Outline_the_Feminist_View_to_Education_in_Socioety

Outline and evaluate the feminist view on the role of education in society. For over the past 30 years(approximately), the main focus of feminist educational research-gender inequality, has changed a great deal, however the main focus of the research has actually shifted to a degree, from examining why girls achieve less than boys in education to explaining how girls learn to deal with the range of disadvantages put into place within school. Feminists view education as an active cause in secondary socialization, which then helps to forge patriarchy. There are a variety of different types of feminists, e.g. Liberal feminists, Marxists feminists, Radical feminists, Black feminists and Post-feminists. The view of the Liberal feminist is that changes in equal opportunities and education policies will end patriarchy, e.g. The National Curriculum, however putting these rules into place has its own consequences like, people may not be able to achieve to the best of their ability because of primary socialization. This is because their gendered roles are allocated to them stereotypically already at home, which could affect later life in school. The Marxist feminist view is that school, being the hidden curriculum, teaches a gender stereotype to the children, which reinforces the idea that girls are to do well in subjects like home economics, to be able to work at home, and boys are to do subjects like math’s to be able to go out and work to provide for the family. The Radical feminist believe that ‘patriarchy will only end when women are freed from the physical and emotional violence inflicted by men in the classroom and the playground,’ this shows the gender stereotypes again as girls are expected to not be rowdy in the playground and underachieve in many lessons. Post-feminists say that women posses multiple identities so therefore there is no single meaning of what female means, this means that women are still seen as: a wife; a carer; a mother; a lover; a housewife, and at the same time they are juggling to persue a career. Sue Sharpe, a sociologist, conducted a study on girls in 1972. She researched girl’s expectations whilst at school. She found that girls were underachieving in science, computer studies, physics, economics and maths and boys were achieving at higher standards in these. Girls achieved higher in subjects like, English literature, home economics, social science and biology. At the time the study took place (1972) females were portrayed to be in the expressive roles and boys were labeled in to instrumental roles. (This still occurs in the present-day, e.g. ironing adverts, there’s a female child watching the mother iron, or washing powder adverts, there’s a male child with a filthy muddy shirt from playing football with there father.) All this primary socialization had a huge impact as to why girls underachieved. In the 1990’s Sharpe decided to replicate her study and saw that there were many back ground changes in society and economy e.g. The Thatcher era which presented new female role models, this gave females aspirations to achieve goals previously thought to be unachievable(Thatcher was the first female priminister.) The 2 studies conducted by Sharpe showed great changes from 1972 to the1990’s. They showed the changes in views of the males and females receiving education. In 1972, 67% of girls wanted to leave school at the age of 16 or younger, in the later study statistics show that it change to the age of at least 18. In 1972 girls considered it unfeminine to work hard whereas in the 1900s it was boys that were achieving at low standards as they then found it unmasculine to work hard. Also, girls in the later study were studying a wider variety of subjects. This was a result of the equal opportunity program brought about by Thatcher. Another researcher studied the views of feminism in a little more depth and argued further reasons for gender stereotype changes in education between male and female, than was found previously by Sharpe. Sylvia Walby's 'triple systems theory' (1999) argues that ethnicity and class play a large part in how girls are affected in education. Also, that, capitalism and racism combined with patriarchy, complicate the meaning of what it means to be female (post-feminism.)