Educating the Other

Gender, Power and Schooling

Dr Carrie Paechter,Carrie Paechter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135710583
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Despite improvements in girls' relative academic success at the school leaving level, and despite suggestions in the press that boys are now the underachievers, girls remain second-class citizens in education and beyond. This book aims to show how and why girls' education remains subordinated to that of the boys', and to demonstrate how this analysis can be used as a basis for investigating the position of other subordinated groups - such as children from lower socio-economic groups, ethnic minorities, or those with special educational needs. By focusing on what distinguishes the 'normal' from the 'other' says the author, we can begin to call the normal into question and challenge the ideas and assumptions of our educational system.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The good constitution of children initially depends on that of their mothers. The first education of men depends on the care of women. Men’s morals, their passions, their tastes, their pleasures, their very happiness also depend on women. Thus, the whole education of women ought to relate to men. (Rousseau, 1979, p. 365)

This book is about what happens to girls and young women in school and how we might go about intervening in this. Despite improvements in girls’ relative academic success at the school leaving level, and despite suggestions in the press that boys are the new underachievers, girls remain second-class citizens in education and beyond.

As to the question ‘Is the future female?’ there is little evidence to suggest that this is the case. The possibility that women may be genuinely equal to men still appears to be enormously threatening. Rather the fact that we are asking this question at all suggests that current hegemonic educational discourses which seek to emphasise male underachievement might be seen as constituting a backlash to past feminist gains. What we may be seeing is, in fact, merely a new rendition of the old patriarchal refrain. (Weiner et al., 1997, p. 629)

My intention in this book is to show how and why girls’ education remains subordinated to that of boys, and to demonstrate how this analysis can be used as a basis for investigating the position of other subordinated groups. Drawing on a long tradition of feminist writing, I investigate the position of girls and young women, in school and in the wider contexts in which they live. I show how a discourse in which they are positioned as Other, secondary to the allimportant male Subject, disadvantages them and sidelines their needs. In the pages that follow, I shall explore how the traditions of Western society and thought have acted against the interests of girls and young women, discounting their successes and positioning them as intellectually inferior. This is particularly the case in the school context, where an emphasis on masculine forms of achievement sets girls up for a lifetime in which they struggle to break the ‘glass ceilings’ of education and employment. At the same time, my aim is to show how feminist writing can provide the means by which a wider variety of inequities can be analysed. Whilst my focus is girls and young women, they are not my sole concern.

In this book I talk a lot about the hegemonic nature of discourses. Both ‘hegemony’ and ‘discourse’ are important concepts, and I need to clarify my use of them. By discourse I mean a way of speaking, writing or thinking which incorporates particular things as given, unchallengeable truths. The unchallengeable nature of these ‘truths’ means that, within a particular discourse, only certain things can be said or thought; to question these assumptions is to step outside the discourse. Or to put it another way:

[Iam] using the term ‘discourse’ to refer to socially organised frameworks of meaning that define categories and specify domains of what can be said and done. (Burman, 1994, p. 2)

Discourses are useful and important; we do need to be able to set limits on what can and cannot be said within a particular context. Scientific discussion, for example, would be far more difficult if the discourse of science did not impose some restriction on what does and what does not ‘count’ as scientific thought. The danger, however, is that we forget that they are, simply, discourses, convenient conventions for the exchange of ideas or the carrying out of social roles, and treat them as self-evident truths. As will become clear later in the book, there are a number of educational discourses, for example, those of female academic deficit or of natural child development, that have become pernicious in this way. They have become so taken-forgranted, so unchallengeable, that they mask other ways of looking at education, and, in the process, deny girls and young women equity in this arena. Consequently, much of the book is taken up with the deconstruction of such discourses, in looking for and challenging the unquestioned assumptions underpinning them.

This deconstruction process can be difficult because of the hegemonic nature of most of the discourses under discussion. Hegemony is a concept originating in the work of the Italian socialist Gramsci (1971), which has since been applied in a variety of theoretical and practical contexts, both within and beyond its Marxist roots. It is a concept;

designed to explain how a dominant class maintains control by projecting its own particular way of seeing social reality so successfully that its view is accepted as common sense and as part of the natural order by those who in fact are subordinated to it. JAGGAR, A. (1983) A Feminist Politics and Human Nature, Sussex: Harvester Press, quoted in Lewis, 1990, p. 474)

Hegemony is thus inherent in social practices, forming part of the ‘thinkingas-usual’ (Schutz, 1964) of individuals within a particular society. It determines which discourses are most binding; hegemonic discourses are those which, while remaining unquestioned and often partially benign, at the same time act as forces in the oppression of some of those whose thought and behaviour they govern. Although hegemonic forces are non-cohesive, and therefore have constantly to be fought for if they are to be maintained (Giroux, 1981), they operate on individuals and groups in such a way as to make them the agents of their own oppression; for example, girls who believe in the discourse of female deficit in mathematics are likely to give up trying to succeed in that subject at an early age (Burton, 1989; Landau, 1994), thus perpetuating the power of the discourse.

Hegemony works to perpetuate the status quo by affecting the structures within which people think, so that they find it difficult or impossible to conceive of things in any other way. Such discourses are effective in supporting prevailing power relations because they serve to mask conflict and, as Lukes points out, ‘the most effective and insidious use of power is to prevent… conflict arising in the first place’ (Lukes, 1974, p. 23). This masking of the power of hegemonic discourses allows for the production of self-disciplining ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault, 1977, 1978; Smart, 1986) and the maintenance of the prevailing social order without force.

My aim in this book is to challenge some of the hegemonic discourses which structure the ways in which the education of girls and young women has been approached, while at the same time showing how this challenge can be extended to the treatment of other oppressed groups. The book is, therefore, in many ways an act of deconstruction. My intention is to use the concept of woman as Other, as a deviation from the ‘normal’ male Subject of discourse, to question much of what is taken for granted in the education of girls. In the first section of the book I begin this process by focusing broadly on the position of women and girls both in society as a whole and in the education system. In Chapter 2, I explain my key analytical concept, that of woman as Other, and show briefly how it can be applied to the position of girls in education. I then go on, in Chapter 3, to consider the evidence about the relations between males and females in school, suggesting that, contrary to recent popular belief, the interests of girls remain secondary to those of boys in this context. Chapter 4 considers the social construction of gender. Here I look at the evidence for how gender identities and roles come to be established in Western society and suggest that this is almost entirely the result of social rather than ‘natural’ forces. In Chapter 5 I set the scene for the rest of the book, by discussing the nature of gender/ power relations and showing how deconstructionist analysis can call into question fundamental assumptions about the nature and methods of schooling.

The second half of the book considers three specific examples in which the female Other is reflected in ways of thinking about particular groups in the education system. Chapter 6 considers the hegemony of the discourse of reason and rationality and suggests that we need to recognize and value alternative, female voices operating within other discourses. In Chapter 7 I extend the metaphor of Otherness and consider which subjects are the Other of the school curriculum, noting in particular the relationship between their marginalization and their gendered nature. Chapter 8 focuses on three groups from the school population inhabiting subordinated masculinities and femininities: non-macho males, ‘sporty’ girls, and lesbians and gay men. Here I consider some of the issues around negotiating and living such identities within a context in which they are at best marginal and at worst excluded from the discourse.

Chapter 9 could easily have become a book in itself. In it I briefly outline some strategies for deconstructing and intervening in the dominant discourses of school. Finally, in the Conclusion, I summarize my position and point the way forward.

Writing this book has, for me, been a fascinating journey of exploration and discovery. I hope you find it even one-tenth as interesting as I did.

Chapter 2
Who or What Is the Other?

A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man. The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas the woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity…. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other. (De Beauvoir, 1949, pp. 15–16)

As women, we may share certain experiences of sexism and domestic responsibility and we may differ in ethnic origin, class or culture; but what unites most of us is our consciousness that it is other people who set the agenda. Thus what serves to link less powerful social groups are their experiences of ‘otherness’ and exclusion from the sites of power and meaning-making. (Weiner, 1994, p. 7)

It seems to be a general feature of human nature that we divide ourselves into in-groups and out-groups (Harbsmeier, 1985; Said, 1978). This process is partly necessary in coming to a sense of personal identity. In order to have a sense of who I am, I need to have some concomitant idea of who I am not. This has its origins in very early life as infants learn to differentiate between themselves and the rest of the world and, in particular, between themselves and their mother or other primary carer. A very important early learning experience is the difference between me and not-me. This clearly necessary distinction seems to be continued throughout life, and is an important part of the way societies are structured (Lloyd and Duveen, 1992).

This tendency to divide the world into categories of me and not-me is not, however, just a simple question of personal identity. The key issue in the creation of in-groups and out-groups is the asymmetrical power relation between them (Said, 1978). The in-group not only has the wherewithal to, as Weiner says, ‘set the agenda’; it is also able to behave as if it were the only group, or at least the only group that matters. This is because this sort of discourse only has one positive term; the alternative, the not-me, is defined negatively as what is other than the central figure, myself. Similarly, the ingroup and its members become the Subject of the discourse; the out-groups become the Other¹, that which is outside the discourse. The subject is defined in opposition to and through the exclusion of the Other; this means, paradoxically, that without that which is denied, the Other, there can be no Subject. The Other is, as a result, simultaneously feared, loathed and desired, which is why the Subject/Other relationship contains so much power. Furthermore, because of the hegemonic function of discourse, this order of things is so taken for granted that neither Subject nor Other is able to recognize the asymmetrical nature of this power relation.

In the Introduction I outlined how hegemonic forces operate in such a way as to make relations of domination and oppression appear normal and inescapable, as if things could be no other way. The language we use is particularly important in this process. Language is an important mechanism for structuring thought. This means that if our language is part of a discourse in which particular groups are treated as Other, then our thinking will focus on the dominant group, the ‘taken-for-granted’ subject of the discourse, and the Other will be treated as a deviant and subsidiary case. This may be limiting in all sorts of ways, for both the Subject and the Other.

What I mean by this may be made clearer by looking at an example. Morgan (1972) suggests that thinking in evolutionary theory has been seriously impeded by the dual use of the term ‘man’ to refer both to the human species and to the male of that species. She argues that as a result a large proportion of the work in this area is androcentric, or male-oriented:

It’s just as hard for man to break the habit of thinking of himself as central to the species as it was to break the habit of thinking of himself as central to the universe. He sees himself quite unconsciously as the main line of evolution, with a female satellite revolving round him as the moon revolves around the earth…Most of the books forget about [woman] for most of the time. They drag her onstage rather suddenly for the obligatory chapter on Sex and Reproduction, and then…get on with the real meaty stuff about the Mighty Hunter with his lovely new weapons and his lovely new straight legs racing across the Pleistocene plains. Any modifications in her morphology are taken to be imitations of the Hunter’s evolution, or else designed solely for his delectation, (pp. 9–10)

So a discourse in which male is Subject and female Other can be an impediment to the development of theory. But this is not the only, nor the most pernicious, effect of treating as Other a particular group.²Duncan, a geographer, notes the ways in which assumptions about the centrality and superiority of one’s own socio-cultural group can affect how one regards and treats those from other cultures. Positioning an alternative way of living as Other allows it to be described as ‘primitive’ and for people who live this way to be treated as less than fully human, as being at an earlier evolutionary stage (Harbsmeier, 1985). Spatial and cultural difference are by this means transmuted into temporal and developmental/evolutionary difference. Duncan (1993) notes, for example, that in nineteenth century Europe:

Difference was increasingly converted into history and history explained in terms of evolution. The prestige of Darwin’s theory of evolution and Spencer’s theory of social evolution seemed to lend renewed vigour to the age-old propensity to temporalize the Other. The tremendous interest in origins promulgated by Darwin increased the desire of Europeans to represent other people as shedding light on how Europeans’ ancestors had once lived…. These taxonomic reforms were instituted within Britain during its age of imperial expansion. Accordingly, the new representational taxonomy had implicit political content and thus political consequences. For example, Europe was seen as the highest stage in evolution, while societies in Asia and Africa were thought to occupy progressively lower stages in the process. Evolutionary theory then provided a racist taxonomy which justified imperialism, for ‘backward’ places could not be expected to govern themselves. Evolutionary theory was put to creative use in the service of imperialism, (p. 46)

In this case, the treating of non-Western cultures as Other allowed imperialist nations to justify their behaviour in terms of the need to bring ‘more primitive’ nations to their own supposed level of civilization (Derrida, 1974). Similarly, Said traces the ways in which Western positioning of Arabs and Islam as Other in the discourse of Orientalism both contains and represents, in a series of dominating frameworks, the perceived threat of the Orient and Oriental.

The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, ‘different’; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, ‘normal’. (Said, 1978, p. 40)

This conversion of ‘different’ into ‘inferior’, ‘at an earlier stage of development’ or exotic/erotic is common in discourses of the Other, particularly those in which the Other is female, as we shall see later.

Woman as Other

There is a line in an old folk song that runs: ‘I called my donkey a horse gone wonky’. Throughout most of the literature dealing with the differences between the sexes there runs a subtle underlying assumption that woman is a man gone wonky; that woman is a distorted version of the original blueprint; that they are the norm, and we are the deviation. (Morgan, 1972, p. 7)

Who is the Other at any given place and time depends of course on who is being defined as the Subject. There are innumerable Others, as there are innumerable sets of power relations between groups, and many people experience Otherness in multiple and sometimes conflicting ways. A black lesbian, for example, will, in thinking about and resisting her Otherness, prioritize her gender, race or sexual orientation at different times and in different contexts; she may also be treated as Other as a result of any or all of these aspects of herself, even by those (for example, white women) who are Othered in some of the same ways (Carby, 1997; hooks, 1982). The same individual (for example, a white gay man) may be, in different aspects of his or her social identity, both Subject and Other (Ang-Lygate, 1996; Coyle, 1996), and different forms or aspects of a person’s Otherness may cut across each other in problematic ways (Aziz, 1997; Ellsworth, 1989). In this book, however, I am going to focus in particular on the female Other, though I will draw parallels between her situation and that of alternative Others from time to time. This emphasis stems from two main sources. The first is my own position. Although I am and have been Other in a number of ways (I am the daughter of a Jewish refugee; I have a lesbian mother and stepmother) my most constant experience of Otherness has been as a woman; in writing about the female Other I am able to draw on my own experience, and, as it were, write from the heart as well as the intellect. At the same time, while not wanting to discount alternative sources, I believe that some of the most important thinking and writing on Otherness has come from feminism; it is partly to do justice to this feminist legacy that the female Other will have most of my attention in this book.

Woman has most particularly been positioned as Other because of the dualistic tradition of Western philosophical thought. This tradition looks at the world through a series of dichotomous pairs: mind/body, reason/emotion, public/private (Young, 1990). The terms in these pairs are, however, not equivalent; one is given priority over the other and, in some cases, as in the distinction between reason and emotion, one is defined simply as the negative of the other (Collins, 1990). Dichotomies such as these have long been used to distinguish Subject from Other, and to call the Other’s humanness into question. For example, Duncan (1993) points out that the Hellenistic Greeks used the term barbaros to refer to a non Greek-speaking Other, who, because the Greeks linked intelligible speech to reason, was seen as non-rational and thus less than fully human.

Central to our discussion here, however, is that one of the most important of these dichotomies is man/woman. The other pairs are then lined up beneath them, with all the p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Who or What is the Other?
• Chapter 3 Gender Differences in School
• Chapter 4 Gender as a Social and Cultural Construction
• Chapter 5 Reconceptualizing Gender Issues in Education
• Chapter 6 Revaluing Female Voices
• Chapter 7 Some Voices are More Equal than Others: Subject and Other in the School Curriculum
• Chapter 8 Subordinated Femininities and Masculinities in Secondary Schools
• Chapter 9 Strategies: A Toolkit
• Chapter 10 Conclusion
• Bibliography