insideMAN

Why Michelle Obama’s global girls’ education campaign isn’t really about education

by 28 Comments

On Tuesday Michelle Obama visited a girls’ school in one of London’s poorest boroughs to announce that the US and UK will collaborate on a $180m global campaign to support girls’ education.

Mrs Obama said the lack of access to education for girls was a “heart breaking injustice” and that “girls’ education is a global issue that requires a global response”.

Except it isn’t just girls who face global educational disadvantage, so do boys.

In March international think tank and governmental advisor, OECD, published a study into the educational attainment of girls and boys in 64 countries across the globe.

It found girls are out-performing boys at school in every country it studied — from China and the US, right through to Jordan and Peru.

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What’s more, the choice of announcing the project in Tower Hamlets – one of London’s poorest boroughs – was presumably intended to send the message that girls from poor and ethnic minority backgrounds are hit hardest of all.

Except in the UK, poor and ethnic minority boys also do worse at school than girls from those backgrounds – and dramatically worse than well-off girls.

According to a 2012 Children’s Commissioner report, poor black boys with a special educational need are 168 times more likely to be excluded from school than white girls without special needs from more affluent backgrounds.

And when it comes to getting into university, in the UK the gender gap between men and women has never been wider. In a remarkable statistic from the UCAS admissions service, in a quarter of parliamentary constituencies, there are 50% more girls than boys going to university.

Ideology, not education

So why is Mrs Obama solely concerned with girls’ education?

One explanation could be that the fund is intended to target parts of the world in which girls are prevented from going to school altogether.

That’s obviously a valid and important cause, but even if this is the case, why launch a global education campaign that focuses solely on girls in those areas, when boys are doing dramatically worse than girls everywhere else?

What’s more, why hasn’t Mrs Obama – or for that matter Mrs Cameron – launched a high-profile campaign, backed by millions, to tackle the grave gendered educational disadvantage that’s hitting boys hardest in the US and the UK — the countries whose citizens they actually represent?

(In fact, when was the last time you heard any major politician raise a rallying call to tackle the crisis in boys’ education in the UK?)

Who’s worth fighting for?

But to ask those questions would be to miss the point. Because this latest campaign isn’t really about children’s education at all – it’s about ideology.

As Mrs Obama arrived at the school, she was met by students singing “Something Inside So Strong” and “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou, while London’s Evening Standard ran the story on its front page under the headline – ‘Michelle: Stand Up For Girl Power’.

At the school, Mrs Obama said: “All it takes is to walk into that courtyard and hear the voices of the young women standing tall and strong and smart. I meet girls like this everywhere I go round the world. That is who we are fighting for.”

What message is this sending to the millions of boys not just in the UK and the US, but across the globe, who are struggling at school, or being kicked out altogether?

I’ll tell you what I think it’s telling them. It’s telling them they’re not worth fighting for.

It’s telling them, that if you’re a girl, world leaders will spend millions to help you, but if you’re a boy, you’re on your own.

By Dan Bell

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  • Groan

    This is indeed part of a distinct pattern of re-direction. Clearly from life expectancy to reading, the facts in the US and UK give no evidential support to the widespread campaigns of “positive action” aka discrimination. Understandably a quizzical look starts to appear when the data on gender is actually presented . Though we aren’t there yet there may be writing on the wall for so many programmes. So to distract attention from the letters starting to appear on the proverbial wall ( let’s call them facts) there are louder and louder appeals to cast our gaze further afield to distant struggling societies as if their battles are a justification for quotas on company boards or bylaws on seating on the tube.
    An exemplary example of this was the Global report on gender equality last year. One smelled a Rat as Rwanda did incredibly well ( largely because the Genocidal convulsion in that country was gendercide leaving a huge shortage of males) . Reading more than the headlines it turned out that any favourable indices for females such as education attainments and participation were “equality” and only those indices with scores favourable to males were counted. This rendered invisible to the casual reader all the indices with favourable scores for women where more than equality was actually recorded in the raw data. Of course the result was that many “western” nations achieved lowly placings in the rankings( even Sweden) “proving” the need to focus on Gender equality in precisely those nations that had high actual scores for females over males on many indices( particularly educational and pay). So although affiliated to the UN the data was manipulated to ignore issues in the developing and “third” world in order to highlight the “first”.
    It seems highly likely ( as has happened with FGM) that much of this funding will go to campaigning groups in New York or London who will supposedly be attempting to effect change in rural Pakistan or the vastness of the Congo basin from their offices.

    • G’Quan

      “So although affiliated to the UN the data was manipulated to ignore issues in the developing and “third” world in order to highlight the “first”.”

      That sounds like you’re saying the UN is somehow a pure and well-meaning egalitarian institution, and the fact that the data was affiliated with it should have meant quality or ethics. The UN has always manipulated data in this way; it’s ruled by ideology and power-politics.

      • Groan

        I tend to agree. However the reports authors and the UN present themselves as virtue.

  • Emilio Lizardo

    The goal of Feminism (gender Marxism) is not equality but dominance and destruction of the gender oppressor.

    • windkirby

      amen.

    • Jack Strawb

      “gender Marxism”?

      When is the last time you actually heard a feminist do anything other than argue for an ever-larger, unearned slice of the capitalist pie.

      Outside of a small part of academia Marxists had fled feminism by 1985.

    • warrior4just

      Males are the dominant gender regardless; the sleeping giant eventually wakes up

  • Darren Ball

    Thanks for this Dan.

    Michelle Obama’s speech was egregiously insensitive given the context. I have consoled myself in the certain belief that the Obamas are not ambivalent towards the working-class or black males – to think otherwise would be ridiculous. Also, the ultimate focus of their campaign is not education per se, but the empowerment of women who remain under-represented in positions of power across the globe – education is a route to an end. I fully support their overall campaign in that regard, and of course the education of girls who are denied
    education where their brothers are not. But Michelle Obama’s speech here in London this week can only have further isolated boys, and especially black boys, who are floundering at school amongst relatively high-achieving girls.

    Across the western world, boys lag behind girls at school, and this is especially true amongst the working-class, and in particular the black working-class. Boys and girls have identical average IQs, so this imbalance is due to teaching and assessment styles which are obviously failing to engage with boys as effectively as they engage with girls.

    Michelle Obama has at least three constituencies: yes she represents women and girls, but she and her husband are also an inspirational couple for black people across the west and beyond; and she’s a liberal from humble origins who has made-good, making her an inspiration to the working-class. Given this context, for Michelle Obama to visit a deprived and ethnic part of London to talk exclusively about the education and aspiration of girls, regardless of their ethnicity and social class, is a betrayal of her other two constituencies.

    I shudder to think how let down those boys must feel, especially the black ones. There you are, a black boy living in a deprived London council estate, struggling at school and feeling disenfranchised. Then along comes America’s First Lady – she and her husband are the most powerful black couple to have walked the planet since the last Egyptian Pharaohs, and she’s from humble origins – just like you are. Wow!! What does she have to say whilst she’s on your manor? We’ll for you, nothing. All she’s interested in is inspiring girls: poor girls, rich girls, white girls, black girls, Asian girls, Muslim girls. ALL girls.

    I can see that it might have been difficult to include disadvantaged boys into her radius of concern without diluting her message for the empowerment of girls and women world-wide, but she does have access to the world’s best script-writers. Ultimately, if she couldn’t find a way to make her point without further alienating and
    isolating the MOST disadvantaged groups within our schools, then she shouldn’t have made her point at all.

    • insideMAN

      Hi Darren, really glad the article resonated with you — thanks also for this really thoughtful and considered comment. I’ll have think on some of those points. Dan

    • Groan

      Well expressed. Poor Black boys ( and indeed White boys ) are so much more likely to excluded as well as less likely to succeed. Somehow the debate has to be moved to consider how all pupils can be best educated, particularly those who appear most irksome or disinterested. As it is there is a sort of purposeful fatalism that means the institutions that should be grappling with such issues for boys, shrug their collective shoulders and effectively blame the boys. It is indeed deeply disappointing from the first lady given the truly terrible statistics for black boys and men in the US . Could one imaging the President doing the same trip to talk only about boys ?

      • Darren Ball

        Unfortunately, addressing the gendered issues affecting men and boys is caught in a queue behind gendered issues affecting women and girls: apparently we cannot even acknowledge the gendered problems affecting men and boys until every last vestige of female disadvantage has been resolved. A bit like declaring a war on terror, this is a cause that will never be completely settled: partly because the way in which gender inequality is defined (which only includes negative aspects of the patriarchy from a female perspective, even where the negative is an unavoidable corollary of an advantage); partly because the goalposts keep moving (such as in education), and partly because there will always be some hard core of male arseholes who will abuse women and discriminate against them.

        In the 1980s it was a cause of great concern in the west that too few women were going to university. Now the proportions have approximately inverted so that there are proportionately too few men, you’d think that the education of men and boys would be the cause of concern? None of it. The concern now is that too few women are taking STEM subjects. And so it will continue, with endless sub-sets of sub-sets.

        Unless we can consider male and female gendered issues in parallel, there will never be a gendered focus for male disadvantages.

        • G’Quan

          What you see is an outgrowth of the tribal structure, a worldview inherently at odds with egalitarianism in spite of its claims to represent it. Indeed, all manner of ideological justifications are established to enable the front of faux-egalitarianism while shielding the comfortable and non-egalitarian instincts. Any initiative from a feminist or quasi-feminist position seeks to reinforce a social system of female protection and related hypersensitivity to female concerns, real or imagined, while drawing attention away from, minimalizing, or denying the issues regarding the poor treatment and marginalization of the majority of males. Furthermore, it takes human matters that should be approached in terms of general humanism and redefines them in accordance with the assumption that the needs of females are paramount, that a wrong inflicted on a woman is a greater outrage than anything inflicted on a man, and that attention should focus on the impact on females above all over concerns. In general conclusion, the focus is selective, the emphasis warped. The central ideology of feminism – which rests comfortably within tribalist instinct of the female reproductive bottleneck – is the supposed need to focus on female betterment, a long-standing bias and non-egalitarian impulse natural to tribal humans but justified as supposed equality by the feminist worldview.

          The core concept in feminist discourse is “Patriarchy”, a term that you yourself sadly used there (showing how extensive their influence has been), and which feminists misuse in a sense that has nothing to do with the word’s actual meaning. Feminist “patriarchy” is code for “the supposed (but non-existent) privileged ruling caste of the supposedly unified male tribe, that benefits males collectively at the expense of females, world-wide and throughout history”. Which of course has nothing to do with patriarchy, the social system wherein familial leadership, authority, responsibility and headship is invested in the paternal figure. Society should rightly be considered in terms of the politicized groups that hold sway over it and its narratives – a) the apex male power structure, political, academic, economical, and b) the collective of females, who are the social and foundational core. The third group is the majority of males, who form a utilitarian framework in service to these first two groups, and do not enter into political consideration.

          The apex male power elite and the collective of politicized females – society is essentially an uneasy and mutually exploitative, yet mutually symbiotic relationship between these two power blocs. Utilitarian males, the majority of males, only enter into political or social consideration when they are a) useful or b) threatening to the social order as consists of the first two groups. Feminism reinforces this attitude, and closes the door on positive change and inclusivity. It is an impediment to social progress, a roadblock on the path to societal healing, and it exacerbates the problems it does not directly cause.

          Feminism – as the very name in conjuction with its claim to supposed egalitarianism indicates – is built on an assumption that males everywhere are part of an overarching entrenched system of selfish benefit and privilege – “the Patriarchy”. To the point that movements and efforts to assist the men and boys in dire straits are rejected and attacked by feminists and their supporters because they’re seen as defending a supposed cabal of privileged power-holders. That is, we can see the justification used to maintain the façade of egalitarianism over the tribal impulses to privilege the comfort, protection and provision of the female and disenfranchise the competitor males who might topple the apex, established males. All preconscious most of the time, but it’s defence of this exploitative social structure that motivates the ideologies and behaviours of the majority.

          Boys are failing or suffering? Society doesn’t care, they’re lower-tier males. It will only ever care how they can be exploited or the degree of threat they represent, and neglect them otherwise.

        • Groan

          I agree. I’d personally accept that some issues for men may have to wait or some things are difficult and long term or there are pragmatic realities. It is the deliberate lies and willful attacks and misandry. For a start there is the obvious; that the advances made for women have been enacted by the men in power! We are in remarkable and changing times how foolish to create divisions when there is so much to face.

    • G’Quan

      “…empowerment of women who remain under-represented in positions of power across the globe”.
      This is simply not true. Under-represented in traditionally male positions of power, which are more perilous and limited in number. But females the world over have access to great power that the majority of males will never have. This very situation highlights that.

  • Billy

    An interesting article and one to add to the ever growing pile of things where a feminist interest has distorted the reality. When it comes to education, its girls not boys who are privileged.

    • insideMAN

      Thanks, glad you found it interesting Billy!

  • Reason

    Why are women still considered a minority?

  • crydiego

    It is interesting that boys don’t face any global problems, -just smooth sailing for penis people.

  • iggy

    “It’s telling them, that if you’re a girl, world leaders will spend millions to help you, but if you’re a boy, you’re on your own”. It always seems to boil down to that worldwide.. something Warren Farrell wrote about in his book 20 years ago “The Myth of Male Power”. The weakness of men is their veil of strength, the strength of women is their veil of weakness. Boys are disposable.. and they find that out fast… some of they don’t make it and decide to check out of life way to early. Governments don’t care about our kids… parents care… and the Obama’s of this world are more than happy to pretend that the state can do a better job than you as a parent. Take the bribe if you wish, just don’t pretend you didn’t take it later.

  • Andrejovich Dietrich

    Because the College gap between women and men isn’t already large enough. Much like when casualties of men vs women in any given situation, nobody cares unless it approaches a 10:1 ratio.

  • craichead

    I looked into this stuff a while back and found that most of the countries in Africa have better gender parity in education than the US does.

    • insideMAN

      Thanks for this craichead, do you have links / sources for that data?

      • craichead

        No you just google search”education by gender (country x)” and there’s plenty of info for whatever country you’re looking for.

        • insideMAN

          Thanks

  • warrior4just

    i dont want to hear female issues on Father’s day

  • OirishM

    http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jun/24/rebecca-minnock-voices-fears-of-emotional-impact-on-son-if-she-is-jailed

    The answer is “nope”, apparently.

    Because of the “the emotional damage sending her to prison would cause to Ethan” apparently.

    Not a mention of the emotional damage abducting him may have caused, however.

    For fuck’s sake.

  • Mohammed Ahmed M Muniser-saleh

    thank her husband she can do this

  • Darren Ball

    Yesterday’s Guardian ran an article by Julia Gillard (Australia’s last Prime Minister and who shared the platform with Obama) entitled “Gillard calls for global Action to get all children in school”. The article then went on to talk almost exclusively about educating girls and ending with a claim that “fighting for better education for girls was now one of the central battles for feminism”.

    The only gendered statistic she gave was this: 58m children not receiving primary education, of which 31m are girls.

    Doesn’t that mean that roughly half the children not receiving primary school education are boys?

    On 10th June the Guardian ran another article by Gillard in which she claimed:

    “126m children in primary and lower secondary schools, 65m of which are girls, are still not getting a basic education around the world.”

    Again, doesn’t that mean that roughly half the children not receiving primary and lower school education are boys?

    She then goes on to say this:

    “Poverty and location further aggravate the already steep obstacles many girls face just because they’re girls. Girls from poor families in rural areas are far less likely to go to school than girls from wealthier families in urban areas.”

    This statement is a complete contradiction: the poor girls aren’t suffering because they’re girls but because they’re poor.

    And then this:

    “As the most recent UNESCO education for all global monitoring report noted, ‘if recent trends continue, the richest boys will achieve universal primary completion in 2021, but the poorest girls will not catch up until 2086.’”

    Argh! She’s done it again: she’s conflated poor girls with rich boys.

    Clearly her stats show that this is not a gendered problem, despite the fact that she’s presenting it as one. I’m not sure what’s most unnerving: at least when campaigners distort facts you can take comfort in the knowledge that they needed to do so in order for the public to consider a particular group in need of special help. But when it comes to girls, it seems that it’s sufficient simply that they’re girls.

    Beyond the stats there is another argument for prioritising the education of girls, insofar as girls become mothers, and mothers will educate their children, therefore boys will benefit vicariously (although not the current generation). This argument would hold if we had to choose, but we don’t. Men and boys always lose with this sort of argument, for instance with the HPV vaccine.

    We don’t need to give boys the HPV jab because they’ll get their immunisation from their partners. Can you imagine reversing the genders? It’s okay to only vaccinate the boys because the girls will get theirs when they start fucking. They just need to make sure that their first fuck is under a certain age and that his parents didn’t exclude him on religious grounds. It’s probably best to fuck a few early on just to be certain. What does this policy say about boys’ sexual autonomy, especially if they’re gay? All this to saveabout £30m.

    Or how about this. The case is made that it’s harder to live rough as a woman that as a man, ergo 85 per cent of rough-sleepers are men.

    Or, a case is made that it’s harder for women to be in prison than men; ergo we have a huge focus on women and do nothing for men.

    As soon as someone makes a case that a problem affects females more than males, males get no help or virtually no help.