by J.M. Schell

Created on: July 24, 2008

Sexism in Modern American Textbooks? Not a Chance.

Beginning in the early 1970s, maleness has been increasingly viewed in our increasingly feminized society as a pathological condition. The pinnacle of this was the ADD/ADHD "epidemic" of the 1990s, treated by Ritalin and this family of high-addictive drugs closely related to heroin. Fortunately, many parents were horrified by reports of what these drugs were doing to other kids (many of the kids involved in the spate of school shootings in the late '90s and early 2000s were on these drugs) and of course in observing their own kids.

Single-parent families in the US are generally headed by females, and as so many such families exist and have been since the late 1960s when feminists began insisting that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" (yuk, yuk!) have been encouraged by looser divorce laws, increasingly libertine cultural views of un-wed motherhood and the general, successful attempt in politics, media and the schools to paint the "average" American male as a slovenly, bumbling moron.

We saw a few years ago when Lawrence Sommers, then-president of Yale noted with concern that women tend to go into disciplines of study other than science and math (simply true) and his immediately effectively being burned at the stake, that if anything, the radical feminization of education in America is complete. Sommers, who identifies himself as a feminist (as anyone at that level in education today must) was not yuking it up over the evidentiary fact that more men than women go into math, engineering, and most hard sciences, he was joining with feminists in bemoaning this fact and seeking ways to "fix" this horrendous problem.

But in an age when we must see, hear and certainly speak no evil in a public forum, his noting this fact aloud spelt the end of the man's career.

To suggest today that any textbook is "sexist" would be laughable if it were not for the fact that those who do so are quite serious. A survey of one state's science and math textbooks that arrives at the conclusion that the texts, the state and the schools are actively involved in a pogrom to keep women out of math, science and engineering fields is nonsense on stilts. Aside from the manifestly un-scientific, subjective approach of such a study, one need only look to the Lawrence Sommers case to understand that any such school district to say nothing of the textbook publisher (not known for typically staffing themselves with slack-jawed, backwoods, ultra-conservative polygamist separatists, after all) that did not present at minimum a 50-50 depiction of girls: boys engaging in math and science, would quickly find itself on the front page of the New York Times and being called to task by everyone from Katie Couric and the gals on "The View" to presidential hopeful-seeking-change Barak Obama.

No. Flatly, no. Anyone hoping to be taken seriously positing such a thing would have to provide a bit more proof than "this is the way I interpreted the artwork in these books!" The more serious a charge, the more evidence one must offer and the more solid must that evidence be. Simply claiming that because someone in a hypersensitive state of feminist ire sees a very limited series of textbooks from one state as depicting women as empty-headed Barbie Dolls is not enough by any measure of rationality.

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