More Coffee, Please

I heard the saddest, statement not long ago:

“She’ll make the perfect beater wife.”

Ouch. I’d cringe even if it wasn’t true. In this case, there’s too much truth. Anyone who speaks to the kid for a few minutes will see the potential for disaster, the strong possibility of a nightmare.

That’s all we can really see in school, of course. We can never predict exactly what will happen to a kid. At the same time, we would be equally foolish to pretend everyone is going to be okay. Education aids success, and there are enough horror stories out there. Every nightmare once sat in some classroom, dreaming of something great.

To some extent, the worse we can imagine for a boy is prison or death. More the point, a male who ends up in either situation does so because somewhere along the line we failed to civilize him. Somewhere along the line, we failed to get the point across—those small ideas, like rules need to be followed, don’t react with violence when things don’t work out well—small, reasonably obvious ideas.

For girls, I think it’s worse. In a boy’s case, we fail to help them fit into society. In a girl’s, we allow them to fit into society’s role.

The kid this remark was about wasn’t a bad person—fairly smart, sweet, and capable. She would never show it though, because somewhere along the line, someone stopped demanding she do well with her brain. It reminds me of an episode of Yes, Dear where one of the characters is working with her daughter on the sounds animals make. She has a cow, and the kid keeps saying “meow.” After several repeated attempts and the kid’s obvious lack of understanding, she pats her on the head and says, “Never mind dear. You’re pretty. You’ll do fine.”

Right. I know it’s a comedy, but there’s too much truth there. Girls are ahead of boys in every academic field¹, and dominate the landscape of the school. At the same time, their culture tells them they need to be the ornament on some boy’s arm, and that if they’re sweet and nice and look pretty, they’ll be okay.

They won’t. Instead, they’ll end up letting their biology run their lives instead of their brains, and worse they’ll end up raising another generation to do the same. We talk about a gender gap in education, and there is one, but it’s not in the schools. It’s in our culture, and as long as we allow a woman to just be a woman, we’re in trouble.

1 My honors class of 19 had 6 boys in it. Hmm.

Gregarious

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