<p>“White is not. White, essentially, MEANS someone who shares the privileges (once substantial) of being white”</p>
<p>That privilege, however, does not include going to college, and never has. You had to have money AND be white to go to college. "</p>
<p>again irrelevant. My point was to explain why a scholarship for whites is different from a scholarship for minnesotans, for lutherans, for norwegian americans, for mayflower descendants, for descendants of the first infantry division in ww2, or any other grouping (including groupings that are entirely, or almost entirely, white)</p>
<p>The UC system didn’t make affirmative action illegal. The voters of the State of California did. The UCs would bring back affirmative action in a heartbeat if they were allowed to.</p>
<p>So your boy graduated with honors. Mine is a 3-year-high-school-graduate-to-be and is ranked #1 in both his junior and senior class. Some kids will always manage to rise above even a biased system.</p>
<p>That doesn’t negate the fact that female GPAs in grade school and high school are sharply higher overall than those of the males. Yet males have higher standardized test scores than females, on average. What’s different? GPAs have a subjective component, which mostly boils down to obedience/conformity, while standardized tests are scored by machine. </p>
<p>Based on my experience, at least two-thirds of K-12 teachers are female. Since we’re talking about “power sharing” – I should note that the raw statistics show that there is a grade bias that favors females, that females disproportionately assign those grades and that, as a consequence, far fewer males than females decide to attend college – a decision with far-reaching economic consequences. So which group is hogging the power today?</p>
<p>hahaha…that is about the funniest thing I have read in a long time. You are implying that female teachers favor female students and thus subjectively give them higher grades, right? Wow, I didn’t know I could be the reason that males decide to go to college in fewer numbers than females! </p>
<p>Have you ever looked at the school schedule? Less recess and PE–two of the things we know boys need. Also, colleges are focusing on the ability to communicate (even engineering has taken a dramatic shift towards communication) and boys just don’t do as well (on average) as girls do at communicating by the age of 17. Boys are lacking fathers to keep them focused–show me an out of control boy and I can almost guarantee he is being raised by a single mom.</p>
<p>But hey, it’s pretty popular to blame societies problems on teachers. Those darn power hogging female teachers–grrrr!</p>
<p>Mtnmomma, your points are quite valid and no single factor has created the current situation. I would also not characterize any subtle teacher bias as conscious or intentional – the fact is that classrooms are far too overcrowded and the “fidgety” nature of boys complicates classroom discipline. Girls are much more likely to exhibit the “successful-student-personality” (calm, organized, eager to please), boys are more likely to be competitive (perhaps argumentative) and disorganized, in particular about turning in their homework on time.</p>
<p>Any system that excessively rewards meticulous homework completion and “participation” – always having your hand up in the air, keeping quiet until called upon, not “disrupting” the class with wisecracks and comments to your neighbors – over test scores on the material presented is subject to bias, especially against males.</p>
<p>Clearly females have always been as smart as males, yet were once subject to heavy bias. Females have not, however, in the past few decades all of a sudden become SMARTER than males, so if males are now faring worse in K12 and being driven away from attending college, it must be due to sociological effects, not due to the sudden lack of male ability.</p>
<p>Maybe not in the south, but in the west, there are plenty of people who don’t have documents past two generations. I don’t mean completely paperless, but there are lots of people without papers in the southwest. At least, they would certainly not have the information required to do a genealogical search in the time required to apply for scholarships! My own grandparents didn’t have information–despite having each passed the driver’s test at 75, not just renewed, but passed the written test–on their own mother’s maiden names, and the last names they had were very common. Of course, they were Hispanics with Spanish last names. I guess they were lucky?!?</p>
<p>“well every other group has scholarships, religiously unaffilated whites should too” </p>
<p>I believe the argument was, every other group is or would be allowed to have scholarships, so white males should too.</p>
<p>I searched for about a year for records for that side of the family. It was amazingly hard. We went to the Mormons, etc. It just disappears three generations back. First names. Their parents died young, left almost no papers. Yes, they are practically paperless. They have birth certificates but their parents didn’t. :shrug: It’s great that your ancestors have papers. Not everyone does.</p>
<p>Maybe people in the south put down “American” because it is not socially acceptable to be a hyphenated-American? Who knows?</p>
<p>My only point is that it seems possible that there could be white people who do not know their specific ancestry and who are not church-affiliated. Not to say that knowing one’s ancestry is impossible!</p>
<p>And I don’t know what their aims are, but it’s worth seeing.</p>
<p>I wrote this whole tl;dr post but it was just pointless.</p>
<p>LoremIpsum, while I agree that the lack of men in the schools is an issue, the rest of your posts about women in schools are just not based on facts. Study after study suggests that especially as young children, the differences between boys and girls (especially as regards the need for physical exercise, etc.) are vanishingly small.</p>
<p>If anything, boys perform more poorly because we as a society for some reason believe they can’t do it.</p>
<p>I’m desperately trying to keep my kids overseas so they will do school here in Germany because I do definitely believe that there are structural and curriculum problems with the US schools, but the idea that somehow girls are fine without exercise, individual attention, and are “naturally” neat is just… so sexist I don’t even know where to begin.</p>
<p>I’m “white” and don’t have a problem with these new scholarships. Incidentally, some of us who are “white” are from families that immigrated here relatively recently, complete w/another language. Don’t assume ALL “whites” have legacy advantages w/the Ivy League, etc. </p>
<p>There are a lot of variety among us “Anglos” – an annoying catchall term sometimes used to throw all “whites” together as a category out here on the west coast.</p>
We don’t have “papers” Mme. I’m not even sure what that means. I would venture to say that many Americans whose families have been here a long time (rich or poor) don’t know too much past their grandparents. Not because the information isn’t there, just because they are not particularly interested in learning it. I was not interested in genealogy myself until about 8 years ago. </p>
<p>It’s just that now it is somewhat easier to find this stuff out, what with the internet. I have recently found my grandmother’s name on 1900 census records, and managed to go back from there as far as 1770 by tracing a path through the various records and the work that others have done and put online. OTOH, once we reach the point where any particular faction immigrated finding information becomes an issue.</p>
<p>“Look at the heads of Fortune 500 countries and the 100 richest people.”</p>
<p>Don’t forget the Congress, the judiciary, the tenured faculty at major universities, and the leaders of law firms, hospitals, engineering concerns, Madison Avenue, and Hollywood. Overwhelmingly men, especially straight white men, across the board. They don’t look like they’re struggling to me. This is supposed to be outweighed by the fact that their fourth grade teachers downgrade them for fidgeting too much? Please.</p>
<p>Times change. There are a great many intelligent women (and some men) who examined the evidence 25 or 30 years ago, saw that females were clearly disadvantaged and continue to feel that way today with an almost religious fervor – dare to question the feminist orthodoxy and perhaps all of the gains of the last decades will disappear! A lot of ridiculous stuff has come out of the radical feminist wing since the 1980s – perhaps best personified by Andrea Dworkin’s concept that any sexual interaction between a man and a women, even within marriage, is rape. Yet rarely do prominent feminists speak up and say: “This woman is nuts!” The sisterhood must remain united at all times!</p>
<p>If one overcompensates to assist one group for decades, eventually the pendulum swings too far and the original group can become disadvantaged. The K12 male-female statistics back me up here, and I’m not interested in starting a flame war. The percentage of males in positions of power is an irrelevant argument here, since these opportunities happen late in life and the demographic change had to start at the bottom and work its way through multiple generations. Give it another 30-40 years and, should present trends continue, men will be second-class citizens in all walks of life. The smart ones will simply abandon those Western nations that treat them this way and emigrate to those countries where their own opportunities will be better.</p>
<p>The CIA has a term for when its efforts result in unfortunate consequences: blowback. The unintended consequences of the female GPA advantage in K-12 has already started to sharply alter the typical ratios of males-to-females in college. Women in college already complain of the lack of “quality” men ready to commit to a relationship – but then why would men do so since they’re in a buyer’s market? Another unintended consequence.</p>
<p>The next unintended consequence will be when males with advanced degrees become so scarce that they will receive a de facto minority advantage in the marketplace – like females do now when seeking a science or engineering position.</p>
<p>In China, girl fetuses were aborted en mass during its one-child policy. Decades later, Chinese women of marriageable age are scarce – they have the buyer’s market and can be extra choosy. Blowback. Unintended consequences. Funny how nature finds a way.</p>
That’s the crux of it - some whites aren’t struggling financially yet others are just as some AfAms, Asians, etc. aren’t struggling financially yet others are. Telling a 17 y/o whose parents have no funds that there are lots of white CEOs, etc. therefore since he’s white also he doesn’t need any help from a scholarship fund won’t go over well nor should it. </p>
<p>The article indicated that another requirement for the scholarship is financial need.</p>
<p>^ Sure. Bill Gates could start a scholarship for people with the last name “Gates.” If I had a lot of money, I could start one for people who shared my last name.</p>
<p>LoremIpsum–I hate to start on this topic, but I think women can’t find men ready to commit because most of them (the men) can get the milk for free, so why buy a cow, if you get my drift.</p>
<p>Of course that’s true, but the question is why. I read a study not so long ago that found women were much more likely to restrict their “free samples” to within the context of an extended relationship in those situations where the male-female ratio was even, or favored the females. With a shortage of available men, women have more competition and less bargaining power.</p>
<p>“rarely do prominent feminists speak up and say: “This woman is nuts!””</p>
<p>What? How many feminist conferences were you going to in the 90s? LOTS of people thought she was nuts (or, rather, that she was wrong in a way that was poisonous to feminist aims), and were not shy about saying so. The movement always was and still is full of disagreement. Say the words “Catherine MacKinnon” in a roomful of prominent feminists today and then hide behind a chair.</p>