Kangaroo Kids: Mommy Papa Day
Recently the School had a Mommy Papa day – where children were to be sent to school dressed as Mom and Dad. Nothing wrong as role playing is always a good thing at learning for the small kids. Moreover, the school’s way of doing things in a fun way – this was going to be just an addition to it.
However, recently when I saw images from that day that were hoisted on the school site it was a bit disappointing. It seemed as if the role playing itself was based on some kind of gender stereotyping – which in some ways is quite unacceptable particularly if such things are going to have impact on impressionable minds.
When there is a continuous effort on part of educated class to break out of such gender sterotyping, it is unfortunate that such roles get reinforced in the school – and that too the kind of Kangroo Kids !
The various images showed:
1) Girls doing household works – like cooking, washing clothes etc
2) In contrast the Boys sat in ‘offices’ doing work on chair table and computer.
3) There were only two images of girls at ‘office’
4) Considering that perhaps these photographs were not all, when I asked my daughter whether she had been made to sit in front of computer / ‘office’ on that day – she said – she was ‘busy in kitchen and washing clothes‘ !
I would guess that when we call ourselves ‘modern’ – when we – at least the educated middle / professional classes take pride in having imbibed values of equality and much of that can be seen at workplaces – where women are taking men on equal footing at fields of engineering, medicine, science / technology, research & education, entrepreneurship etc. – where we think that the gender based discriminations have been relegated to backwaters of India – it is somewhat surprising that such things continue in the mindset of modernist schools !
Among the many images –
It is perhaps a mans world – where the psychology of the society has been moulded in such a fashion that the gender stereotyping of roles has become ingrained in the minds of the people. It doesn’t matter how many times they have seen the masterchef Sanjeev Kapoor on the television or that they have been happy with success of women like President Pratibha Patil, Police Official Kiran Bedi or Chief of MNC Indra Nooyi. (Even mother of our daughter is an engineer working in a technology organisation !)
Equal opportunity is not just a matter of intellectual discussion, but gets transformed in small measures starting from such small things. I only hope that the schools in India would come out from such stereotype mindsets whether it be in actual role playing or depicting of such things in school textbooks.
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