[techblueberry]

I don’t necessarily have a problem with talking about gender differences but I’m not sure I’m convinced by the focus of your argument.

Historically teaching has always been “women’s work”. It’s skewed a bit more female in recent years, but that’s because it skewed male temp rotation before then. it’s always seemed like an odd retcon to say that we turned education female, combining that with the low pay of education which will turn away more men.

I also feel like school has only gotten more flexible over time, my parents generation talked about how easy we have it and school was more about sitting still for them, as it was for me twenty years ago.

I’m not saying the education system is great, or that there aren’t ways to improve it, or that we couldn’t improve it based on gender differences, or that there aren’t more “college prep for girls” programs than “college prep for boys programs” just that your specific description of concerns I don’t think is quite historically accurate. I think it’s weird to complain that we need to treat men and women differently when most people’s problem seems to be that we treat women differently; we’ve had 60 or so years of women’s studies and feminist theories playing out. Should we start caning boys? Is that the solution to all our problems?

As with most things, it’s probably just the end of postwar American Economic domination. Go before World War 2 and the high school graduation rates aren’t high enough to describe anything about the way things “used to be”.