade A-C GCSE passes, or O-level passes, in the years from 1962 to 2006, show a pronounced gender gap emerging abruptly in 1987/88. This was the year in which O levels were replaced by GCSEs and in which continuous assessment, based on coursework rather than exams, was introduced into the overall assessment process.
As Collins astutely points out, ‘it is generally believed girls do better on coursework’, and worse in exams.3 and, tellingly, he goes on to say:
‘… since teachers mark the coursework, this provided the opportunity for the first time for teacher bias to influence the attainment of candidates taking these exams. It is not possible from the data to determine if teacher bias plays a part in the origin of the gender gap in these examinations of 16 year olds. However, the coincidence between the timing of the start of the gender gap and the introduction of GCSEs …, taken together with the evidence of teacher bias in favour of girls at KS2,4 is sufficient cause for real concern.’
Since teachers mark coursework rather than independent examiners, unlike in an all-exam system, and since teachers are predominantly women (and women of the age of feminism), it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that the opportunity for feminist bias to influence the academic attainment of girls and inhibit boys’ academic progress is a very significant possibility here.The political underpinning of this female bias is illustrated by the recent feminist furore from the teaching profession against Michael Gove, Minister for Education, who sought to re-introduce final exams into overall GCSE assessment at the end of two years rather than in a series of smaller units.5 Gove was peremptorily removed from office for his political incorrectness and replaced by a woman who is very much junior to him politically (and also remains Minister for Women and Equalities) , no doubt to placate the fanatical feminists who want to maintain the status quo ante. No surprises there, it seems. Even Tory governments are toeing the Marxist-feminist party line.
In the 1970s, the period immediately preceding the emergence of the trend of boys doing badly, it is known that academic standards in education went through the floor. This was largely because of left-wing interventions in the education system that were described at the time as bringing about an ‘egalitarian wilderness’ in their ‘comprehensive education’ system. Comprehensive schools were a wilderness, but they were not egalitarian, as I shall go on to illustrate.
This was a time when co-education became the received ‘wisdom’ of educationalists, who, of course, were almost certainly the products of postmodern, feminist/liberationist thinking. The early women’s liberationists had, by then, colonised the university lecturing profession, and were spreading their ideology from inside the education system. This has been a classic ploy of totalitarian infiltrations for centuries.
In the 1970s, as these late 1980s data show, the game was being changed for girls – and boys were being marginalised. Today, boys are being victimised by this ideology. More than at any time in history, boys are now being actively disadvantaged in their education by a feminised-dominated state, and there is now a desperate need for society to address this most serious problem before it is too late.Now, you might argue that academic achievement isn’t the only outcome of education. Indeed, some might say that it has nothing much to do with the rounding out of an adult person. Some might say that socialisation between boys and girls is essential for a well-balanced society, and that you get this by mixing boys and girls together in school. You might point to Albert Einstein who, in 1936, composed an essay under the title ‘On Education’, in which he said this:6
‘If a young man has trained his muscles and physical endurance by gymnastics and walking, he will later be fitted for every physical work. This is also analogous to the training of the mind and the exercising of the mental and manual skill. Thus the wit was not wrong who defined education in this way: ‘Education is that which remains, if one has forgotten everything he learned in school.’
You might think aphorisms such as that quoted by Einstein inform us as to wider, higher, better aspirations for society: one in which people have learned higher social skills in childhood by association with one another at school – and who could disagree with that? However, this social rounding must not be at the expense of boys’ education and to the advantage of girls. Boys today need neither socialisation at school, nor socialism – they need education, with pieces of paper that prove it – just like the girls are getting.Collins points to a chilling echo of Einstein’s aphoristic wisdom about boys needing physical development from a feminist perspective. In the 2009 Higher Education Policy Institute report on boys’ and girls’ participation in higher education,7 he refers to this passage:
‘In our view, of even greater concern is the possibility that current trends take us to a situation where higher education and the related professions are overwhelmingly female, and where almost the only men to progress to higher education are those from the most advantaged socio-economic groups. For some, there is no problem with such a scenario. As one of the contributors to the Times Higher Education discussion put it, “if the boys don’t want to get educated, why not let them play football while the more intelligent sex gets on with running the world”’ [My emphasis.]
What sort of world would we have if this were true? A world in which men were only the plumbers, electricians, labourers – and footballers? Whilst women were the intelligentsia? What craziness is this, where even intelligent(?) female insiders in education seem prepared to give such an idea voice? God help us all if that were to come about, but that is what is on the cards under the relentless feminist heel that has colonised our schools, our universities, and whose ideology has taken over our entire education system, seeking female domination over men and society.
We must take a stand against this, and against those who, without conscience or compassion, are prepared to promote or even acquiesce in a process that amounts to the abuse of our boys. In particular, the mothers of sons need to wake up to the stark reality that the feminist zeitgeist into which many of them have bought is destroying their children’s futures.
What kind of woman espouses an ideology that attacks her children like feminism does? And where are the fathers? What are they doing to fight for their boys’ rights? Are they so besotted with the idea of defending women and girls that they have lost sight of what is happening to their sons?It is all well and good arguing that boys need muscle and fitness, but whilst these are fine male attributes, it is ideas that count – men’s ideas (and their actions) have been shaping the world throughout the entire span of human history. Is this all to be put to an end because of an upstart ideology that seeks advantage for women only?
Have we completely lost sight of the fact that, unlike women, men are the full-time, whole-of-life workers, who contribute 72% of all income taxes?8 Does the piper no longer have the right to call the tune? The broadly equal gender balance in the workforce belies that fact that men remain the mainstay providers of our national taxation that pays for our defence, our civil peace, our health (and our education!) Are males to be systematically short-changed when they are at their most vulnerable as children by the society to which they are the main contributors? Are men to be dismissed through unalloyed feminist bigotry?
Women bear the next generation, but men safeguard it. Men are as much a part of our future as women. Men have not only built the infrastructure of our society, they have built society, through political and moral leadership over centuries – and they have fought for its preservation with their blood. Is that to be torn asunder in the neglect of our boys’ education?Physical ability might have been all very well in Einstein’s day, but we no longer live in an industrial society where men sold their muscle for wages. That era came to an end in Britain probably one dark day in the so-called ‘Winter of Discontent’, when organised industrial labour (represented by the Labour Party – now the feminist party) took its last ditch stand in a futile fight against inevitable economic change. That era was a hinge in history: one where our modern, developing economy tipped over from industrialisation to a service economy.9
I suggest that, today, boys’ academic education is now more vitally important than ever. Our economy is now undergoing a further economic transition – to a ‘knowledge economy’ – one in which we as a nation will sell our know-how to other nations that are further behind in their economic development than we are. A good example of this is manufacturing technology, the know-how of how to make things. Our production operations skills, honed in two centuries of industrialisation, are the finest in the world. Another is construction technology.
British architects and engineers are major earners of foreign revenues because they are superbly good at what they do, and are in demand. Yet boys are (and will remain) predominantly the manufacturing specialists, the architects and the engineers of the future. Are we to disadvantage them by under-educating them: sacrificing them on the fire of a political ideology that seeks the success of girls at their expense?The answer, it seems, would be ‘yes’ as long as we embrace the idea of feminism, and believe, as Yvette Cooper does, that boys should be educated to be feminists. That sounds like brainwashing to me: indoctrination of children to become women’s-servants when they grow up. The men of the future (and what a future they face should Cooper and her Marxist fellow-travellers have their way!) are being grievously disadvantaged in our schools by this evil ideology. And this is not just in our schools, it is happening in our universities too, as Collins ibid. points out:
‘The annual number of women graduates now exceeds the annual number of men graduates by 32% (2012 graduates were 43% men and 57% women). Female dominance of higher education applies across every class of institution. In 2008, 56% of graduate jobs went to women. Current graduate figures suggest that in the near future we can expect ~60% or more of doctors, lawyers and journalists to be women, and ~77% of vets and teachers to be women (the latter being virtually the case already). Women postgraduates outnumber men postgraduates by nearly 60% (the participation rates being 11% and 7% respectively). University staff in the UK are 54% women and this dominance by women is likely to increase considerably in view of the female:male postgraduate ratio.’
Is there any wonder that women are in the ascendancy in universities when the education system ensures they get the better grades than their male counterparts at school?Our boys have a basic human right to have a decent education (the same right that is so strenuously asserted for girls, worldwide, by international feminism), and that is being disgracefully denied them through the relentless pursuit of advantage for girls in our schools and universities. Boys too have a right to expect they will be fairly and properly equipped for adult life to become contributors and shapers of society – and yet they are being deprived of that right in one of the most civilised nations in the world, because that nation has taken on an unhealthy collective preoccupation with the rights of only half of its citizens.
Desperate times need desperate measures and I believe we now need all-boys’ schools with male teachers, right from early years to sixth form. And we need them pretty damn quick if our boys are to be saved and nurtured to become well-rounded men. This is the only way this evil educational imbalance is going to be addressed, and the poison of feminism purged from our boys’ lives.There was a time – only a few decades ago – when it was perfectly normal to have single-sex state schools. Indeed, they still exist for the elite in schools like Cheltenham Ladies College that consistently turns out candidates for the all-woman Newnham College, Cambridge (boys schools, of course, are now totally politically incorrect).
I went to a boys’ grammar school, then, later, to a co-educational grammar school (there was also a girls’ grammar school, all in the same small town) and there is no doubt that the standard of academic achievement was higher in both single-sex schools than in the co-ed one. The reasons for this were manifold, but primarily, each sex of child went through a process of education that suited them and was tailored to their learning styles.
Not only did my Boys’ Grammar achieve higher academic attainment, it did something else. It bred men who were not only educated, but cultured. (There was a faintly monastic air about the boys-only school that simple wasn’t there in the co-ed one.) Art and music were an essential part of the curriculum alongside languages, science and sport. This was a time when true equality of opportunity, not the false equality that feminism passes off, created practical social mobility.
The boys (and girls) who went to state grammar schools were an elite, but not one born of wealth and privilege, they truly were able to progress on the basis of their own merit, and they were taught almost exclusively by same-sex teachers, in same-sex environments, with same-sex values, and same-sex discipline – all of which were sensitive to, and tailored to, the norms and mores of each.The ‘masters’ as they were called at my school, wore their academic gowns in class and who ruled with that manly authority necessary for boys, were frequently men of calibre (many of them had been officers in the armed forces in the Second World War). Day after day, boys were not only being taught, they were being mentored – by men – in the way only men can mentor boys. They were being prepared for the transition to manhood.
These boys’ schools delivered more than a good education, they delivered well-rounded, socially competent, socially responsible and socially obedient young men, who went on to take their rightful place in society as fathers and husbands: full contributors to the common social good.There is an urgent need for society to challenge the basic assumptions about women and their ‘rights’ in the light of what I believe is a pressing issue now – today – that boys are being wilfully and recklessly discriminated against. We now have before us irrefutable evidence that the entire feminist social engineering experiment, that unreasonably gynocentric onslaught on our society, has gone much too far (and it is showing no sign of abating). Our boys are being nakedly abused, their rights taken from them by an extreme left-wing ideology that has oozed its way into the popular psyche and is creating a massive social time bomb.
If this madness continues, not only will our future success as a nation be damaged, there will be another price to pay.
When these boys grow up, boys who are being so grievously short-changed at the hands of ideologically driven women who are wilfully exercising such politically-motivated and overweening control over them and their destinies, and realise the damage that has been done to their lives, they will react. When those men of the future see the degree to which they were discriminated against as children: when they see the economic disadvantage that was ordained for them from their childhood; when they realise that society is run by and for women, they will react with a vengeance. There will be serious consequences in terms of their attitude towards women, towards their propensity to form families – and in their commitment to society, not least in their civil obedience.Let us learn from the past and now have same-sex schools: ones in which, by all means, girls in girls’ schools are assessed in ways that maximise their opportunities, but where boys in boys’ schools are assessed in ways that maximise theirs too. Let those schools then compete against each other for their excellence of academic output, on a level playing field again.
And, whilst we’re on with it, what about creating all-male university campuses too? Ones where men can get on with their learning free of the hysteria of anti-rape demonstrations and the indoctrination that they are somehow dangerous to women. Maybe then men can be equal to the women of Newnham, Cambridge?
Then I wonder which sex will be ahead?
Source
Additional:
http://stgeorgewest.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/death-of-west-bill-lind-on-cultural.html
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