Teenage boys everywhere have a widespread bias against putting in the effort to get good grades.

They might call it "gay" or "sissy" or "acting white" or whatever, but the root cause is usually their perception of what masculinity should look like.

The men they look up to are anti-intellectual. This exists in all communities, race is not the main problem here.

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graemep 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Lack of role models, right? What men do they look up to?

I guess primary school teachers in the US are predominantly women as they are in most countries? So boys without intellectually inclined men at home or in their social circles do not have role models for educated masculinity.

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pavlov 4 days ago | parent [-]

I’m not sure if the gender of teachers is so much a factor as class identity.

Young French author Édouard Louis has written about his experience growing up in an extremely anti-intellectual working class milieu in France. It’s a country where school teachers are traditionally men, and discipline is stricter than in America or the Northern European countries. But that seems to go together with a class separation where the working class boys don’t see the male teachers as role models but more as representatives of the distant authority.

	▲	ethbr1 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The lack of US male teachers (as well as non-white teachers, especially at higher grade levels) is born out by the numbers: https://usafacts.org/articles/who-are-the-nations-teachers/ The share of male teachers has trended downward in the 80s and 90s (by ~ -1%/yr), then slowed in the 00s+ (to ~ -0.5%/yr), and now sits at 22.4%. The share of white teachers sits at 80%+ for post-kindergarten grades. So if teachers represent academic achievement, then there are certainly a lot of kids (especially male minorities) who don't see themselves in their teacher (ethnically and gender-wise).
	▲	graemep 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Both will play a role, and it will differ between societies. Boys from more intellectually inclined backgrounds will have the role models outside school and that correlates with class (as do attitudes to authority, of course).

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dartharva 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> This exists in all communities, race is not the main problem here.

Absolutely not, this is hilariously wrong. I invite you to find any male role models in China and India (or just outside the Western hemisphere in general, for that matter) pushing such anti-intellectualism.

The male influencers here may misguide on communal lines, but you won't find anyone looking down on studying or considering it "unmanly" in any context.

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5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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jjani 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Teenage boys everywhere have a widespread bias against putting in the effort to get good grades.

"Everywhere" as in "across the world and across time", "because testosterone/teen boys will be boys"?

If so, then I can give you an emphatic no, this is not at all true. It is, as with 99% of things, a cultural phenomenon. The degree to which the "bias against putting in the effort to get good grades" exists varies enormously depending on subculture and time. You may have personally only experienced cultures where this is the dominant case, but that does not make it indicative of immutable nature.

If not, then where and when is your "everywhere"?

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eunos 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That must be dealt with full spectrum crackdown on national level.

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0xEF 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I'd like to see what a "full-spectrum crackdown" on anti-intellectualism in the US would look like, given that most of its population struggles to discern fact from fiction in the news cycle, healthcare and legal proceedings. The introduction of generative AI has only made that worse, pushing more distrust of any information that didn't come from a source counted among "one of us." Our problem stems from an intentionally poorly educated populace that still heavily relies on idolatry, allowing whatever demagogue with the means to rise and essentially manipulate the masses.

I'm pretty sure, at this point, this was intentional, individuals and orgs with the resources to create finely tuned systemic problems having been at it since the country's inception.

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kotaKat 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Banning TikTok could have been a great first step, but too may people were cooked by the algorithm to stop it.

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zdragnar 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

FWIW, my friend was accused of acting white probably around the year 2000 or so, well before anything algorithmic.

Not to say that tiktok is innocent, but it certainly isn't the root cause.

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ethbr1 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The irony is that TikTok et al. could also be the very solution GP wants, depending on algorithm.

Imagine kids glued to an app that shows them engaging and intellectually-positive content. (Which at that scale could actually be inferred)

Fast social isn't intrinsically evil: recommendation algorithms that maximize engagement at the expense of other social goods are. (Or even that operate blind to them)

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lo_zamoyski 4 days ago | parent [-]

You're ignoring the effect of the medium itself.

Education requires sustained engagement. Books are conducive to that kind of deep engagement with the material. It requires perseverance, an ability to sit with a topic at the expense of indulging all the cheap distractions that may be available to them (the internet furnishes these gladly and easily). TikTok and bite-sized social media is certainly not conducive to that. The train never leaves the station. Social media's very form consists of feeding the impulsive indulgence of distraction. It only produces superficiality and trains the user's attention span to contract, or to never develop in the first place.

Gamifying learning is a fool's errand. Children are easily distracted, because they haven't yet learned discipline. They need something to counteract these urges, like removing the tempting distraction, an environment that is saturated with relationships and habits that enable good behavior and pursuits, or the threat of punishment for straying from good behavior.

	▲	ethbr1 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed in principle, but you're never going to substantially remove distractions from children, because school doesn't control them at home (nor should it) and most parents are too busy to be involved (DIWK). They're going to be bathed in the omnipresent social environment radiation for a large portion of their time. And they're going to form part of their self image and life goals from that. Better to make it as positive as we can. Or at least prevent it from being explicitly anti-intellectual.

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sneak 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Burning books and censoring media has rarely been a path to fostering intellectualism.

You call it an app ban, but really it’s just press censorship.

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eunos 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Media from mainstream to alternative march in tune with pro intellectualism messages. Any works of art that espouse anti intellectualism would be swiftly and immediately canceled (including its authors) without hesitation. Do this for a generation or two minimum.

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boppo1 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Get sydney sweeny to date alec radford, make sure there's lots of PDA.

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aredox 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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BeFlatXIII 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Mandatory HRT to improve academic performance time.