ABSTRACT
In some senses, all children are Other in school1. Officially, schooling is geared to them and their needs, but the power lies elsewhere. Their knowledge does not count; their expertise is not valued. The point of education is to get children to understand and enjoy other, more formal kinds of knowledge, to get them to abandon their common-sense theories of how the world works and to adopt those more generally agreed upon by the teachers. In school, children’s time is structured and circumscribed and the spaces they may inhabit are limited, both by time and by their lack of power (Shilling, 1991). In discussing what happens to girls in school it is important to remember that they are an even more subordinate section of a group that is already positioned as Other in this setting, and that, furthermore, they are not the only group which is Othered in this way.
