Heavy discrimination against males in British education

We are now seeing the results of the feminized education that British schools offer: Many boys are turned right off

The gap between the number of men and women applying to university has grown fivefold under Labour as evermore women opt to take a degree. While the Government trumpeted record numbers of teenagers wanting to continue with further education yesterday, academics voiced concerns about the widening rift between the sexes. Between 1998 and 2007, 14,305 more men applied for university places, compared to 51,214 more women. This gap has increased every year for six years.

Malcolm Grant, Provost of University College London, gave warning that unless the trend slowed, colleges could become male-free zones. He said: "We are concerned because you'd think that if we had an equality of genders in society, it would be reflected in their performance at A level and university. "We need to understand what it is that's causing young men not to thrive in the A-level culture and not to choose to apply to university. The male participation rate is sufficiently divergent that we'd expect it to continue."

Professor Grant's comments echo widely-held fears, already expressed to ministers, that young men face being locked out of university and marginalised in the jobs market. Last year, 57 per cent of first degree graduates were women. In 1980, 60 per cent of university entrants were men. In 2005, 30 per cent of boys took A levels compared to 40 per cent of girls.

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Does Barnard Need Junk Academics?

Post lifted from Muqata. See the original for links

Its tenure time at Barnard College, and Nadia Abu El Haj is aspiring to attain the coveted Barnard professorship title in her field of Anthropology. Unfortunately, tenure for Nadia Abu El Haj does about as much to further Columbia and Barnard's academic standing, as Hamas has done to promote peace in the Middle East.

One only has too examine her doctoral thesis (and now a book), "Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society." to see that her analysis of "archaeological practice" has nothing to do with anthropological or archaeological analysis, and is just your run-of-the-mill anti-Israel rhetoric, masquerading as junk research.

Her analysis of Israeli society determines that it is a "settler-colonial community", and has "invented" an ancient history in the region by the use of archeology. She attempts to demonstrate how "(social) science generates facts or phenomena, which refigure what counts as true or real," and concludes that the "existence of the ancient Israelite and Hebrew kingdoms should be considered "a pure political fabrication." Historians are appalled by her junk research.

"El-Haj is not a practicing archaeologist. She hardly knows the Hebrew in which many Israeli archaeological debates are conducted. She has taken part in very few actual digs. Yet she confidently condemns Israeli archaeology as a tool of the Zionists. With only gossip to go on, she accuses one archaeologist of bulldozing non-Jewish strata to get to the levels that might offer details about ancient Israel. Bizarrely, she then concludes her book by reversing herself on such desecration, asking us to "understand" sympathetically the Palestinian mob that destroyed Joseph's Tomb on October 8, 2000. I guess it all depends on whose narrative is being bulldozed."

Jonathan Burack, The Family Security Foundation, December 28, 2006

Archaeologists have criticized her book harshly:

The dean of Middle Eastern archeology, William Dever of the University of Arizona, "who has authored more than 20 books on Middle East History, said Ms. Abu El-Haj seems intent on writing Jews out of ancient Middle East history, and demonizing a generation of apolitical Israeli archaeologists in the process. Barnard should deny Ms. Abu El-Haj tenure, he said, `not because she's Palestinian or pro-Palestinian or a leftist, but because her scholarship is faulty, misleading and dangerous.' " Campus Watch

"At the heart of her critique is an undisguised political agenda that regards modern and ancient Israel , and perhaps Jews as a whole, as fictions. "Abu El Haj's anthropology is undone by her... ill-informed narrative, intrusive counter-politics, and by her unwillingness to either enter or observe Israeli society... "The effect is a representation of Israeli archaeology that is simply bizarre... Filling in what is missing from her text becomes fatiguing. In the end there is no reason to take her picture of Israeli archaeology seriously, since her selection bias is so glaring. "Abu El Haj has written a flimsy and supercilious book, which does no justice to either her putative subject or the political agenda she wishes to advance. It should be avoided." Alexander H. Joffe, Lecturer in Archaeology, Purchase College, SUNY Journal of Near Eastern Studies. Chicago: Oct 2005. Vol. 64, Iss. 4; p. 297

"Perhaps the most astonishing part of the book is a discussion on the last page of the text (p. 281). Abu el-Haj describes and condones the attack, and subsequent ransacking, by a Palestinian mob on what is known as "Jacob's Tomb" in Nablus in 2001. Several people were killed as a result of this attack; the gleeful tone in which she describes this act of vandalism exemplifies how her political agenda completely overcame her duties as a social scientist. "This book is the result of faulty and ideologically motivated research. One can but wonder how the 1995 dissertation on which it is based was authorized at Duke University and how a respected publisher like the University of Chicago Press could have published such unsubstantiated work."

Maeir, Aren, Professor of Archaeology, Bar Ilan University, Isis, volume 95 (2004), pages 523-524, Solomonia Blog

It's ironic that while supposedly advocating archeology, Abu el-Haj indelibly aligns herself with the Palestinians, who have absolutely no regard or respect for Biblical archeology whatsoever. Doing everything in their power to destroy the archaeological remnants from the Temple Mount, Palestinians dug out a huge underground Mosque in the "Solomon's Stables" area of the Temple Mount, and proceeded to destroy and dump everything they could find of historic significance, while repeating the mantra, "There were never any Jewish Temples in Jerusalem."

As Arab mobs riot these days over Israel's attempts to rebuild a bridge to the Temple Mount and the to excavate outside the Mugrabi Gate (and therefore, outside the Temple Mount complex and Mosques), one has to wonder why Barnard College is demeaning itself by offering tenure to junk academics, bent on the denying the legitimacy of the Jewish State.

Are you an alum of Barnard or Columbia? Why not drop an email to Barnard College President, Judith Shapiro, (jshapiro@Barnard.Edu) or Columbia College President Lee Bollinger (Bollinger@columbia.edu) and let them know that tenure for Nadia Abu El Haj degrades your alma mater.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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