engleski

In Search for Difference: Gender versus the Economic Transformation of Education

In this paper, the role of education in the intellectual, creative and moral development of the child will be confronted with those aspects of the education system challenging that role. With the emphasis on the difficulties education systems have in observing children’s capacities and potentials independently of their gender, certain aspects of the educational reproduction of gender difference will be addressed, whereby in the very focus of our interest will be holders of educational processes in institutions of early childhood and preschool education. The paper is divided into three parts. In the first part the ambiguous role of education in contemporary European and Croatian society will be discussed, the ambiguity stemming from the social inability to reconcile the emancipatory aspects of education with its pragmatic role in the economic production of goods. In the second part economic and gender aspects of the teaching profession in Croatia will be emphasized, building upon the understanding of said profession as a paradigmatic example of the inadequacies of solving gender inequality with short-term market interventions instead with substantial changes in social and economic relations. In the third part research results on early childhood and preschool education students’ attitudes toward sex role stereotyping will be presented. It is concluded that students in that field are in most cases egalitarian, but that some of them still have a traditional understanding of gender relations. Finally, future educators’ egalitarian views are confronted with the reality of their feminized, underpaid and marginalized profession.

education ; gender equality ; teaching profession ; early childhood and preschool education

nije evidentirano