Summary
Social media influencers are fuelling a rise in misogyny and sexism in the UK’s classrooms, according to teachers.
More than 5,800 teachers were polled… and nearly three in five (59%) said they believe social media use has contributed to a deterioration in pupils’ behaviour.
One teacher said she’d had 10-year-old boys “refuse to speak to [her]…because [she is] a woman”. Another said “the Andrew Tate phenomena had a huge impact on how [pupils] interacted with females and males they did not see as ‘masculine’”.
“There is an urgent need for concerted action… to safeguard all children and young people from the dangerous influence of far-right populists and extremists.”
I can’t help but notice that all of the radical fascists that have taken over all of media and politics all happen to be of the age that were given timeouts. Seems that none of them learned how to respect other people’s free agency.
No, “time outs” aren’t the problem.
From what I’ve seen and experienced, Western liberal educators spent a ton of time focusing on the success of women and girls - which was necessary, I’m not trying to vilify women’s equality here - but unfortunately, the pendulum swung from “girls don’t need an education because they’ll just be homemakers, focus on boys” to “ignore boys, because girls need to catch up” and has been stuck there for a while.
We can’t fix a problem that we refuse to acknowledge even exists, and we need to start admitting that we really have been pushing boys and men to the side for years now - Yes, even the white boys whom we also assumed were so “privileged” - and that we’re going to have to make some steps to amend that by reaching out to boys and treating them in ways they will respond positively to, if we want to resolve this issue.
The alternative is letting men like Andrew Tate take the wheel and mentor these boys as he sees fit, which is obviously a terrible idea.