For my leaving present when I left my job as a teacher, I was given a fantastic Christmas jumper that said 'Sleigh the Patriarchy'. This was an appropriate present for me, as my colleagues were very used to my lectures on the patriarchy and the damage it does to both teachers and students. One of my proudest moments was getting a colleague to change her intimate hair removal regime; a small but meaningful gesture in re-evaluating how we as women relate to our bodies in their natural state.
As an English teacher I was also very vocal in criticising the texts that we taught to our students. When I started out as a teacher we had a lot of freedom over what we taught our younger key stage 3 students, as long as the department had enough budget to buy the books. But in more recent years that has changed, as the preparation for GCSEs is now increasingly starting in Year 7, and 19th and early 20th century texts written by white men have become the standard. Those dead white men just won't go away.
I also had a stint teaching History, and was pretty appalled to discover that even now the curriculum is still heavily focused on kings, queens and wars rather than a more inclusive social history, looking at how people in the past lived day to day. I tried to teach my class about the lives of medieval women, but this had to be squeezed in between the required lessons on various battles and reigns of kings. Where were the women? I wanted to educate our young people in our shared common humanity by looking at ordinary people of the past, including women; but the system wanted me to educate them in the age old story of men fighting other men, with the unspoken assumptions that war is what brings progress, and that winning a war is an enviable achievement. Surely we are all questioning these assumptions right now as Russia has brought war to Ukraine, yet this is what we are teaching to the next generation.
Patriarchy is soaked into the whole education system. The idea that we evaluate learning with one high stakes examination period at the end of a two year system is a masculine approach. It has at its core the idea of learning as a linear journey towards a fixed goal that can be objectively assessed by a written exam, that relies on memory and recall above all else. What would a feminine education system look like? Maybe it would be education as a collaborative, cyclical journey where skills and knowledge are visited and revisited, where assessment is formative and ongoing to recognise that learning does not take place in a step by step way. Students go forwards and then backwards, they might plateau for a while and then take a huge leap forward. This would be a system where 'soft' skills such as communication, empathy and teamwork are as valued (if not more valued) than rote learning and the regurgitation of facts and formulaic answers. Imagine the impact this would have on all our young people, not just the girls. Imagine the impact on our society if this was the education we gave our young people.
Teaching is a profession that is predominantly female, and in every school there are women trying to balance the demands of their career and their role as caregiver. You would expect in a profession where women are in the majority, that schools would be flexible workplaces where every effort was made to acknowledge the many demands on those women who are mothers and daughters, and very often doing the majority of housework and life admin too, and to make it as easy as possible for these women to achieve a balance between all the demands that are placed on them. But no. Women are leaving this profession in droves as their schools do absolutely nothing to support them. Every day in our schools women teachers are made to feel valueless, expendable, weak, inadequate and lazy. They are pushed to their limits by the demands of their jobs and their many roles, and for too many the consequences are breakdowns and burnout. What are students learning as they see their female teachers undermined, overworked, bullied and frequently reduced to tears, and time off work, by the patriarchal system they are forced to work in?
On this day, International Women's Day, maybe it is time to reflect on how our education system embeds patriarchy in our society. Maybe it is time to take action; as a parent you could question the school's choice of texts, you could write to the governors or the Department of Education expressing your views on the curriculum and the exam system. Maybe you just need to talk to your children, raising their awareness of patriarchy and discussing alternative systems of education and of society. You need to undo the damage done by your child's education. Together we can smash the patriarchy, one conversation at a time.
