Education and Gender Equality

Book excerpt: First Published in 1992. This book grew out of a special issue of the journal Sociology of Education. There is no simple relation between education and gender equality. As with social class relations, schools both reinforce subordination and create new possibilities for liberation, and these contradictions occur at every level and in every aspect of education. Schools are sites of pervasive gender socialization, but they offer girls a chance to use their brains and develop their skills. To explore education and gender is to examine the bridge between the public world of occupations and the private world of families. Schools link the families from which young children come and the sex- and race-segregated occupational worlds to which they are sent. Because schools link public and private worlds, help to form consciousness, and structure inequalities, there are many ways to look at gender and education. In this book, the chapters break into four major topic areas. The first section analyzes gender and education from a comparative and historical perspective, the second section on ‘Diversity, Social Control, and Resistance in Classrooms’, third section, on ‘Gender and Knowledge’ and the final section on ‘families and school’.