Workshop #5: Gender, Sexuality and Social Studies Curriculum
After trodding through Crocco’s chapter, “Gender and the Social Education: What’s the Problem?”, I was left unimpressed. The author pulls out loads of statistics to substantiate arguments, but the entire discussion seems mired in reactionary ignorance. “Gender equity” isn’t something to be balanced, it’s something to be harmonized (using Brent Davis’s distinction). The challenges Crocco discusses necessitate radical solutions, but we won’t get there by bickering over who has more access to what and who had higher marks where.
In the understatement of the century, Crocco states that “construction of the ‘problem’ is critical in facilitating creation of answers”. Obviously, answers are unlikely to come in the absence of a problem, but the point being made is that the type of problem used affects the types of ‘answers’ it could have. I would argue that so long as we frame the question of gender equality within such anachronistic margins, we will be skirting the real problem – ideologic fundamentalism. Historical movements fought a progressive campaign of awareness, but the challenges we face as a species are far more nuanced than some simplistic dichotomy of sex organs.
The author then goes on to bemoan the disparity of gender representation in the social studies curriculum. Although I certainly see relevance in addressing this condition, I see it as indicative of a larger class struggle. That class struggle is far more insidious and repressive than modern instances of gender inequalities, and banal conflicts like this keep us distracted and impotent.
Within the conclusion the author stresses the relevance of including female perspectives within the curriculum and society itself. I have no fundamental disagreement with this agenda. However, socialized oppression is being promulgated by women too. It’s not an issue of simply adding a few more perspectives into the mix – this values quantity over quality. If the quality of those perspectives is equally anachronistic and regressive (merely having changed the object of our fundamentalism), what progress have we made?
Crocco may have pointed to valid problems, but they are implications – ramifications of deeper, more relevant challenges.
‘Tobey’ Steeves
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