During breakfast, my attention was caught by a picture in the Globe and Mail with a higher proportion of girls in graduate school and was curious and read the article. The title of the article: There is a new gender gap in education: Around the world, boys rank behind girls by nearly every measure of scholastic achievement. Since 1981 the number of women attending Canadian universities outnumbered men for the first time, and from then on the gap grew.
What a change since my time in university some 36 years ago! Two generations ago, where women could be numbered by using your two hands, the odd one in a sea of male faces, especially in business school, attempting to play the game the boy’s way since no major women model was in existence back then.
A lot has changed since then and that is encouraging. Women still might not have reached the same proportion in upper management as men but this is not the topic that I want to write about today. In the article the journalist accounted that in 1998, only some 12 years ago, some of Canada’s leading educational publishers began revisiting their standard science textbooks for Grades 7 through 10, in an attempt to correct the gender bias against females in the classroom.
“If you had a picture of a person doing something positive, winning a race, performing an experiment successfully etc., you had to make sure it was a girl”, according to one of the consultant involved in the revisions. “If you had a bad thing – bullying, making a mistake, being unsure which course of action to take, etc. – the image was invariably a boy.”
12 years later boys have been recast as the underdogs of academics. The dropout rate for boys in certain urban schools is over 60 percent. Diligent efforts went into helping girls learn, leaving boys out to find their own way in a feminized education system.
Two things strike me in this article:
1) First the speed at which a change in the system was brought about, 12 years seems a short time span compared to a few centuries of gender discriminations.
2) Second, what strikes me is the lack of vision of the publishers who fell into the trap of systemic problem solving.
When you attempt to correct something in a system without envisioning the whole picture you create a similar problem down the line. But this seems to be in line with the short term vision most our society runs from, lead into reaction by the most pressing problem, next in line to tackle.
Find a solution to the problem! Empower women into higher education! A worthwhile goal indeed but a narrow one at best, since the consequence it seems according to various research papers on the subject has been a disengagement from school for boys. Without going into the causes analysed in the paper, I would like once more to stress the narrow vision of tackling a problem within a complex social system.
The learning model gained from experiments in metanoic organizations could offer some valuable insights to be used in our social systems. Charles Kiefer and Peter Senge refer to metanoia in the following way:
“The essence of metanoia is the individual’s realization of the extraordinary power of a group committed to a common vision. In metanoic organizations people don’t assume they are powerless. They know and believe in the power of visioning, the power of the individual to determine his own destiny. Through responsible participation they empower each other and ultimately their institutions and society, thereby making life meaningful and satisfying for everyone.”
How about creating such a compelling vision of a world that works for everybody in our textbooks for children to learn and engage in, rather than depicting one as succeeding and the other one as failing and painting gender pictures on the characters?
That would require we adults together with the children begin to contribute our wisdom to such a vision and committing to its manifestation for all, rather than leaving it all to the politicians and the bureaucrats.
The example of the 33 miners from Chile who survived their ordeal of being trapped 700 feet in the womb of Earth illustrates the type of commitment as a group needed for surviving the hardships of their ordeal, empowered by the efforts of their country to do whatever it takes to bring them up to safety, a new model for the world. So many times economic pressures will simply agree to sacrifice people and projects because we lack a compelling vision of a world that works for all.
Too often we pay lip service to a vision and abandon it at our first few challenges. Or is it because that vision is not aligned with our own highest purpose? Have we ever dared to look at our own highest purpose, at the contribution we each are here to make to our fellow humans travelling in this particular time and age?
For me it has to do with helping women recast their role in society, helping them heal from the narrow definitions of roles they have or had to play in traditional Patriarchal societies, taking their orders and their cues from the masculine 3D mentality, limiting their freedom and their creativity and thus robbing the world of a balancing force to greed and exploitation of resources. So many women who have reached a state of economic freedom are healing deep emotional scars which keeps them disconnected from their soul. Authentic freedom is the light of the soul shining through our being and guiding our ways.
Let’s make that a compelling vision for our world .
Tags: authentic freedom, common vision, education, light of the soul, metanoic organization, power of a group, systemic problem solving, visioning
