"The more that illiberalism has risen in recent years, the more libertarian I have become."
Liberalism in a heterogeneous society is unstable. Unless a lot of basic questions are off the table because a supermajority agrees on the answers (e.g., what is a woman?), liberalism winds up just erasing the old order and clearing a path for some kind of successor religion/dogma, which is what we see happening in post-Christian liberal democracies. And doubling down on liberalism when everyone else has started picking self-interested teams doesn't make liberalism more likely, it just removes you from discussion of achievable solutions.
In a previous post, someone commented that "getting through medical school without knowing about Bayes is a shame." It's a bigger shame that most people who write about political culture don't know what a Schelling point is. The kind of post-Christian liberalism you want isn't a Schelling point. It naturally and rapidly devolves into something worse.
It is an ugly manifestation of the fight between the libertarian right associated with the Rothbardian Mises Institute, and the libertarian left associated with the Koch funded Cato Institute. The recent success of the Mises Caucus in the Libertarian Party apparently had to do with the failure of the party to stand up for libertarian principle during the pandemic.
The F-M ratio for “people jobs” has been essentially flat since the 1990s according to Charles Murray’s analysis of the CPS. So why would it be rising for teaching in particular?
I suspect it has to do with the broader labor market trends toward increasingly more women working full-time as more men drop out-- the current prime age employment rate for males is at Great Depression levels (as it was in 2019 also). Perhaps women who would have stayed home with children or worked only part time in previous generations are especially likely to be teachers today while educated working men are in enough demand to find better opportunities elsewhere.
I also suspect that these trends are self-reinforcing. My sense of the education career path (especially coursework at the university level) is that it has become increasingly woke and feminized in a way that turns off men who otherwise would be interested in teaching.
A friend of mine writes and presents technical seminars for computer professionals. He is highly respected and esteemed for what he does; instead of simply presenting facts and techniques, he teaches people how to think about technical problems, which is a big deal in the field. But he says that this was his second choice in deciding what to do in life -- his original plan was to be a science and math teacher for middle school children, with computer lectures as a side-gig to make a little extra money. But when he spoke about doing this, he was sternly warned that people will assume that he is a pedophile or a bully for choosing the teaching profession because he is male, and unashamedly admits that he likes kids. He was also told he was too smart for the profession. He made other plans, and some California students missed out on having a really excellent teacher.
" My guess is that the quality of teachers—of either sex—has gone way down since I was in school. Perhaps this harms boys more than girls."
Hey, that's what Reeves does, too! Guesses. Of course, you call it "speculation". Sounds much better.
It's not like there isn't tons of data on this very point, Arnold, and all of that data says you're wrong. High school teacher quality as reflected by SAT scores has been consistent for decades, and they've been taking credential tests to ensure it since the late 70s. Elementary school teacher quality is much, much higher since 2003 or so. Fewer women from the top decile enter education, but 7-9 are roughly consistent, and only a small increase in the number of women in the lower 6--and given that sped teachers didn't exist back in the 60s, it's hard to care (sped teachers are lower even than elementary). The average ability of teachers has been largely consistent because remember, all those smartest women took jobs from the not quite as smart men, who went into teaching--mostly high school.
Notice Reeves doesn't mention race. Anyone talking about education who doesn't mention race is lying or ignorant.
People talking about the recent decline of male teachers and the overwhelming femininity of the teaching profession are always ignoring the fact that 75% of teachers are elementary school teachers because they teach maybe 25 students each. Middle and high school are considerably more male, closer to 40% and in math and science close to 50%.
Two other things aren't mentioned: most administrators are teachers first, and administrators at the high school level are overwhelmingly male. Even at the elementary school level administrators are just over 50% female. So a lot of male teachers get bled off into admin. Also, the growth in charter school teachers is huge (you'd think a libertarian like Arnold would be bothered by substituting government funded teachers for private school teachers, but no), and I suspect that they are even more female in classroom facing teachers, given the scarcity of sped and ELL classes in charters.
Point being, I don't think the slight increase in female bias is detectable to the average student. Most elementary school teachers are female, but at the high school level you've got a close to 50% shot of getting a male teacher in math and science for sure.
"his original plan was to be a science and math teacher for middle school children, with computer lectures as a side-gig to make a little extra money. But when he spoke about doing this, he was sternly warned that people will assume that he is a pedophile or a bully for choosing the teaching profession because he is male, and unashamedly admits that he likes kids. He was also told he was too smart for the profession. He made other plans, and some California students missed out on having a really excellent teacher."
That's utter crap. As in, either he's lying or you are. No one is told that sort of thing privately, much less systematically.
As for what is hurting boys the most- I see the internet and gaming as the main problems that are different from when I was growing up. If I had the internet and the video games of today (I wasted a lot of quarters and time on the arcade games of my yourth anyway) from birth until age 18, I think I would probably be destitute and/or homeless today. It is a temptation I wouldn't have been able to handle at age 13, I think.
"The problem is not that men have fewer opportunities; it's that they are not seizing them." What? The statement has the patina of psychological truth (what man what's to play a rigged game?), but where's the the empircial evidence of "not seizing them"? How does one measure seizing?
I wonder if the male-female divergence in high school scholarship has not increased. In my own dim memory of the '50's I do not recall thinking of girls as generally more like, “No, you should study, not go out, and you should turn your homework in, and you should plan ahead, and have you thought about which college you're going to?" That would be consistent with the idea of a DECLINE in male "agency, ambition, and motivation" and the rise of "toxic masculinity."
I was in elementary school from 1971 to 1984. Here is how my teachers broke down by gender:
Elementary: 6 female, 3 male from K-8.
High School: I had exactly, out of 4 x 6 classes over the four years, 1 male teacher (Algebra II). There was only one other male teacher in the high school section during my four years. A ratio of about 20-2 f-m.
So, I, like Arnold, am not sure that there has been a big increase in the proportion of female to male teachers, but where there is a change is in the higher authority figures in the schools themselves- I had nothing but male principals and vice principals, the people who meted out punishment at the schools for infractions. When I look at the local schools today, the proportion of females in those higher positions are definitely more female than they were when I was student 40-50 years ago. That is where the change has been.
"The more that illiberalism has risen in recent years, the more libertarian I have become."
Liberalism in a heterogeneous society is unstable. Unless a lot of basic questions are off the table because a supermajority agrees on the answers (e.g., what is a woman?), liberalism winds up just erasing the old order and clearing a path for some kind of successor religion/dogma, which is what we see happening in post-Christian liberal democracies. And doubling down on liberalism when everyone else has started picking self-interested teams doesn't make liberalism more likely, it just removes you from discussion of achievable solutions.
In a previous post, someone commented that "getting through medical school without knowing about Bayes is a shame." It's a bigger shame that most people who write about political culture don't know what a Schelling point is. The kind of post-Christian liberalism you want isn't a Schelling point. It naturally and rapidly devolves into something worse.
(I see an old "lifted from the comments" essay by Handle about Schelling, but no other mention on your sites. It's really good and deserves re-reading. http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/lifted-from-the-comments-4/)
Salter and Magness are not correct. What is behind their smear on the so-called Mises Caucus in the Libertarian Party is explained here: https://www.stephankinsella.com/2022/09/magness-on-hoppe/
It is an ugly manifestation of the fight between the libertarian right associated with the Rothbardian Mises Institute, and the libertarian left associated with the Koch funded Cato Institute. The recent success of the Mises Caucus in the Libertarian Party apparently had to do with the failure of the party to stand up for libertarian principle during the pandemic.
The F-M ratio for “people jobs” has been essentially flat since the 1990s according to Charles Murray’s analysis of the CPS. So why would it be rising for teaching in particular?
I suspect it has to do with the broader labor market trends toward increasingly more women working full-time as more men drop out-- the current prime age employment rate for males is at Great Depression levels (as it was in 2019 also). Perhaps women who would have stayed home with children or worked only part time in previous generations are especially likely to be teachers today while educated working men are in enough demand to find better opportunities elsewhere.
I also suspect that these trends are self-reinforcing. My sense of the education career path (especially coursework at the university level) is that it has become increasingly woke and feminized in a way that turns off men who otherwise would be interested in teaching.
A friend of mine writes and presents technical seminars for computer professionals. He is highly respected and esteemed for what he does; instead of simply presenting facts and techniques, he teaches people how to think about technical problems, which is a big deal in the field. But he says that this was his second choice in deciding what to do in life -- his original plan was to be a science and math teacher for middle school children, with computer lectures as a side-gig to make a little extra money. But when he spoke about doing this, he was sternly warned that people will assume that he is a pedophile or a bully for choosing the teaching profession because he is male, and unashamedly admits that he likes kids. He was also told he was too smart for the profession. He made other plans, and some California students missed out on having a really excellent teacher.
One man’s “freedom of association” is another man’s “segregation”
"Rather than promoting Ludwig von Mises’s brand of cosmopolitan liberalism"
It's almost like they've never read Mises.
Reeves book is total garbage.
" My guess is that the quality of teachers—of either sex—has gone way down since I was in school. Perhaps this harms boys more than girls."
Hey, that's what Reeves does, too! Guesses. Of course, you call it "speculation". Sounds much better.
It's not like there isn't tons of data on this very point, Arnold, and all of that data says you're wrong. High school teacher quality as reflected by SAT scores has been consistent for decades, and they've been taking credential tests to ensure it since the late 70s. Elementary school teacher quality is much, much higher since 2003 or so. Fewer women from the top decile enter education, but 7-9 are roughly consistent, and only a small increase in the number of women in the lower 6--and given that sped teachers didn't exist back in the 60s, it's hard to care (sped teachers are lower even than elementary). The average ability of teachers has been largely consistent because remember, all those smartest women took jobs from the not quite as smart men, who went into teaching--mostly high school.
Of course, there's vanishing little evidence that smart teachers make much difference, and lots of evidence that black teachers for black kids do make a difference. I've written a lot about this over the years, here's one (https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/10/31/teacher-quality-report-lacking-a-certain-quality/).
Notice Reeves doesn't mention race. Anyone talking about education who doesn't mention race is lying or ignorant.
People talking about the recent decline of male teachers and the overwhelming femininity of the teaching profession are always ignoring the fact that 75% of teachers are elementary school teachers because they teach maybe 25 students each. Middle and high school are considerably more male, closer to 40% and in math and science close to 50%.
Two other things aren't mentioned: most administrators are teachers first, and administrators at the high school level are overwhelmingly male. Even at the elementary school level administrators are just over 50% female. So a lot of male teachers get bled off into admin. Also, the growth in charter school teachers is huge (you'd think a libertarian like Arnold would be bothered by substituting government funded teachers for private school teachers, but no), and I suspect that they are even more female in classroom facing teachers, given the scarcity of sped and ELL classes in charters.
Point being, I don't think the slight increase in female bias is detectable to the average student. Most elementary school teachers are female, but at the high school level you've got a close to 50% shot of getting a male teacher in math and science for sure.
"his original plan was to be a science and math teacher for middle school children, with computer lectures as a side-gig to make a little extra money. But when he spoke about doing this, he was sternly warned that people will assume that he is a pedophile or a bully for choosing the teaching profession because he is male, and unashamedly admits that he likes kids. He was also told he was too smart for the profession. He made other plans, and some California students missed out on having a really excellent teacher."
That's utter crap. As in, either he's lying or you are. No one is told that sort of thing privately, much less systematically.
As for what is hurting boys the most- I see the internet and gaming as the main problems that are different from when I was growing up. If I had the internet and the video games of today (I wasted a lot of quarters and time on the arcade games of my yourth anyway) from birth until age 18, I think I would probably be destitute and/or homeless today. It is a temptation I wouldn't have been able to handle at age 13, I think.
"The problem is not that men have fewer opportunities; it's that they are not seizing them." What? The statement has the patina of psychological truth (what man what's to play a rigged game?), but where's the the empircial evidence of "not seizing them"? How does one measure seizing?
I heard the Reeves interview too and bought the book. I’m about half way through. He seems even handed and reasonable.
I wonder if the male-female divergence in high school scholarship has not increased. In my own dim memory of the '50's I do not recall thinking of girls as generally more like, “No, you should study, not go out, and you should turn your homework in, and you should plan ahead, and have you thought about which college you're going to?" That would be consistent with the idea of a DECLINE in male "agency, ambition, and motivation" and the rise of "toxic masculinity."
I was in elementary school from 1971 to 1984. Here is how my teachers broke down by gender:
Elementary: 6 female, 3 male from K-8.
High School: I had exactly, out of 4 x 6 classes over the four years, 1 male teacher (Algebra II). There was only one other male teacher in the high school section during my four years. A ratio of about 20-2 f-m.
So, I, like Arnold, am not sure that there has been a big increase in the proportion of female to male teachers, but where there is a change is in the higher authority figures in the schools themselves- I had nothing but male principals and vice principals, the people who meted out punishment at the schools for infractions. When I look at the local schools today, the proportion of females in those higher positions are definitely more female than they were when I was student 40-50 years ago. That is where the change has been.