Theories of gender development

Several theories of gender development have generated most of the research during the
past ten years: Social learning theory, cognitive-developmental theory, and gender schema
theory. Proponents of social learning theory believe that parents, as the distributors of
reinforcement, reinforce appropriate gender role behaviors. By their choice of toys, by urging
boy or girl behavior, and by reinforcing such behavior, parents encourage their children to
engage in gender appropriate behavior. If the parents have good relationships with their children,
they become models for their children to imitate, encouraging them to acquire gender-related
behavior.
What is Gender Stereotyping?
Gender stereotyping is defined as the beliefs humans hold about the characteristics
associated with males and females.
Gender and Equality
Gender equality gives women and men the same entitlements to all aspects of human
development, including economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights, the same level of
respect, the same opportunities to make choices, and the same level of power to shape the
outcomes of these choices.
Research from around the world has shown that gender inequality tends to slow
economic growth and make the rise from poverty more difficult. The reasons for this link are not
hard to understand. Half of the worlds population is female, hence, the extent to which women
and girls benefit from development policies and program has a major impact on the countries
overall development success. Research also shows that women and girls tend to work harder than
men, are more likely to invest their earnings in their children, are major producers as well as
consumers, and shoulder critical, life-sustaining responsibilities without which men and boys
could not survive much less enjoy high levels of productivity. Womens empowerment is
particularly important for determining a countrys demographic trends, trends that in turn affect
its economic success and environmental sustainability.
Most counties now acknowledge that gender and the extent of gender equality will
influence the timing and shape of demographic change. Recent research has explored these
relationships and has highlighted potential policy implications. In general, as the differences
between mens and womens roles diminish, women gain status and power within a society and
begin control their reproductive lives. When women have more autonomy, maternal and child
health care tend to improve, fertility and childhood mortality tend to decline, and population
growth slows.
Strong evidence from around the world confirms that gender equality accelerates overall
economic growth, strengthens democratic governance and reduces poverty and insecurity
Gender inequality

Four themes characterize feminist theorizing of gender inequality. First, men and women
are situated in society not only differently but also unequally. Specifically, women get less of
material resources, social status, power, and opportunities for self-actualization than do men who
share their social location be it a location based on class face, occupation, ethnicity, religion,
education, nationality, or any other socially significant factor. Second, this inequality results from
the organization of society. Third, although individual human beings may vary somewhat from
each other in their profile of potentials and traits, no significant pattern of natural variation
distinguishes the sexes. Then, is to claim that women are situationally less empowered than men
to realize they need share with men for self-actualization. Fourth, all inequality theories assume
that both men and women and men will respond fairly easily and naturally to more egalitarian
social structures and situations.
Gender and Power
Gender refers to the different ways men and women play in society, and to the relative
power they wield. While gender is expressed differently in different societies, in no society do
men and women perform equal roles or hold equal positions of power.
Power is a basic fabric of society and is possessed in varying degrees by social actors in
diverse social categories. Power becomes abusive and exploitative only when independence and
individuality of one person or group of people becomes so dominant that freedom for the other is
compromised.
Max Weber in his Essay in Sociology, defined power as the likelihood a person may
achieve personal ends despite possible resistance from others. Males and females traditionally
have had differing amounts of power at their disposal. By virtue of the males greater ascribed
status in society, men have more legitimate power (based on rank or position) than do women.
Gender and Education
Investing in education is seen as one of the fundamental ways in which nation state and
their citizens can move toward long-term development goals and improve both social and
economic standards of living. The education of women is seen as providing the key to securing
intergenerational transfer of knowledge, and providing the substance of long-term gender
equality and social change.
Schools also reinforce gendered social roles. Researchers have documented the
differential treatment accorded males and females in the classrooms that reinforces a sense of
inferiority and lack of initiative among female students.

Globalization and Education

Characteristics of Globalization That can be Linked to Education
In seeking to understand and theorize the nature of globalization and its effects in
education. It is argued that globalization has both potentially negative as well as potentially
positive effects. It is also argued that the restructuring of the state under the impact of neoliberalism, which has been the underpinning ideology of economic globalization, has had a real
effect upon the structures of education, as well as upon educational policies in the form of new
managerialism and human capital theory.
In the light of these arguments, it is extremely risky to advance a description of the
characteristics of globalization that most closely affect education which include at the very least
the following.

In educational terms, there is a growing understanding that the neo-liberal version of

globalization, particularly as implemented by bilateral, multilateral, and international
organizations, is reflected in an educational agenda that privileges, if not directly
imposes, particular policies for evaluation, financing, assessment, standards, teacher
training curriculum instruction and testing. In the face of such pressures, more study is
needed about local responses to defend public education against the introduction of pure
market mechanisms to regulate educational exchanges and other policies that seek to
reduce state sponsorship and financing and to impose management and efficiency models
borrowed from the business sector as a framework for education decision making. These
educational responses are mostly carried by teacher unions, new social movements, and
critical intellectuals, often expressed as opposition to initiatives in education such as
vouchers of subsidizing private and parochial schools.
In economic terms, a transition from Fordist to Post-Fordist forms of workplace
organization; a rise in internationalized advertising and consumption patterns; a reduction
in barriers to the free flow of goods, workers and investments across national borders and
correspondingly, new pressures on the role of workers and consumer in society.
In political terms, a certain loss of nation-state sovereignty or at least the erosion of
national autonomy, and, correspondingly, a weakening of the notion of the citizen as a
unified and unifying concepts, a concept that can be characterized by precise roles, rights,
obligations and status.
In cultural terms, a tension between the ways in which globalization brings forth more
standardization and cultural homogeneity, while also bringing more fragmentation
through the rise of locally oriented movements, another theoretical alternative identifies a
more conflicted and dialectical situation, with both cultural homogeneity and
heterogeneity appearing simultaneously in the cultural landscape. Sometimes this merger
and dialectical tension between the global and the local is termed the glocal.

What Are the Core Values and Competencies of Global Education?

Our vision of global education was organized around the following core values: peace
and non-violence, social justice and human rights, economic well-being and equity, cultural
integrity, ecological balance, and democratic participation.

Socio-cultural, Economic, and Political Issues on Globalization

1. Socio-Cultural Issues
Globalization and massive migrations are changing the ways we experience
national identities and cultural belonging. Globalization decisively unmakes the
coherence that the modernist project of the nineteenth and twentieth century nation
promised to deliver the neat fit between territory, language and identity.
Managing difference is becoming one of the greatest challenges to multicultural
countries. Children growing up in these and other settings are likely than in any previous
generation in human history to face a life of working and networking, loving and living
with others from different national, linguistic, religious, and racial backgrounds. They are
challenged to engage and work through competing and contrasting models, and the
complicated relationships between race, ethnicity, and inequality, in new ways. It is by
interrupting thinking as usual the taken-for-granted understandings and world views
that shape cognitive and metacognitive styles and practices that managing difference
can do the most for youth growing up today.
Global changes in culture deeply affect educational politics, practices and
institutions.
2. Economic Issues on Globalization
In Globalization and Education: An Economic Perspective, Harvard economist
David Bloom argues that because of globalization, education is more important than ever
before in history. He deploys a vast array of up-to-date data on the state of global
education in much of the developing world. Blooms materials prompt both optimism and
caution. He claims that growing world-wide inequality indexed by increasing gaps and
income and well-being, generally mimics a continuing and growing global gap in
education. While primary education enrolments have improved worldwide, consistency
and quality of educational experiences remain patchy. Furthermore, secondary
education in developing countries remains quite a weak.
Bloom (2002) argues that increasing efforts to improve basic education
particularly in developing countries will surely help narrow income gaps with developed
countries. Education, he claims, is clearly a strong trigger for positive development
spirals.
The current cycle of globalization is in the part of product of new global media,
information and communication technologies that instantaneously connect people,

organizations, and system across vast distances. These new technologies of globalization
are rapidly and irrevocably changing the nature of learning, work, though, and
entertainment, and the interpersonal patterning of social relations. According to Gardner,
education should help students synthesize information from a variety of disciplines and
geographies, so they understand how economics inform politics.
At the economic level, because globalization is affecting employment it touches
upon one of the primary traditional gals of education, preparation for work. Schools are
not only concerned with preparing students as producers; increasingly, schools help shape
consumer attitudes and educational institutions and products, both curricular and
extracurricular, that confront students every day in their classrooms. This increasing
commercialization of school environment has become remarkably bold and explicit in its
intentions, which admits quite openly that is offers schools free televisions so as to
expose children to a force-fed diet of commercials in their classrooms everyday.
Globalization will continue to be a vector of worldwide change. We need better
understanding of how education will be transformed by globalization and how it, in turn,
can shape and manage the course of globalization. We need a major research agenda to
examine how education most broadly defined can best prepare the children to engage in a
global world. We need better theoretical understanding of globalizations multiple faces
economic, demographic and social and cultural.
3. Political Issues on Globalization
There has been the constraint on national or state policy making posed by external
demands from transnational institutions. Yet, at the same time that economic coordination
and exchange have become increasingly well-regulated, and as stronger institutions
emerge to regulate global economic activity, with globalization there has also been a
growing internationalization of global conflict, crime, terrorism, and environmental
issues, but with an inadequate development of political institution to address them.
Conflict and Consensus Perspective on the Role of Education and Understanding
Globalization
While globalization has created a great deal In economic, policy and grassroots
circles, many applications and applications of the phenomenon remain virtual terra incognita.
Education is at the center of this uncharted continent. We have barely started to consider how
these accelerating transnational dynamics are affecting education, particularly pre-collegiate
education, instead educational systems worldwide continue mimicking and often mechanically
copying from each other and borrowing curricula, teaching methods, and assessment tests.
Today, the world is another place. The forces of globalization are taxing youth, families,
and education systems worldwide. All social systems are predicated n the need to impart values,
morals, skills, and competencies to the next generations. The lives and experiences of youth
growing up today will be linked to economic realities, social processes, technological and media
innovations, and cultural flows that traverse national boundaries with ever greater momentum.

These global transformations, we believe, will re quire youth to develop new skills that are far
ahead of what most educational systems can now deliver. New and broader global visions are
needed to prepare children and youth to be informed, engaged, and critical citizens in the new
millennium. Education will need both rethinking and restructuring if schooling is to best prepare
the children and the youth of the world to engage globalizations new challenges, opportunities
and costs.

Educations challenge will be able to shape the cognitive skills, interpersonal sensibilities, and
cultural sophistication of children and youth whose lives will be both engaged in local contexts
and responsive larger transnational processes.
Globalization engenders complexity. Throughout the world it generating more intricate
demographic profiles, economic realities, and identities. Globalizations increasing complexity
and necessitates a new paradigm for learning and teaching. The mastery and mechanical
regurgitation of rules and facts should give way to a paradigm in which cognitive flexibility and
agility win the day. The skills needed for analyzing and mobilizing to solve problems from
multiple perspective will require individuals who are cognitively flexible, culturally
sophisticated and able to work collaboratively in groups made up of diverse individuals.
Globalization and its impact on Education
Globalization has a wide ranking potential to influence all sectors of development.
Besides its impact on the pace and pattern of economic development, it also casts its shadow on
the system of education. The impact of globalization and the manner in which the system should
respond to the needs of globalization would require to be studied basically under two broad
heads, as follows:
1. The needed reforms within the educational system lke content, equity, sand excellence,
etc. and
2. The fall out of globalization, which will entail determining strategies relating to the
impending internationalization of education, finance-related issues and privatization of
secondary and higher education.
1. Content of education