Or: A brief tour of the conversative gender-politics playbook

There is nothing new under the sun. This is certainly the case for arguments about gender and education, and especially so of conflict over the ways in which the structure of our education system disadvantages one sex or the other. One especially hackneyed claim — stretching back to the transformation, beginning in the mid-19th century, of teaching from predominantly male profession into a predominantly female one — is that schools inflict various sorts of injustices upon boys.

Every couple decades this claim seems to come back en vogue. Each time, the most predictable characteristic of popular conservative alarmists is their insistence that Men And Women Are Just Different — often in a sort of almost-too-obvious-to-require-evidence tone that makes me think of 1950s television shows. Within this framing, gender as socially constructed and related liberal and postmodern notions are alternately ridiculed, ignored or condemned as dangerous and harmful (as harmful to men, that is).

David Brooks’ October 16 column in The New York Times is a case in point. As you may know, Brooks and the Times‘ other big-name columnists are no longer readable online unless you have a paid subscription. I admit I’ve been increasingly persuaded by Kerim Friedman’s anti-lament about this:

for the most part I find them all to be a bunch of blithering idiots

but Brooks’ take on gender and education is a particularly illustrative case study of the kind of essentialism that persists on the right, so I’ve reproduced exerpts of it here.

For 30 years, attention has focused on feminine equality. During that time honest discussion of innate differences has been stifled (ask Larry Summers). It’s time to look at the other half.

This is classic. In just 31 words, it hits three rhetorical points straight out of the modern conservative gender-politics playbook:

• Painting Harvard University President Larry Summers as a victim of liberal intellectual thought police
• Blaming the legacy of feminism itself as part of the problem.
• Using the phrase “honest discussion of innate differences” (Later, he invokes its cannonical corollary by nodding to those who “say the educational system has been overly feminized.”)

For the Gender-Essentialist Right, these are powerful codewords, much as “culture of life” and “legislate from the bench” are for the Christian Right. (I also give Brooks bonus points for his essentialist word choice, using “feminine” as if it is interchangable with “female” or “women’s.”)

Once upon a time, it was a man’s world. Men possessed most of the tools one needed for power and success: muscles, connections, control of the crucial social institutions.

“Connections” and “crucial social institutions” — Hmm, well, let’s see. As of 2005, it seems well-connected men run the vast majority of the following: Elite colleges and universities, multi-national corporations, mainstream media, organized religions, nation-states and self-important Op-Ed columns. Not exactly a stunning contrast to the situation “once upon a time.”

In high school, girls get higher grades in every subject, usually by about a quarter of a point, and have a higher median class rank…. Girls are much more likely to be involved in the school paper or yearbook, to be elected to student government and to be members of academic clubs. They set higher goals for their post-high-school career.

This general point — that girls appear, in broad terms and by “the numbers” of grades, enrollment and course-taking, to be achieving more highly relative to boys — and the supporting facts cited are more or less accurate. However, there are many other variables worth considering — what happens to male and female students as they progress through the education system and choose particular fields and careers, for instance — and strongly gendered patterns of engagement and participation persist across many disciplines.

We have to absorb the obvious lesson of every airport bookstore, which is that men and women like to read totally different sorts of books, and see if we can apply this fact when designing curriculums. If boys like to read about war and combat, why can’t there be books about combat on the curriculum?

This passage is just amazing. Not only does it display such blatant arrogance (assuming that a single unexamined observation is “obvious” and qualifies a self-labeled member of the intelligentsia to comment on curriculum design), but it offers a conclusion devoid of any connection to facts or logic. First, it suggests that our schools, presumably as a result of the aforementioned three decades of feminization, have simply removed all books related to war and combat from their curricula. Is this true? I doubt it - this sounds suspiciously like a phantom problem invented to conform to the picture being painted. Also, the polarization of adult men’s and women’s reading patters is arguably problematic itself - isn’t that a reason for schools to try to both tap into students’ existing preferences AND broaden their interests? To me, boys who learn to associate maleness too strongly with violence and girls who learn to associate femaleness too strongly with, say, objectified prettiness (or passivity, or being “well-behaved”, or …) are both negative outcomes, and education has the hopeful potential to cultivate individuals’ developing identities in an expansive, rather than limiting, way. To an essentialist, though, anything that might make the picture of “innate differences” fuzzier is a dangerous threat to the natural order.

Would elementary school boys do better if they spent more time outside the classroom and less time chained to a desk?

This is actually a good question, but there’s no good reason to ask it in such a gendered way. These days, the relative amount of time young children spend behind a desk instead of playing and exploring outside the classroom is increasingly and disturbingly unbalanced. Moreover, it might be that girls are more tolerant of extended periods of sitting and quiet work and “do better” at such tasks than boys, but this is easily tranformed into an argument for the social-conditioning view: Our cultural norms and media instruct exactly these behavioral differences. (Quick - think of an advertisement that shows two girls playing together. Now think of one with two boys playing together. Now describe the activities in each ad to 10 people and see how many of them can guess which one is which.)

“Humanity is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities.” - John Dewey

By various accounts, we live in an age of division. The zeitgeist, especially as cultivated by dominant voices in the media, is one of fierce conflict between oppositite poles: marriage protection versus marriage-for-all, fundamentalism versus modernism, strict constructionism versus judicial activism, religion versus science, Red America versus Blue America.

As an adherent to a constellation of leftward positions and (in theory) an educational scholar in training, I find it a tempting intellectual puzzle to ponder the essense of such divisions — not just the ideological underpinnings of a given “side”, but the origins of such ideological committments themselves. What conditions cultivate a particular set of positions that I disagree with? How can I therefore understand them more thoroughly and develop a sensible plan to mitigate their future cultivation?

Dewey’s Aristotelian warning and its relevance to these questions has been particularly apparent to me since moving to the Bay Area, an environment in which I often find myself divided from certain varieties of self-proclaimed liberals and progressives. How so? Well, it is certainly true that, for certain issues, my perspective on the world lies on one side of an genuinely binary divide. However, the larger fault I find with many conservaties and some liberals/progressives is the dangerous insistence on a simplifying, either-or stance in the first place.

There are a great many alarming things about the present state of the nation, but the seduction of Either-Ors is a fundamental problem that exacerbates many others. While the world worries about the prospect of an avian flu pandemic, here in the United States we suffer from a pervasive simplicity complex. A friend of mine reminded me of an excellent example of this syndrome at work (from the second 2004 presidential debate):

KERRY: Well, again, the president just said, categorically, my opponent is against this, my opponent is against that. You know, it’s just not that simple. No, I’m not.

I’m against the partial-birth abortion, but you’ve got to have an exception for the life of the mother and the health of the mother under the strictest test of bodily injury to the mother.

KERRY: Secondly, with respect to parental notification, I’m not going to require a 16-or 17-year-old kid who’s been raped by her father and who’s pregnant to have to notify her father. So you got to have a judicial intervention. And because they didn’t have a judicial intervention where she could go somewhere and get help, I voted against it. It’s never quite as simple as the president wants you to believe.

GIBSON: And 30 seconds, Mr. President.

BUSH: Well, it’s pretty simple when they say: Are you for a ban on partial birth abortion? Yes or no?

Most difficult and important problems, properly examined, aren’t simple, but there exists an overwhelming public appetite for simplicity, one which attaches high value to uncomplicated, either-or answers and clean, liability-free solutions.

For many reasons this phenomenon is especially prevalent in the realm of education, including the nature of the current policy environment and the fact that so many adults, having been students in the past, are convinced that the relavent considerations are easy to enumerate and understand and that what’s right for their own or others’ children is obvious. This is especially dangerous, since educational institutions possess incredible power — granting both privelege and marginality — over the individuals within them, and no just exercise of that power can possibly be simple.