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in order for boys to do well in school the powers that be need to treat them less like girls! I have heard a couple of arguments like this. Many people are now saying that our schools have been " feminized",

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I do not think that believing that boys should not be treated like girls means that one necessarily lacks feminist consciousness or that they are somehow saying that feminine qualities are bad. I think that there may be a point to what they are saying in terms of this education debate.

In my own experience in Canadian primary school, I do agree that it was boys, not girls, who were mistreated - particularly if the boys were at all hyper-active or rambuntious. I remember a lot of times feeling really uneasy as I watched certain boys being disciplined or yelled at, or singled out and verbally abused for being loud or having too much creative energy. There were not alot of male teachers and I think that the female teachers could relate more to the girls.

In the higher grades, in middle school and highschool, I think it went the other way. Math and science glasses were taught more by men and male students started to dominate the classes, with female students becoming more marginalzed etc.

[ 04 March 2004: Message edited by: Skye ]

[ 04 March 2004: Message edited by: Skye ]

The teacher (a female) said it "scared" her.

Fer chrissake! I wonder when they'll start making the boys cut off their penises because the teachers are "scared" of it.

Creative? We'll drill it out of you.

Energetic? We've got Ritalin for that, and social marginalisation if that fails.

Shy? Don't worry, we'll let them taunt you into despair.

Bookish? None of that, we are doing busywork here. Can't have you reading now.

Unathletic? We have our very own former jocks to marginalise you in a regular class.

There are gendered overtones in a lot of it. I remember being told to sit separate from the rest of my class because I was a 'non-jock' as my PE teacher described it. (asshole)

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I don't think an effort to ensure that both genders are included, and that we don't create structures that harm boys or girls, can be called anti-feminist. Not to be mixed up with the paleo-social conservative boys in blue/ girls in pink skirts behavioural stuff. Rather, a recognition that boys are different than girls, and our schools should be able to deal with that.

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[ 05 March 2004: Message edited by: Oliver Cromwell ]

No individual is bound to one or the other set of traits, however I don't think it's antifeminist to say that more boys, more often, have or develop some male behaviours, and vice versa for girls.

Nor is it a bad thing. A bad thing is to try to pretend that there is NO difference between the genders, despite the many blatant variations.

It is difficult to wade into this discussion without sounding sexist, but I'm not. We have a long way to go in dealing with the social constructions of male and female, and I certainly look forward to the time when young boys aren't expected to live up to a wide variety of constructions about what young boys do, and ditto young girls. However, forcing young boys into molds that don't fit their predispositions and experiences is just as bad as doing it to girls.

Boys are different than girls. Being a boy is not a bad thing, behaving like a boy should not be a bad thing.

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All of us fit somewhere along a continuum of characteristics and behavioural traits. Some of those are constructed to be male or female traits.

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What is a male trait?

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This is not heresy. We need to be careful not to think that efforts to avoid marginalising boys are somehow denigrating feminism. That is all I am saying.

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I am glad you brought this up, CMOT because it is something that I have been thinking about for a while. And far from coming from a lack of feminist consciousness, I think that calling attention to the ways that education adversley affects boys, is definately a feminist issue. The reason I believe this is because education, particularly early education, helps shape and mold the men in our society. From everything I have seen in my own experience in school, when boys exhibit anti-social behaviour their punishment is that they are humiliated and then isolated from other people, (ie. their class)

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I fear that these overly aggressive tactics to deal with boys are failing. Using isolation and humiliation to punish boys will created detached men who are alienated from their own feelings. It will also, I fear, create men who may internalize that humialiation and anger - only to lash out later and repeat cycles of abuse.

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It's sad really. When I think of traits that are "inherently male", the only ones I can come up with are negative. According to our society, men are supposed to be violent, confrontational, competitive and pessimistic. Truly manly men are supposed to bottle up their emotions, forcing them down into a tight little ball in the center of their chest. They will never dance, cuddle or cry. I live outside what used to be a mining town, that being the case there are still quite a few "manly men" living here. I will never be manly, that road leads to repression and a damn miserable existence

[ 05 March 2004: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

However, there are traits that we expect, and find, more often in boys than girls. We can find them in anyone, but there are general tendencies.

Yes, there are negative traits associated with being male, though I'm inclined to think that a lot of them aren't as negative as they are currently constructed to be.

For example:
1. Stoicism. Not oecessarily a negative trait, unless it becomes a power thing. Sometimes stoicism is a much valued and needed trait. Not that it is inherently male, but it is constructed by many as a male trait and therefore negative (i.e. strong silent manly men).

2. Capacity to be aggressive. Not that aggressiveness is a good thing, but there are, unfortunately, circumstances in which having the capacity to be aggressive is a good trait. Like any other trait, it is perceived as more 'masculine', and it can certainly be a bad thing, but not always. Nobody would describe a man or woman who became aggressive in self defense or the defense of their child as a macho or manly man. Our world requires the capacity to be aggressive, and by stifling that trait in all circumstances, we fail to channel it into healthy and controlled directions.

Those are the two off the top of my head, but there are many more. This is shaky ground, because I don't think that there are any inherently gender specific traits. I think that a key weakness of feminism, or at least shallow feminism, has been to negativize the masculine traits that are present, in differing degrees, in most people.

I personally understand the core message of feminist consciousness to be that there are no real gender norms, and to deal with each person based on their personality, abilities and skills rather than their gender.

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I personally understand the core message of feminist consciousness to be that there are no real gender norms, and to deal with each person based on their personality, abilities and skills rather than their gender.

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ITA.

What bothers me about many discussions such as these is that people do not want to understant or admit the significant role that your beliefs about gendered behaviour have in your perception of a boy's or girl's actual behaviour.

I'm reminded of a study where men and women were shown an image of an infant crying. When they were told it was a boy, they said it was crying because it was angry. When they were told it was a girl, they said it was crying because it was sad or frightened. Same baby, same behaviour, different interpretation based solely upon whether the observer thought it was a boy or a girl.

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10,000 years of programming.

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We can break down socialization etc. all we want, but there will still be the matter of the chromosomes and the hormones.

I know that if I don't have a cup of coffee by around 10 am, I get cranky and irritable. I have no doubt that just below the surface there is an entire mix of hormones and chemical relationships that affect my moods and behaviour in less obvious ways.

Ditto for women. All socialization aside, we have different sets of drives and hormones to deal with. This is not denying feminist consciousness at all, but rather pointing out that there ARE differences.

Those differences are nearly impossible to bring down to one or two traits, and never possible to break down to one individual. However, there are things that girls do more than boys, and vise versa. Some of those, I have no doubt, have to do with the ways we are wired.

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Originally posted by CMOT Dibbler:

Why 10,000? Didn't we become self aware before that?

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that is how long some anthropologists figure it's been since there was a human society where women were treated as the full equals of men.

i'm sure there are hard-wired differences, but i don't think we'll have any way of figuring out which are which until we are better at not socializing ourselves to behave differently.

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and imho, we are far better off trying to structure school to better meet all of the different learning styles, instead of those we now consider to be 'boys' or 'girls'. there are more than two different learning stles, so if we only expand it that way, we will still be shortchanging too many students. better to have a curriculum that includes everyone, then let the boys and girls figure out for themselves which they prefer.

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