Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “Why women should NOT rule the world”

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April 14, 2008

Why women should NOT rule the world

Hatched by Dave Ross

Note: This is the first of what I intend to be a series on my premise that the decline of America began when women began being put in charge of the school systems of this nation. I’m beginning what I think is a novel experiment in the annals of blogging: I’m going to compose this series with, I hope, the help of my readers. I’m soliciting examples from the readers that, if suitable, I will incorporate into the series, and, which I eventually hope to use to create a much larger piece that I hope will find wider circulation in some publication that has the cajones to print it. (yeah, that’ll be the day!)

The title of this series was suggested to me by the recent publication by former Clinton White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers of her book “Why Women Should Rule the World,” although I have been toying with the premise for several years.

It is given urgency by the (admittedly less likely) possibility that Hillary Clinton might become president.

It would be foolish of readers jump to the conclusion that I am in any way against the idea of women in leadership positions, or equal pay for equal work. I’m speaking of the rise to primacy and in fact dominance by women of our elementary and secondary education system in the last few years. Because almost everyone goes through the public school system, this accords women a particular opportunity to dominate a sector of our lives that has a profound affect on our society as a whole.

Think back when many of us were in school. Yes, women dominated the classroom. But usually it was a man at the head of the school, or of the district. When little boys would face off in the school yard, as little boys have a tendency to do, usually it was a man who would separate them.

“Who started this?” the principal would demand. He would send the guilty party to detention, or to sit out in front of the principal’s office for the rest of the day to consider the error of his ways. Or the principal might demand that the two boys shake hands and go back to class. The boy who was defending himself usually had leave to go about his business without further repercussions.

Compare that to the way we do things today in many schools around the land. Under the “zero tolerance” policies in force in many school districts, both boys, the aggressor and the defender, will be punished. Occasionally the police will be summoned. It is considered just as bad to fight, even if someone else threw the first blow. Presumably the only way to get out of being punished under these circumstances is to fall down in a faint upon being punched!

A second example occurs to me that comes from my real world experience as the editor of a small town newspaper. A few years ago our high school football team was preparing for the upcoming season. Each year the team poses for a group picture for a poster that carries the calendar of all the games. Each year the team plays under a slogan. One year it was “Get it Done!” (a particularly neanderthalistic slogan if you ask me). But this year it was “Cowboy Up!” That is a rodeo term that refers to the cowboy in a rodeo getting ready to mount the bucking bronco. So the football coach suggested that the boys of the team be photographed in cowboy regalia, on horseback. He added the touch of giving the boys Remington rifles to hold to make them look more like cowboys.

The superintendent, a woman, hit the ceiling. The photo was withdrawn and the team photographed again, this time without the offending firearms.

Twenty, or even ten years before, this episode would not have turned out the way that it did. Today, even if the superintendent had not been a woman, it would probably would have turned out as it did, because of the pervasive influence of the female perspective on schools. Even when men are in charge they frequently run schools as if women were in charge.

A third example will suffice to bring this introduction to a close. Just last week a 6-year old Virginia first grader was declared a sex offender for slapping another student on the bottom! The police were called and an incident report was filed. Now, I have no evidence that the top school officials in this case were women, but the unseen hand of a philosophy that we have all heard articulated by radical feminism is in evidence: the idea that all “men” no matter how young, share a group guilt.

You might persuasively argue that this is all simply political correctness run amok. But would political correctness be as strong as it is if the female perspective hadn’t become the dominant “rubric” (a favorite term among educators) in our public school system, and therefore in society as a whole?

TO BE CONTINUED

Hatched by Dave Ross on this day, April 14, 2008, at the time of 8:51 AM

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Comments

The following hissed in response by: MikeR

Good post, Dave. Worth mentioning that Dennis Prager has been discussing this idea for many years.

The above hissed in response by: MikeR at April 14, 2008 11:18 AM

The following hissed in response by: snochasr

Why are we blaming women for this state of affairs? Wouldn't it be more appropriate to blame liberals? Unless gender is determinate of political persuasion, which I doubt, I think you're off by a note.

The above hissed in response by: snochasr at April 14, 2008 11:25 AM

The following hissed in response by: MerryMaven

I agree with your premise. Being a girl myself, I am accutely aware of the damage done by my sissy sisters. I don't think your examples support your thesis, though.

In addition to being a girl, I am also an insurance underwriter so I am also accutely aware of liability. I think each of your examples has more to do with the power of the bar than with the power of women. In each of the cases you mentioned, if the action taken had not been taken, parents would have howled for the heads of the administrators and would have contacted their lawyers and made ugly noises.

There are many other ways that the feminization of education has had a deleterious effect. Consider for a moment, my one-sentence description of the difference between mommies and daddies: Mommies are all about safety and security and daddies are all about dealing with the big bad world. The mommy thing is in part hormonal and we can't help ourselves so consider:

- The self-esteem movement was all about making sure that children didn't get their eensy-weensy feelings hurt and making sure that everyone felt good. To hell with their doing well - that's the kind of thing a man would care about.

- The choice of books to read is totally controlled by big girls drunk on power. This is one reason that boys don't read. All there is for them to read in school is stupid girl books and no self-respecting boy would be caught dead reading a Beverly Cleary novel (or whoever is au courant).

- The entire political correctness movement is so girlie because it's all and entirely about people's feelings. Accomplishments and crimes have nothing to do with it, and you can convict people of thought crimes just because they made you cry. That's TOTALLY girlie.

OK, I feel somewhat embarassed about being a girl now so I'm just going to go hum some Rogers & Hammerstein songs: I'm a girl and by me that's only great, I am proud that my silhouette is curvy....

The above hissed in response by: MerryMaven at April 14, 2008 12:54 PM

The following hissed in response by: nk

Lighten up, Dave. You are giving reactionaries an inferiority complex. But I do agree with you that women should not rule the world. ^_^

The above hissed in response by: nk at April 14, 2008 2:07 PM

The following hissed in response by: Insufficiently Sensitive

The woman whom I want to rule the world is the one who taught six grades simultaneously in our one-room school house in California.

When we stood too close to the coal-oil stove and the caps in our cap pistols self-detonated from the heat, she made it a physics lesson instead of having a cow.

The above hissed in response by: Insufficiently Sensitive at April 14, 2008 3:56 PM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

MerryMavin:

Actually, some men wish their own silhouettes weren't quite so curvy...

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh at April 14, 2008 4:17 PM

The following hissed in response by: Heather

Before the 1970s, bright women tended to work in 3 fields, as nurses, as secretaries, and as teachers. This changed dramatically with women continuing to work even after marriage and children were born and raised, and with changes in federal law that reduced discrimination. I entered the Navy in 1977 and was pretty much in the first wave of women to continue to serve after their children were born. Now, bright women have many, many choices on what fields to enter. Post retirement, I became a teacher. A statistic I've heard from several sources states that the average teacher is in the bottom quartile of college graduates. If true, could that change be more important than whether men or women run schoolhouse? Our current principal, a female, is a delight to work for. She has, and uses, a great deal of common sense in dealing with childhood misbehaviors.

The above hissed in response by: Heather at April 14, 2008 8:29 PM

The following hissed in response by: snochasr

If we're talking about ruling the world, rather than just the educational establishment, I don't think men should do it, either. The notion that one gender either enables or is prohibitive of successful national governance is patent nonsense. Take Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, for example. Neither one should be permitted within a mile of the White House, even as a tourist.

The above hissed in response by: snochasr at April 15, 2008 5:39 AM

The following hissed in response by: oarmaswalker

There is a book out that covers part of this subject matter: "The war against Boys" by Christina Sommers. As the father of four boys, I'm very concerned about this subject matter in particular.

The above hissed in response by: oarmaswalker at April 15, 2008 6:29 AM

The following hissed in response by: Hall Of Record

Your premise is widely known and discussed. For example:

http://hallofrecord.blogspot.com/2006/01/education-failure-boys-doing-badly.html

http://hallofrecord.blogspot.com/2006/01/education-failure-what-boys-need.html

http://hallofrecord.blogspot.com/2007/05/educating-boys-they-could-have-asked.html

But every comment on this subject may be a step toward correcting the situation.

I, too, am not against focusing on women. For example, just today I wrote:
http://hallofrecord.blogspot.com/2008/04/womens-foundation-of-california.html

Keep up the good work.

The above hissed in response by: Hall Of Record at April 15, 2008 2:10 PM

The following hissed in response by: qrstuv

I think you're going to have to do a lot more work to demonstrate that the problem is somehow women, when a century's worth of "progressivism" could explain it just as well.

So far I am not impressed, to say the least.

Jonah Goldberg did a much better job than you have of tracing the intellectual underpinnings of the nanny state. You might read his book.

The above hissed in response by: qrstuv at April 15, 2008 4:57 PM