If a broad profile were to be drawn of the common experience of growing up as a woman in Indian society, it would highlight physical restrictions as well as mental or psychological negativity communicated to little girls from birth onwards.
A son’s birth is greeted with celebration, while a daughter’s birth is, at best, endured. The unwantedness of daughters gets conveyed in ways which are hardly subtle. The idea of lifelong dependence and insecurity gets communicated in terms of marriage and motherhood being the sole objectives of a woman’s life. The temporary nature of one’s natal home and the anxiety of adjustment in an unknown family form part of the learning that a girl cannot escape during childhood.
Illustration: Jayachandran / Mint
Communication of deep-rooted beliefs—such as the “impurity” of menstruation—enables girls to internalize their lower ritual status under patriarchy. Transmission of culturally sanctioned attitudes constitutes the gendering process which guides girls into becoming socially acceptable women.
Socialization in the family setting receives powerful reinforcement from the modern media, including television and cinema, which use these basic elements of culture to weave commercially successful products that perpetuate tradition in terms of its material practices and attitudes.
Little attention has been paid in educational research and teacher training to the implications of such negative aspects of girls’ upbringing on their psychological development. Educational policy endorses child-centred pedagogic practices which essentially respond to the child’s own search for opportunities to express itself.
Nurturing self-esteem is another major value in the child-centred philosophy of education, as it enhances the motivation and confidence to learn. In the case of girls, both agency and self-esteem come under stress and, in many cases, get damaged at an early age by behavioural practices and beliefs entrenched in the culture of child-rearing. Some of these practices have an explicitly discriminatory character, involving positive parental behaviour towards male siblings, which heightens the negative treatment meted out to girls.
But even outside the frame of discriminatory behaviour, the everyday signal conveyed to girls that they have a vulnerable body and a “weak” mind, unsuitable for the rigour of subjects such as science and mathematics, poses a major challenge for school education.
There is little evidence to suggest that teachers recognize the challenge or appreciate its nature and scale. They themselves carry patriarchal prejudices towards the feminine self, and in this matter, male teachers may not differ much from women teachers.
Internalization of patriarchy is common to both, and teacher education does little to induce self-reflection or questioning. Teachers are trained to impart subject knowledge and that is what they mainly do, without worrying about the socially constructed structure of their students’ minds.