This blogger remembers his high school and college years, 1961-1971. All during those years, the gender balance of all his teachers and professors was more-or-less evenly distributed, half-and-half. He greatly appreciated seeing both genders take responsibility for the education of future generations of Americans.
More recently, however, in October 2009 exactly, the state of Maryland held a state-wide symposium in Columbia(Howard County) on parental involvement in education. This blogger attended that convention, and, to his shock-surprise, discovered that a good 90-95% of attendees at the convention were women! He began to seriously wonder if he as a man was a freak incongruity, an unwelcome intruder at some event far more exclusive than publicly advertised. What had happened over the last 35 years since he left the four ivy-covered walls of formally-structured academia? Men at the conference, while certainly present, were few and far between.
Is education today becoming an exclusively woman-thing? Statistical surveys recently are indicating that more women than men graduate from college with advanced degrees, and that women academically out-perform men at all levels of education and schooling. Are men getting the message, sought or unsought, that education is no longer for them, so they better get out of education "while the getting is good"? What would be the economic and socio-political consequence of a complete feminine take-over of all academia? Could America afford, or perhaps even desire, such a consequence? Now that John Wayne is dead, it might enable women to say, "Men can do anything they want to----as long as they have supper ready for us women when we come home from work." (Some men, particularly among the French and Italians, have proudly shown themselves to be among the world's best chefs. Meanwhile, most medical doctors and lawyers in Russia are women.) Europe appears to be not the least bit squeamish about crashing the walls of gender distinction in the distribution of highly-educated top-paying professions. Et tu, America?
Today, technological advance is replacing brute bodily physical strength as the central qualification of competence to perform many tasks previously thought to be "a man's job". Most notably, the military is moving in this direction in relation to national defense. John Wayne is dead, and so are those brash "rides into the very jaws of hell and returning back again unscathed(ta-da-a-a-h!). No longer does the U.S. Marine Corps claim to "build men", or to be "looking for a few good men", as it once did, shall we dare say, "in the good-old days"? (Do we hear older males' champaign glasses clinking in salute to the memory of those days?) But today, the U.S. military is gravely concerned that today's educational institutions may fail to accomodate competent operation of new and advancing technologies so sine qua non to America's national defense. If women academically out-perform men in school, the new American military may have no choice but to rest the burden of national defense mainly upon the shoulders of women. Will women then still need men "like a fish needs a bicycle"? Maybe. But the extent of feminine willingness to transition over to this previously-exclusive "good-old-boys' club" remains a big bottom-line question. Trends of gender in education will hold the key to answering that question.
What if between men and women, women become the more superiorly-educated sex, what effect, if any, will this have on love-life relations between the sexes? Will women love men more, love them less or love them about the same as in past generations? This blogger admits to speculation about married life to a woman far more-educated than himself(whatever "educated" means). To a medical doctor, a corporate CEO, to a Nobel Prize-winning college prof? Maybe. But to a lawyer? When pigs fly: when William Shakespeare advocated killing all the lawyers, he made no reference to sexual preferences. "The first thing we must do...." Some superiorly-educated women may decide it is high time to contemptuously spit men out of their mouths; but, the wiser among them will see education as a continuous revelation to themselves of how very ignorant they still are, and perhaps understand that maybe--JUST MAYBE--their "ignorant and stupid" man might still know a few things they would find at least interesting, if not downright urgently important. In any case, sameness of profession, and of intelligence level in the same, can lead to intense professional jealousy and rivalry, as well as to complementary romantic compatibility. So regardless of education, marriage should ideally be with complementary rather than with competitive professional roles.
The Bible still counsels that God has chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise, so that no man--or woman--will boast in His presence. (I Corinthians 1:17-31). -LKM
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