RELATIVE IMPACT OF GENDER ISSUES IN EDUCATION IN BECOMING A TOOL FOR POLITICS OF EDUCATION

Abstract

In this present paper, the researchers have tried to link the effects of gender issues with the politics of education taking place primarily in the textbooks across our country. The radical potential of the linking of gender and the political scenario has brought to light different forms of oppression. The original content which finds place in our textbooks is conceived, gets transformed and this manipulated content later finds place as knowledge in our school textbooks. This is not merely a coincidence but a whole mesh of politics working around this. The information is selected, processed, condensed and compromised as per the political needs and accordingly the text gets repositioned to satisfy power groups involved. When this compromised knowledge reaches the real classroom environment, it is merely disseminated by the teachers who are not much involved in decision making, their main task is to implement the designed curriculum in the classroom. In a way, they unconsciously become puppets in the power hands.

The curriculum, according to theorist Michael Apple, who propounded the theory of politics of curriculum, is never simply a neutral assemblage of knowledge, somehow appearing in the texts and classrooms of a nation. It is always part of a selective tradition, someone’s selections, some group’s vision of legitimate knowledge. It is produced out of the cultural, political and economic conflicts, tensions and compromises that organize and disorganize people. As Apple argues, the decision to define some group’s knowledge hardly sees the light of day, says something extremely important about who has power in society. Thus, there seems to be a direct link between the way knowledge is reconstructed or say deconstructed and presented for the satiation of political needs.

This paper is a small attempt by the researchers to bring forth the politics existing in the school textbooks in the name of existing gender issues. The underlining fact remains that gender issues should not become a tool to establish relationship between power and knowledge which unfortunately it is.