Misogyny and how should schools address it?

[mids2019]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9qednjzwv1o

Although I think on the whole I do agree with the below I do have some doubts about the extent schools should be teaching pupils about relationships and how do you define misogyny at the periphery.

Are we in danger of making fgirls think all boys/men are misogynists? At a really sensitive part of development how do we identify those boys are truly misogynist and not those that maybe make comments about a girl's figure , the frequency of which would make it difficult to poliice?

The article does read as if schools should be viewing all teenage relationships with suspicion with the very high rates of states abuse so is this also a call for children to refrain from relationships until adulthood!

Just shutting down? I think it's really sad that you wouldn't, or couldn't, offer anything more cogent, or more likely to persuade, than that.

Basically, my view comes down to this: if it's important to be able to say the following unpunished:

"Men are more violent than women"
"Men are stronger than women"

Then it must be permissible to say the following unpunished too:

"girls are not as good at maths as boys"

Banning and punishing them is not a neutral act of hygiene. If a statement's false, it's false. It shouldn't need to be buttressed by punishment.

A lot of harm would have been avoided in the past ten years if the response to an upsetting challenge like the above were "prove it", not "shut up".

Challenge pupils not parents!

We followed school policy.

No harm is done telling obnoxious kids to stop being unpleasant in a class. And we couldn’t move into a discussion on it as we were there to teach a subject not to instigate a class discussion on random subjects.

Your posts are very fractured and difficult to decipher. I suspect you’re a male poster.

English and Maths are essential subjects and most children will have some strengths and weaknesses in both. You can eg get a child who is great at report and letter writing but dislikes poetry analysis, and another child who is excellent at algebra but dislikes more 3D based maths problems. Defining children based on their sex is poor form.
Maths is a language ultimately and girls are known to be put off by stereotypes, just as boys can be put off English or choir singing despite having huge potential in the latter. It is important to challenge these stereotypes from an early age. True maths ability is not known until the brain is fully developed in one’s mid twenties anyway I thought.

And l think it’s been repeatedly proved that men are more violent. Look at the prisons and domestic violence figures.

But let’s pretend it’s not a thing due due to free speech🙄

Misogyny should be tackled in SOCIETY not schools. Schools are mirrors, not petri dishes- they reflect the outside world. When the outside world tackles misogyny, things will be better in school. Schools can't solve the ills of the world on their own.

Male violence though even if it were a more natural hormone based phenomenon - if society just says “oh men are more violent” then we subconsciously condone and excuse violent behaviour in children from a young age “let boys be boys” type thinking which is just as toxic as implying that girls are worse at maths. Girls might as a group need different maths strategies to learn or might thrive better in examination systems where everything is not based on a competitive end exams. Girls may learn more collaboratively, boys may learn better outdoors in real life. Perhaps it is not sex based at all, but each individual child learns differently and our job is to provide them with the tools to find their best way of learning.

Surely it is to be more expected in private/public school because social dominance is the name of the game?

It's absolutely a thing. It's an example of a divisive statement that is incredibly important to be able to say.

"Why would I allow divisive statements?" is not the winning argument here. Coupled with banning/punishing, it's just weaponised "be kind". I'm not a fan at all. Engage with the evidence. Bad arguments fall away quicker that way.

(Yes, I'm male and chose my username so as not to obscure that).

That starts before they go to school.
The parents should step up.

@GeneralPeter can you show me where you found that fact? Because I'd be incline to think it's made up.

👏

To add to that, teachers and TAs are increasingly on the receiving end of misogynistic abuse themselves. It started with Karening and has escalated- deep fakes of teachers is going to be a huge problem. But make some of the victims sort it, on top of fixing everything else in society that's part of their remit.

It's absolutely a thing. It's an example of a divisive statement that is incredibly important to be able to say

Why? No one NEEDS to say it

Yes, private schools need to act on this consistently and effectively.

The problem is that you can educate boys endlessly but if parents are misogynistic/racist/homophobic, the school’s teaching will be undermined at home. Astonishing how many parents don’t see discriminatory language of any description as problematic and won’t back schools up.

It’s an excellent idea. There is already a lot of research and training going in to this, and talks already happen in many schools (particularly boys schools) so this is simply doing more of it, more consistently. Sad we need it but we do.

Absolutely. There's a lot to challenge which is being supported at home, racism/antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny.

I think women and girls have actually got weaker in recent years. The boys were toxic when I was at school, a lot of sexism and rape jokes, but we told them to fuck off and were good at clever comebacks that put them back in their box. Now they just seem to shake/cry. Teenagers are a bit vile and have underdeveloped brains, I don’t think we can stamp out teenage boys being a bit sexist but we can empower the girls to stand their ground and not be shaken.

Being able to say that men are more violent than women is extremely important.

It shouldn't need to be said, but it does.

It matters prison policy, domestic abuse, single-sex spaces, policing, and a hundred other things.

If you can't discuss sex differences like that, you can't see the fact that men are massively overrepresented in prison as anything but bias. You perhaps will see keeping men out of women's spaces as bigotry.

(Obviously, I don't think it's bias or bigotry. I think to explain why not it's important to bust the taboo over recognising statistical distribution differences between men and women. We can argue about any specific one, but surely we can agree first to stop punishing the raising of the issue?).

The school I went to used to pair us up, 1 boy, 1 girl to do termly science or geography projects.
We had no choice, partners were chosen for us, and it forced us to work with people we wouldn't normally have chosen. Each project had a different partner.
It's hard to honestly believe someone is useless when you are reliant on them to get the project done.

Which fact?

I'm arguing about what it should be permitted to say without punishment. I'm not arguing only for my own claims to be unpunished.

(I do, as it happens, think there are trait differences in aptitude distribution between men and women across a range of things, and that this almost certainly explains some of the extraordinary sex imbalance we see at the far right tail of tests of mathematical ability. I also think that any such argument is contestable, that such debate should be encouraged, and that it should be grounded in evidence in either direction, not taboo-making. I also would be amazed if sex differences in such things were either 0% nature or 0% nurture. Both extremes feel pretty implausible to me, but I think claiming either should be allowed).

Jeez! You’ve summed it up!

In fairness, secondary schools so teach about misogyny and what makes a healthy relationship.

I feel that schools are expected to do everything for children these days and whilst schools can help with social problems, there needs to be more done by media and regulating social media.

A few years ago I taught a very bright A level group and I had a girl tell me that feminism “had gone too fa these days” and a boy tell me women would never be equal to men.

I reported this and the consider with new PSHEE lessons on the dangers of Andrew Tate and misogyny.

I think the school could have done more by contacting the parents of the boy. I did leave the rest of the class to rip one them for a bit longer than I would normally. I felt “healthy peer debate” would have more of an impact than my lecture!

This is why I send my daughters to a girls school where they're free to be educated without sexual comments from boys, free to kick a football around at lunchtime, free from boys taking up all the teachers time in maths/science (as they did all the time in primary....). Unfortunately very rare to get state girls schools and the government's policy on private schools is forcing many co-ed, sadly.

I was talking about boys being better at maths. That doesn’t need saying.

Men being more violent than women needs saying as much as possible. I agree with pomp who said girls and women are getting weaker and l agree with this.

Your average 12-year-old male arsehole opining on how boys are better than girls at maths is not giving, or interested in giving, an argument supported by evidence!

And in almost every case, young Mr Clever Clogs the Self-Certified Male Genius will actually find that there are probably girls who are better at maths than he is in the very same room.