Learning gender in the early years of schooling in South Africa

Abstract

What young school-going learners learn about and how they participate in formal and informal gendered and sexual cultures has received little attention in the literature on schooling, gender, sexuality, and education in South Africa. This chapter focuses on social processes through which the early learning of gender manifests in the early years of South African schooling. By drawing on the new sociology of childhood, the chapter argues that young children are active gendered agents, expressing and asserting themselves as boys and girls. Boys and girls learn to negotiate their identities within material, discursive, and cultural contexts. Of concern are the ways in which the learning of gender is embedded within unequal relations of power and through which male power is exercised. Addressing the learning of gender in the early years is important if gender power inequalities are to be reconstructed in ways that do not entail marginalization and violence.