women today have too much rights

"Modern" textbooks and recommended literature often go to extremes to remove male role models as lead characters and examples. In her book "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn", Diane Ravitch cites the example of the state of California rejecting The Little Engine That Could as an approved reading book because the main character was male. "It's not that grownup society is hostile to boyishness as such. On the contrary, grownups eagerly encourage risk-taking and adventuring -- provided only that it's done by girls. There's no shortage of books for young readers about wars and western exploration, about mountain-climbing and bravery during floods and hurricanes. But the protagonists of these books are usually 10-year-old girls. Pick up a catalogue of the children's books published in the past two or three years. You'll find Seeing Red, the story of an intrepid Cornish girl who saves her village from Napoleonic invasion, and The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, about a young girl's adventures in the California Gold Rush. There is Grace the Pirate, Behind Rebel Lines: The Incredible Story of Emma Edmond, Civil War Spy, and the Daughters of Liberty series, which tells bold stories of girlish derring-do during the Revolution. "Stories for boys are no longer permitted to be so exciting. Here is a publisher's blurb for a book about a boy who courageously 'defies teasing to remain enrolled in ballet class.' Here's another about 'Lame teenager Shem' who 'finds manhood in the Michigan wilderness with the help of an old Indian woman.' And a third: 'Doing volunteer work at Santa Barbara's Sidewalk's End, a day-care facility for children of the homeless, Ben witnesses an instance of physical abuse and -- for the best of reasons -- decides to take matters into his own hands.'" "... boys must always have girls with them, doing everything they do -- indeed, almost always doing it better. You hear many complaints that boys today don't seem interested in reading. Who can blame them?" Some "experts" decry what they see as "violent" plots or themes, and rail against children being exposed to such books. But are books about monsters, fantasy, super-heroes or other stories with "action" or violence actually damaging? And is there a gender bias issue at stake here, with many such books often being enjoyed by boy readers? We don't have the answers to those questions, but here are some interesting perspectives: Boys' Violent Tastes Harmless: Psychologist by Anne Marie Owens, National Post (Canada), June 24, 2003 "The author who raised the first alarm about boys and violence in North America says we should stop worrying about boys indulging in war games, wrestling and fantasy play and begin embracing their low-brow tastes. Michael Thompson, the psychologist who wrote the groundbreaking book Raising Cain and several other best-selling books about boys, told a gathering of librarians from across North America that 'snobbery and elitism' are too much a part of the prevailing attitudes toward boys. ... 'A good choice is a book that a boy takes deep pleasure in reading, and nobody can tell a boy what that book will be.'" In Praise of Violence by John Podhoretz, Weekly Standard, October 7, 2002. This is a review of a book, "Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence" by Gerard Jones. Excerpts: "Killing Monsters is a book that demanded to be written, if only to provide a moment's respite from a piece of conventional wisdom that goes almost completely unchallenged. Over the past thirty years it has become axiomatic that depictions of violence in popular culture are utterly without redeeming merit. Critics on the left (such as Peggy Charren of Action for Children's Television) and critics of the right (such as Michael Medved) are in full-throated agreement on the evils of fantasy and fictional violence as depicted on television, in the movies, in comic books, in popular music, and in video games. ... In the book's most original and telling insight, Jones suggests the problem arises from a failure to comprehend the nature of childhood play, which he believes is almost entirely metaphorical. ... At every moment, the play of children is shot through with the knowledge that they are playing. They are not powerful. They are not big." Progressive Ed"s War on Boys by Janet Daley Just when you thought nothing new could be added to progressive education's long catalog of failures, yet one more has come to light"and it is a particularly grave and far-reaching failure. For progressive ed, I would argue, is responsible for the epidemic of underachievement among boys in British state schools, now so deep and widespread that it is taking on the proportions of a national crisis. Where boys had once lagged behind girls only in the earlier years of primary education"and then only in English and history rather than in math or science"they now keep falling behind in both English and mathematics through the entire course of their schooling, as national test results clearly show. Where once boys could have been expected to catch up with girls academically by the age of 12, and to exceed their performance at public examinations by the age of 18, their performance now falls further and further behind with every passing year. Experts and pundits have blamed this poor performance on everything from the influence of street culture and the media, to the lack of employment prospects for working-class boys, who once would have been absorbed into manufacturing, to the declining number of male schoolteachers who could provide role models. But the real culprit is the radical shift in teaching methods and in the content of the school curriculum that progressive education has wrought. To understand why this should be so, consider just exactly what progressive educators hoped to accomplish"and how, in the process, they explicitly rejected male virtues and values. Progressive ed's "liberation" of the British classroom and curriculum had an unashamedly and overridingly political agenda. To the extent that British progressive theorists spoke in terms familiar to American progressivists"of raising the child's "self-esteem" and sense of self-worth"they understood these words in the context of class. Rather than encouraging working-class children to see the inadequacies of their own deprived social backgrounds and to aspire to go beyond them, schools would embrace and idealize "anti-elitism," in the name of delivering children from their feelings of class inferiority. It seemed to occur to no one that this inverted snobbery would lock deprived children into the limitations into which they had been born, opening no wider perspective or experience as an escape route out of the notorious passivity of working-class attitudes. What this meant was that state schooling was giving up on social mobility in favor of the virtue of class solidarity. London Times, June 13, 1997. "The poor performance of English boys in relation to girls, particularly in reading skills, is a relatively new phenomenon. ... Today, significant differences between girls and boys are still dramatically apparent in English tests at the ages of 14, 16 and 18. ... However, there is one English-speaking country that is very similar to England but where no sex differences in reading exist. That country is Scotland. ...it is important to note there is one major difference in educational policy between the two countries [England and Scotland]. While 1960's child-centered methods of instruction have radically reshaped the teaching of reading in England, in Scotland methods have remained more traditional and phonics-based. It may be that code-based methods of reading instruction are more advantageous for boys than other methods."