Sex, Power and Pedagogy

Abstract

In this paper I want to address certain issues about the position of girls and women within the education system with reference to an examination of some observations collected in two nursery schools.¹ I shall draw out certain contradictions for traditional Marxist approaches to the relations of power within educational institutions. One such view is that education as a bourgeois institution places teachers in a position of power from which they can oppress children who are institutionally powerless. To somewhat overstate the case, the teacher, powerful in a bourgeois educational institution, is in a position to oppress children whose resistance to that power, like all resistance, is understood as ultimately progressive rather than contradictory. Children’s movements have tended to understand resistance in terms of ‘rights’ or ‘liberation’. Similarly, certain feminist accounts have used the psychological concepts of ‘role’ and ‘stereotype’ to understand women and girls as unitary subjects whose economic dependence, powerlessness and physical weakness is reflected in their production as ‘passive’, ‘weak’, and ‘dependent’ individuals. While such accounts have been extremely important in helping to develop Marxist and feminist practices, I want to pinpoint some of the reasons why such analyses might not be as helpful as we might previously have supposed in understanding the phenomena presented in this paper.

Screen Education, no. 38, Spring 1981.