Re: Educational brainstorming

Linda Purrington (lpurring@earthlink.net)
Thu, 14 May 1998 08:08:40 -0700


Yes. And would you elaborate on what you said about technological
illiteracy being an important equity concern and causing increasing
problems?
What problems do you identify, exactly?
And how would you phrase this equity concern, not only for the nation,
but perhaps also the nation in world context?
What about relationship illiteracy?
Linda Purrington
Title IX Advocates
lpurring@earthlink.net

Robert McIntosh wrote:
>
> John, You raise so many interesting points. One that interested me was
> when you said,
> Also, a majority of the teachers I
> had were female. Should we demand more male teachers? And how
> would we get more males into teaching? Apparantly this is not a top
> priority in this technophile society.
>
> One suggestion I have is to pay teachers more. This is clearly the main
> reason that men go into other fields besides teaching. If teachers were
> paid like technocrats, we'd have no problem attracting men into the
> profession.
>
> As far as women programmers, I taught programming for many years and
> always had a difficult time attracting women to my classes. I
> attributed this, at least in part, to the fact that women are socialized
> to value relationship over all else. Programming is generally an
> isolated activity. Just you and this box. It's a complex issue and an
> important equity concern. Technological illiteracy is having
> increasingly dire consequences as we proceed through the information
> age.
>
> Bob
> McIntosR@nwrel.org
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: John Meyer [SMTP:john_meyer@geocities.com]
> > Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 1998 12:46 PM
> > To: edequity@tristram.edc.org
> > Subject: Educational brainstorming
> >
> > I've been watching this debate for some time now, and I even wrote a
> > research paper about it, and I have a few thoughts as to the equity or
> >
> > inequity of boys and girls.
> >
> > First off, I noticed that a lot of the push was towards
> > getting girls
> > into technology, which is fine by me. Having a girl in technology,
> > having
> > everybody in technology, takes off a little bit of the stress in
> > working
> > with technologically illeterate people.
> > But I don't see many feminists shouting about getting boys
> > into more of
> > the humanities, which are suffering in terms of being cut out of
> > funding
> > and such. With boys having a disproportionate percentage in the
> > illiteracy
> > group, and with the dire need of humanities in school, you would think
> > that
> > we would be pushing humanities as well. Also, a majority of the
> > teachers I
> > had were female. Should we demand more male teachers? And how would
> > we
> > get more males into teaching? Apparantly this is not a top priority
> > in
> > this technophile society.
> > Also, it will take a special kind of person to succeed in
> > technology,
> > and I am not talking about male or female. Let's take programming,
> > although that is only a small part of the whole technological puzzle.
> >
> > When you program for 50 hours a week, looking at a monitor with your
> > eyes
> > focused like a laser, trying to find a single bug in your program that
> >
> > keeps it from working, you find out a true test of endurance. If
> > feminists want more female programmers, that's fine; just remember
> > that
> > putting a person in programming and having them survive for long are
> > two
> > different ideals.
> > My own belief is that in order for education to thrive, we
> > need a return
> > to the "Renaissance Man/Woman". We need men and women who are
> > interested
> > in a varity of topics, not just "specializing". And with the turnover
> > and
> > layoff rates in the economy, a lot of people are going to have to
> > broaden
> > their horizons as well. So, what do you think?
> >
> > john_meyer@geocities.com


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