When I was a kid, I pretty much associated “teachers” with “women”.  My teachers in first through fourth grade were all women – my fourth-grade teacher had in fact been my father’s fourth-grade teacher as well (which used to awe me, although now I see that it’s really not that big a deal). 

But then in fifth grade, I was astounded when I got Mr. Buchholtz’ class.  Mr. B was a big, football-player kind of a guy.  He was a Navy veteran, and had spent time in Vietnam.  He told war stories, rode a Honda 500 (or a Fiat X1/9) to school, showed us karate moves, took us out to his family’s farm for a day of running around in the countryside, led the games of tag football on the playground…

…in other words, he’d probably be fired, in this day and age; he showed us how to make toy guns, he had a paddle that he used liberally if kids sassed him, he took no BS…

…and was a godsend to a bunch of 11 year old boys who’d been cooped up in classrooms all day.  Suddenly, it was safe to want to roughhouse (indeed, Mr. B revelled in roughhousing, frequently wrestling with piles of gleeful fifth-grade boys and whuppping all our butts), to run and yell and be boys in school. 

Of course, modern feminism has succeeded in basically feminizing the classroom, nowhere more than in elementary school.  It’s made school a fairly hostile place to be a boy (or at least a boy that doesn’t learn to be verbal and facially-compliant with a regime hostile to their emotional makeup), to the point where being  a boy is going to get a kid slapped into “Special Education”.  And as a result, boys are eschewing education; they drop out of secondary school in numbers that dwarf girls’; in higher education, young women currently outnumber men by a significant margin that looks likely to climb to close to 3:2 in the not-too-distant future.

Both trends – the feminization of the Educational Academy and the falling numbers of men seeking higher education – would seem to be exacerbating this problem – the dire shortage of male teachers:

At [principal Thomas DeVito’s] Ferryway School, where boys slightly outnumber girls, male teachers are a rare species, presiding over only four of the 35 classrooms.

“The district has a job fair every year, but we don’t see a lot of guys,” DeVito said.

The problem is especially acute, he said, when it comes to hiring elementary teachers at his school, which spans kindergarten through eighth grade. For those jobs, he said, “I don’t think I’ve interviewed any males in the last five or six years.”

The same scenario is playing out across the state and the nation, where the number of male teachers is dwindling despite a recent focus on drawing more men into classrooms. In Massachusetts, only 24 percent of teachers last year were men compared with 32 percent 15 years ago, according to the most recent state data. Nationally, a quarter of teachers are men, a 40-year low.

Here’s the question:  why does this surprise people?  After thirty years of making not merely the educational establishment and academy, but education itself hostile to boys and the very notion of masculinity, why would any guy go into the field?

Of course, there is [Daschle on] “concern” [/Daschle off]:

At a time of increased emphasis on improving student achievement, especially in inner-city schools, education specialists are raising serious concerns that male flight from classrooms could be hindering boys’ ability to learn.

A study by an associate professor of economics at Swarthmore College, which has been gaining national attention in the debate over single-gender classes, found that boys learned better in reading – a subject in which they typically struggle – when teamed with a male teacher. Similarly, girls did better in math and science with a female teacher.

And lest you think the piece will skirt the real issue…:

Even more eyebrow-raising, the research questioned whether a predominantly female teaching force is causing more boys to be labeled as behavior problems because women may struggle in handling the sometimes rambunctious nature of boys. It also questioned whether boys may respond better to a coachlike sternness found in some male teachers.

But in an interview, the study’s author, Thomas S. Dee, cautioned against a knee-jerk reaction of simply recruiting more male teachers.

“The more appropriate avenue to explore is how do we make teachers more productive for all students,” Dee said. “I’d rather have my son with a great teacher who is female than a mediocre teacher who is male. Teacher quality often gets lost in this debate.”

…well, OK.  They sorta skirted it.  Boys are incredibly complex; they certainly deserve better than what the educational-industrial complex has dished out for them this past few decades (I’ve written about this at some length).

Of course, it’s not all structural imbalance; it’s also bigotry borne of hysteria:

Yet the shrinking number of men can be chalked up to another reason: Some men worry that overly protective parents might falsely accuse them of being pedophiles because teaching, especially in the lower grades, is still largely perceived as a woman’s job, requiring a nurturing personality that supposedly is not common among men. In other words, something must be wrong with the guy who likes working with children.

Whether by hysteria or structure, this is a self-perpetuating vortex. 

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 7:15 am and is filed under Education, PC / "Woke" Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.