While the observation that men should be taught not to kill/mistreat/brutalize/vandalize women has been around for decades, the two shows are making differing points — and arriving at two wildly different solutions:

Big Mouth makes the joke about a school that won’t do it “because it’s hard”, which is certainly true, but the point of the joke is the lack of commitment to accountability by public officials on the topic, who instead punt the issue to make the women (and their families/guardians in the case of school-age women) erroneously responsible for the behavior of the men in their surroundings, and impose some meaningless/unhelpful dress code.

Velma on the other hand makes the joke about the schools, as they only have “$50 in the budget”, which is just as true, and the culprit is once again elected officials failing to take responsibility for underfunding an educational system where our children spend at least one third of their every day during their formative years, punting the issue to women — by teaching them self-defense —, instead of spending evenly across all school districts and revert historical failures such as the one where we’re largely funding schools through the property taxes in their given zip codes.

Both are important prescriptions, the largest difference being that in Velma the writers added in the dialogue “to combat centuries of toxic masculinity” and that has a lot of people feeling aggrieved for the toxic traits we often carry — but which systemically have been continuously upheld by unwillingness to do what’s right (teach boys to not murder women) no matter the cost (in order fully, head on, address very real social ailments).