Friday, February 6, 2009

Not in my high school experience....

In good old high school, I always felt that males and females had equal opportunities. In my classes there were usually about an equal amount of male and female students. My yearbook class was made of completely girls; however, girls were the only students who signed up for the course. Although teachers did seem to pick favorites, teachers rarely seemed to favor one gender over the other. There was definitely favoritism towards the winning sports teams, but those teams were both male and female teams. Furthermore, guys and girls had friends of both genders and were generally respectful towards each other. My high school experience was not plagued by injustices towards either gender.
Despite my experience in high school, I recently heard about an incident in our middle school that is, in my mind, unequal treatment of males and females on the part of the principal. Apparently, a couple of the boys were going around the school and touching girls inappropriately. When the parents of the girls addressed the principal, he told the parents that “boys are just curious,” as if that was an appropriate excuse for their behavior. In my opinion, the principal’s reaction was completely sexist in using the “boys will be boys” excuse. In no way should anyone excuse sexual harassment because of the gender of the executor.
Thankfully, this was an isolated incident. Yet, I still feel it was important to include because sexism cannot be totally eradicated at this point in our history, as our country is still young. Hopefully, the more we progress as a nation the less sexism we will have to encounter. Nevertheless, in the years I was a part of my school district, I personally do not have any instances where I felt an inequality of the sexes.

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