‘Vive la distinction’: the gender and schooling debate in France
Interesting.
France, that bastion — if not Bastille — of egalité, has its own debate on single-sex versus co-ed schooling, to judge by a recent opinion piece in Le Monde.
The writer notes that the subject is currently much dicussed in France. He points out that number of British schools have reverted to education organised on single-sex lines, and that a recent report in a French journal (l’Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Économiques) concluded that mixed-gender classes were having no discernable effect on recognition of male-female equality.
On the contrary, Marie Duru-Bellat, a researcher at Sciences Po, has called co-ed classrooms a daily “theatre for reproducing, or even erecting, stereotypical images of the social roles of males and females,” where the “ingrained learning, pre-established by the parents’ well before and during the years of schooling, finds itself reinforced in the co-education school.”
Why, with equal skills, opportunities and affinities is there not a more consistent outcome in gender terms for the same course of studies? asks Duru-Bellat. She pins responsibility on the teachers who, by their different demands and attitudes towards their boy and girl students, help to reinforce gender stereotypes. She takes the example of scientific subjects.
Unconsciously, there will be more attention and greater rigour shown by teachers towards the boys on the grounds that they have a potential that it’s necessary to bring out. In contrast, less attention is given to the girls.
Increasingly, the boys are reinforced in the idea [that they have] a natural leaning towards these disciplines while the girls [become] doubtful. The researcher offers the hypothesis that the careers which follow are more brilliant for the boys while the girls are less encouraged to succeed. It’s also the way the cycle of “male dominance” replicates itself. In single-sex classes this difference in treatment is absent and the girls are comfortable with succeeding fully.
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