Gender canyon: getting girls into schools in the South is literally a matter of life and death ... Can `gender-sensitive' education help ... ?
New Internationalist › Nbr. 1999, July 1999
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Gender canyon: getting girls into schools in the South is literally a matter of life and death ... Can `gender-sensitive' education help ... ?
NOTHING gets people going so much as sexual politics. Except perhaps race. Or religion. And when the three are mixed together you get something pretty explosive. One of the hottest issues in my local elementary school in recent years has been that of gender-segregated swimming, a storm which had thankfully blown itself out by the time I became a governor. The school had its own tiny unheated swimming pool, just about big enough for children to learn their first few strokes. It also had (and still has) a fascinatingly diverse multicultural population, which includes Kenyans, Chinese, Serbs and Albanians. A consistent one-third of the school's children come from the local Muslim community; most of their families migrated originally from rural Pakistan.
To make a long story short, representatives of the Muslim community (of whom there are three on the governing body now, though there was then only one) requested that girls should swim in separate sessions to boys, saying that their children (often those l...See the full content of this document
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