I recently had the opportunity of witnessing two small boys interact with each other and, a little later, a small group of three girls doing the same. To say that this was eye-opening would be quite an understatement. Of course, it is well known that, for instance, the educational system has been changed to cater to the personality of women whereas typical behavior of boys has been reframed so that it nowadays justifies medication. While I do not want to make any excuses for this rotten system, the aforementioned encounter certainly made it clearer to me how we could end up in such a bad spot.
First, let me tell you about the boys, both between six and eight years old. I did not bother to inquire about their exact age. It was enough for me to infer their approximate age. These boys, and their parents, were guests in a family home. As the adults were enjoying some afternoon tea, the boys got more and more antsy, eventually getting up and treating the living room of a house they had not been to before as their playground. It did not take long until they were running around screaming, throwing pillows through the air, or dropping some books on the floor just for the sake of it. Their behavior was quite horrible. They were a real nuisance and only due to the mistaken desire of the adults in the house to be polite those boys were not scolded.
A few months later I managed to see three girls interact, ranging in age from 3 to 10, of which two were sisters. The contrast to the aforementioned boys could not have been starker. They just sat down at a table, first to paint together and later on also to play. If you did not know that there were three little girls playing together in this house you probably would not have guessed it. This went on for two to three hours.
If you put yourself in the position of a teacher, facing the prospect of dealing with a bunch of rowdy boys, then any submissive girl who just sits there, does not disturb anybody, and simply follows along provides some reprieve from the realities of teaching children. I thought to myself that if I am not sure I could stomach a bunch of ill-behaved boys for five days a week, and it is easy to see why teachers give preferential treatment to girls.
The bigger issue is, of course, that school does not cater to the needs of boys. They need an outlet for their excess energy and if schools scrap PE lessons and their parents do not play with them either, such rowdy behavior is seemingly the expected result. Obviously, it is much more convenient to put them on ADHD medication, so this is what happens. It is a quite sickening state of affairs. In the end, neither sex benefits much. Many boys get robbed of their chances to do well in life. In contrast, a lot of girls get pushed by the system to achieve economic success, ending up in careers they are not particularly suited to. I still think that this is by design. Boys get demoralized so that they remain controllable whereas girls go through higher education, which is basically a societal contraceptive program.
The average teacher surely has little understanding of the societal implications of how we treat little boys and little girls. However, the feminized educational system is set up in such a way that it will seem natural to provide advantages to girls. You could just as well imagine a system in which we cater to the strengths of boys, which would make girls look completely out of place and helpless. All it would take is focusing strongly on direct competition and lots and lots of physical exercise, as well as an all-male teaching staff.
For some reasons, I think a military style of education may be very suitable for boys. It is like scouts or something like that
Education for boys used to be quite tough, if you think of British “public schools”, i.e. the expensive private schools. Catholic schools surely were also not known for having been all fun and games. Of course, the downside is that physical abuse by teachers was relatively common.
Like Indiana Jones I’m a teacher at a privately run institution myself (but luckily only “part-time” as well).
Those observations by Sleaze are spot on. Most girls are quite good at just doing are they’re told. Or if they’re doing nothing, then more or less fading into the background while appearing to be just cute and sweet. Of course in most cases they are not really interested in anything that surpasses the obvious.
Boys on the other in most cases behave not only much more energetically but thy also tend to question the status quo and as they are told by authorities, like e.g. by teachers. Consequently if they encounter an authority that appears to be on their side, that they can trust and respect and that respects them, they will respect that hierarchy and as such they will go to great length in sacrificing their pride and desires to keep that hierarchy going.
An education system successfully geared towards boys and young male adults would certainly focus on competitive sports and physical and mental strength, while catering to providing skills, either manual or intellectual and mental. A strong curriculum in practical philosophy would also need to be mandatory as garbage philosophy and paradigms fed by the “elite” re the prison to keep most people enslaved. Such a school would run all those activities under the umbrella of an overarching motto or abstract transcendental principle, which would provide guiding and direction and it would inspire a strong “esprit de corps” as well.
On top of that it would also focus on STYLE. In such a masculine school a school uniform would be mandatory. Unfortunately most teachers have absolutely no sense of style at all, they just don’t know how to dress. Young men should learn about masculine style, fashion and what clothes can communicate. In such a school teachers should be rolemodels for that.
E.g. boys at age 12 should know four tie knots: The three “Windsor” ones and then maybe one more extravagant one, like the “Christensen” knot or the like.
I’ve run “how to tie a tie”-workshop with boy-only groups age 13 to 14 and I can say from my exprience that after some intial resistance and/or bewilderment they liked it a lot.
Those are some really good observations. I’ve been having similar thoughts regarding the importance of practical philosophy especially when it comes to education of boys.
Part of the reason why they are so rebellious is because they understand that modern education is only designed to train obedient wageslaves. When you give them proper structure and discipline, such as in martial arts training, they behave quite differently.
Out of curiosity, what are some of the authors you would include in your curriculum of practical philosophy?
Well, an overview of the Greek and Roman schools of philosophy would serve as a good foundation.
E.g. Socrates, Plato & his transcendental idealism; Aristoteles; the stoics (preferrably emperor Marcus Aurelius and the slave Epictetus) and Epicureism with Epicurus and Lucretius.
Pupils should know the basic tenets of those respective paradigms and they should be able to apply those different paths of reasoning e.g. to one topic.
Going on from there it could branch out into many other directions, both past and present.
One very worthwhile endeavour could be the examining of the paradigms of different religions and mystical traditions and gauge how coherent ir self-refuting they might be, such as buddhism as ultimate form of nihilism, gnosticism as anti-christianity, nature cults, islam as monism, marxism as eschatological materialism, the different flavours of Christianity etc,