Abstract
Sexism still restricts the options for both boys and girls.
I've written several articles for Kappan over the years, but I can still remember writing the first one while sitting on the floor of the Hilton hotel in Chicago (not my usual work space). My late wife, Myra, and I were in an endless line waiting to interview for our first higher education jobs at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) conference. It was 1971, and we had our newly minted doctorates and naively thought that we had as good a chance as anyone to be hired. We were wrong. Over and over, we were told, “We don't hire married couples.” We even heard, “We would hire either one of you, but not both. You can choose.” So, I sat down on the hallway floor of the Hilton to write “Nepotism, A Clause for Concern.” Evidently, we had shown foolish judgment in getting married. What were we thinking? That first article came from the heart.
It was more than 30 years later when I wrote “An Educator's Primer to the Gender War” (Phi Delta Kappan, November 2002), and it was my heart speaking to me again. I had listened to the “backlash” critics arguing that schools were favoring girls over boys, an argument still heard today. Three points especially offended me. One was the critics' utter blindness (or were they pretending?) to male entitlements so plentiful in school. Second, so many critics were not educators, but pundits funded by such far-right foundations as Scaife, Carthage, and Olin. Third, these critics were intent on creating war imagery to underscore their point, with such titles as “The War Against Boys.” If girls were improving, it must be at the boys' expense. Just what the nation needed, another war.
I had worked for decades to show how sexism had restricted the options of both boys and girls. In much of my writing, I argued that good teaching practices, from effective wait time to an inclusive curriculum, would serve all students well. Evidently, this was now a radical idea. To respond to this foolishness, I decided to use satire: I wrote a research-based scenario that reversed the sexes. In my scenario, girls had numerous entitlements, some obvious, others subtle, while boys were kept in their place. If you read the article carefully, almost every example is still true today. I called it “bizarro world,” like a Seinfeld episode. For me, the piece highlights the subtle biases still prevalent in our schools. My hope is that this article makes us all more sensitive to the need for an equitable education system in which we learn to cherish individual differences and eliminate the win-lose equations and war analogies that come so easily to the lips and do so much damage to our hearts.
Find this Kappan Classic, “An Educator's Primer on the Gender War,” on page 81 of the digital edition — online at