I’ve got a lot of anger brewing lately, so I’m a bit rash at the moment. But I think I’m controlling it admirably, at least most of the time.

I lost it a little last week when commenting back and forth on a blog that I read. DetentionSlip.org.

There is an article about a school in Bangor Maine, that is threatening to suspend all high school dances if the students don’t clean up their dance moves. Read: stop grinding on the dance floor.

I think that’s pretty stupid on several levels. First, and coming from base principles, I don’t see a valid reason for prohibiting pseudo-sexual contact. For me this is a non-issue. I recognize that the community and school administrators are not as sexually accepting as I am however, so I can understand their desire to keep what they perceive to be inappropriate behavior off the dance floor.

Still, threatening to ban all school dances? Absurd. It is a terrible enforcement policy that punishes an entire school populous for the disciplinary actions of a specific group of students. (If every one of the students at a dance is grinding together I think we probably have a different issue at hand.) Otherwise, the appropriate response is to discipline the students in violation of the schools policy fairly and immediately, and make the policy clear to everyone attending the dance.

I said as much in my comments, although not as clearly or precisely, not at first anyway. What got me angry is not the schools ridiculous enforcement policy, but the comments of another reader who only entered “Guest” as a name. My reading of the comments suggests someone of the female gender, so I will use that pronoun through the rest of this rant. Guest states that she is a teacher, and feels that grinding is inappropriate and that the school is in the right. Fine. No problem. The problem is the immediate and continual display of gender bias, criminalizing young men, “boys” as she says, and infantilizing the young women, or “girls.”

Among her offensive comments were phrases like “Almost all boys are perverts,” “Most boys are violent,” and “boys are always thinking about sex.” Her words paint young women as naive, innocent victims of the perverted advances of boys on the dance floor. When called on her bias she claims that it’s not bias because it is based upon her actual real life observations of behavior.

Here is the article and comments. Bangor: High School Bans Dances

The comments back and forth ranged among a variety of topics, including gender bias, sexual obsession in culture, sports as a healthy outlet for violence, and supression of sex as the appropriate response. Throughout she continually demeans young men by reducing them to out of control hormonal children who must be “trained” in “appropriate” behavior.

The number of issues I have with this are innumerable, and I’m so incredibly full of anger that I’m having trouble breaking them out into their component pieces. It is no wonder that public education is in such disarray if even a fraction of teachers display these attitudes and biases.

May all the gods forbid that we treat our students as actual, real live people, with rights, and feelings, and complexities that can never be reduced to out of control hormones. I’ve read many times in the last few years that young men are consistently producing less and less acceptable test scores across the country, while young women are continuing to perform at expected or superior levels. To hear teachers express their obvious bias against male students, and the clear expectation that they will not learn or perform in class, for me answers a lot of the questions raised about this phenomenon.

I can’t help but remember that 50 or 60 years ago young women were in the same boat. They were not expected to do as well as the young men. They were ridiculed for their educational aspirations, and nobody really worried about pushing them to excel. Our culture assumed that they simply weren’t able to be smart, because they were too obsessed with girlish things, like hair-styles and learning to cook and sew. I find an eerie parallel between that pattern and the current crop of “boys are too hormonal to really focus” teaching styles.

I am not an endocrinologist, but I have serious doubts that the hormonal stages of adolesence have changed drastically for young men in the last 60 years, so this idea that they aren’t capable of thinking straight cause they’re too horny and sex obsessed on account of their wacked out hormones doesn’t hold any water at all. But that’s the party line right now.

This is part of why I’m struggling to find where I fit into the educational system. I can’t sit by and watch this. It is a tremendous disservice and abuse of our children (both the young men and women). I just don’t understand how people can sit by and accept these things, how anybody can think it’s okay.