One of the top stories at the Washington Post website today is about a rape trial at St. Paul’s, one of the most prestigious boarding high schools in the US. The details of the case don’t really matter — the allegations could either be entirely true or entirely false and it wouldn’t be all that relevant — what’s more interesting is the wave of trepidation that goes through liberals over the experience of co-education in practice as it compares to the grand theories that motivated the gender integration project of the 1960s and 70s.
St. Paul’s only became co-ed in 1971. Before that, it was a single sex institution. Like a lot of factors in American life, the hyper-focus on the events of the present tend to demolish memories of even the recent past.
Rather like civil rights and integration were supposed to bring equality between the races — but they devastated dozens of formerly thriving American cities instead — co-education has degraded countless institutions. The same educational institutions dominated by the left at every level have come to be condemned by that same left as honeycombed with wreckers: white male rapists who are ruining the grand integration project with their schemes.
The failures of co-ed are closely related to mass immigration. Because large parts of the native population decided to push both men and women into the workforce — and managerial elites saw immigration as a way to kill two birds with one stone — plug the gap in population growth while improving diplomatic relations with the newly independent third world nations.
President Truman’s commission on American immigration policy laid the groundwork for the abolition of the national quota system. It made the case to the public less in technocratic terms and more in terms of how it fit with America’s longstanding political-philosophical commitments. There was a broad institutional consensus which was also ecumenical. There was also a (false) scientific consensus at the time which concluded that different human races are not biologically distinct from one another.
The rationale for opening up immigration also had a lot to do with the anticipated needs of the progressive economy. Because wartime central planning required the creation of hundreds of thousands of new jobs (not by the market process, but through dictatorial fiat), the first stages of mass immigration and mass internal migration (especially of rural blacks to the industrial north) were required to meet the demand shock.
Essentially, progressives created enormous quantities of make-work fake jobs, and then proclaimed there was a labor shortage — which there was, to meet the demand of a less efficient, more centrally planned economy. They then pushed enormous numbers of foreigners and women into an economy overburdened with make-work projects, causing all sorts of economic and social chaos.
The Truman commission also made the funny insinuation that Japan may have been offended into launching the Pearl Harbor attacks due to discriminatory immigration policies. This is doubly funny in the light of Japan’s contemporary exclusive immigration policies, which globalists often criticize even today. It was also believed that opening up American immigration was critical to countering nationalist propaganda in the third world as well as Communist propaganda about the corruption of the West.
Few of those are justifications today which motivate ongoing mass integration project are still relevant, but understanding how it all fits together helps to explain why it still has so much institutional support.
By the time that these policies really began to make themselves felt — the 1970s — industry in the US was already becoming less competitive internationally, and the claims that there was a real ‘labor shortage’ began to become more ridiculous.
Tying this back in to liberals horrified by the implementation of coed in practice while extolling it as necessary in theory, liberals often make persuasive arguments for a new policy on a theoretical, debating-hall basis based on a set of shared assumptions about philosophy. These arguments eventually become institutionalized. When the institutions fail to fulfill the promise set out by the dialectic which spawned them, it doesn’t really matter, because the intellectuals who keep the whole tower of words buzzing care more about keeping the dialectic going than actually checking whether or not their premises were correct and if their predictions about their policies have been accurate.
Don’t think the theory is really co-education, women’s colleges are the most extremely liberal, and they won’t even admit females who “identify as male”. They attached to male schools as parasites, and parasites’ greatest flourishing can come as the host’s resistance is overwhelmed and its systems begin to collapse
It seems like such a simple concept, to discredit proponents of a remedy by comparing its results with their predictions. This practice is conspicuously ignored in the case of progressivism because its trial would be devastating to the credibility of its intellectual sponsors and institutions, who instead make their cause sound so generous and loving that no one but a troglodyte could object to them. How self-interested selflessness can be.
I know I’ve quoted this bit from Sultan Knish a lot, but it bears repeating here:
“You can’t find common ground with the left because it is an activist machine dedicated to destroy common ground, not only with the right, but even with its own allies on the left. Progress turns what was once progressive into what is reactionary. And what was reactionary into what is progressive.
These changes have the mad logic of a byzantine ideology behind them, but to the ordinary person their definition of progress seems entirely random.
A Socialist a century ago considered factories progressive instruments of the future and men in dresses a decadent reactionary behavior. Now factories are reactionary pollution machines of globalization and men in dresses are an oppressed victim group who have transcended biology with the power of their minds.”
And here we see it: to the feminist of 1965, co-education at universities was the height of progress and the vanguard of our march into a progressive future marked by gender equality. Now co-education is the insanity of sending one in four of our daughters off to college to get raped. This is similar to the way in which being “colorblind” was enlightened anti-racism thirty years ago, but now is deeply racist because it denies both white privilege and black identity. Or to how, twenty years ago, simply wanting to leave grown adults alone to do what they wished behind the privacy of closed doors was progressively pro-gay, but now the suggestion that gays should keep what they do behind closed doors makes one a vicious homophobe.
It’s impossible to keep up with it all, and trying to do the impossible is a waste of time. The real answer is just to stop listening to leftists and their daffy ideas.
“Essentially, progressives created enormous quantities of make-work fake jobs, and then proclaimed there was a labor shortage — which there was, to meet the demand of a less efficient, more centrally planned economy. They then pushed enormous numbers of foreigners and women into an economy overburdened with make-work projects, causing all sorts of economic and social chaos.”
And so is the economic trail that leads to demographic replacement. Anyone surprised it’s built on lies?
I had always assumed that the Kennedy’s attempts to bust the Anglo-based immigration policies were due to the historical animosity between the Irish and the English. Thanks for shedding an interesting light on the subject. I wonder: if JFK, Truman, Ted Kennedy, et al, could come back today, would he be pleased or horrified at the results of the policies they set in motion?
Well if you like your Christian Judean civilization, you can keep your Christian Judean civilization.
When you get down to the kitty gritty of it all, it is the human extinction movement employing social engineering to destroy the civilized enlightened world in preparation for destroying then the people themselves of that once prosperous culture of happiness and liberty.
That is their way.
I think they lose in the end.
I think this time around, it is going to be a war of extermination. This cycle is particularly foul with the sonofabitches. They are onerous miserable humans, hardly deserving of the title. They destroy everything they put their fetid meathooks on.
I see it all over of late, good people have just about had enough of this Marxist politically correct crap being shoved up their butts.
The fools have no idea how lucky they really are.
Times almost up though. Tolerance and civility only can be abused so long before it changes into something that will not be denied of its long overdue deliverance of a proper comeuppance for what is being done.