ACTA's Must-Reads

Much of education, from grade school through college, is informed by a bias that is not merely pro-female, but explicitly anti-male. Moreover, the larger Western culture has found cause to denigrate male behavior as the cause of all that troubles the world. Competition, dominance, and the capacity for violence are meant to be solved by the feminization of the West.

The problem is, you cannot delete man's nature. And as the black American culture has shown, women can indeed get along pretty well without men. However, males that are no longer necessary for a family are also no longer civilized by by the family. Such males still find things to do, and these things are more often than not decidedly unfeminine and, usually, not very nice.

But even from a a more narrow economic point of view, I'll bet those colleges that are successful in recruiting men will recruit more women as well. My own daughter chose her college partly on the basis of this ratio. She's not the only one, I'm sure.

MIA from this study may be men who are business owners where college degrees are not required to make six figure incomes.How about the one man auto repair shop or plumber, electrician, painter, handyman, surveyor, home inspector. General contractors, auto dealers, gas station owners. And the list goes on and on. this study may have a built in bias- Can a man be successful without a college degree.

Can a woman be successful without a college degree? Of course. So can a man. Men can also be successful with a college degree. So why are the powers that be discriminating against men going to college? Title IX has decimated male college scholarships in favor of female scholarships for tiddly-winks and other such exciting pasttimes. Men are getting the shaft and women are getting the gold treatment.

This is just a little off-topic, but regarding the recruiting of women into the hard sciences (and engineering), we might work on getting some men in there too. I run a technology business in CA and I've noticed a couple of things: there haven't been a whole lot of US-born Americans, male or female, relative to the size of the talent pool here in a long time, and more ominously, my university colleagues report that it's getting harder to recruit the top Chinese and Indian students into grad school because opportunities for them back home are improving. In other words, we have kept US R&D alive for years by importing foreign talent (to supplement the inadequate supply of interested US students) but those days are ending. What will become of the US technology base when everyone goes home and R&D is all being done overseas? Maybe I should have gotten my degree in sales and marketing instead of chemistry, so instead of inventing stuff I can sell products invented in Asia and Europe here in the US.

So why are we spending "lots and lots of money" just on getting women into science and engineering when society places so little value on these careers? What can we do to get men interested too?

Oh, and one more thing...

"And as the black American culture has shown, women can indeed get along pretty well without men."

I'm curious... how exactly has black American culture shown this?

This follows right along with the drop in marriages. Young men are staying away in droves from both college and marriage because the have come to understand, on an gut level, that both environments have become fundamentaly toxic for them. You lead a horse to a cesspool, but you can't make him drink.

Aomment and then a question about that comment: how do black women get along without men...the issue here that is not being address is that TV depicted many very young black women (New Orleans) with 3-4 very young kids and NO men around. Why? Goes back to days of slavery when marriage was simply a way to raise/grow products (slaves) for sale; no family life...for closer look at this read The Color of Wat3er, which tells us how black etended families take care of all, who are BVrothers and Sisters rather than simply My family; your family...Real problem: a single woman family (any color) will be more likely to be very poor. Thus black or white single moms are much poorer than man/wife family. etc etc

Fred Lapides is simply wrong. A look at say Koreans and African Americans in the Los Angeles area reveals a huge disparity. Within the Korean community a nuclear family and extended relations within that family pool resources, often for small businesses which provide upward mobility.

By contrast the poor African Americans in places like Watts or South Central have men basically abandoning their offspring by multiple partners, and thus no extended nuclear family to pool resources to move out of poverty.

Bill Cosby and other "racists" have talked about this failure of culture to address real problems, with the usual bad results. African American women are particularly ill-served by a culture that glorifies male promiscuity and mocks "family men."

Instead we get the usual scapegoating and the ridiculous idea that education, deferred marriage and children (fewer kids with more resources devoted to them) and staying as an intact family don't matter in the climb out of poverty. There is no "extended Black family" merely grinding poverty and dependency.

A separate issue is that there seems to be a sense among middle class African American women in the media ("Stella Got her Groove Back" Terry McMillan) that there is a shortage of African American men of their class who act as "playas". I have no idea if this is anything more significant than the usual media fad for idiotic and untrue ideas or if it's real.

Asked and answered.

I suspect that black American culture shows us very clearly what happens to a society when mature masculinity, which is what we need to be instilling in our sons, is devalued and rejected.

Fox News noted this problem back in June, 2005. Males have forces working against them in other ways also. But, of course, I'm just an angry, white man and whatever you do to me doesn't matter.

My husband and I both have graduate degrees and we value education. We expected to send our 2 sons to college, but we will only be sending our older son to college. Our younger son will not be going to college because he is profoundly autistic. Statistics suggest that 1 (or more) in every 80 children will be diagnosed as autistic, and an overwhelming majority of autistics are boys. Although admittedly this may not be statistically significant, could this be a factor in declining college enrollments by males?

I wonder, how big is the gender disparity when corrected for population differences in that age group? Even if demographics showed there are more college age females than males nationally, I doubt the gap would account for this 135/100 ratio.

The lack of interest in science by women is too bad, but it is true to an extent for males as well, and that probably contributes to drops in male enrollments. Science is hard. It is not some PC feelgood discipline where anyone's "opinion", however uninformed, is valid and worthy.

Western civilization is the high water mark in human cultures, I think, and science and engineering and math are the Darwinian cutting edges which continually inform and refresh it. It is the rest of the curriculum that has failed; much of it [e.g. "traIning" news anchors and brochure writers] is vocational in nature, a land where failure is but an abstraction.

I think one "trains" vines and animals; we ought to "educate" young men and women. And that means rigor. Ain't happening outside of the sciences.

Agree pretty much with Mark, Jim Rockford, and nick's comments above.

I don't think it's reasonable to blame the "feminization" of education for the increase of women going to college. Actually, there seems to be a flaw in your perspective on this issue. Instead of focusing on the ratio, what about the actual numbers? More people are going to college than before, in general and among both men and women, but just statistically a bigger percentage of women are going than men. Why? I find it rather dubious to say it is because education in high school is feminized as much as the idea of being smart or educated is devalued by boys who see it as feminine or "uncool" to study and get good grades. It seems possible that many boys don't want to be perceived as being "like girls" so they reject school. Sounds like sexism to me! As long as being feminine is held up as the absolute worst thing a boy can be then boys will continue to suffer. Can you really blame that on women?

I agree with the other commenter that what we are lacking is a value of mature masculinity. I think women would value this rather easily, the bigger challenge is convincing young men to value hard work, responsibility and respect for others.

Sorry, to the 'wingers--but it's simply a product of what meritocracy we have in higher ed:on the average, women get higher grades and (with the occasional Math exception) higher test scores. There's no affirmative action based on gender. So no tears for the guys from the (right-wing) PC police, okay?

And there's no point in putting any faith in a sad, almost-funny hack like Spellings.

And don't forget the backlash! Feminism already has a bad name among kids, and mass anomie among undereducated men will just make things worse.

But perhaps it doesn't matter; the global jihad will soon shift us all to the right anyway.