Gender and Education

The presentation on Gender and Education was very interesting. Below I am going to discuss some of the new ideas I learned.

1) I found the video of the parents playing with the kids to be very fascinating. When the mother and father both played with their son, the father tended to engage in more direct physical interaction with the boy, while the mother encouraged the boy to be physical with himself, but not towards her. The mother tried to play with the tea sets and other toys that were more gender neutral and that facilitated non-physical play.

2) Right from the time babies are born, they are treated differently. Boys are bounced around and held away from the body, while girls are always held close to the body and are stroked. The ironic thing with this is that girls are biologically stronger immediately after birth than boys.

3) My favorite case focused on the boy who told a story in which one character died. When the girls heard this story, they were angry, because they did not think that death was an appropriate ending to the story. They thought the character should have fainted. After a long discussion, the class concluded that stories could only contain death if a bad guy died. The incident with the story shows that girls are less likely to fantasize about violence or to be accepting of violence than boys. Even though many boys fantasize about violence, they usually do not have a true concept of death. In play, death only lasts a few seconds and they get upset if it lasts longer.

I really enjoyed this presentation, because gender and learning was not something I had thought about a lot in the past.