It is time to get women out of the schooling of boys. It is way past time. Women in our feminized classrooms are consigning generations of our sons to years of misery and diminished futures. The evidence is everywhere. Few dare notice it.

The feminization is real. More than seventy-five percent of teachers are women; in New York state, over ninety percent of elementary school teachers are women; in the US, over seventy percent of psychologists are women, with (sez me) the rest being doubtful. This is feminization with fangs.

I have just read Back to Normal: Why Ordinary Childhood Behavior Is Mistaken for ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, and Autism Spectrum Disorder, by a psychologist, Enrico Gnaulati, who works with children alleged to have psychological problems in school, usually meaning boys. I decline to recommend it because of its psychobabble, its tendency to discover the obvious at great length, and its Genderally Correct pronouns, which will grate on the literate. (I mean constructions resembling “If a student comes in, tell him or her that he or she should put his or her books in his or her locker.”) However, a serious interest in the subject justifies slogging through the prose. (The statistics above are from the book.)

The relevant content is that women are making school hell for boys, that they have turned normal boyish behavior, such as enjoyment of rough-housing, into psychiatric “personality disorders.” They are doping boys up, forcing them into behavior utterly alien to them, and sending them to psychiatrists if they don’t conform to standards of behavior suited to girls. The result is that boy-children hate school and do poorly (despite, as Gnaulati says, having higher IQs). This is no secret for anyone paying attention, but Gnaulati makes it explicit.

As a galling example he cites one Robert, an adolescent responding badly to classes and therefore suspected by his teacher of having a “personality disorder.” From the book:

“She required all forty students in the class to design Valentine’s Day cards for each other. She was emphatic about wanting them personalized. Names had to be spelled correctly and compliments written up genuinely.”

Valentines? This was eight-grade English. Students, who by then once knew grammar cold, should be reading literature or learning to write coherently. In my eighth-grade class, we read Julius Caesar: “I want the men around me to be fat, healthy-looking men who sleep at night.” Valentines? Compliments?

This, the author assures the reader, did not take place in an asylum for the mildly retarded, but in one of the ten best high-schools in California. What must the rest be like?

Of course Robert was having trouble putting up with the girly drivel, this feminized ooze, devoid of academic content. “Oooooh! Let’s have a warm, emotional bonding experience.”

This is why women should not be allowed within fifty feet of a school where boys are taught. A boy, especially a bright one, will want to drop out of school through the nearest window, run screaming to a recruiting office for the French Foreign Legion, anything to get away from inane, vapid, and insubstantial feel-good compulsory niceness inflicted by some low-wattage ed-school grad.

Get these ditz-rabbits away from our sons. Let us have separate schools for the sexes, with each being taught by teachers of the same sex. I do not presume to tell women what they should teach girls – astrophysics, valentine design with sincere compliments, whatever they like. Just stay away from the boys.

The thrust of current social propaganda is that the sexes are identical in all important respects. They are not. The differences are great. It is time we stopped pretending otherwise.

First: By their nature, females are far more interested in social relationships than in academic substance. If you are a man, ask yourself how often you have serious intellectual discussions of politics, science, history, or society with women as compared to men. Seldom. Degrees and exceptions, yes. Still, seldom.

Second: Women are totalitarian. Men are happy to let boys be boys and girls be girls. Women want all children to be girls. In school this means emphasizing diligence – neat homework done on time, no matter how silly or academically vacuous – over performance, meaning material learned. Women favor docility, orderliness, cooperation in groups, not making waves, niceness and comity. For boys this is asphyxiating.

If women wanted to start a bar for women only, men would not care. If men want a private club in which to enjoy male company, women go explode in fury. Totalitarian.

In common with the keepers of the Russian gulag, women are more than willing to drug little boys into submission. There is a Stalinist mercilessness in this, a complete lack of understanding of, or interest in, what boys are. (“Ve haff vays of making you...”)

Third: Women prefer security to freedom, males freedom to security. In politics, this has ominous implications for civil liberties. In the schools this means that wrestling and dodge ball are violence, that tag might lead to a fall and scraped knees, that a little boy who draws a soldier with a rifle is a dangerous psychopath in the making. This is hysteria.

(Stray thought: If I wanted to create a murderous psycho, I would Ritalinate him into a little speed freak, repress his every instinct, and humiliate him by having the police drag him away. It would work like a charm. In his trial, his defense would be justifiable sociopathy.)

Fourth: “Therapy.” This disguised witchcraft is very much a subset of the female fascination with emotional relations. It allows them to talk endlessly about their feelings. Men would rather be crucified. Thus everything becomes a “disorder.” Among these absurdities are things like Intermittent Explosive Disorder (appropriately, IED), and Temper Irregulation Disorder. These disorders have only been discovered since women took over the schools.

The list could go on. Boys, like men, are competitive, physically and intellectually, delighted to play hours of intensely competitive pick-up basketball. Women in the schools prefer a cooperative group game led by a caring adult. What a horror.

Even the ways in which men get along with each other differ sharply from the female approach. (Thus the desire for venues for men only.) For example, when I once broke a leg in a sky-diving accident, the women in the news room were sympathetic and concerned. At a Special Forces party I attended, there was laughter and sarcasm. “Goddam dumbass Marine can’t even do a PLF (parachute landing fall) right. Hey, let’s break his other leg.” Translated from the male, this meant (a) that they accepted me as one of them, and (b) that to them a broken leg was not a tragedy but an inconvenience. Which it is.

Fifth: In the United States, women simply dislike men. Saying this causes eruptions of denials. If you believe these, I’d like you to meet my friend Daisy Lou the Tooth Fairy. Check the ranting of feminists, the endless portrayal on television of men as fools and swine, the punitive political correctness and the silly anti-rape fantasies on campus.

In the schools this hostility takes the form of the passive aggression behind the predatory niceness. “We’re boring him to death, keeping him miserable, and sending him for psychiatric reprogramming because we care so much about him.” Uh, yeah.

Outside of the US, fewer women buy this. My stepdaughter Natalia, Mexican, is working on a degree in clinical psychology, and sees students – read “boys” – sent to her by teachers to determine whether they have ADHD. “They don’t have ADHS,” she says. “They’re bored.”

Finally: Women display a pedestrian practicality alien to males. If a woman needs to use a computer, she will learn to do it, and do it well. She won’t learn assembly-language programming for the pure joy of it. She can drive a car perfectly well, but has no notion of what a cam lobe is or the difference between disk and drum brakes. This is why men invent things, and women seldom do.

Boys’ schools, male teachers.

Last week I fulminated about the calamitous effects of the feminization of the schools, of turning the school into an emotional infantile crèche aimed at the fundamentally female goals of psychological conditioning, conformity, and totalitarian niceness. A lot of mail arrived, pro and con. Since schooling is of importance to the US, perhaps it is worth looking at.

Predictably, I was accused of hating women. Actually it is not women that I find objectionable, but American women, who are a small part of the world’s women.

My saying “American women” is of course a wild generalization subject to degrees, exceptions, and qualifications. A more sober statement would be something like this: There are enough American women overtly hostile to men, enough snarling feminists teaching semi-literate misandry in academic departments of sexism (Women’s Studies), enough little boys being drugged at female recommendation, enough repression of normal behavior of small boys by female teachers, enough bias against men in divorce courts, enough depiction of men as fools and knaves by females in the media, that it seems to me wise to avoid the species. I mean none of this to apply to women to whom it does not apply.

Now, if I were the only one who thought the foregoing, I would dismiss myself as a crank expat living in Mexico. Among American men however there is a great deal of agreement if my personal experience, countless websites, and a lot of email are any indication. It matters, methinks, that so much very real ill-will exists between so many men and women.

Further, my objection was not to female teachers per se, but to the current crop of feminists who don’t like boys, or understand them, or want to, and are ruining them. All of my teachers in grade school, and perhaps half in high school, were women. They were fine. The reason was that they accepted the masculine view that schools existed to teach content. They did: first arithmetic and then math, and history, English grammar and composition, literature, Latin, and so on. Bless them.

What I dislike is the feminized, therapeutic view of schools as places not to teach anything but to engage in Pavlovian conditioning of kids to female norms of syrupy goodness, non-violence (tag, dodge ball, and wrestling) docility, conformity, and warm interpersonal glop. Learning anything gets short shrift.

An examination of the intellectual qualifications of teachers, such as rankings against those in other fields on the Graduate Record Exams, will show them to be at the bottom. These are averages, of course, and there are exceptions. Still, people of low voltage do not naturally have much interest in academics. They easily become prey to a pedagogy focusing on “interpersonal relations.”

The effects show. Maybe fifteen years ago I went into a middle school in mostly white, moderately upscale Arlington, Virginia, and found on the wall a student’s project celebrating the contributions of Italians to science – specifically those of Enrico Fermi to, so help me, “nucler physicts.” On the wall. Without correction. I have seen other examples.

These malfeasances spring from favoring self-esteem (when I am dictator I will have anyone who uses that word hanged) over knowledge. It is not a masculine approach. Nor will it produce the thoughtful, intellectually competent citizenry the country desperately needs.

In a Marine Corps day rooms I once saw a coffee mug inscribed, “To err is human, to forgive divine. Neither of which is Marine Corps policy.” (Why did that come to mind, I wonder?)

Something strange is happening in the United States. A Canadian friend recently said, “I can remember when Americans weren’t afraid of everything.” Just so. Don’t run on the playground because you might fall. Don’t roughhouse because you might get a bruise. Don’t go outside at high noon because you might get skin cancer. Don’t swim after eating, because you might get a cramp. If a child draws a soldier, call a SWAT team because he is a murderous psychopath. Don’t ride a bicycle without a helmet. Fill in the deep end of the pool because someone might drown. Supervise everything. Control everything. Fear everything.

If these are not the neurotic fears of women and capons, please tell me what they are. Such run the schools. They make policy.

Is everything so dangerous? In my first eighteen years, three kids I knew died – one in kindergarten of appendicitis and two in high school, one of cancer and the other a suicide, probably because of hideous sebaceous acne over most of his body. Deaths by dodge ball: 0. By falling down while running: 0. By murderous seven-year-old psychopaths: 0.

Yes, I realize that the schools face many other problems, chief among them that much of the country no longer takes schooling seriously. Pious slogans like No Child Left Behind of course mean No Child Allowed Ahead. Discipline a child and his parents sue. Suspend serious troublemakers and you face charges of racial profiling. Disguising the gap in performance between ethnicities takes precedence of teaching. The stupidest fad is grading teachers on how well their students test, it being impossible to get a class of unintelligent, misbehaving, culturally uninterested students to perform well.

I wonder whether I and some of my correspondents are not talking past each other. Being in my late sixties, I remember a world that any but the most antedeluvian of current teachers cannot. It may be that therapy, drugging, and fear of everything have been around so long now that they are thought normal. Maybe even the idea of schooling as I knew it no longer exists except among ancients. “Nucler physicts”? No teacher in my sixth-grade school (Athens, Alabama) would have tolerated that for a moment. I suppose, though, that if I objected to illiterate spelling today, I would be told of the danger to the child’s self-esteem.

When my daughters were in high school some fifteen years ago, a history teacher (I think it was) was warned to stop correcting her students’ grammar: That was for the English teacher to do. When I noticed that their science handouts had common chemical terms badly misspelled, I contemplated going to the school and asking why the hell they had teachers of such surpassing incompetence. Sand against the tide. It would have been racist, and my daughter would have paid the price.

And when my eldest graduated, all of the academic awards went to girls. Since girls have always been diligent and made good grades, it follows that either boys have become less intelligent, or that they have been pushed under by a hostile feminocracy. I am not imagining this. It is documentable. There will be a price for this.