Watch out: too girly!
Hungary’s state audit office has issued a report about the risks of the country’s education system being “too feminine”, saying it could hurt the development of boys and create demographic problems.
…
“The phenomenon called ‘pink education’ has numerous economic and social consequences,” states the report by the state body, which is seen as close to the nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
Why is it called that though? What color is “masculine” education? Does “masculine” education also have numerous economic and social consequences?
“If education favours feminine traits” such as “emotional and social maturity” and “provokes the overrepresentation of women in universities, equality (of the sexes) will be considerably weakened”, the report concludes.
Seriously? They’re going with that? They’re saying emotional and social maturity is bad? They want more manly emotional and social cluelessness and crudity? Less thought, more bullying?
The report adds that boyish traits of creativity and innovation are “necessary for the optimal development of the economy”.
Who says those are boyish traits? And how do they interact with social and emotional maturity? Is there any reason all four traits can’t co-exist?
As they move farther to the right, they are emphasizing that male=power, and female=support for power. Women (yes, yes, they know who women are yada yada yada) make the boys (and enough girls to make more boys) and feed the boys who will make Hungary Strong Again.
Would you like to see Austro-Hungary rule again, my friend?
Judging from their statement, women aren’t creative and innovative. To that, I would answer Hah! Fooled you!
See, it’s interesting. Back when women were trying to win the right to equal education, they said the education system wasn’t suited to ‘girls’. It was too masculine, too much thought, too much smart. Then women started achieving, and out achieving in many places, so that there are now more women in college in the western world than there are men. Suddenly the same education is now “pink”, “feminine”, and boys/men can’t succeed.
Funny how nobody was throwing hissy fits about the equality of education when it was men who were most of the graduates. (Well, not nobody, because obviously feminists were, but to people who think like this, I presume feminists = nobody we have to give serious thought to.)
Well, it is true that ON AVERAGE learning styles of boys and girls are different, and that teaching and assessment styles can favour one or the other, and thus a good system should bear this in mind.
No, they’re saying that, on average, boys tend to be less good at it (which a good system should bear in mind).
@2 yes:
https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/lady-science-no-26-pt-2-lady-wranglers/
As soon as women demonstrate that they can excel in something tagged ‘too manly for girls’ all of a sudden it’s not really that important any more.
I don’t know about Hungary, but in the UK today 57% of 18-yr-old girls now go to university, whereas 44% of 18-yr-old boys do.
Why the difference? Well likely a mix of reasons, but one is that the mode of assessment nowadays disfavours boys vs girls, so fewer boys get the grades.
And for white boys from poor backgrounds it’s worse, “Only 13 per cent of white boys [eligible for] free school meals go on to higher education, less than any ethnic minority group, according to data from the Department for Education last year.”.
But this isn’t a concern because these days it isn’t fashionable to care about white males. Nor is it fashionable to care about class and socioeconomic status, even though it is usually the more important variable in explaining outcomes compared to race, sex or the other fashionable “intersectional” identities.
So yes, we should indeed take note of whether our education systems favour one sex versus the other.
All you’ve got to do is follow the Orbans.
(If we really want to kill the rhythm and meter of the original.)
@5 another reason is that boys/men have more job options, and more options for well-paying jobs that don’t require a university degree. Women tend to stay longer in education because we need higher/more qualifications to get an equivalent job to a man with less formal education.
guest@#7,
That’s for sure! I’m continually amazed at the ex-prisoner support group I volunteer with, to see people with no job skills and serious records of felonies getting very good jobs. Local factories offer a $2,000 sign-on bonus. A guy who spent three months learning to be a truck driver was deluged with offers paying $80-100,000 per year (which is a whole lot more than I’ve ever had as an audio engineer).
A college education can permit a high-paying career (you wouldn’t want your dentist to be self-taught) but I think the necessity of an advanced degree is open to question.
@8 Interesting. Maybe I should find another line of work…. You say ‘people’, and technically speaking there’s no legal reason women can’t do these jobs, but in practice these are basically ‘men’s jobs’. Women typically need a degree to do our equivalents–teacher, nurse, admin (yes you apparently need a degree for that now if you want a chance)–and of course they typically don’t pay nearly as well.
Coel, I’m not sure we have a lot of evidence that the system favors one sex over another. At this point, I’ve been an educator for some time, and I don’t see that the men do any worse than the women in general; the only difference I’ve seen is that the women (and minorities) tend to work harder. If I have slackers in class, it’s nearly 90% likely they will be white males. Why? Because my teaching doesn’t favor white males? Or because it disfavors them?
Or is it maybe that so much favors white males, and they’ve been led to believe that things are their right that they’ve been seduced into entitlement? White males are the least likely to complete the bonus tests, or do any of the other extra credit options I provide. They are the most likely to fall asleep in class, and not because they are the only ones working. They are the least likely to take any sort of notes or join the discussion. They will answer questions only if they are sure they are right, rather than trying no matter what.
And still the women and the men of color defer to them, assume they are the best students in class, and will look to them for answers when we do reviews. If the white man looks like a nerd, they are even more likely to be deferred to. I watched a young black man turn to a young white man over and over, even after they got question after question wrong on the review, and would have gotten it right if the young black man trusted his own answer instead of believing that the other guy would be right.
Also, men are the most likely to be late to class, especially white men.
Should we redo our educational system to pander to this sort of behavior? No. If white males want to succeed, most of them can. I work within numerous so-called learning styles, presenting the material in many different ways. The women and minorities do better because they show up, ask questions, take notes, and turn in their work. Pandering to those who won’t do that is simply bad policy.
Besides, what Peter N. said.
@Iknklast:
Yes, agreed on the “males”. [I’ll leave race out of it for now, just focusing on boys vs girls.]
On average, girls tend [and this really is just “tend on average”] to be more conscientious, harder working, more biddable, doing their homework.
Boys tend to be lazy, argumentative, less conscientious, but sometimes make an effort, where they will try to wing it on raw ability. If they do have ability, they can do well. [If they don’t they don’t, boys are usually over-represented among the least able academically. In fact they tend to be over-represented at both ends of the distribution, in line with the “greater male variability” hypothesis.]
It follows that assessment based on lots of coursework over a sustained period, and exams that test whether one has done one’s homework, tend to result in girls doing better. Whereas assessments based on one-off exams at the end, and exams that are “problem solving” rather than “homework”, tend to suit boys.
No, but we should be aware of human nature and the differences between boys and girls and which assessment styles they react best to.
Coel @11
I’m curious. Back when boys outperformed girls academically, was the latter type of assessment more common?
I remember hearing the argument that current education is more suited to girls because students are expected to be quiet and non-disruptive in class, which puts boys, with their (putative) greater energy and rebelliousness at a disadvantage. But were things really different in olden times? I remember reading Tom Sawyer as a child, and identifying with Tom’s boredom and restlessness in class. But Tom got the strap if he stepped out of line.
I am concerned about what seems to be happening with working class boys in education, but based on my admittedly limited understanding of educational trends, I am skeptical about some of the proposed explanations. Was there ever a Golden Age when boys roamed wild and free in the classroom?
The Simpsons on boy’s school vs girl’s school vibes.
https://youtu.be/UVn0w5ikkD4
@Lady Mondegreen:
In the UK (all that I know about), yes.
In the old days, school and university assessment was 100% on a one-off exam at the end. Coursework counted for nothing. Over time it has changed, so that nowadays credit is gradually accumulated by a large number of done-in-own-time assignments (even more recently there was a partial reversion back to exams, partly because too many kids were getting parental help, etc, with their assignments, but that’s another issue).
A second issue is that (in STEM anyhow) exams have changed from being problem-solving tests that really required insight and intelligence, to exams that reward having learned the course. This is mostly because exams used to be aimed at the top 10% of the cohort (only 10% went to university then), wheres nowadays they’re aimed primarily at the middle-ability student, so at kids 50% down the ability range.
A third issue with the national UK STEM exams leading up to university is that they now require the student to use exactly the approved wording in their answers, or they lose marks. This is so, even when an alternative wording is just as right in scientific terms. The rationale for this is a demand for consistency and auditability, which means they don’t want the markers to use any judgment, but just mark by reference to tightly scripted model answers (this also allows them to use less-skilled markers who can be paid less). This change also favours girls, who tend to be more biddable and are happy to use the particular phrases they are taught; boys tend to be more scatter-brained and unorthodox and less coachable, and so express themselves in different ways, and so lose marks, even where the boy’s answer is as insightful and correct as the approved answer.
All of the above contributes to the long-term change from boys doing better overall to (nowadays) girls doing better overall.
A lot of work went into getting more girls into STEM in Australia. There was a lot of success, and now so many of our youngest and brightest researchers are women. They worked hard, they studied hard, and they went without completing higher education. And guess what?
Their average wage is lower than garbage sorters. Even when women win they lose.
Coel, the boys I have taught do worse on one-off exams at the end, and at problem solving. Why? Hell, I don’t know. I’m just the instructor. But that is the way I have seen. Perhaps it is different in the UK, but if it is, then that definitely argues for a cultural difference rather than innate.
I do not think the differences you describe, if they exist at all, are innate. I think they are learned.
Also, I’ve read a lot of the studies done on “learning styles” and “learning differences” and on different methods of teaching. I have yet to see one that is robust enough to take seriously, that has a difference that isn’t within the natural scale of error, that was double blinded, and that was well planned and executed. In fact, I have read several where the conclusion is in direct contradiction to the results, and since most people only read the abstract, they pick up the wrong information. So pardon me if I tend to be skeptical.
And why is it such a horror if boys are outnumbered by girls? When it was the other way around, there weren’t long mournful articles bewailing the loss of brain power, creativity, and innovation. There weren’t even long mournful articles about the lack of emotional maturity.
And by the way:
I have been teaching for more than 20 years. I would appreciate not being told I “need to be aware”. I am aware. I spend many hours evaluating what students are learning what, and what styles work best. I teach toward many different methods, and I have a lot of success. But there is another factor I have seen rear its ugly head over and over. A lot of teachers these days are women. A lot of boys won’t listen to women teaching them.
I’m not at all convinced that the style of learning has a big impact on whether boys or girls do better. As a purely anecdotal point, I always did much better with internal assessment and assignments, because my technique and discipline for a single end of year exams swot absolutely sucked.
I suspect the biggest factor in declining male academic success is simply that over recent decades male heroes and role models are no longer scientists, engineers, academics, poets or ‘elites’ generally. They’re anti-heroes, the fighters, drinkers, women aniseeds, sneerers. In fact, engineers, scientists, or educated males in popular culture are more likely to be cast in either the role of the bad guy or a sidekick. It’s not just Bond films. Popular culture, the current zeitgeist, just doesn’t push boys to want to become highly educated and expert men, so fewer of them do. Girls by contrast have been told loud and clear – and have seen – that the way to get ahead and not be stuck in the kitchen or working as a cleaner or in a shop, is to become educated. They’ve done so in droves.
Now, what happens when some activity becomes seen as a ‘girl’ thing to do? It becomes even less attractive to boys, because sexism (at best) and misogyny (at worst) is the air we breathe and the water we swim in.
You can make pathetic excuses about how boys need to be taught differently, but frankly, until society gets over itself and values education and doesn’t denigrate anything and everything girls do as icky, pointless or loserish, male under-performance will be the result.
Pick a country. Keep the education system exactly the same, but ban woman from education. Simultaneously increase academic and professional salaries by 30%, and make such people societies heroes. I guarantee that within a generation boys will be falling over themselves to succeed academically.
“aniseeds”? That can’t be right but I can’t guess what is. Usually I can tell, but not this time.
[…] a comment by Rob on Watch out: too […]
Spellcheck is killing me at the moment. women aniseeds = womanisers. Don’t ask me how that worked out.
Thank you, iknklast#16 & Rob#17. I suspect that the chief reason for the mostly male & rather self-pitying talk about the supposed difficulties males have with learning in comparison with females is an uncritical acquaintance with the wisdom of such profound thinkers as Jordan Peterson & Ben Shapiro.
I should add, I suppose, that in my experience of teaching at universities and in adult education in Japan, males, I suspect because of the more obviously hierarchical nature of male society, tend to be more prone to challenging the authority of teachers for the sake of it (and for the sake of appearing daring in the eyes of their peers), and not because they have anything worthwhile to say. But this kind of behaviour is not confined to males.
Rob @ 20 – well that made for a good laugh. Brilliant, spellchecker!