Gender Bias in Education - Assignment Example

GENDER BIAS IN EDUCATION? According to Sadker, boys and girls(Stitt, 1994) sit inside the classroom reading the same subject textbook but receive different educational methods of instructions. It is common knowledge that there are more girls(Marshall, 1993) that have higher scores academically than boys in the primary grades. When they both graduate from high school, the girls have fallen behind. There is a study that shows that the variance in the school performances between boys and girls is due to the gender bias in education. Some people argue that the boys lag behind the girls in the elementary grades because the boys were “less taught” than the girls. (Sadker, 1994) Does this mean that the girls are more intelligent than the boys? What is defined by intelligent does not only include only high scores. It is already common knowledge, as evidenced by statistics, that more boys get into trouble than girls. More than 65 percent of elementary and high school students receive lows grades of D’s and F’s. Boys also account for more than 77 percent of high school students leaving the school before graduation. More boys are involved in drugs and get drunk than girls. (Mulrine, 2001) Does this mean that the boys were trained in school to be unruly and lazy? Research in Ontario Canada, according to Canada’s Minister Janet Ecker, shows that elementary students when tested in math and science showed that there is a WIDE variance between the achievements and attitudes between boys and girls. In British Columbia, standardized school tests show that more girls got higher scores than boys in the subjects of reading and writing. The academic scores of girls almost equaled the boys’ scores( O’Neill, 2000). According to the American Association of University Women 1992 findings, girls receive less class attention from the teachers. In fact, AAUW report also put forth that the girls received more negative attention than boys. But a glance at the school curriculum will show that girls are short changed inside the classroom. (Bailey, 1992) Steps must therefore be taken to reduce or even eradicate the present gender bias in education. In the classroom environment, girls must be made to feel that they are equally treated academically and in terms of teacher attention with their male classmates. This could be the reason why girls “fight back” by showing that they are more intelligent than boys when the class cards are presented. Most teachers ingrain in the minds of the elementary girls that they are “girls”. Teachers, during the formation years, emphasize that girls should be models of neatness, quietness and calmness. The teachers, on the other hand, train the boys to be adventurous, physically and mentally active and to speak up. The girls, especially grade 6 students, are made to prioritize popularity as the socially accepted trend. Being liked by both the boys and girls in class is the girls’ primary outlook. Boys, on the other hand, are taught by the teachers to maintain the age old tradition of being independent, adventurous and competent in school, the community and at home. (Bailey, 1992) In fact, this feministic role started in the middle between the period of 700 to 1200. Girls, during this time period, were taught the roles they will play in relation to the different roles the boys of their age will play. In a study, a class of elementary girls were tagged as a group of nice girls, a group of girlies, the group of spice girls and the boy-acting girls. The researcher Diane Reay discovered, in her research, that nice girls had a bad meaning attached to it because it connoted that the girls showed lesser toughness and attitude. The girlies term was meant to indicate that girls spend more of their allocated time flirting with persons of the opposite sex. The girls that were grouped as boy acting or tomboys was attached to girls who plays boys’ games and did boy things. The girls who were classified as spice girls proudly displayed girl power and at times did rate the boy on the playground. The girls related their girl attitudes in relation to the boys near them. (Reay, 2001) According the Reay research, most schools tolerated the boys’ behavior but showed disgust when the girls did the same boy acts. Assertive behavior is allowed when boys do it but the girls were considered disruptive in class. These schools are given approval for not minding racist, sexist, violent interactions and homophobic interactions among its students. Boys are taught not to cry like a girl or throwing himself as being abnormal. According to the American Association of University Women Report, the schools are giving the girls an indirect message that they are and can never be equal to the boys in the class. The classroom is the second home and the teacher takes over as secondary parents. Since the family is the basic unit of society, then the school is probably the next basic unit of society. The school is where the students learn to the rules on what is right and wrong interaction in their interpersonal relationships. Therefore what the students learn in the school will forever be brought out into the bigger environment of the county or state or nation when they will integrate into after they finish their schooling. In short, what the children learn inside the classroom as boy and girl “stereotype” roles will later be brought into the world outside. Therefore since the students are, early on, indoctrinated as what is the proper boy and girl moves the society today is just the effect of what they learned when the working class were just children joining an elementary and high school class discussion themselves. (Marshall, 1997). Gender in bias education even goes so far as to affect the classroom textbooks themselves. The authors of such school textbooks were either the classroom teachers or, for sure, former elementary students trained in the same biased educational climate themselves. They would, therefore, write books that are gender biased because experience is the best teacher. Even the teachers themselves are “teaching” the students, maybe unknowingly?, through their actions that the girls will be treated lesser than the boys. The cycle of gender bias in education goes on and on. Some schools have started major changes in the classroom curriculum to reverse, somehow, the prevailing gender bias in education. This spoiling of the boys, is probably one of the many reasons for the lower academic scores of the boys as compared to the girls. The boys are allowed certain privileges not afforded to girls like more classroom and teacher time and other benefits. According to Myra and David Sadker’s research, most teachers are trained, during their college days, to give four major responses their classroom students. The teachers would praise the students actions inside the four walls of the classroom and this makes the student receiving the praise feel good and happy. Another response given by teachers a remedy approach. The teacher encourages the students to change their wrong answers by guiding them through hints and clues until the students generate the right answer themselves. This is the major purpose of education. The third teaching method of classroom mentors is the criticizing method. This method creates a feeling of being not intelligent and the like. The fourth method of teaching is the accepting style. The teacher accepts the answers of the students. This is, of course, the best word that the students want to hear. But before the students will have to give an answer that is acceptable, generally they have to study well the lessons given to them. The Sadkers research shows that the boys received more praises than the girls. The boys, also, received more remediation responses from the teachers. The girls, meanwhile, receive the most response of acceptance(Sadker, 1994). This is truly a strong gender bias in education. Most teachers favor and are more helpful to the boys as compared to the girls. On the other hand, this typical response to the boys may spoil some of male students. The girls, meanwhile, have to study harder to get an accept answer from their biased teachers. This now explains why more girls get higher grades academically than the boys. The boys tend to accept their fate that they do not have to study hard because they do not need the high grades but only need the praises and the remedy comments from their teachers. Another research made by Good and Brophy reported that most classroom teachers give the boys a big allowance to expand their ideas and even guide the boys to the correct answer using hints and clues making the teacher and boy student more animating. The classroom instructors generally do less of this animating and hinting style of teaching with the girls. The teachers ask the boy students to answer more general response questions than the girls(Marshall, 1997) Also, social services are offered more to the boys than to the girls. Researches indicate that boys are given more opportunities to take up testing for the gifted programs than girls. An estimated 70 percent of students entered in special education programs are boys(Orenstein, 1994). This does not mean that it is because the boys are more intelligent than girls, but rather, the boys are given more opportunities than the girls. Research shows that disabilities in learning occur evenly between boys and girls, but the diagnosis of the boys, which have the same results as the girls, are interpreted liberally. (Bailey, 1992) Maybe it is because boys will be boys and girls should not be boys. Gender bias in education is unreservedly taught by the textbooks used in the classroom where the roles of girls and boys are discussed. Therefore the young minds and teachers take the gender biased education textbook lectures as bible truth. As they say, it is easier to bend a young growing tree ( change its ways) but is difficult to bend an old tree (resistance to change attitude). Most books acknowledge the contributions of more men and boys and less of women and girls. The school curriculum is geared towards gender bias. There is now a move by some schools to use gender equality textbooks in the classrooms and to get knowledge that is not gender biased and there are also moves to eradicate the gender bias in education textbooks. (Kleing, 1985) There is a long uphill battle yet to conquer. Most school textbooks exemplify more men heroes and models of society than women and more educational scholarships are offered to men and less to women. Admittedly, historical books like the war of independence of the United States from Britain show mostly men as founders of the American heritage. (Bailey, 1992) Thus, the gender biased education curriculum should be rehabilitated as soon as possible. This gender biased curriculum has led, for too many long years, the unequal classroom training in both the textbook usage level and the stereo typed and biased teacher treatment of the girls and boys level. The teachers should now be harnessed and retrained. Their gender biased teaching methods should be pulled out as soon as possible. This could not be done overnight but as the Chinese saying goes “ the journey of a thousand miles begins with the FIRST step”. The teachers, who are the second knowledge enhancers, next the child’s parents, must be brain washed to use new strategies that will alter the classroom instructions and revise the gender bias in education curriculum. Parallel to the retraining of the teachers and the complete revision of the gender biased school curriculum, the classroom textbooks will be changed with newer books where the authors are not gender biased. Another study by Kelly Jones et al, reported that in a taped classroom discussion, the teachers were given an analysis of what came out of their mouth and body gestures as well as facial expressions in their usual classroom lectures. The teachers were reminded that some of their words were gender biased. The teachers were then reminded to use gender equality words and phrases as much as possible. In fact, a teacher was so surprised that the videotapes showed that the teacher was clearly giving more classroom time to the boys and being more considerate and favoring of the boys. (McCormick, 1995). Now that the teachers have been awakened regarding their gender biased behaviors, they must now be furnished with materials that will help themselves make a 360 degree turn. As they say, habits are hard to break. But the strong will and determination of the school teachers and the school principals to be on the right track will be the turning point that will surely make the gender biased education program move to the much awaited equality based education program. The implementation of the new equality based education program will result in the perception of the girls as no longer relative deficiencies to be forever dominated by the boys and educated with bias and toward a more equal interaction between the boys and girls in a class. (Jones, 2000). The teachers who are given materials and classroom textbooks that is gender equality based and their retraining to be more gender equal will result to the slow and continuous setting to the sidelines of gender biased education. After the retraining of the teachers to be more gender equal, the school curriculum needs to be redesigned to be responsive to the call for a gender equal education. The new school textbooks and modules will have to focus on using gender equal words to have a successful gender equal education. But the new gender equal textbooks must also acknowledge that there VARIATIONS between the boys and the girls. A good example is that a boy is a better choice to lift heavy object because of their physical construction and that girls are known to be better at knitting chores than boys. The textbook materials must now tell stories of both men or boys and women or girls on equal footing and in terms of number of stories being told. The storybooks and tales must show that men and women as well as boys and girls are equal in all aspects. Presently, the college textbooks put an impression that men and boys are bright, curious, brave, inventive and powerful whereas girls are depicted as silent, passive and invisible. (McCormick, 1995) What is mind boggling is that girls and women have not stood up, since time immemorial, against the unequal treatment bestowed on them by their teachers in the classroom setting. They just sweetly accept that they were destined to be treated this way and keep silent. The trend today as enshrined in our constitution is that men and women are considered equal in terms of employment education and others. It is against the law to violate this gender equality regulation. The girl victims have been trained, for many years, to accept their fate that they are given lesser classroom time as compared to boys. The teachers prefer to explain more to the boys as compared to the girls. The boys are given more allowances in terms of praises and remedy as compared to girls. But what is inspiring enough is that more girls get higher grades in most classroom exams than the boys. Could this be that the boys have been too spoiled by this gender biased education system that they prefer not to maximize their mental capabilities? Intelligence, according to a psychologist, is not how high your grades are only. Because a boy may have high intelligence quotient (IQ) but due to the environment he is in he does not use the full capacities of his brain. It is also a known fact that people with average intelligence get higher grades than those with higher IQ scores because such girl or boy was diligent and hardworking enough to spend more time studying the lesson at hand. With the compulsory retraining of the teachers and the revised gender equal textbooks, plus the gender equal school curriculum, there is still time to turn back what was done for countless years. Otherwise, the girls will continue to stay silently by the sides of the classroom not complaining about the gender bias education prevailing in the United States and most countries in the world. According to Sadker, unless the gender bias education system will be eradicated, more than half of the children will be shortchanged (girls and women) and their much needed gifts will forever be lost. (Sadker, 1994). But in London and the United States, there are concrete improvements in the educational system towards more equality in terms of instructions.(Shaw, 1995) References Stitt, B.,(1994), Gender Equity in Education: An Annotated Bibliography, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, IL. Marshall, C.,( 1993), The New Politics of Race and Gender: The 1992 Yearbook of the Politics of Education Association, Falmer Press, Washington, DC, Shaw, J., (1995) Education, Gender and Anxiety, Taylor & Francis, London, Sadker, D., Sadker, M. (1994), Failing at Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls. Toronto, ON: Simon & Schuster Inc. Reay, D.(2001), 'Spice girls', 'Nice Girls', 'Girlies', and 'Tomboys"; gender discourses. Girls' cultures and femininities in the primary classroom. Gender and Education, 13 (2), O'Neill, (2000), T. Boys' problems don't matter. Report/ Newsmagazine (National Edition), 27 (15) Bailey, S. (1992), How Schools Shortchange Girls: The AAUW Report. New York, NY: Marlowe & Company. McCormick, P.(1995), Are girls taught to fail? U.S. Catholic, 60, (2), (1995) Klein, S. (1985)Handbook for Achieving Sex Equity Through Education. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press Marshall, C.S. & Reihartz, J.,(1997), Gender issues in the classroom. Clearinghouse, 70 (6) Mulrine, A.(2001), Are Boys the Weaker Sex? U.S. News & World Report, 131 (4), Read More