WORKING TO CROSS PURPOSES. On one hand, there are some in higher education who fret about supposed sex imbalances in higher education enrollments. I've been following this story for some time. Four years ago, I noted this.

Anybody remember something called "internalization?" It was wrong, we were instructed, to engage in stereotyping of people in order to prevent those characterizations from becoming self-fulfilling prophecies? And to point out shortcomings consistent with stereotypes was to engage in blaming the victim?

Apparently those rules don't apply to contemporary boys, who can be dosed with Ritalin on the slightest provocation, or regarded presumptively to be louts or rapists. (I exaggerate, but I have encountered enough of such thinking to be more than a bit displeased when it arises.)

My focus has been on the stability, or not, of the Surf City equilibrium. A Minding the Campus essay by Charlotte Allen gives reason to return to the internalization argument. It's going to be hard to entice men to register in order to provide the women with a social life when the men become presumptive villains in the classroom.

There are many possible reasons why men would rather not sign up for education courses. For black and other minority men there are probably too many better-paying career opportunities elsewhere. It's natural that if you belong to the first generation in your family to graduate from high school and enter college in the first place, you probably want to enter a profession that will enable you to pay off your student loans relatively quickly.

Furthermore, many ed schools seem to have an Anybody But White Males policy in place when it comes to awarding the scholarships, fellowships, and grants that ease the financial burden on education concentrators. Take Stanford's School of Education. The American Association of University Women awards grants ranging from $18,000 to students enrolled in master's programs in education at Stanford to $20,000 to students enrolled in doctoral programs. Only women are eligible for these generous stipends. Other Stanford fellowships earmark minorities, but only certain favored minorities: "African American, Alaskan Native, American Indian, Hispanic, Asian American, Pacific Islander," according to the terms of one fellowship. It's ironic that men constitute a distinct minority in education programs but never qualify for "minority' financial aid.

The most troubling reason for young men's lack of interest in learning how to be K-12 teachers, however, may lie in the content of many ed-school's curricula, often: loaded with political correctness, lame psychobabble and useless Marxist and feminist theory, all at the expense of subject-matter content and practical instruction on teaching difficult concepts or maintaining order in a classroom. General bias against men, especially white men, seems to be the rule. When the NEA released its 2008 survey detailing the paucity of men in K-12 classrooms, several commenters on psychologist Helen Smith's "Dr. Helen" blog expressed disillusion and bitterness with an ed-school pedagogy that made them feel unwelcome.

Ms Allen buried the lede.

Ed schools need to think hard about their female-favoring curricula and financial-aid policies that are turning off male students in droves.

Her argument might generalize to the rest of higher education.