ABSTRACT
In 1987 the National Policy for the Education of Girls was launched, the culmination of nearly two decades of attention to gender-based inequity in schooling outcomes. Much of the initial work was based on the identification of girls as educationally disadvantaged, a position that is in itself problematic (Yates, 1993). By the 1990s the orientation has changed to an examination of the ways in which gender operates in schools to the detriment of both boys and girls in educational experience and post-school options. Many of the arguments that were used to present the case for girls needing special treatment in education have been recycled by the ‘boys and education’ lobby. Consequently the popular press has carried many articles focusing on gender as a fundamental educational divide, either operating for the boys or for the girls but inevitably biased towards one or the other. This chapter investigates these tensions within the context of one Australian primary school.
