Prague, Feb 9 (CTK) – The Czech Education Ministry has for almost seven years seen to it that textbooks are approved on the basis of their gender balanced approach before they are used at schools, but this effort often fails, daily Lidove noviny (LN) writes yesterday.
Gender experts point out that the reviewers who assess textbooks and should identify gender stereotypes in them teach the respective subjects and they are not well versed in gender issues, Anna Babanova, who has dealt with this issue for ten years, told LN.
A typical example in school primers or readers is the depiction of women cooking in the kitchen and men who send their children to buy them papers, she added.
Irena Smetackova, who helped work out the assessment methodology, says many textbooks approved as gender balanced are not so in practice.
LN writes that even the prestigious National Geographic journal dealt with this topic of late. It assessed princesses and other heroines from the Walt Disney animated fairy tales according to their emancipation level, while Snow White fared the worst since she swallowed the hook several times and either the seven dwarves or the prince had to rescue her.
Pictures of passive and helpless girls whom boys must help still appear in Czech textbooks, said Babanova who advises their authors how to change the stories to make them more balanced. She also cites a few examples.
“In the case of a mum cooking beef, I proposed that she work on computer, and an aunt received a skipping rope instead of a scarf. If we show children that the world around is diversed, it will be positive for their formation of life roles,” she said.
It does not matter how many girls and boys are in a textbook, but the overall balanced approach is important, she added.
Experts point out that textbooks, fairy tales and other books children read in their free time help them create their values and a general picture of how society is working, and this is why the men’s and women’s worlds must be balanced in them.
On the other hand, Radka Smahelova, from the Fraus publishing house that focused on textbooks, argues that it is hard to avoid some stereotypes about men and women especially in the textbooks for smaller children from the first to fourth grades.
“We must proceed from what children know and have around them,” she said, adding Fraus has not received a single objection to its textbooks’ gender imbalance.
The Education Ministry always orders two expert opinions on a textbook’s gender balance. One is usually worked out by an academic, a didactics expert, who is able to assess the general concept, and the other by a teacher from practice, LN writes.
However, these people are often not well educated or interested in gender issues, indicates Smetackova, who teaches at the Faculty of Education of Prague’ Charles University.
“There are many experts in pedagogy who do not consider gender imbalance an important topic,” she said.
Babanova says many teachers have no information about this topic, and this is why she organises gender seminars for them.
A textbook based on gender stereotypes has nothing to do in a democratic school system, she said.
