By James Bowman on 1.8.07 @ 12:07AM
Indeed, they certainly explain Nancy Pelosi if not Richard Cohen.
A new report for the British government urges that boys and
girls should be taught separately at school in order to prevent the
boys from falling even further behind the girls than, according to
the most recent examination results, they already have. "Teachers
should be encouraged to tailor classes to fit the needs of boys,
with more emphasis on 'competitive' lessons and the reading of
non-fiction books..." according the account of the report in the Daily
Telegraph.
One swallow and all that, of course, but I can't help wondering
if summer's on its way -- or, to change the figure, if this is the
straw in the wind that will herald the official culture's turn
away, at last, from its slavish adherence of the past thirty years
or so to feminist and unisex orthodoxy. Are boys again to be
allowed to be different? Or, rather, are their manifest
differences from girls to be officially noticed and provided for
rather than suppressed and ignored? And, if so, are men once again
to be allowed to be different from women? It's most unlikely, I
know, in this time of the rhapsodic hymning of Nancy Pelosi's giant
leap for womankind. "Women young and old bask in the new speaker's
shining moment," enthuses the Washington Post, as if
there could be no two opinions about the desirability of female
leadership just because it is female. But the media may,
after all, not have the last word.
Fortuitously, there comes to hand a memory of the late John Rae
in the "Lives Remembered" column of the Times of London. Rae, who
was headmaster of Westminster School when I taught there in 1980,
was a thoroughly delightful man who was reputed to know every one
of the hundreds of children under his tutelage by name. He even
knew my name, and always treated me as a friend, though we
disagreed about many things. For he was quite famous at the time in
Britain as a progressive educator whose efforts on behalf of the
pressure group STOPP, the Society of Teachers Opposed to Physical
Punishment, were instrumental in bringing about the abolition of
the cane in British classrooms. Roger Mintey writes in the
Times that Rae "noted that schools for girls functioned
well without corporal punishment, fagging, excessive chapel
attendance, Officers' Training Corps parades and an obsession with
games. He demonstrated that boys' schools would benefit by the
abolition of these practices."
That use of the word "demonstrated" to mean "facilely and
falsely analogized" is typical of the cultural consensus of our
time, one of whose most unquestioned and unexamined assumptions
about the world is that female and male must always be treated
equally lest the disparity of "power" should lead to the
"oppression" of the one by the other. Thus in the spirit of a
reader pouncing upon a grammatical or spelling error, a woman named
Lynne Leonard of Ellicott City, Maryland, recently wrote to the Washington Post to protest
that an article about a new vaccine against the human
papillomavirus had mentioned that it might lead to promiscuity in
girls while one on the benefits of circumcision in preventing HIV
infection didn't mention anything about its promoting promiscuity
in boys. "The double standard is alive and well," she concluded
triumphantly. And indeed it is. Also, the sun still comes up in the
east. But there are a certain kind of people that take these
physical and moral constants as personal affronts to their own
sense of justice and equity. They are already living in utopia,
where such things as double standards have been outlawed, and they
don't understand why the rest of us don't join them there.
Laboring under the same assumption, Richard Cohen of the
Post recently took the occasion of Monica Lewinsky's
master's degree from the London School of Economics to call on his fellow journalists to treat her with
more respect. "It would be nice, too, and fair, also, if Lewinsky
were treated by the media as it [sic] would treat a man." There's
that pesky double standard again! Indeed, he continues, "it would
be nice if my colleagues in the media would resolve to treat Monica
Lewinsky as a lady." So it would be too. Very nice. It
would also be nice if they hadn't already made her name into a
by-word and a scandal, and it would be even more nice if scandal
itself weren't what scandal always is and always has been, which is
a permanent and indelible stain on someone's reputation. But none
of these things will ever happen, and neither the media nor anyone
else apart, perhaps, from her close friends and family, will ever
treat Monica Lewinsky as a lady. This is as predictable -- and is
for the same reason -- as the fact that there will always be a
double standard. The world is what it is, and it is particularly
obtuse to treat its being what it is as some kind of injustice.
That way lies the pretense that men and women are the same, and all
the evil that has flowed and continues to flow from it,
educationally and otherwise.
topics:
Education, Nancy Pelosi, Economics, Books, Law
