We were reviewing our progress on equal opportunities for boys and girls recently, and there was no dodging the fact that there were more failures than successes on the record. It can be very sobering to look back on a decade in which one has striven for change, and to measure just how much has come about.
Might a woman perhaps have done better? In fact, I beat no women for the job, for that short list of 10 years ago was all male. Today there would at least be a token woman among the six; a tiny advance which perhaps mirrors our own achievements. Sexist prejudice was in the open in those days. It was common to hear the opinion expressed that women had less ambition, relied too much on intuition, made emotional rather than rational responses and were more difficult to work for. Nowadays the prejudice has gone underground and it is harder to see who the enemy are.
Failure is that much more galling when one has meant well. Our comprehensive was designed from its very inception to resist and counter gender imbalance. The often stated aims of the school make our attitudes clear, the organization underlines our belief in equality of opportunity. Boys are compelled to take on such subjects as fabrics and child-care, at least for a sampling period, girls are obliged to try metal-work and some aspects of engineering; no subject at all has any regulations or pressures to exclude either sex.
We have a higher proportion of female heads of department than of male in relation to overall numbers of staff, the school is managed by people very acutely conscious of the feminist cause, the chairman of governors is a woman, even the uniform is unisex - yet to a substantial degree we have failed.
Most of our friendly, well loved Devonian parents would be startled by that statement. They look on the school as a success. Their daughters (and mine) have been happy at the school and have done as well, in their eyes, as their sons. Our parents come from the complete spectrum of occupations and socio-economic groups. Those that read the educational press will very likely disagree with my sentiments here, and this fact alone is a measure of the tide against which we try and swim; but at least we are trying.
I said earlier that one used to be able to see who the enemy were. While that was so one could measure achievements. Now it is more difficult. Most people in authority at least pay lip service to the aims of equal opportunities, most institutions and organizations protest a general support, the opposition is no longer evidently recognizable, able to be brought to battle. Now the enemy is concealed in ambivalent attitudes and often, sadly, is wearing skirts.
This was brought home to me last month when I was reviewing with short-lived pleasure the numbers of children embarking on computer studies courses. For the first time girls opting for the subject marginally outnumbered the boys, and I was a good deal closer to euphoria than a shrewd old head should find himself. When I talked to the pupils I discovered a fact that was dismally deflating. Three quarters of the girls who hoped to work eventually with computers saw themselves as manual operators, while about three quarters of the boys saw themselves as future programmers or executive users of the machines.
No one had fed this scenario to them and they had been following identical courses in mixed groups. It all stemmed, quite obviously, from self images which had been with them for a very early age.
Some of this villainy can be traced to textbooks written when microprocessors in schools were unheard of. The Janet and John series, particularly popular in the primary sector when these 14 year olds were tiny and starting school - and still in use in some areas - was an outrageous source of gender role reinforcement.
Even more worrying, and far more difficult to do anything about are the attitudes that prevail in the generality of our literature, on which so much of secondary level English teaching, compulsory for all children, is perforce founded. Nearly all English literature, from Chaucer to the twentieth century, is male-dominated and reinforces the concepts of the male and female role traditions. It is interesting, and depressing, to note that female authors are every bit as bad in this respect as their male counterparts.
There are plenty of books about women, of course, and books with heroines: but few of them break the long established mould. Shaw is perhaps the exception, but is seldom set by examination boards. Jane Austen offers some comfort in Persuasion to those who have the subtlety to see her point. Mrs Gaskell and George Elliot occasionally raise a flicker of hope but do not sustain it. Some of Charlotte Bronte is not much more than up-market Barbara Cartland, and a book like Jane Eyre, avidly consumed by every fairly literate adolescent girl in the Western world, probably does more harm to the feminist cause than most books written by men.
The areas of the curriculum that cause us special concern at the moment are not just subjects in which girls are not taking the advantage they should. The action for equal opportunities must apply to both sexes and the overall situation in which girls, and later women, are at a disadvantage stems from the typecasting of girls subjects and boys' subjects. Hence we are very concerned that needlework, or its more modern derivative, fabrics, can attract only four boys in a group of 22 once the compulsory years are over; though cookery in particular and home economics in general have to some extent crashed this barrier. We only have 10 boys doing the O level course to something like 40 girls, but in one of the CSE sets there are actually more boys than girls this year.
Another worry is that technology does not seem to be able to attract girls once they are past the compulsory stage. The micro-electronics area of the course certainly should do so. It is clean, involves nothing heavy, favours small nimble fingers, and many aspects of it have a particular relevance to the kind of home gadgetry with which girls and their mothers are nowadays substantially surrounded. Perhaps this will improve once we succeed in building up the number of girls in the examination physics sets and when we begin to achieve for girls something comparable with what the boys manage in the matter of O level chemistry success.
I thought 10 years ago that the key to this whole area lay with mathematics, and I think I will yet be proved right. At that time we instituted an individualized maths programme which largely does away with the normally intense classroom competition for teachers' time and attention.
Recent research on this topic seems to indicate that boys compete more successfully for the teachers' time and attention than do girls, and that their greater aggression wins for them a bigger share of the spoils of learning. When all the children are working at their own pace on their own programmes, and come to the teacher at different times on a one-to-one basis, the more overt competition is filtered out.
We thought 10 years ago that this would develop into a plus factor for the girls in the matter of the number taking and succeeding in maths. Progress has been slow but there have been some significant advances. As far as O level is concerned, we have reached the stage where 50 per cent of our candidates are girls, as they should be. With A level the best we have managed is 33 per cent girls, though this does represent an increase of about 5 per cent over the last 10 years.
It is in our personal, social and moral education programme that we have perhaps tried hardest to encourage a degree of role reversal and reverse role understanding. Without such progress, public, parental and pupil prejudice will never be broken down, as it must be if we are to succeed in the equal opportunities field.
To this end we ensure that our sex education groups and our family planning discussions are taught as a matter of principle in mixed classes, as is the work on personal hygiene. For example, in a discussion group on the problems associated with menstruation, the value to the boys - the real purpose of the exercise - is greater than to the girls who tend to know it all already. The genuine enlightenment of the boys owes a lot to the fact that it is a mixed group within which the subject can be treated in a natural and matter-of-fact way.
That we compel boys to do some elements of the child-care course has been criticized in some quarters as irrelevant or even insulting. Nothing could be more stupid. The boys are fascinated by it and it is marvellous to see the rougher and tougher male element humanized, tender and caring when handling the tiny babies our helpful team of young mothers bring in to school. If you could see such normally clumsy lads, all macho bravado forgotten, coping with infinite care with the handling of a slippery and possibly wailing infant, you would probably agree with me that if it were only possible to arrange this exercise for one sex, it would have to be for the boys that we should provide it.
We try to break down gender role prejudices in other areas also. Physical education groups are mixed for such activities as 'keep fit', 'disco dancing', trampolining and gymnastics. Many games such as hockey, basketball, volleyball, badminton and tennis can accommodate both boys and girls. In community service we make a point of sending boys to help in preschool playgroups and girls have done good work in conservation schemes, digging drainage ditches and doing forestry work. Both sexes have combined to work with handicapped children and in the geriatric wards of hospitals.
It would be silly to pretend that all has been failure because one has fallen short of one's aims. There have been successes, but the general advance has, sadly, been slight. I should have been more realistic about the time scale of things, and this is what I hope the public will now understand. If in 10 years, with firm intentions and apparent power for managing change, we have achieved so little then real progress in the advancement of equal opportunities on a national scale will certainly take 50 years and perhaps a century. We must face this fact and refuse to be put off.
If we come to understand the magnitude of the task along with its importance, appreciate the time-scale and resist the pessimisms associated with short-term failure, future generations in education will eventually succeed where, with the best will in the world, we have only scratched the surface.
.lcWriting about the ten years of equal opportunities in his school in Devon, John Sturt, the headmaster, finds that there is still much left to do.
