David Penberthy: The Mr Men study was dumb, but this one’s dumber

THE Mr Men stupidity is not the first example of taxpayer-funded postmodern mush from a university, writes David Penberthy. My brother-in-law has his own jaw-dropping story.

THIS just in from the has-the-whole-world-gone-mad files: researchers at a British university have found that the much-loved series of Mr Men children books is nothing more than a vehicle for sexism of the worst kind.

According to sociologist Madeleine Pownall, the Mr Men books perpetuate gender myths and entrench power imbalances between men and women. Through painstaking, taxpayer-funded research, she discovered that not only do the male characters do slightly more talking than the females in the books, the females also needed to be rescued more often whereas the males get to have rollicking adventures.

Further, Dr Pownall argues that the characters are lazy stereotypes of perceived gender traits. Little Miss Bossy is a nag, Little Miss Chatterbox an airhead, and Mr Tickle might as well have been renamed Mr Weinstein given his fondness for going the grope under the guise of innocent tickling.

Not a word of this is made up. Pownall submitted her research paper at the University of Lincoln where it was so acclaimed she even got to present it to the British Psychological Society’s annual conference.

The revelation of this body of academic work has prompted a predictable worldwide bout of clichéd talk about political correctness gone mad. Setting side the fact that it is, I was more interested in this story in the context of another report that came out in Australia this week about the perceived value of different tertiary degrees.

Professional services firm Ernst and Young interviewed more than 3000 students and employers and more than 50 university leaders, policymakers and observers for its University of the Future report.

Is Mr Tickle really Mr Weinstein?

It found that almost half of existing university degrees could be obsolete within a decade, and that more than one-third of students felt they learnt nothing of value in their course.

Graduates were also asked whether their degree was relevant to their chosen career. Nursing rated highest on 87 per cent, followed by health services and support (86 per cent), education (80 per cent), law and paralegal studies (79 per cent), business and management (67 per cent) and psychology (67 per cent).

The course that scored worst for job relevance? Humanities, culture and social sciences, the good old Bachelor of Arts, with just 36 per cent, followed by science and mathematics (41 per cent), architecture (48 per cent) and creative arts (48 per cent).

As the proud owner of a BA, it troubles me that my degree has now come to be regarded as the ultimate byword for uselessness. That perception is fuelled, in part, by a baseless modern disregard for the value of a classical education.

The joke has always gone that BA stands for Bugger All, because learning about philosophy or history or politics is an apparently frivolous pursuit with no application. It is a rubbish assertion.

A proper classical education — rooted in collecting and processing information from multiple sources, constructing arguments, learning about major events and ideas — provides a solid base for the many jobs framed around communication, problem-solving, people and system management, government and business. Where this defence of the classical education falls down is when it is confronted by meaningless, postmodern mush that is epitomised by Dr Pownall’s silly research paper.

Little Miss Bossy has been condemned as a nag.

My fear is that this sort of superficial PC nonsense is now more common than you would think in our sociology schools.

For that, the universities have no-one to blame but themselves, in that they have abandoned traditional rigour for faddish and frivolous study.

The post-structuralist trend, where classic English texts are analysed in the context of their modern-day messaging around issues of race and gender, is now an established part of our literature courses.

Media studies courses invite university students to engage in NAPLAN-level discussions around the depictions of indigenous or multicultural Australia on TV soap operas.

Women’s studies departments take the crackpot theories of extremists such as Andrea Dworkin, whose cheery central thesis is that all penetration is rape, and hail them as both mainstream and worthy of inquiry.

A few years ago I got a hilarious phone call from my brother-in-law who, apart from being a successful author and illustrator of children’s books, is also one of the most progressive people I know.

He had just been contacted by a PhD student who was doing a thesis about images of biodiversity in literature, and the link between climate change, environmental degradation and the depiction of the natural world in children’s books.

This soon-to-be doctor had gone through my brother-in-law’s many books and counted the number of exotic trees he had drawn — oaks, willows, pines — and then took him to task about why he hadn’t drawn eucalypts and she-oaks.

My brother-in-law thought it was some kind of prank call; not so, indeed the joke was on us, the taxpayers for funding this research, and also the dopey university for deeming it worthy of examination.

As with the depressing recent report by David Gonski into the poor performance of our schools (amid record levels of funding), the simple problem with all this seems to be that we are throwing far too much money at subjects with no academic rigour, no link to traditional nuts-and-bolts learning.

If you spend several years in a university sociology department scouring children’s books for sexist overtones, there is only one job out there for you. Damningly, it’s in a university sociology department.

Originally published as David Penberthy: The Mr Men study was dumb, but this one’s dumber