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To hammers, all things look like nails. To the dumb hammers of feminism, everything looks like a ‘patriarchal’ plot. There’s not a ‘gap’ or ‘inequity’ these inquisitorial harpies can’t spin out of thin air. Yet the very real and yawning gaps that blight men’s lives in the West are completely invisible to them.
They screech about ‘femicide’, but completely ignore that men are at least three times as likely to be homicide victims than women. They get their size-48 knickers, apparently recycled from discarded Chinese purse seine fishing nets, in a big, yeast-stained bunch that ‘25 per cent of homeless are women’ – which means that three times are many men are homeless.
And they bellow unholy murder that, big surprise, more boys than girls tend to be maths nerds. All while ignoring that, across the board, the entire education system has been structured to favour girls over boys. With clear results: boys are falling further and further behind. Many of them are ending up unemployed for life in their 20s, thanks to the (feminist PM engendered) NDIS.
And this is just how these misandrist fishwives like it.
Australia now faces a generation of “lost boys” as young men fall behind, not only at university but also throughout the education system.
Of the entire Albanese government ministry, Education Minister Jason Clare is the only one who shows even the occasional spurt of common sense. Fighting tooth and nail against the entrenched interests of the teacher’s unions, Clare is agitating for a return to explicit teaching, phonics, and other less ‘intellectual’ but far more useful approaches to teaching.
Clare is also clearly, and rightly, concerned about the structural matriarchal discrimination against boys in education.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare is to be applauded for flagging a parliamentary inquiry into the factors responsible for differences between boys and girls, starting with NAPLAN and including school attendance rates, university, TAFE and apprenticeship enrolments. Opposition education spokesman Julian Leeser also has advocated strongly on the issue.
Researcher David McCloskey zeroed in on the disparities last year, highlighting a two-track higher education system based on gender and schooling.
His analysis revealed that, nationally, one-third of men aged 25 to 34 have a bachelor’s or higher degree compared with 46 per cent – or almost half – of all women, and the gap is growing.
Even in the best-performing state, NSW, girls are more than 50 per cent more likely to earn a degree than boys. The inequity persists across government and private schools.
Clearly, gender and which school a person attends have a dramatic impact on whether they attain a university degree, and so a ticket to a better life.
This calls into question the fairness of our education system. The system does not provide every Australian with an equal opportunity to improve their life through hard work and education.
It also raises warning bells around the ability of young men to thrive in a rapidly changing world. Nine out of 10 new jobs to be created in the next decade will require a post-secondary education. It speaks of a generation of men locked out of the best new jobs, with growing risks to social cohesion from those who feel that society has left them behind and denied them a “fair go”.
On the plus side, a whole lot of ‘academic’ and white collar jobs, which favour females, are under threat from AI. A post-structural Fat Studies ‘intellectual’ can easily be replaced by an AI – even a pocket calculator has more computing power than your average tenured landwhale, really – but good luck getting an AI to fix your Tesla, Cressida Hyphenated-Surname.
At Western Sydney University we are looking at new programs to attract more young men into higher education.
This includes greater opportunities to earn while you learn, work-integrated learning, applied learning experiences, degree apprenticeships and internship-based degrees.
Good luck with that. Witness the unholy meltdowns when Milo Yiannopoulos tried to establish a scholarship for white males.
Of course, the high cost of degrees remains one of the biggest lingering disincentives. It is the root cause of student debt, and we must continue to call for the Job-ready Graduates Scheme to be scrapped. This public policy blight is a failed, broken, unfair and socially regressive measure that gave the nation $52,000-plus three-year arts degrees.
But nearly every one of them is a Labor/Greens voter, so they kind of deserve it.
