Is our education system radicalizing young men?

My 11-year-old son joined the elementary school band, and so I went to the parents’ orientation night held at a local high-school. As the night went on it became obvious why young men rage against the larger social system and why they might find a character like Nick Fuentes attractive. The classrooms were inundated with DEI messages and trans pride flags. On the walls there were posters, stickers and decorations that all invoked the various totems of diversity. Black Lives Matter messaging, decolonization messaging, LGBTQ+ messaging and basically every sort of race and gender social justice messaging you can imagine was present.

The advertisements for post-secondary opportunities featured social justice education prominently, including advertising a course on “indigenous ways of knowing” as something grade 12 students should pursue upon graduation. Many of the teachers had “this is a safe space” stickers on their doors. The entire aesthetic which dominated the decoration of classrooms was the progressive, leftist-coded “in this house” and “be kind” variety. As soon as you walked into a classroom there was no doubt as to the political leanings of whichever teacher occupied that room. Progressive social justice activists have colonized the school and marked their territory. A woman in a mask (who was in charge) got up and read a number of land acknowledgements before recognizing the contribution of indigenous people to ways of knowing.

When it comes to how the teachers behaved, I am going to draw on both that night and the other times I have been at my son’s school to explain it. The boys are treated almost as though they are defective girls. The feminine modes of interaction and socialization are treated as though they are the only legitimate ones and serve as the accepted way to properly interact and navigate the world. Almost all the authority figures at my son’s school are women.

One day my son found out that the school had hired a single male education assistant, and he came home and told me, in wondrous amazement, that he saw a “boy teacher.” The level of surprise he expressed was as if he had walked into school and seen a triceratops walking the hallways. My son often comes home from school and expresses frustration that his preferred way of communicating, as well as the things that are aligned with his temperament, are treated as though they were somehow inferior.

As he is 11 (and being assessed for autism) he lacks the correct technical language to describe this, so it generally shows up as him getting in trouble for being insufficiently “gentle” and “kind” in response to various passive-aggressive power plays and instances of bullying carried out by his more socially developed female peers. 

To say that the parents’ night for the school band was feminine-coded would be an understatement. It would be more accurate to say that feminized modes of behavior and communication were embedded in every single interaction. It was a totally alien environment for anyone who isn’t well versed in navigating the social codes of progressive, leftist institutional spaces. It was like the slogan “the future is female” was taken to be a command delivered from God himself and turned into an education program.

Now, I want you to imagine what it is like for an 11-year-old boy to be saturated in that environment day after day. He is an alien in his own school who is treated essentially like a ticking time bomb who needs to be managed rather than engaged with and taught, and he knows this is happening. It is hard to overstate the level of hostility towards boys that is floating around in the ambient culture of the school system. It isn’t so much that there is an explicit form of anti-male bigotry – although examples of that exist – it is more that there is an overall attitude of distaste for anything masculine and an utter indifference towards the interests, fortunes and inner lives of young boys. The expectations, norms, rules and standards of behavior cater to the sensibilities of girls and women. This is the entire social system that a young boy goes through from when he is aged six until he graduates from university. 

It’s an old trope on the right to say “imagine if the roles were reversed,” but that would be to miss the point. I know that many on the left will say that all of this is perfectly acceptable because of historical injustices and the pursuit of social justice. What I want to point out is how absurd the world must appear through the eyes of the average 11-year-old boy. He is basically told he has a host of social advantages (white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege) that he has never experienced and will never benefit from, and this justifies the system which he is immersed in.

And the worst part is, if young men point any of this out, the very people who are doing it will look them in the eye and deny that any of it ever happened. Making matters worse, these men begin to figure out that the institutions have been used to advance a leftist political agenda that scapegoated their group (young white men), and when they point this out everyone in authority calls them evil bigots. And all this happens during their formative years.

Now, imagine you are a young white male. You graduate from the school system and are released into the world only to find that the feminine modes of socialization pushed on you are entirely unfit for purpose. That the social skills you were taught fail utterly in both the job markets young men tend towards (construction, engineering, building, landscaping, etc.) and have no purchase in the dating market where highly agentic, masculine, wealthy men have a huge advantage over the passive, docile “nice boy.”

On top of that, imagine that a great deal of the job listings that you peruse make it clear that preference will be given to women and “diverse” candidates, and that the job interview itself is full of shibboleths, coded statements and trap questions meant to elicit responses that allow the hiring party to exclude anyone who isn’t sufficiently versed in and aligned with the priorities of the DEI/Woke/Social Justice paradigm.

Then if you do get a job you will exposed to various sensitivity trainings, DEI trainings and intersectionality workshops in which your group (straight white men) are repeatedly scapegoated as the source of all the world’s pathologies. Laid at your feet are patriarchy, colonialism, racism, sexism and a great number of other social evils for which you are taken to be complicit in and have a responsibility for fixing in virtue of being a white male. While all this is going on a series of scandals (Covid, men in women’s sports, trans kids) reveal to you the degree to which the institutions that make up the society you live in have adopted an ideology that is actively hostile to you because you are a straight white male, and have been denying you opportunity while scapegoating you for all societies problems and treating you like you are a defective girl. Once you understand this, the real question is not, “Why are some young men radicalizing?” It’s more,  “Why are there any young men at all who have not been radicalized?”

I am not claiming for a second that the women who make up the majority of teachers have malicious intent. In fact, most of the women I have met in the school system are genuinely doing their best. However, there remains a clear lack of male teachers and male influence in the public school system which heavily contributes to an imbalance in the way that the social environments of public school are constructed.

To make matters worse, well meaning teachers have been given a curriculum and a set of teaching tools that were designed by leftist activists with a political axe to grind. Many education colleges train teachers to make Critical Social Justice (aka “wokeness”) central to the teaching mission, and to bring social justice concepts into every area of education. Many of the teachers who are the most politically active are merely doing what they were told they were supposed to do when they were students in education colleges, and the result is a system loaded with teachers who believe social justice is central to education and who therefore do their best to do what they were trained to do: teach elementary school kids using Marxist theories of oppression they learned in college. While this doesn’t absolve them of responsibility, it does help explain the problem.

None of this is to excuse any of the extremist radicals who are attempting to harness the resentment and anger of young men for their evil purposes. It is more to explain why young men will attach themselves to any voice willing to stridently call for the obliteration of the social system and ideology which lied to them during their formative years and is currently doing things which rob them of opportunities for advancement and success. The institutions have totally blown their credibility with young men who view the current set of social institutions as ideologically corrupt and totally illegitimate.

I am not saying the situation is hopeless, but unless you engage in a good faith attempt to understand what the school system, universities, non-profits, HR departments and other civic institutions have done to young men, you will never be able to gain their trust enough to lead them away from guys like Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate and Andrew Torba.

One of the reasons that Jordan Peterson became so popular in 2016 is that he spoke so clearly to the struggles that young men were being forced to go through and he did it in a way that was healthy. Peterson encouraged young men to take responsibility, to make something of themselves, to avoid bitterness, to put their lives together and, once they had done that, make some contribution to the world. Not only did he tell them to make something of themselves, but he told them that they could make something of themselves.

He told them that they were not evil, racist oppressors who needed to step aside, but that they were men who could and should make themselves into people who could be trusted to make contributions to the world and to take up places of authority and responsibility… and that this was a good thing to do. In essence, Jordan Peterson became the mentor figure for young men on the political right and in the political center. 

Over the last few years Dr. Peterson has fallen ill and this has left the space for a mentor figure wide open, which a number of influencers are trying to exploit. Influencers with large followings on social media can gain currency among teenage boys quite quickly, and unlike college-aged men (Peterson’s initial audience) high-school boys are far more likely to gravitate towards crass humor than the university lectures Peterson became famous for.

In order to prevent young men from falling down the Nick Fuentes rabbit hole, we need to make an honest play for teenage boys, and we need to do it in a way that appeals to them on their own terms. Because Fuentes is already doing that, his strength is only going to grow.