Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

on parenting classes for fathers. A cartoon figure of a puzzled male student asks
the apposite question: ‘Why has the involvement of men in parenting become
a focus of attention?’ (p. 48). Teachers might conceivably use this as a cue for
classroom discussion.
However, textbooks seldom relate Japan’s situation in this regard to any wider
context. The Tokyo Shoseki text features a graph comparing the workforce
participation of Japanese women with their counterparts in America, Sweden
and Germany (p. 48), but this is exceptional. The plight of women in poorer Asian
countries is highlighted, with Malala Yousafzai featuring on the cover of the same
textbook. To be sure, the plight of Pakistani women and girls is hardly comparable
with the situation of their Japanese counterparts. But when the proportion of
female students at Tokyo University, the country’s premier institution of higher
education, is stuck well below 20 per cent (University of Tokyo, 2017), Japan surely
has little cause for complacency.
In China, where Mao Zedong famously declared that ‘women hold up half the sky’,
female liberation is officially depicted as a key achievement of Communist rule.
However, research by Ross in the early 2000s indicated persistent assumptions
regarding ‘the gendered division of labour and role patterns’, especially in
instructional materials for young children (2006, p. 43). In fieldwork in Shaanxi
Province, she found that all ‘scientists, workers, peasants and soldiers’ portrayed
in Social Studies texts were men, while ‘100 per cent of teachers and 75 per
cent of service personnel’ were women. Only 5 per cent of characters ‘named or
central to a storyline’ were female. Males also predominated in a mathematics
textbook reviewed by Ross, appearing ‘in privileged settings and occupational
roles that… implicitly derogate female mathematical abilities’ (p. 43). A more
recent analysis of the situation of urban Chinese women (more educated and
‘liberated’ than their rural sisters) suggests that official discourse on women’s
social role remains highly state-centred and utilitarian, legitimating a social
order still highly skewed against women’s interests (Fincher, 2014). Meanwhile,
curricular representations of political leadership, reflecting reality outside the
school gates, 37 implicitly depict public decision-making as an overwhelmingly
male preserve.
37 The top echelons of the Communist Party are overwhelmingly male-dominated, while
Politburo Standing Committee, China’s top decision-making body, remains exclusively male.
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Chapter 3: East Asia