The public school system in the county where I live is failing badly. Why is it failing? Because it lacks leadership. How can we turn it around? By seeking out a good paternal leader and putting him in charge.
Our public schools are awful these days.
In the county where I live, fewer than half of all public school students are on-grade in Math. Barely half are on-grade in English. Around 7 out of 10 can’t pass their graduation exams.
Not only are the schools failing academically, they can’t even get students to class. Truancy has skyrocketed, with the number of chronically absent students doubling in the past two years. Now, a quarter of all students miss weeks and months of school.
If the school system here had a dashboard, all the lights would be blinking red. If it had an alarm installed, a klaxon would be blaring, “Failure! Failure! Failure!”
How have the people who run it responded? By writing a plan…to improve things marginally…over the next eight years. When asked why she set the bar for improvement so low, the administrator creating the plan replied, “It’s what’s we can achieve.”
So, we’ve got a public school system that’s failing badly in all sorts of ways, run by people with no sense of urgency about turning that around.
Their management has been feminized.
The public schools here used to be good. Why are they now so bad? Mainly because they have a feminized management culture.
Feminism began percolating into the county schools back in the 1970s. I can remember, as a 4th grader in 1976, being shown the movie Free To Be…You And Me in class. Produced by the Ms. Foundation for Women, it told us kids that it was good for girls to compete with boys, and okay for boys to play with dolls.
My friends and I didn’t pay much attention to it. We sat through the thing, then went out to roughhouse with each other during recess. Sadly, over the subsequent 50 years, the feminization of the schools increased, and now they are thoroughly feminized:
- The boys who tend to do well in school are the ones who aren’t stamped “defective” for displaying masculine traits. These compliant, often effeminate boys are the ones most likely to go to college and become teachers.
- Female teachers, regardless of whether or not they have any aptitude for leadership, are ushered into traditionally male leadership positions, in accordance with woke ideology.
- Thus, the schools are now managed mostly by naturally-effeminate men and culturally-masculinized women—people who lack the strong paternal presence that distinguishes good leaders.
Feminized management delivers bad results.
The schools’ feminized management culture is a problem because such cultures deliver bad results. I saw how this works while on a ride with my cycling group:
- One day a college professor was riding with us, and she stopped in the middle of a blind uphill turn. Several people behind her stopped as well, which created a dangerous situation: a careless driver could have come barrelling through the turn and wiped us all out.
- Alarmed by what I saw, I went over to the woman and hefted the bike she’d tried to pedal up the hill. Sure enough, it had 30 extra pounds of gear in a side bag. I told everyone to keep going, then took the bag off and hoisted it onto my shoulders.
- “Uh, I’m uncomfortable with you handling my things,” the woman said. “We can talk about that later,” I replied. “Right now you need to get out of this turn, or you might get hit by a car.” She gave me a sour look, then pedaled up the hill.
- That night I told a female friend of mine what happened. “You grabbed that lady’s bag without asking?” she queried. “Darn right I did,” I said. “She put half a dozen people in danger. There was no time to be polite.” My friend just frowned at me and said, “I can’t believe you did that.”
That episode showed how masculine men and feminine women tend to deal with things differently. For me, the priority was getting people out of danger, and I was willing to hurt someone’s feelings to do it. For my friend, the most important thing was to protect that woman’s feelings, even if it meant leaving others in a bad situation.
That’s basically what’s going on in the schools right now. The people who run them are leaving kids in a bad situation in order to spare each others’ feelings. Among them, the salient question isn’t, “How do we fix the schools?” but rather, “How bad would my colleagues feel if they were held accountable for screwing them up?”
Feminized management is ruining our schools.
Women tend to prioritize feelings and relationships for good reason: during our species’ evolution, they played a vital role in defusing tension and resolving conflicts among the members of hunter-gatherer bands. Men, who evolved to aggressively fight predators, weren’t well-suited to do this. Women, who evolved to sensitively raise children, were.
We see this clearly in tribal societies today. In the tribes of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, for example, female Clan Mothers use their feminine wisdom and insight to choose the male Chiefs. The Chiefs then use their masculine drive and assertiveness to get things done.
Unfortunately for the kids of my county, the “Clan Mothers,” not the “Chiefs,” are in charge of the schools. The result is an excess of feminine sensitivity that’s making kids neurotic, and a lack of masculine structure that’s crippling their achievement.
The school system is like a big, bureaucratic, overprotective mom, in that it coddles students and expects little from them. This sets them up for failure, and when they do fail, the system usually ascribes that to some spurious “special need.”
It has lowered academic standards so that more students make the grade. For example, no longer must a student demonstrate proficiency to be promoted to the next grade. Now social promotion is the norm: students can learn and do little, and still move on.
Also, course curricula have been dumbed down, even in Advanced Placement classes. Most students here get As or Bs in their AP classes, but they get the equivalent of Cs, Ds, or Fs on their AP examinations, which are graded outside the county.
The system puts a happy face on failure.
If you’re unwilling to hurt others’ feelings by working to fix a failing school system, what do you do? You put a happy face on failure, and try to convince parents that everything is fine. That’s what the school system did when it trumpeted the “blue ribbon” status of one of its schools.
That status is bogus. When I looked at the US Dept. of Education criteria used to designate “blue ribbon” schools, I saw that they are all relative. It’s grading on a State-wide curve, and here in Maryland, which has some of the worst schools in the nation, that curve bends very low.
In singing its own praises with its “blue ribbon” school, the system is essentially saying to parents, “Hooray, we’re not Baltimore!” It reminds me of this mock promotional video in which Cleveland’s main virtue is, “We’re not Detroit!”
I’m not the only one who’s noticed that the “blue ribbon school” designation is bogus. Two researchers at Education Next, a publication that “goes where the evidence points,” pointed out back in 2006 that when rated according to the test scores of their students, these highly-touted schools are barely above average.
Only a non-educator can improve our schools.
All of that bespeaks a lack of strong, paternal leadership. This sort of leadership sets high standards and enforces them. It tells kids not, “You’re just fine as you are,” but rather, “You can be better.” It challenges them to be excellent, or at least competent. It doesn’t try to hide failure, it confronts it head-on.
Fifty years ago, our schools had good paternal leadership. Every school in the county had a male principal, usually an ex-coach or veteran who didn’t know much about education, but a great deal about discipline and achievement. It’s no coincidence that back then our schools were regarded as some of the best in the nation.
Where can they get such leadership today? Not from within the school system. With its feminized culture and woke values, it selects against men who display masculine assertiveness and can-do drive. To get a real leader, we’ll need to go outside the system, and select a man like Colonel Douglas MacGregor, pictured at the top of this essay. That means a retired military officer.
Why a retired officer, and not a corporate leader? Because military units, like public schools, contain people from all walks of life. Also, because the stakes for military operations are so high, military schools and courses are typically good.
Being retired, he’ll have an income—a military pension—that’s independent of the school system. Thus, he’ll have no need to “go along to get along” with the current system in order to protect his livelihood. He can operate as an independent agent.
Once we’ve identified such an officer, preferably one who retired at an O-5 or O-6 rank, we’ll need to make him Superintendent of Schools. No other position will suffice. He’ll need that position to make the changes necessary to turn the school system around.
That won’t be easy. When he does what must be done to make our schools successful again, the system’s middle managers will respond with ad hominem name-calling, passive-aggressive blocking, and even some surreptitious sabotage.
For someone whose job involved preparing for war, however, such resistance will seem like small potatoes. The Strong Father stands firm and sets things right, in institutions as well as families. Let’s observe the rule of Take Natural Gender Roles, put him in charge of our public schools, and watch in satisfaction as he turns them around.
