{"id":1222,"date":"2006-05-09T10:15:38","date_gmt":"2006-05-09T10:15:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=1222"},"modified":"2006-05-09T10:25:36","modified_gmt":"2006-05-09T10:25:36","slug":"girls-in-religious-schools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=1222","title":{"rendered":"Girls in religious schools"},"content":{"rendered":"

I went to what was at least nominally a church school, all-girl, headed by a pretty clueless male reverend. Most of the time his lack of worldliness and commonsense didn’t matter (although sometimes, as I think of the fate of a friend of mine who ended up in a psychiatric hospital, it did).<\/p>\n

But he did do more general damage in some special “personal development” lessons that he took for sixth formers. Most of it was pretty inane stuff, but I can still clearly picture (probably because of the rage I felt at the time), his solemnly drawing graphs on the board to explain that men’s sexual arousal was a sharp curve, while women’s was much flatter, and therefore women shouldn’t wear low-cut blouse. He didn’t say the next sentence, but it hung in the air: “If women got raped, it was probably their own fault.”<\/p>\n

I thought of this when I read an excellent piece in the Guardian<\/em> today. The government is (in one of its more potentially long-term pieces of stupidity) encouraging the development of religious schools, and even the take-over of state schools by religious groups<\/a>. It has also, commendably, introduced an gender equality duty on institutiions. But …<\/p>\n

Much to the amazement and anger of gender equality campaigners, the government has not published any gender-specific statistics on faith schools and is not aware of any research in this area – on whether girls and boys in faith schools are taught a different curriculum, as was found to be the case in a now closed independent Muslim school in Scotland; on whether girls and boys in faith schools are achieving different grades or leaving school at different ages compared with each other and with their peers in non-faith schools.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for the DfES says undertaking such research would be a “massively disproportionate” use of taxpayer’s money. Yet under the gender equality duty that comes into force in April next year, there will be a legal requirement for all state schools to actively promote gender equality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The article is promoting an Amnesty International debate tomorrow night in London on Women’s Human Rights and Fundamentalism. I won’t be able to go since I’ve already got two things booked, but it sounds good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I went to what was at least nominally a church school, all-girl, headed by a pretty clueless male reverend. Most of the time his lack of worldliness and commonsense didn’t matter (although sometimes, as I think of the fate of a friend of mine who ended up in a psychiatric hospital, it did). But he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminism","category-miscellaneous","author-natalieben"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}