I think “apolitical” women are not in the movement for very good reasons, and as long as we say “you have to think like us and live like us to join the charmed circle,” we will fail. What I am trying to say is that there are things in the consciousness of “apolitical” women (I find them very political) that are as valid as any political consciousness we think we have. We should figure out why many women don’t want to do action. Maybe there is something wrong with the action or something wrong with why we are doing the action or maybe the analysis of why the action is necessary is not clear enough in our minds.
That approach worked really well. If they really want to win young men, they should try exactly the same approach with the same degree of seriousness. Maybe there is something wrong with the actions they are taking, or why they are doing those actions; or maybe they need to think more clearly about the whole project.
Because my son is in the right demographic, I happen to know quite a few young men. Here is what I hear from them.
1) They are angry that their educations were useless. Democrats control teachers unions and education bureaucracies everywhere. My son explained from middle school, with me to reinforce this, that he wanted to be an engineer and needed more math. The teachers and administrators explained that there was nothing they could do: he had to take the required literature and social studies courses. The high school offered pre-calculus and calculus classes, but to get to them you had to navigate a very tight path and somehow he could never get room in a schedule between the required courses. He ended up at least a year and probably two years behind in math from where he wanted to be.
2) Meanwhile, those literature and social studies courses were heavy on indoctrination: diversity literature, 'geography' studies that focused on the lingering effects of slavery, history that taught important figures like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman but not others who weren't considered proper role models (as if history was about teaching role models rather than how the world became what it is today). They know the schooling they have had has been aimed at breaking their spirits and making them compliant, not empowering them to succeed.
3) They can see the political system aims to reduce them to tax farms to fund benefits for others. All these scholarships go to others, especially to women but also various favored minority groups. For those who don't succeed with the scholarships, there is Section 8 housing and Aid to Families with Dependent Children and a host of other benefits, which will be paid for by the taxes levied on these young men. Though in principle these are gender-neutral, in practice women who have children with men they didn't marry or did but left get the children and access to the benefits (plus child support from the men). The Democratic-led education establishment is at once trying to suppress their accomplishment and lift other people over them economically and culturally, and the Democratic platform aims at using them as a source of funds all their lives.
4) Finally, these young men find that the young women they fancy -- as young men will -- have totally bought into all this ideological indoctrination and economic benefits package, which is entirely in their favor. When looking for mates they find women who defiantly express demands that they consent to all the ideology, and all the exploitation. The women like that they will be given a leg up in education and career, and if it doesn't work out they will have the back-up plan of government aid. The young men are being offered the duty of supporting these women and any children they generate, but without the benefits of necessarily getting to be the fathers of the children or the husbands in a family. They'll still have to pay for it.
Even Marxists should be able to grasp the economic interest aspect of this set of complaints, since their ideology reduces everything to economics. The Democrats are losing men because they have constructed an ideology that economically disadvantages young men systematically. Rather than the ideological indoctrination making them submissive to this, it has instead created a kind of class consciousness: they know they're being oppressed, and they know whose fault these distortions are. They've been in that education system most of their lives. They are completely familiar with where all this is coming from. They are not fooled; in spite of best efforts, they are not fools.
8 comments:
I'm sorry to hear that your son was so ill-served. I hope he is able to use online and other resources to catch up to where he should be. People learn different ways, though--I found, for reasons I don't quite understand, that some concepts were easier to understand when the instructor said the very same words that I'd already read in the textbook.
He probably won't catch up quickly, if he ever does at all; they successfully derailed him from the career he always told his public school counselors he wanted. On the other hand, in America you do have the advantage that you can always go back to school later if you are willing to pay for it; perhaps someday he will want to try again for that route. His grandfather (my wife's father) was an aerospace engineer, and given his deep interest in aircraft and rocketry that he just demonstrated at the Smithsonian, I think he would have been good at it. Public school didn't want that for him.
On the other hand, now that he's out of public education he has the opportunity to explore on his own. He tells me he does like the math courses he's taking in college, but he is in an emergency management program rather than an engineering one. He got very interested in that while volunteering with me in the fire and rescue service, first during the COVID period and since. He did the Fire academy in night school while doing the college Emergency Management program in the daytime. So he may yet have a good life, and even a decent education. It just had to wait until he got free of the public education system, and he'll have to pay for it out of pocket with student loans he'll carry for decades.
Experiences like your son's are why I give thanks that I teach in a private school, with almost full freedom of topic. I can tailor my classes (within certain limits) and add material that interests specific students. I take a poll at the start of the year, and based on that, modify parts of the curriculum.
There is no need to short-change boys in order to emphasize girls. History has so many fascinating examples of accomplishments and heroism by members of both sexes that it is almost criminal, in my opinion, to overweight one or the other.
LittleRed1
There is good in 'blooming where you are planted'. I was lucky to be able to find work that was remunerative and I enjoyed and found fulfilling. I hope your son can do the same but the path is definitely harder now.
An excellent point that history is not supposed to be teaching about role models, but has largely become that. This is part of the favoring of girls (and female teachers) who like the stories about people more than events and processes.
My guess is that, after some years of making it unreasonably difficult to fit the higher-level math and science classes into the required woke curriculum, they'll cancel the classes for lack of attendance.
My father attended a fairly pathetic small-town East Texas school in the 1920s and 30s, then a not-very-impressive state college. He learned math and science by studying what the school wouldn't teach. He had a few extraordinary teachers who realized the inadequacy of their own educations and turned the classes into a kind of seminar, where the more motivated students could push the curriculum higher.
Free stuff isn't that free, whether it's education or medicine. If it's something important instead of a luxury perk, we've got to avoid getting distracted by the "free" fake (despite how costly it was in terms of our tax burden) and go get the real thing.
True enough, Tex. He'll have to pay for it, but escaping the system was the best thing for him.
My kids have mostly shunned politics, and I can hardly blame them, but I remind them that it will come for them, like it or not.
We have a somewhat unique perspective on this as our son is somewhat fair and blue eyed, yet our daughter is a lovely ambiguously brown girl (easily mistaken for Hispanic). I'm confident that with her drive and work ethic, she'll excel in todays world, but my "white boy" son, we fear he's going to have a much harder time getting ahead. Hopefully that's going to change...
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