Gender and education
by Yuvi - November 15, 2020
Gender and education and Gender issues in school
Gender
Gender refers to the attitudes, feelings, and behaviours that a given culture associates with a person’s biological sex. Behaviour that is compatible with cultural expectations is referred to as gender-normative
Culturally and socially constructed difference between men and women that varies from place to place and time to time
Gender is not something we are born with, and not something we have, but something we do.
The word ‘gender’ refers to the socio-cultural definition of men and women, the way societies distinguish men and women and assign them social roles. Gender is seen closely related to the roles and behaviour assigned to women and men based on their sexual differences
Sex
Sex refers to a person’s biological status and is typically categorised as male or female. There are a number of indicators of biological sex, including sex chromosomes, gonads, internal reproductive organs, and external genitalia.
Gender issues in school
Nature of Gender Issues –
Society perceives a female child as different from a male child. As such it assigns stereotyped roles to the female child.
It is seen that some teachers in the school, while teaching, give examples and use teaching strategies which are biased against girl students. Such teachers opine that girls should have a different type of education which may be helpful for them to develop as a good housewife and a mother.
In fact, girls and boys may to some extent differ in terms of certain abilities and both these sets of individuals excel each other in terms of certain abilities. Therefore we should evolve specific teaching-learning strategies to develop their inherent abilities to the maximum and also to prove extra opportunity for development of other competencies in which they are weak.
We must make some bold efforts for replacing the professional value system by a belief in the equality of sexes.
An attempt should be made to recognize the individual differences between girls and boys and make use of these during the teaching- learning process.
Another issue to be discussed is the social attitude towards girls which is reflected not only in the treatment received by girls, but also in the instructional materials meant for them. This becomes more serious in case of girls coming from weaker sections of society i.e. scheduled castes, scheduled tribes.
They carry the stigma of belonging to a weaker section. Both these educational and social perceptions come in the way of the development of a girl child in over society. Most parents hesitate in sending their daughters to school for education, because they think that the money which is required for educating girls could be more usefully to spend on their marriage instead of education.
In co-education system, teacher has to teach both boys and girls in class. The teacher he or she should not make any different between boys and girls due to their sex.
As a teacher, we see that mostly parents of lower class families do not want to send their girls in school they think that giving education to girls is totally fruitless and wastage of time and money. They think that the money required for educating girls could be more usefully while spending on their marriage instead of education.
Teacher should develop awakening in the society about the need of education of girls.
He/she should encourage parents to send their daughters in school.
The curriculum and instructional materials should be transacted keeping in view the issues related to gender as well as individual differences.
We see that Indian girls are timid and take a lot of time to open up and participate in the learning process. Teacher should encourage them to take part in teaching learning process.
Teacher should organize co-curricular activities especially to girls so that they could develop self image. Teacher can do very much to solve these gender related problems.
