A manual encouraging boys with the slogan “boys can do anything” has been printed but not distributed because “it was felt that it no longer fitted the policy of promoting the interests of boys and girls equally”.
When have we ever pretended that we are promoting girls interests equally? In the 70’s the programs were designed to lift girls performance, and it worked. Now its not politically correct to do the same for boys.
Boys are not girls, they have different needs and approaches and therefore need separate policies. On the one hand the Liberal government is promoting private and single sex schools, on the other hand the NSW government continues to behave as if girls and boys are the same.
Discrimination and equality have a complex flipside, treating people equally generally is synoymous with treating them in the same way. Its very difficult that to prove that two approaches, while different, are both equal. This is why I think that we need to put the femi-nazi’s on a bit of a leesh and calm them down, its impossible to do any real healing work while they continue to drone about how they have burnt 30 bra’s and are still not a CEO. The answer was never to treating women as men, or men as women, it was always to be accepting of differences and squash obvious cases where men or women were disadvantaged on the basis of gender.
My last work was prodominantly female, my current one is prodominantly male. In both cases, the nature of the type of work lead to the gender imbalance. At my old work I do believe being male disadvantaged me from promotions, but I’m in no way convinced that that is necessarily a bad thing.
Am I the only one who wants to argue with the logic that promoting females at the levels we are doing is necessarily beneficial to us all? Calling it equality is not fooling anyone, if boys and girls were receiving “equal” treatment they would be performing equally (taking into account some natural imbalances). The NSW Government has been in power a long time, and Bob Carr in other fields has made significant changes and ground (in curbing litigation for example, and the work on the roads). In Education, it has put in place some new policies that have so far been very successful. But on this issue it has lagged and ignored it, for fear of being politically incorrect, for a very long time. It is time for the NSW Education Department to start implementing policies that will mean that boys will feel accepted and an important part of school. I guarantee that in ten or twenty years time this will correct the shortages of male teachers. Firing all the teachers who project strongly anti-male views on their students would be a good start.
A final note is that democracy, unfortunately, gives unequal power to those who swing (and I don’t mean have sex with couples). One of its fundamental assumptions, that it shares with some (shit) economic theories, is that people are information brokers, and will make the best choices for themselves. Proportionally a lot more men than women fall into the practice of voting for one party, and this fact (assuming it is one) means that women wield a disproportionate amount of power. The answer, of course, is that men need to fight women on their own ground and start discussing issues as a group and voting as a group. Of course this is complicated by the fact that most mainstream media is aimed at women because they are easier to influence as consumers, and many men have a stigma attached to thinking. As usual, in the short term, the future is bleak. It will get worse before it gets better. I imagine the major proponents of boys doing better at school will be mother’s for some time. But slowly there are signs that a countermovement is growing, and that the femi-nazi’s virtual free rein on thought and ideologies is coming to a close. Watch this space in ten or twenty years time when the baby boomers (finally) die, PlanetJoel.com predicts the a counter-revolution.