new good aussie vid just dropped

  • StewartCopelandsDad [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    boy boy ily but this wasn't very good. Obviously the sexist cosmology of Prager U is silly but they're doing reactionary interpretation of real facts, e.g. college enrollment is at 60:40 women:men. (Prager can't say that directly because college is a librul socialist factory and they want everyone to stop going.) Lots of ink spilled about the causes, better to engage with it than brush the whole issue off by looking at the dumbest interpretation. Especially because, IMO, this trend is probably making men as a demographic skew even more conservative.

    • temptest [any]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      If this weren't just an entertainment video, then ideally it just wouldn't be made, because it probably couldn't be much better than this.

      At the end of the day, even within the US there are different cultures, societies, and etc., but like they're demonstrating, even the legitimate issues the Prager video touches upon are ridiculous to a typical Australian (or NZ like me). Through many friends who went universities there I know of an Australian city chem lecturer using meth recipes to demonstrate interactions in a memorable way, and another who brought a rifle (unloaded, of course) into a lecture a few years ago to demonstrate a concept in computer security. Both still teaching. In school we played unisex teams for sports like football (soccer) and hockey, had a teacher secretly show us how to make dry ice bombs, had sex ed all in the same room (srsly imagine thinking men shouldn't need to know how pregnancy works, or women knowing how condoms are used...), analysed poems about Zeus raping a girl, Shakespeare's usual smut is actually mandatory, and, well, literacy isn't so atrocious that "teach boys to be readers" is a sentence we can take more seriously than "teach women to add and subtract numbers". Which I'm hoping is also by-and-large ridiculous............

      Australians, along with most of The West, are largely ignorant of this topic. Inevitably. It would take dedicated, concerted research to make any insightful comment beyond "what the fuck is your country doing to kids?" or "PragerU is just making this up, right?"

      • StewartCopelandsDad [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        It's a frame issue honestly. The Prager argument that schools these days have gone soft or whatever is largely based on lies and mischaracterizations, but there are some real policies like zero-tolerance bullying policies which are supposed to shield schools against legal liability. Anyway, ceding the frame to Prager and just saying "pop tart gun suspension is silly because of real school shootings" kind of loses the argument right there.

        Your primary school experience is pretty much the same as mine in the northern US. University campuses almost all ban guns so your security professor would have had to bring in an airsoft rifle.

      • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        teach boys to be readers doesn't mean teach boys to be able to read it means get boys to read for fun.

    • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Yeah this is a bad video. They don't engage with the issue at all. Modern schooling can really suck for boys. Obviously Fox + Prager don't care and are liars, but there are plenty of legitimate issues.

    • Retrosound [none/use name]
      ·
      1 year ago

      college enrollment is at 60:40 women:men.

      What's wrong with that? Sounds like the policy of educating women has succeeded beyond all expectations? Are men crying themselves to sleep over it? They can do just fine in the trades, it seems they keep saying.

      • StewartCopelandsDad [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Bait post. Men are not a monolith, trades should be open to women, and we shouldn't see any large disparities between different demographics' college rates. When you see that most CS students are male, your instinct should be "why are women being shut out of this" rather than "gee women must not want to be programmers". Where does that feeling come from? Social realities shutting them out. Same when you see that most college students are female. It's not that men just innately don't feel like going to college. Something is up.

        • temptest [any]
          ·
          1 year ago

          If you call something a "bait", then you're supposed to not take said bait.

          That's the entire point of calling something bait.

          • StewartCopelandsDad [he/him]
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            The point of calling it bait is to warn that nobody should get into genuine back-and-forths about the content of the message. Unlike 4chan bait, a quick corrective reply won't derail the broader conversation since we have threads. Since the comment received 3+ upbears, we have mistaken comrades who need to be educated.

            • temptest [any]
              ·
              1 year ago

              Unlike 4chan bait, a quick corrective reply won't derail the broader conversation since we have threads.

              That's true, they're completely different sites mechanically. Although really I don't even think it was bait, it was just fundamentally incorrect and in dire need of a corrective reply (like yours).

        • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          "why are women being shut out of this" rather than "gee women must not want to be programmers".

          the real question there is why at the highschool level do so many women drop out of stem fields. Probably has something to do with a sexist thing society does but which thing and how do we fix it