Re: “Our boys are falling behind on education,” April 18 guest commentary.
Dottie Lamm’s alarmist scenarios and fretting are a mockery to the feminism she claims to embrace. Let’s all shudder at the ” ‘role reversal,’ wherein women will reign supreme in all fields but the sciences.” And how about those men who will be “permanently relegated to the role of full-time ‘homemaker’ . . . by default”? Let us never presume to expose males to the degradation suffered for centuries by women defined solely as “homemakers.”
What planet has she moved to? I guess it’s the one where girls are punished for being more verbal than boys and achieving greater success at academic degree completion because many were able to seize the opportunities finally available to them after centuries of exclusion from higher education.
Primary education did not suddenly become verbal. Girls simply have greater access to the means whereby this reality serves them. And if brain scans showing more advanced language centers in preschool girls creates superiority, then it’s about time this difference is recognized.
Lamm’s suggestion of an educational dichotomy that punishes males because females finally enjoy some means to advance serves no one. The disproportional advantages she assigns to female primary education have not had the corresponding payoffs for females which might create the marriage gap she predicts. The Pew Research Center, for one, is replete with examples that confirm the maintenance of the old boys network, effectively excluding women from leadership positions proportional to their academic achievements, and wage discrimination remains a stubbornly entrenched reality.
Her contentions fairly bristle with implications that males are victimized by female success, making a mockery out of the history of sexism endemic in religion, politics, industry and business. This, despite three successive female U.S. secretaries of state.
Altering primary education to suit boys’ needs should be in everyone’s interest. The murky waters she has created in her determination to “do her darnedest to keep young boys from sinking into that economic mud floor” confuse at best. Feminist? I think only when it suits.
Margaret O’Mara is a former educator who lives in Denver.
