Gendering education
Rehabilitating sexist stereotypes in the classroom
Teaching gender identity leaves children confused about who they are and alienated from their parents, writes Joanna Williams.
Schools, as social institutions, reflect and shape our assumptions about what it means to be a man or a woman. But changes in elite thinking about the meaning of sex have detatched gendered socialisation from both biology and broader social norms. This has led to demands for gender neutrality (as opposed to sexual equality) while also creating the troubling prospect that outdated sexist stereotypes are rehabilitated in the guise of transgender inclusivity. Meanwhile, parents are left increasingly alienated from the process of raising their own children.
Schooling girls and boys
For two centuries, sharp distinctions in the schooling of boys and girls reflected the ‘broad acceptance of natural, inherent, differences between the sexes’ and the subsequent unequal position of men and women in society. (1) In the classroom, this meant differential access to the curriculum and distinct behavioural expectations, with girls taught cookery and domestic economy, for example, and boys woodwork and metal work. As Jane Martin notes in Gender and Education in England since 1770, throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the government provided financial incentives for schools to increase the teaching of domestic science to girls. This suggests girls needed prompting to undertake the training in domestic service which prepared them for later employment and, in a circular argument, then justified future gendered educational inequalities.
Unequal educational opportunities, driven by a notion of inherent sex-based differences, continued to shape schooling well into the second half of the twentieth century. The Crowther Report, published by the Ministy of Education in 1959, contains a lengthy section on ‘Women’s Education for Marriage and Employment’. Schools were expected to prepare ‘less able’ girls for domestic roles because, ‘their needs are much more sharply differentiated from those of boys of the same age than is true of the academically abler groups’. Feminist pushback to such ideas was already beginning to emerge and from the late 1960s onwards, teachers – many influenced by the growing women’s liberation movement – sought to challenge sex-based stereotypes and sexist assumptions about girls’ ambitions, expectations and life chances.
Research on gender and education burgeoned from the mid-1970s onwards, leading to a growing push for sexual equality at a time when more radical thinking about schools was gaining ground and activist-educators were becoming increasingly influential. Co-educational schools and mixed-ability teaching were increasingly the norm. Issues of language and representation in the classroom came to the fore with teachers influenced by a growing feminist movement actively seeking ways to promote gender equality among their pupils. However, firmly entrenched attitudes and practices were often slow to shift.