The Politics of Gender: Women, Education and the Market in 1993

Abstract

This chapter sets out an analysis of the assumptions underlying the new educational settlement (Grace, 1990). In particular, it analyses the patriarchal nature of the “world view” and practices of that settlement guiding model, that is a free market and its endorsement of what I have termed the concept of rational market man. The intellectual paucity of neo-liberalism free market ideologies and possessive individualism which have guided and legitimated educational change are starkly revealed when a gender analysis is applied to them. This chapter examines a few of the multitude of different “realities” through which women live out their lives in a gendered and unequal society. Such realities are closely related to educational provision and yet they can never be taken account of (and never resourced) in educational policy and planning as long as the hegemony of market models is retained.