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nificant.

The results from a number of studies on teachers in the classroom show that teachers devote over two-thirds of their time in the classroom to boys and at the best only one-third to girls, even when there is an even distribution of the two sexes in the classroom. Research has also shown that teachers' attitudes and expectations towards the two sexes are completely different.

Dale Spender found that teachers (no matter which sex they were) were in general more concerned about boys. They considered boys to be more capable than girls, and they got on better with boys.

Interviews with teachers showed they knew far more about the boys in their classes, they learnt their names sooner and they knew the boys as individuals. When they had difficulty placing a pupil it was always a girl, and to some teachers who were interviewed the girls were often nothing more than an undifferentiated mass.

Underestimated

Girls in school 'learn their lessons well. Dale quotes from Michelle Stanworth who in conducting research on pupils in schools found in her sample that all the girls in a class underestimated their rank as supplied by the teacher, and with the exception of one boy the boys all overestimated their rank in relation to the girls.

The boys in classrooms see girls as a 'despicable' category that they do not belong to. The girls serve as a negative reference group to promote positive self image for the boys. Dale Spender also mentions the extent of sexual harassment of girls in the classroom and also the way in which girls are constantly ridiculed, interrupted and silenced by boys.

In the face of this overwhelming evidence from the teacher and boys of their 'inferiority', girls often retreat, accept their ' inferiority' and assume their 'proper place' Preparations In looking at the theories of prominent educationalists, Dale concludes that all of them have seen girls' education as a preparation fur marriage and motherhood. Jean Jacques Rousseau (the 18th century champion of liberty) stated that women were created for the purpose of entertaining and caring for men. They must be confined and restrained and urged to practice self-sacrifice, in order to acquire that docility which woman requires all her life long for she will always be in subjection to a man.

The Norwood Report of 1943 and the Newsom Report of 1963 both reiterated the need to train girls for their vocation of marriage and motherhood.

Dale Spender also argues that the issue of co-educaas it seems.

From the research of R.R. Dale, who is an authority on co-education, she points out that it is known (and in fact has been known since 1937) that girls perform much better in single-sex schools than they do in mixed-sex schools. Boys on the other hand perform better in coeducational schools.

Real life Educationalists ive never treated this as problematic - it not

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and now 'for our male viewers

tion versus single sex schooling is not as simple