Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Men Are Stupid.

I watch a lot of TV and I have to say that I see a trend that bothers me. It's one where men are constantly portrayed as not necessarily stupid but not quite as intelligent as women. It's prevalent in mostly American shows and I honestly think that in the next 15 years that it may be a fact.

The current education system has failed boy's across the country and even though our political leaders have seen this, there has been nothing done to change it. All we hear from teachers and politicians is more rhetoric. No one cares that our young men are choosing not go to college or that those that do fail to finish. They seem to gloss over the statistics, women are graduating from college at three times the rate that young men are. Even before college boy's are struggling to even graduate from high school.

The problem is simple, we have a system geared towards young women that was developed during a time when changes to the previous education system were necessary because our schools had relegated the majority of women to being stay at home moms and house wives. We now know that the systematic changes did work and they did help women, in fact more women are attending college than ever and even better, more women are graduating from college than ever but the down side is that the opposite is true for men.

This cannot work in our society, we cannot have a system of education that discriminates against one gender, we have already seen what this does to our children. We either need to find a system that works equally well for both genders or we need to develop a separate system to educate boys and girls. Separating boys and girls in the class room has received a lot of negative press but in school systems where they do separate genders, we see smarter children, better prepared for their upper education. Either way if we do not, then we will reap what we sow.

An important step is letting the media know that the stereotyping of men as being less than intelligent needs to stop in it's infancy, before it becomes a problem. This needs to begin with women, because it's most women who seem to be amused at men being the but of jokes. Honestly they can be funny but they can also hurt because when young boy's see this it impacts how they view themselves, especially when those women who are their mentors or parents perpetrate such stereotypes. We have seen how damaging negative stereotypes can have on a gender in the past and how difficult it can be to reverse that mentality.

To make these changes men and women need to work together to ensure that both boy's and girl's have a bright future where they are both on equal footing and that needs to start in our schools and in our homes. The old standards that were used to ensure equal opportunity need to be looked at and addressed now to make sure that the system is truly equal or in 30 years from now we are going to see quite a few angry men who look back at a society that abandoned them.

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