Maggie's Farm

Schools are run by women, for Pete's sake. They favor certain behaviors unconsciously. It's been that way for years. Read Tom Sawyer, Little House, Anne of Green Gables.

It starts at early levels and does not relent. If you read the local honor roll at your Middle Schools and High Schools, you will see girls outnumber boys 2-1. 3-1 on high honors. If this were reversed we would be hearing about it from morning to night.

Here's the catch. Schools do favor girls, and lie to them, implicitly telling them that the rules for success at school are just about the same as the rules for success at life. Because that would seem fair. But when they graduate, and it becomes clear that school rules and life rules only have about a 50% overlap, they feel cheated and enraged. I'm not sure I blame them. They got snookered.

I have wondered whether the emotional energy behind some of the angrier forms of feminism stems from this - that girls who worked harder than their brothers and got better grades now have to recalculate.

It divides the success of boys sharply. They either succeed in the school way (sometimes by alternative strategies), see that life isn't fair and find some other way to skin a cat, or simply fail.

Similarly, the system doesn't work well for girls who don't have those "typical" girl virtues. They scramble and often fail as well.