Much of the dysfunction in our current political environment can be traced back to a stark divide in American society that is defined by education and gender.

Just look at the exit poll results from the 2024 presidential election. Grouped by education, exit polls showed that 57% of college graduates voted for the Democratic presidential candidate vs. 42% of non-college graduates, and for voters with postgraduate degrees, the share for the Democrats rose to 65%. Grouped by gender, the exit polls showed that 53% of women voted for the Democratic presidential candidate compared with 43% of men.

One key driver of these divisions can be laid at the feet of the American educational system. For the past several decades, this system has increasingly fostered intense competition for individual gain and prioritized extrinsic measures of academic, athletic and other extracurricular achievement over students’ intrinsic interests.

These changes produced schools that emphasize test performance and narrow thinking, limit creative pursuits, and confine young people within a hyper-controlled environment requiring constant rule compliance. The result is an overscheduled childhood and adolescence micromanaged by adults (parents, teachers, coaches, tutors) that deprives young people of agency, autonomy, intrinsic motivation, self-knowledge and strong peer relationships in a shared community.

Over the years, college degrees have become ever more dominant as the mechanism for deciding who gets the best jobs, overtaking previous criteria for job selection, such as practical experience and high-level craft skills. The credential-based academic meritocracy has emerged as the primary path not just to good pay, but to social respect as well.

With respect to gender differences based on general population traits, a major meta-analysis shows that girls have outperformed boys at all levels of school for nearly a hundred years. One reason for this may be that males are biologically predisposed to be more physically active, aggressive and rebellious. Fueled by testosterone, boys are prone to greater levels of activity and aggression, which keeps many of them bumping up against the norms of the well-regulated classroom that rewards compliance and punishes resistance and where students are expected to sit still, take turns, and wait for permission to speak. So, boys frequently pose greater disciplinary problems for the teacher than do girls and experience higher levels of punishment. Another reason is that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for executive function behaviors, such as regulating emotions and engaging in higher-order thinking, generally develops more slowly in males. The rigid demands of today’s school environment have only exacerbated these typical gender differences.

As a result, males, on average, have less ability to apply themselves to the increasingly inflexible requirements of today’s classroom. No wonder they drop out more often and suffer from increased feelings of discrimination, loneliness, and higher rates of suicide. An additional consequence may be the 4:1 frequency at which boys are diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder relative to girls.

Moreover, the steady decline in discrimination against females in schools and colleges during the past several decades has amplified the biological disadvantages of males in today’s school environment. In general, girls do better at school than boys at all levels of the educational system.  They tend to have higher grades, higher graduation rates and higher college enrollment. College admissions offices routinely admit boys with lower academic records than girls to maintain a roughly even sex ratio in the student body.

We support an education system that does not favor males over females. That said, neither do we support one that favors females over males. We cannot ignore how the striking difference in the voting patterns of males versus females in the 2024 presidential election calls attention to an education system that can harm young males and may be a factor in destabilizing our country.

The pressures of the achievement meritocracy negatively impact many students at all levels. Some students who do well academically succumb to those pressures and become filled with anxiety and depression, and/or are turned off by the meaningless race for individual gain, turning to drugs for relief from their misery. Some students who do less well feel humiliated by their lack of success and develop strong grievances, embracing right-wing populists who “hear their pain” and give voice to their resentments.

We believe that the political divisions in education and gender constitute a clarion call to seriously examine and reform today’s school environment by decreasing the toxic achievement pressure on all students and paying particular attention to how the classroom environment has negatively impacted male students.

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David Labaree is a sociologist and emeritus professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education whose research focuses on the relationship between education and society. His books include “Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling” and “The Ironies of Schooling.”

Deborah Malizia is an attorney/mediator who studies mediation training as a means of increasing emotional well-being among lawyers and young people.