So Hot Right Now: Essentialism!

The NYT Magazine, which has officially changed its name to the Gender Pseudoscience Times Magazine, has an interesting story on single-sex education:

On that November day in Foley, Ala., William Bender pulled a stool up to a lectern and began reading to his fourth-grade boys from Gary Paulsen’s young-adult novel “Hatchet.” Bender’s voice is deep and calm, a balm to many of his students who lack father figures or else have parents who, Bender says, “don’t want to be parents. They want to be their kids’ friends.” Bender paused to ask one of his boys, who said he was feeling sick, “Are you going to make it, brother?” Then he kept reading. “ ‘The pain in his forehead seemed to be abating. . . .’ What’s abating, gentlemen?” The protagonist of “Hatchet” survives a plane crash and finds himself alone by an insect-infested lake. Bender encouraged his boys to empathize. They discussed how annoying it is, when you’re out hunting, to be swarmed by yellow flies.

Meanwhile, in Michelle Gay’s fourth-grade class, the girls sang a vigorous rendition of “Always Sisters” and then did a tidy science experiment: pouring red water, blue oil and clear syrup into a plastic cup to test which has the greatest density, then confirming their results with the firsthand knowledge that when you’re doing the dishes after your mother makes fried chicken, the oil always settles on top of the water in the sink.

First of all, shout out to my boy Gary Paulson.

Second of all, what is Enlightenment? The use of knowledge to cast off the shackles of servitude. Or, to paraphrase Kant, the use of science to confirm your dishwashing technique.

Speaking to a group of sixth graders, Sax explained his theory that girls’ hearing ability is much better than boys’, as is girls’ sense of smell. The girls, just on the edge of puberty, sat utterly rapt, seeming to want to understand why their brothers, boy cousins, cute skater-dude neighbors and fathers were so weird. A few weeks after the lecture, Sax sent me a packet of color photocopies of thank-you notes he had received from the girls. One, from a girl with two fathers, read: “Dr. Sax, Thank you so much for coming to Burkes. . . . I had a smell in my room and my Dads couldn’t smell it but I could. I thought I was going crazy. It ends up there was a dead rat in the wall. Hope you come back soon.

There you have it: already one concrete benefit to Sax's line of inquiry. Let’s keep going down this path. Frankly, I don’t see how any of its costs or reverberations could outweigh that girl getting rid of her dead rat.

I’m positive that the anecdote about the dead rat rotting in the wall is an allegory for gender essentialism, but I'm still trying to work out the ending. Maybe the rat comes to life and eats the little girl, and it turns out that her Dads smelled the rat the entire time but had been willfully repressing it in order to drive her crazy. Then an army of little girls comes over and fills the house with buckets of oil and water mixture, drowning the rat. Then they do the Dads’ dishes, and all seems to be well again! But in the last sentence we (the readers) discover that the rat is still alive in a sewer, feeding off of anti-depressants and transfats, and growing stronger than ever as it plots its revenge.

Lookout, Kafka!