First of all, I would like to explain what hidden curriculum is. Hidden curriculum was originally coined by Philip Jackson’s ‘Life In Classroom’ (1968) to draw attention to the idea that schools do more than simply aid the transmission of knowledge between one generation and the next. Jackson argues that we need to understand “education” as a socialization process. That is a process that involves the transmission of norms and values as well as a body socially-approved knowledge (that also involves socially-derived conceptions of what constitutes valid knowledge, acceptable levels of understanding.
“NCF (2000) ensures that women learn to play out their “traditional” social roles as good mothers, wives and daughters within the family and the nation. It gives the emphasis on Indian tradition and the collapsing of values education with religious education puts on hold the possibilities of education emerging as an enabling tool for women empowerment.” We find how the policy implicitly envisages spoiling the value of education and promoting traditional role and religious education. One might think that religious education always inculcates high morality. A woman can only keep safe her chastity, if she resides inside the home. NCF (2000) is promoting the women empowerment but under the boundary of four wall of family. This does not talk give the encourage women education, schemes for women literacy, promote the gender equality through equal participation of women in social, cultural, economical, and political sphere so that they can become independent.
According to National Education policy (1986) gives brief regards to women education. The view of 1986 policy refinement does not produce any important positive supply the manner in which gender is dealt with in the texts. But there is dire need to develop and implement gender inclusive and gender sensitive curricular strategies to nurture a generation of girls and boys who are equally competent and are sensitive to one another. They should grow up in a caring and sharing mode as equals and not as adversaries. We can also see how social leader like Dadabhai Naroji, his views is not very open towards women education. His thinking is male oriented for example, “But that time has not come yet...Good and educated mothers only will raise good and educated son.”(Bhog,p.1639).
NCF(2000) seems to be saying that there is a dichotomy between Western and Indian culture and tradition. So it is difficult to bring social secular trend as Western cultures have. For example, “It also ignore the subordinate position that women occupy in different religions.”(Bhog,p.1640).
The NEP (1986) argued that it will play a positive interventionist role in the empowerment of women. Unfortunately, Indian state appears to be failure preventing the domestic violence and sex-selection technologies and sexual harassment. We find in textbook also women are represented as stereotypical role. For instance, “In 10 lesson, the presence of women was either mentioned in passing or confined to traditional roles-ie, as mothers, sister, etc.”(Bhog,p.1640). On the contrary, minor event in the lives of great men were portrayed and described are very much highlighted. For instance, “No details are given of their family life or homes. There is, in Baba Amte’s life history, a mention of the impact that his mother had on him but this is an aspect of the customary supporting role that women have to play in the lives of great men.”(Bhog, p.1640).
The textbook imagery reflects the idea of women as care-givers and by showing them predominantly as housewives. But in few those instances where they are portrayed in other brave, they appear again in the care-giving role. For instance, “Rani of Jhansi is no doubt a great rider and fighter but she is vulnerable too- prone to depression (at the death of her son and husband) and doubt (the Rani often finds refuge in prayer and withdrawal from the world). Even when she comes back to fight the British, she has to take recourse to spiritual fortifications-she is said to pray every morning-before commencing on worldly matters. (Bhog, p.16410). In case of Madam Curie, we see that she has been portrayed both aspects private work (home) and as scientist. She had to do both domestic responsibilities being women. For instance, “even she busies herself in the laboratory, surrounded by chemical fluids, test, tubes and complicated experiment not to mention her scientist-husband. We are informed” Maria used to do to do all the house, wash clothes, cook food and wash dishes. After two years, she gave birth to a girl child. This increased the load of work but did not affect the quality of her work.”(Bhog,p.1641).
The construction gender is done through textbook. Schools are the centre where gender construct are embedded by way of teaching. Masculinity and feminity are introduced in school as ideal word. In schools boys are told right from the beginning that you are boy you should not weep or cry. We can look at this photo which reflects how children are laughing and cutting jokes, when a boy weeps. However, boy may have a lot trouble. He cannot weep because friends will cut joke upon him. For instance “As babies or children when boys fall and hurt themselves, their parents and other family member often console them by saying ‘Don’t cry’. You are a boy. Boys are brave, they don’t cry.” To support my point, I want to mention here, what British sociologist Bill Williamson also argues that men and women” have to contend with the institutional and ideological forms of earlier times as the basic constrains on what they can achieve.”
(NCERT,Class VI,p. 15)
Textbooks reproduce the gender division of labor. The women’s role is generally undervalued in the labor process. In Civics textbooks points out that what are the duties of women and rights of men. We can see the roles of women are invisible except in private sphere. It appears that these textbooks are also written by male centered views. For example, “Portrayal of women and men in sex bound role confirms the patriarchal notion that men are the legitimate, inside real actors in the social arena; women are the unworthy outsiders.”( Rubin Saigol,p. 138).
What textbooks presents not only in India but all over the world we find same gender issues. For instance, “A study of primary-school textbooks in Colombia found that they represented men and women in three dichotomies: men as public and women as private, men as strong and women as weak, and men as active and women as passive.”(Stromquist, p.399).
Lastly, I will discuss school as a social institution and agency of ideological state apparatus and acts as vehicles of socialization either direct or indirectly. While injecting ideas, values and they function to mediate between the summits of power and everyday life. For instance, Bernstein argument suggests that children speak voices of pedagogy. “He distinguishes between voice and message plays a key role in discriminating between-social and pedagogic identities, specialized voices based upon power relations. This relations revealed in talk and dominant and subordinate voices and the yet to voiced. We need to distinguish different types of talk in the classroom-classroom talk, subject talk, identity talk, and code talk.” (Madeleine Arnot and Diane Reay, 2007,p..323)
We can see how gender construction is being practiced by teachers into the classroom. Girl is told that she is weak. For example, girl monitor of 4b, Shanti, was prcieved as being ‘’ineffective’’ by both boys and girls in controlling dhammaal(uproar) , whereas Gagan, her counterpart in4a is called by teacher as “ideal monitor’. The hidden agenda of domestication is brought out in the commentary of ne boy: Our teacher tells the monitor, you are a girl and you can’t keep the class quiet? See gagan.(Raju,10;4b) (Battacharjee, p.342)
In school, where there is gender division on the basis of sex. Girls’ writings are considered beautiful by teachers. Ideal norm of good handwriting is a wedge in the gender divide: “all the children told me how the girls are asked to write on the board because their writing was good. When boy (monitor) is asked of 4b: My work is to keep the boys quiet. (You don’t write on the board?). No, The girls make us write in our books. (Why?) They don’t let us know(what the teacher has asked them to write.) they tell us to keep the boys quie… teacher says their writing is good.” (Bhattacharjee, p. 344)
There is masculinity and feminity construction into classroom. Girls are considered quiet, passive whereas boys are regarded haraami, active. There is effect of this genetic term in the classroom. For example,”Our teacher does not scold, so nobody sits quiet. Even if she does shout nobody listens. The boys are all haraami…the girls listen, but the boys don’t… They trouble me. They hit me back. (Bhattacharjee, p.367).
In fact, Schools as institutions that embody collective traditions and human intentions which are the products of identifiable social and economic ideologies. If much of the literature on what schools tacitly teach is accurate, then the specific functions may be more economic than intellectual. If we are honest with ourselves, we must acknowledge that the curriculum field has it is a root in the soil of social control. For instance, “Whose meanings are collected and distributed through the overt and hidden curricula in school? That is, as Marx was fond of saying, reality does not stalk around with a label. The curriculum in schools responds to and represents ideological and cultural resources that come from somewhere. Not all groups’ visions are represented and not all groups’ meanings are responded to. How then, do schools act to distribute this cultural capital? Whose reality stalks in corridors and classrooms of America schools? ((Nancy King,p.44).
Conclusion:
Above we have seen that instead of policy commitment (NCF 2000,NPE 1986) to provide an empowering education for women and girls, the situation on the ground did not improve much. The crucial role of schools play in maintaining dominant class and gender ideologies through both curriculum content and teaching practices. Still we see in out textbook, “Traditional meaning of the masculinity and feminity continued to persist along with the oppositional, dichotomous categories of active-passive, emotional-rational, nature-culture and dependent-autonomous.”(Bhog,p.1642). There is no intention to deny the usefulness of education as an instrument of change but I think education could achieve the desired goals only under certain minimal conditions. These conditions are; a commitment on the part of the agent of change to the goals of change, a relative clarity about the message of change and the existence of an objective situation in which the new values seem to provide guidance and legitimacy to an increasingly larger section of the population that is influenced by education. It appears that these conditions are not fulfilled in Indian today. For example, “There is therefore, urgent need to train teachers, not only to acquaint them with a new curriculum but to make female teachers recognize their own oppression. Especially, needed, in the context of a more effective teacher’s role in sex education, is training to inform teachers about human sexuality and help them reflect on their own experience.” ( Stromquist,p.404).
REFERENCES
Apple, M.W. (1990). Ideaology and Curriculum; Economics and Control in Everyday School Life.Pub.New York: Routledge.Giroux (1981). Ideaology,Culture and the Process of schooling. Pub.Temple University Press(U.S.A.).
Madelein Arnot and Diane Reay, Discourse; studies in the cultural politics of education,Vol,28,No, 3 Sept 2007,pp.311-325. Pub.Routledge Falmer ,London and New York.
Bill Williamson,’ Continuities and Discontinuities in the Sociology of Education’ in Flude and Athier,op.cit.,pp.10-11.
Rubin Saigol, His Right/ her Duties: Citizen and Mother in the Civics Discourse.
Nell P. Stromquist,Molly Lee Birgit Brock-Utne, The Explicit and the Hidden School Curriculum.
Nandini Bhattacharya, Through the Looking Glass: Gender Socialization in a Primary School.
Dipta Bhog, Gender and Curriculum.
