Women : A Minority Or A Majority?

As discussed in a recent essay by Saul Kaplan “The Plight of Young Males”, there is a serious academic gender achievement gap in the United States and as I will discuss, around the world. Young women are doing significantly better than young men, and the results are shocking. In the latest census, males make up 51 percent of the total U.S. population between the ages of 18-24. Yet only 40 percent of today’s college students are men. Since 1982, more American women than men have received bachelor’s degrees. In the last ten years, two million more women graduated from college than men. As Kaplan reveals, the average eleventh-grade boy writes at the level of the average eighth-grade girl. He also states that women dominate high school honor rolls and now make up more than 70 percent of class valedictorians. Kaplan says, “I am happy to see women succeeding. But can we really afford for our country’s young men to fall so far behind,” (733)?

As a writer, I find myself getting lost. Typically, when I go to start writing I hit a brick wall. It’s as if all my thoughts suddenly escape my mind and I draw a blank. It takes me forever to conjure up some form of a thesis and then takes even longer to figure out what I should write to support it in a way that makes sense. Then, attempting to find a way to organize my ideas and put them together in cohesive paragraphs seems like an impossible task in the moment. It is not uncommon for me to get flustered and just throw something down on the paper because I get anxious seeing how much work is left to do. If I end up going back to read it over prior to submission,

When I sit to write, I have to think about what I want to say. This is not easy for me as I tend to think about several things at once. Clearing my mind and focusing on the writing task is a challenge in itself. I do not consider myself a strong writer and find it intimidating especially when I know it will be critiqued. The sense of failure when seeing the paper I worked so hard on look like the newest local headline of a recent murder is disheartening for me. I assume I am being overly critical of myself but those feelings seem to be redeemed when I look over the aftermath of what was my wonderful work of mental art.

As a woman myself, it is hard to imagine a time when I would not have been allowed to attend college, let alone be writing this paper. As children most of us heard stories from our grandparent’s about what life was like they were young. I can remember laughing at the thought of “walking up hill both ways” to get to school. With the liberties American Women have today, it is easy to take for granted everything the women before us fought so hard for. It is easy to forget the treatment they suffered in their struggle to bring us to today. In this paper we will examine the lives, struggles, and small victories of women that have led us to

I need to just start writing even if it is awful, or even if it is hard to get myself to start writing because just the action of doing it and starting to write will help me to be able to write good papers. It will help me to be able to write and to do it because I know I should, and I know I can. I’m glad I read that because it’s good for me to know that other people struggle with basically the same stuff that I struggle with, having a bad first draft, and not wanting to start writing, but to put it off for awhile. Having knowledge now that it’s normal to not have desires to put stuff off, and just write crazy things in your draft, since it isn’t final. But it’s possible if you just commit yourself to it. Then it will most likely work out for the

Associate professor Julie Bette at University of California wrote an essay regarding young women views about their gender. In this chapter titled “Women Without Class”, the author, Julie Bette, explores how female teenagers express different version of their femininity. Bette conducts her exploration by observing and interview female high schoolers in small town located in California’s central valley. The tittle “Women Without Class” to reflects Bette’s interest in young women from modest means and low educational attainment, who have low “cultural capital” to enable class mobility.

The founding fathers of America laid the foundation so that everyone could attain the American Dream and to pursue happiness. Unfortunately, that isn’t how today’s society operate. To live life free and happily is very hard to do. Many factors influence these hardships. Economic woes, judicial system failures, and modern day discrimination had made it extremely difficult for a male figure such as me to attain an authentic education.

"The girls get the message; the boys don’t. That is the boy crisis in education” (Mortenson, 139). It seems that America is eager to readily teach and educate the women, but are not so quick to respond to the unemployed and uneducated man. It is only a few men who actually obtain a higher education like a bachelors or associates degree. Most of the boys today settle with just accomplishing a high school degree, and are never able to become qualified to master the technological demands of employers today due to a lack of education. "They are the boys whom we are not reaching through education - but who must be reached with higher education and training in order to prepare them for the jobs that will be there when they enter the labor market” (Mortenson, 139). Fifty percent of men in America never obtain a higher education according to Mortenson

Many people see education as a privilege, however I see it as an opportunity. As an African American male I make it my mission to continue the work of those black men and women who worked tirelessly to make sure that have the option to obtain higher education. I realize that I stand on the shoulder of those men and women. Hearing and understanding their stories of doing whatever it took to make sure that they were educated – knowing that education brought them dignity and respect that no one could take away from them; helped me understand that education is the key that unlocks doors. Education will allow me to be a change agent in the world and fight against social injustices and on behave of those who are unable to speak for themselves. Education

Such a movement involved the American women to band together, raising an awareness of protecting women in pay, position, and anti-discrimination laws, which became as powerful as a women elevating herself to the arena of a soap box (Tavaana, “The 1960s-70s American Feminist Movement”). In the brief age of revolution, the nation also began to see the importance of women studies in high education institutions (Elfman, “A ‘Second Wave of Feminism’”). In the text, Rich divulges in her views on civil rights, emphasizing on her bias view on women suffrage in education, but rationalizes it with social currency: “...You, the women students here, and… us, who teach in a women’s college [are two parts of education]. But ultimately those two parts are indivisible… Less than a decade ago, with the rebirth of a feminist movement in this country, women students and teachers in a number of universities began to demand and set up women’s studies courses – to claim a women-directed education (Rich, 220, 221).” Whether it was intentional or not, Rich’s use of the word “indivisible” when describing the bond of female student and teachers (with no gender specific aim), was utterly relevant to say the least. Any US citizen hearing the speech, then and now, could recognize the correlation of the verbiage used in “Claiming an Education” as well as in the official Pledge of Allegiance. Rich was calling attention to not only the participation of national academia

Equality for All Students In the essay “Have Today’s Schools Failed Male Students” by Patricia Dalton it is clearly seen that male students in today’s society have failed to make sure their education needs are met. They are pushed more into sports than into the books.

Analysis of “Boys Left Behind” “ Boys Left Behind” is written by Kevin Hassett describing the situation of what boys are facing in current society. Hassett claims that America’s society worries too much about how females are being treated unfairly and forgets about the struggles of boys. He describes the academic performance of boys and girls, where which, girls outperformed boys at every academic levels.

In Adrienne Rich's essay, "Claiming an Education", the author speaks about the female experience against the male-dominated academic scene. Despite the fact that this essay was written in 1979, a number of Rich's points seem timeless. Rich encourages young women to insist on a life of meaningful work. As a seventeen-year-old student, I have often heard from my female companions that they anticipate a higher education as an opportunity to hunt down a spouse. The frequency and zeal of this conclusion, seeing education only as means of marriage, strikes me as particularly pitiful and archaic. Adrienne Rich’s thesis in “Claiming an Education” aptly expresses the array of roles women hold in societies, the benefits, and weaknesses of our education system, as well as the struggles that women are exposed to. She successfully develops her thesis statement by the effective use of a variety of methods of development and various literary devices to improve her writing quality and to help readers interpret her message. I agree with Rich’s thesis statement because education entails being responsible for oneself, not just for women, but for all students.

Education is something often seen as an equalizer in the face of social injustice. The concept of using school and information to put different people on a level playing field is a noble but misguided attempt at social equality. Education undoubtedly affects the position of people in society positively, while creating an outlet to educate the ignorant, it becomes problematic when education is not an equal opportunity for everyone. In Adrienne Rich’s essay, “Taking Women Students Seriously”, she speaks of the inequality mainly affecting women while subtly hinting at the inequality present in education in regards to race and class. Gender, race and class are three characteristics that work together to create either a positive or negative profile for one’s education.

In Adrienne Rich’s speech, Claiming an Education, a statement was made that broadened my views of being a student in a university: “you cannot afford to think of being here to receive an education: you will do much better to think of being here to claim one” (paragraph 2). To furthermore explain this statement, students (especially women) should not attend school to just “receive” what is offered, but to rightfully take what is yours; which would be the degree.