ABSTRACT

For most children, schooling represents their fi rst contact with a governmental institution of social control. As such, schools provide an important setting for transmitting socially held values. These social values include beliefs about gender-appropriate behavior, and most of these lessons are transmitted informally through school structures, teachers’ comments, curricula, and students themselves. These gender lessons are particularly important in America, where gender is an organizing cultural principle (Bem, 1993) that infl uences academic and vocational performance and choices, family roles, sexual behavior, and other aspects of daily life such as “polite” behavior. Within a patriarchal and heterosexist society that purports to have prohibited gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment, we might question what lessons students learn about gender and how they do so.