ABSTRACT
Many readers of Winnicott find it easy to accept the idea of transitional objects when illustrated by examples of babies being attached to teddy bears and blankets as comforting substitutes for a parent, but understandably baulk when the concept is extended to explain all artistic production and consumption. Television watching, hi-fis and jacuzzis perhaps (Silverstone, 1993; Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981; Young, 1989), but even applying it to books and reading as the last chapter did can strain credulity. But I want to go further and argue, first, that academic disciplines such as English, maths, physics or computer studies are a form of transitional object and, second, that viewing them in this way gives us a better chance of understanding the marked gender divisions in subject choice that appear first around GCSE and then even more so at ‘A’ level and in higher education. In the next chapter, I suggest that this stereotyping and polarization of subject choice is tied to genderspecific patterns of psychological development and identity formation in which anxiety plays a large part, but in this chapter I concentrate on the meaning of a discipline or subject and aim to show how this grows out of the process of teaching. All of which is preliminary to suggesting that when children move from primary schools, where teaching is person-based, to secondary schools, where it is subject-based, the preconditions of learning are altered which, in turn, affects the sex stereotyping and subject choices which characterize the later stages of education.
