Stop The Presses: Few Men Teach Kindergarten!

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is telling us (registration required) that very few men teach kindergarten:

At the end of the 2003-04 school year, only 73 of Georgia's 5,592 kindergarten teachers were men. And just 2 percent of the nation's nearly 190,000 kindergarten teachers are men, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

We wonder what kind of excitement would be generated if the above text was.....modified... a little. Let's take a look:

At the end of the 2003-04 school year, only 73 of Georgia's 5,592 kindergarten teachers were women. And just two percent of the nation's nearly 190,000 kindergarten teachers are women, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Can you just imagine the uproar if the "revised version" were true?

There would be: federal hiring programs, state hiring programs, lawsuits, a large public-relations campaign, mandates, and much gnashing of teeth. All of this would be to remedy what some would see as an injustice based simply upon a politically-sensitive statistic.

The obvious answer to the mystery of why there are so few men teaching kindergarten may be because relatively few males want to teach kindergarten; there is no wide-ranging conspiracy to bar men from doing so.

We think that the reasons men (in general) don't want to teach kindergarten are societal, not biological, in nature.

Could it just be possible that there are some jobs that are overwhelmingly filled by males because there are relatively few women (for whatever reason) that want that type of job?

As Sigmund Freud once said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

And as anonymous once said, "Sometimes an interesting statistic is just an interesting statistic."

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