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children. Starvation is enough reason to press every couple to not
have more than two children.
Chauvinism in schools
Child care workers and teachers are in control of children almost as
much as parents. In two career families, the nursery school has the
child 9 or 10 hours a day. Shouldn't children be trained and educated
from 1 to 5? If yes, we need trained child care workers. We also
expect a lot from schools even though we assign one teacher to care
for and teach 25 or 30 children. What can schools do if we parents
send them students who have little practice at self-discipline, little
understanding of the importance of learning, and little sense of their
responsibility to make a contribution to the world? The fact is that
schools from kindergarten to Ph. D. programs are chauvinistic in the
sense that teachers assume they know what courses the students
should take, when to read which chapters, when and how to evaluate
the student's progress, etc. As long as students do not take
responsibility for their own educational-career plans and motivation,
someone else will (and often do a poor job of it).
Furthermore, recent research has shown that teachers (both male
and female) unwittingly deal with boys differently than girls. They call
on boys more often than girls; they give boys more time to reason out
the answer; they encourage boys more to improve their performance
(Sadker & Sadker, 1985). This boys-are-more-important attitude must
change. In addition, schools are fully aware that male sports are more
valued and given priority over female sports. The argument is that
girls do not go out for sports as much as boys do. That's true, but if it
is good for boys, why isn't it good for girls? As a society, we don't
encourage, reward, and value girls in sports as much as boys. That
needs to be changed too. Girls themselves and their parents also have
to take some responsibility for having less interest in sports (and
excessive interest in being "cute"). Perhaps as students gain self-
awareness, new values, self-responsibility, and self-control, there will
be less need for controls--presumptuous authority--in the schools and
at home (Ernst, 1977).
Chauvinism at work
The greatest amount of unrecognized and unchallenged chauvinism
is at work. We are in awe of the boss or owner. We certainly are
awestruck by high authorities--the president of the U.S., the president
of GM, any multi-millionaire, the state Governor, a local judge, general
manager of a factory, president or dean of an university, etc. Indeed,
we seem to want to believe that our authorities are
superhuman...super-able (we like to pretend the president doesn't
have speech-writers), super-smooth (we want them to always be
prepared and right), and super-good (no vices), which, by contrast,
only makes us ordinary people look inferior to leaders. Yet, my
experience suggests to me that many people off the street, given a
