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.

▲

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).