This question is often asked as though the answer is elusive or mysterious in some way. However, if you’re a young man who attended grade school after the mid-80s, the answer is pretty obvious. Girls receive preferential treatment and have mountains of incentives heaped on them from the beginning, and coed education creates an environment that punishes normal boys’ behavior. In addition to this, there are real people working hard to give girls an advantage and hurt the chances of boys. Yes, there really are people out there who have a sadistic turn of mind and wage war on certain children. If one wants to hurt people, it is easiest and most effective to attack them when they are weak and defenseless, so what better way to get at a group than to go after the children among them?
One such enforcer is Ileana Jiménez, a teacher at an independent school in New York. On her personal website, Ms. Jiménez touts her credentials:
Throughout her thirteen year career, Ileana Jiménez has been a leader in the field of social justice education for students of color, LGBT youth, women and girls.
Currently a teacher at the Little Red School House & Elisabeth Irwin High School (LREI) in New York, she offers courses on feminism, Latina/o literature, LGBT literature, and memoir writing.
The hallmarks of her diversity programming initiatives for students include a yearlong series on the intersections of race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality in 2007-08 titled Gender and Sexuality: What’s Next in the Conversation? and her interview of Rachel Maddow in 2009. She frequently leads presentations on inclusive programming and curriculum at the annual NAIS People of Color Conference, the NYSAIS diversity conference, and independent schools in the Northeast.
Note that she refers to her coursework as “programming.” How apt.
As a teacher at an independent school, Ms. Jiménez may be a diversity hire and therefore encouraged to take her radicalism to ridiculous lengths to give an otherwise well-heeled, mainly white private school some progressive cred. Of course, the question that ought to be asked is what good it does the poorer students and “students of color” to allow such a loon to represent their interests.
However, even more important is the fact that this woman occupies a position of power over boys (the school is coed) when she has made it absolutely clear that she is primarily interested in helping girls:
A passionate advocate for the education of girls and women, Jiménez is a frequent speaker at Smith College, where she currently chairs the planning committee for the 2010 A Legacy in the Making: A Conference for Alumnae of Color event to be held on campus.
Outside of teaching, Jiménez serves as the board secretary of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, judges for the Lambda Literary Awards, and is a recent alumna of the Progressive Women’s Voices program at the Women’s Media Center in New York.
Ms. Jiménez has even gone so far as to have her students write President Obama demanding that feminism and feminist theory be taught to all students in America, starting in elementary school. Here is an excerpt from a letter she had a girl in her class write:
The first problem that I would like to address is the lack of intersectional feminism within education. Feminism is a wonderful example of how all social injustices interlock. In high schools on down in the education system, children are taught modified African American studies. Students are taught an even more limited version of Women’s Studies. They learn nothing about the struggles of say a Japanese woman during WWII or of an Ethiopian girl’s everyday life.
[...]
To do that, I propose that by fourth grade, students be exposed to basic feminist ideas. Then in middle school, there should be a month in each grade dedicated to learning about basic feminist vocabulary and grasping the ideas and goals of the first, second, and third waves of feminism.
Clearly, the girl is trying to be obedient and impress her teacher. This is normal for schoolchildren, but what if impressing one’s teacher means parroting pseudo-Marxist feminist rhetoric? Is this really what’s important for educating and socializing children in contemporary society? If so, we’re all in big trouble.
The sad thing is that people like Ms. Jiménez are products of the education system themselves. I’m sure most of them were good, obedient students who cranked out page after page of meaningless drivel for their women’s studies professors in college. The problem is that they have become self-replicating robots, plugging into the brains of children to create more automatons for a sort of feminist borg collective. Of course, this won’t work with most children, because kids don’t give a damn about “intersectional feminism” for the most part. But in the meanwhile they will be graded on it, and the ones who are not resistant to the brain-rotting feminist prion will be elevated into positions of prestige and, eventually, authority. Those who actively resist will most certainly be punished in some fashion, and most of them, for obvious reasons, will be boys. That’s how this works: you set up a system that’s guaranteed to determine between allies and enemies, and then dole out rewards and punishment accordingly. It is quite effective.
Because parents cede so much control of their children to schools and teachers these days, it is quite important to keep a close eye on what they are doing. Unfortunately, most parents fail in this regard, and people like Ms. Jiménez, who can inflict real harm on children, are not kept in check. Perhaps if more people understood that the damage done to children by radical feminists and the like in education is likely to have repercussions throughout society in years to come, they’d take them a little more seriously and take steps to remove them from children before they can inflict further abuse.
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