I pick my kids up or hug them when they get off the bus, but they bolt from me in order to go play with their buddies, most of whom are little boys.

And that’s fine, because I know that while I indeed carried each of them for nine months, birthed them, and kept them clean, fed and healthy all these years, I recognize that my two sons have had enough adult estrogen for one day.  They want to dash off on scooters and bikes in order to climb trees, hunt for sticks, crack jokes, and unwind—all not in the watchful presence of a middle-aged female authority figure.

Because hanging out with Mom at that point would just be too much like an extension of their day already spent sitting and listening to Mrs. So-and-So.

I am more of the same.

And up until this year, when it crystallized that this setup—this school-centered game plan for their lives—was in fact problematic, I never considered the gender imbalance as being a huge part of the problem I have with my kids’ schooled existence.

In the daycare centers and schools my kids have attended, the overwhelming majority of the teachers have been women. A pattern has thus formed:

1. They have spent their time in classrooms with kids only their same age.
2. The authority figure/teacher has been a woman.
3. The few adult males in their day—custodians, P.E. teachers, the random other specialist teacher, and the principal—have not had much overall contact with my kids, and no significant individual interaction with them.

So it’s women who, so far, have been the backbone, heart and lungs of my kids’ education.

Some people—maybe a lot more than some—are not too upset or bothered that their little girls and boys are in buildings staffed with females rather than males.  Those men who strive to be preschool and elementary educators report numerous instances of bias, from parents, administrators, even peers:  fears of men’s perceived tendencies to be sexually predatory; ideas that men in majority-female professions are somehow homosexually inclined; and notions that men are not inherently well suited to nurture or care for the young.

In a country where 93% of the people currently in our prisons are men, should I be feeling relief, rather than disappointment, that fewer than ten percent of my kids’ elementary staff are males?

What a sad statistic that awaits my sons.  Not only are they growing up in a world that will systematically steer them away from future roles as educators of young people, but worse, they will also come to see it as a given that imprisonment is largely a thing for people of their gender.  The old clichés of goody-goody girls and baddy-baddy bad boys will perpetuate.

That sucks, in my view.  And while I can’t magically grow a phallus and then go get hired in an elementary school in order to alter the statistics, I can at least ponder the situation—and then take corrective action.  Find ways outside those estrogen-filled buildings to enable my kids to learn from living, breathing men as much as from women.

Remove my kids completely from those unionized, estrogen-filled buildings, and give them days spent in the real world.

Because I, raising two little boys solo, have taken note of vetted studies that illustrate the reality that my boys might learn better from a male rather than a female teacher.  It is reported that in today’s schools, boys are losing ground, yet girls are flourishing.  I’m a girl—if girls are gaining ground, that’s terrific.  But why should this be a chariot race of the genders?  Why should anybody be losing ground?

And why isn’t someone sounding the alarm about the detrimental effects of having so few men to learn from in schools?

Women alone as nurturers.  That seems to be the order of the day in child care centers, preschools, and elementaries.  But by the conspicuous absence of male role models over the minutes, hours, weeks, months and years of children’s schooling, are children inadvertently getting the message that it is not expected that men should be their nurturers?  And that such nurturing potential by males is not important, not beneficial, and perhaps nonexistent?

So here I go, with my own theory of why men aren’t stepping up to teach our young.  The line we’re all fed, of course, is that men are groomed to become family breadwinners, and thus they shy away from roles as educators of the young because such jobs typically are not well paid.  Me, I’m not so sure I believe that line.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s not the low pay.  Men have been known to be poorly paid in a variety of professions.  And many businesses and companies don’t exactly offer men the greatest job security like before.  One would think that any man would crave the security and negotiating power found in today’s teacher’s unions.

Is it that these absent males are perhaps on to something?

Is it that they realize that such an environment, as a lifelong place of work, would be perfectly unfulfilling, even dreary, because it is unnatural to warehouse little people in such groupings, at desks, all day long, expecting them to jump through these mindless little hoops in unison?

Do the men simply not apply for teaching jobs because, deep down, they know that institutional schooling is probably just as soul-crushing today as it was for them as little boys?

Maybe, just maybe, men don’t want any part of primary schoolteaching as a profession because it would mean they’d have to spend time…in primary schools.

Maybe that is why the preschool and elementary worlds have been, are, and will remain year after year a no man’s land.