Women’s lib killed the public school system.
This eyebrow raising opinion comes courtesy of interesting blog called Cosmic Variance, run by a group of physicists and astrophysicists who hold forth about whatever they damn well please, thank you. They’ve been picking apart Matt Miller’s Atlantic piece about the crazy quilt of schools wrought by local control of education. (OK, Miller’s piece ran in January, but they’re physicists. Time is relative.)
Julianne Dalcanton, an Associate Professor of Astronomy at the University of Washington according to her bio on the site, writes about a conversation she had with a donor when she was a postdoc at the Carnegie Observatories. This elderly gent announced to her that “Women’s lib killed the public school system.”
“When I picked my jaw off the floor, I encouraged him to expand on his thesis, and found that he wasn’t completely nuts,” Dalcanton writes. “Back in the day, women of brains, talent, and ambition had two acceptable career options: nursing, and teaching. If I had been born 50 years earlier, I would not have a PhD in astrophysics. Instead, I would probably have grown up to be a school teacher, just like my grandmother. It didn’t have to pay that well, since really, what would have my other options have been? Not law school, not physics, not mechanical engineering, not finance. Today, the brightest women have far more options beyond teaching, and while some still teach, the vast majority of us work in other fields. The salaries in teaching remain low, as for many fields that have been dominated by women, guaranteeing that teaching is not as competitive with other career options available.”
Most of the commenters on Cosmic Variance, every bit as erudite as the authors, aren’t having a lot of this and let Professor Dalcanton know it. Fun reading on education in a fresh and unexpected corner of the blogosphere.
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