Textbooks lack gender equality
2005-01-06 22:33
Cape Town - Although racial diversity is depicted well in school setworks, gender roles are still being stereotyped.
These books also displayed, among other things, gender inequalities that did not reflect the South African society.
This was found by Carolyn McKinney, a researcher of the University of the Witwatersrand, and published in a book Diverse Learners by the HSRC.
McKinney studied 61 Grade 1 readers and language and science textbooks from Grade 7, which are commonly used in schools.
The focus of the illustrations and text in these books generally fell on middle-class, urban families, while neglecting poorer, rural households often headed by women.
Not a single story out of the 111 studied told the story of a grandmother caring for a family, while this was a common practice, McKinney found.
"It is striking that gender stereotyping is the worst in stories that cover the core family and the household," she found.
An illustration of a person living with a disability could only be found in one of the books. This created the impression that people living with disabilities were not part of society, and "one wonders how disabled children feel when they read these books," she said.
This was a misrepresentation of the social reality, she said.
The rural poor are socially marginalised and excluded. At school children learn about inclusion, but this was glaringly absent from the textbooks.
Children also struggled to identify with the illustrations, because these were too far removed from their reality.