ABSTRACT
In a trend common to most western countries, Australia has in recent years experienced an apparent move towards sexual equality in schooling, offering the possibility of a significant change in girls’ lived experiences of schooling (Foster, 1995; 1998; Weiner et al., 1997). This, potential, however, has not been realized because both Australian education policy and curriculum development have failed to address the public-private dialectic in social life and in schooling itself, and men’s and women’s different and asymmetrical relations with that dialectic. The term ‘dialectic’ is used here to emphasize the interconnected and shifting aspects of public and private life, which nevertheless remain fundamentally gendered in character.
