When asked this week about the dangers of “manosphere” content being served up online to our boys, Nationals leader Matt Canavan started off well.
“We’ve got to have a deep hard look at why young boys are attracted to this stuff online,” he said. “It is terrible. It is toxic.”
But then he veered off into a verbal internet rabbit-hole. He wound up sounding like he’d been trawling the comments sections of the very social media accounts being scrutinised.
“But the reason … a big reason,” he continued, “is they’re sick and tired of getting lectures on how bad men are at school … They’re sick and tired of the feminisation of our curriculum and the lack of direction and leadership they’re given. Maybe we should look at getting more male teachers.”
Perhaps Canavan needs to check his own social media algorithm.
He may have been influenced more than he knows – a fundamental principle of the manosphere is that society has been “feminised” to the point where it is hostile to men, and that gender equality has come at the expense of men’s rights.
In the manosphere, women and feminism are to blame for the problems of men and boys. And the concept of personal responsibility, once seen as a cornerstone of masculine identity, is traded away for a victim agenda where men complain they are passed over and demonised for the crime of being male.
But the Coalition has never been more desperate for relevance, and Canavan’s comments do hit the zeitgeist. Many parents of boys (Canavan is a father of four boys) are anxious that their kids hear a balanced message about masculinity. They know that boys are sweet and vulnerable, just as girls are, and they understandably want to shield them from unnecessary, generalised broadsides on their gender.
Consent education doesn’t threaten this – as Education Minister Jason Clare said, it “isn’t woke” to teach respect in schools, but Canavan probably knows that. He seemed primarily interested in making wild points about how women teachers have ruined education, and in criticising what he called the prevailing “anti-boy” sentiment of consent and respectful relationships education. (Meanwhile other, more sensible political responses included NSW Premier Chris Minns calling boys’ easy access to pornography “the problem of our times” and calling for a roundtable on sexual violence.)
Liberal leader Angus Taylor was later asked about Canavan’s comments. Taylor refused to endorse consent education, instead opting to say something milquetoast and culture-war friendly about teachers “running agendas” in schools. He said he was worried that “kids come home from school and there are political agendas from time to time being pursued”.
Like Canavan, Taylor is picking up on a segment of genuine community sentiment. What a pity his comments were entirely vibes-based and lacking in evidence, let alone the suggestion of a sensible policy response.
In further comments to a News Corp publication, Canavan called for stronger discipline in schools.
“Young boys need structure, discipline and rules,” Canavan said. “It’s gone away from our school system. Problems are not solved by talking, boys need boundaries.”
Here, Canavan risked saying something sensible – because research suggests he is right on this point. There was even a Senate inquiry into classroom disruption in 2024.
A study published this week, by the Centre for Independent Studies, shows that misbehaviour in Australian classrooms is at “crisis” levels.
The centre’s director of education research, Blaise Joseph, surveyed a nationally representative cohort of 400 teachers about the extent of misbehaviour they face. He found that on average, teachers lost nine minutes in every 30 to student misbehaviour, which was defined as anything that disrupted learning, no matter how low level.
Joseph told the ABC that the term “crisis” should not be used lightly, but “losing almost one-third of teaching time to student misbehaviour is of sufficient scale and urgency to warrant that description”.
Female teachers were more likely to lose teaching time to student disruption, and they were twice as likely to report that it was having a significant impact on their wellbeing and health.
While it was not possible to make a direct link, Joseph said that “there is lots of anecdotal evidence in recent years that female teachers are especially bearing the brunt of some misogynistic conduct from students”.
Joseph told me that he has two theories as to why student behaviour is so bad. The first culprit is the large amount of time children spend on screens.
“That takes away their ability to focus. Their attention span is reduced by constant stimulation,” Joseph said. “They find it hard to get into a classroom, settle down and focus. That makes them more disruptive.”
The second factor contributing to ill-discipline, Joseph told me, is the significant segment of the student population needing special care from teachers.
“The proportion of kids in schools who are classified as having a disability or learning difficulty that requires an individual education plan or adjustment is above 20 per cent,” Joseph said.
That is one in five kids that teachers must individually cater to. This statistic is borne out in the explosion in autism/ADHD spectrum diagnoses plaguing the NDIS bottom line.
“There is a big pressure on teachers and schools to adapt to every individual student and in the case of misbehaviour, to make exceptions,” Joseph says. “There does need to be individual care for some students, but if we expand the group of students who need exceptions to the rules, then the rules end up being undermined.”
As for the feminisation of the teaching profession, Canavan is right, we do need more male teachers, although with his inimitable logic, he made that sound like the fault of women.
Teaching has always skewed female, primarily because historically it was one of the few jobs that was open to women. But Joseph says that in Australia, the proportion of male teachers was above 40 per cent in the 1980s and 1990s. By 2006, it had dipped to 32 per cent, and now it is about 28 per cent. The figures are similar in the United States. Does it matter?
“There is some evidence that having male teachers is good for boys’ education,” Joseph says. “But it’s not clear or consistent.”
What does matter, a lot, is that Australian educational standards are slipping – our students’ international test results are in long-term decline, and the latest NAPLAN results show that a third of students are not meeting benchmarked literacy and numeracy standards.
There is a scandal here, and as Joseph says, a crisis for anyone who wants to take it up. But it doesn’t fall into neat ideological categories, and sadly, it is irrational to blame women for it.
If Canavan or Taylor cared about educational standards, or outcomes for all our children – male and female – they might formulate a policy to deal with the obvious and clearly demonstrated problems in our education system. Rational thinking and strong leadership are supposed to be masculine traits. Our federal leaders should feel free to embrace them.
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