Ever since ‘international development’ became
an area of intellectual enquiry in the period after the Second
European Civil War, there has been an on-going global debate
about the role of education in development. The inclusion
of education in discussions of development is quite in keeping
with the UNDP’s definition of human development, now
viewed as a much broader concept than macro-economic growth.
In addition, and thanks to major UN initiatives, especially
between 1990 and 1995, and despite the competing development
paradigms, such development discourses are no longer gender
neutral. This is not surprising. Discourses surrounding gender
are familiar phenomena of the age of post-modernity. It is
now quite widely accepted that gender as a category of analysis
must be incorporated into the development paradigm and that
development planning must take gender issues into account
to maximize the impact of measures and policies.
Within Jamaica, as is indicated by on-going public discussions,
it is the education of males relative to females, that is
of concern to policy makers, educators and those interested
in gender, education and development There is great concern,
for example, with the issues of male marginalisation and under-achievement.
Yet, there seems to be a clear disjuncture between the general
perception of male marginalisation and under-achievement and
the persistence of male hegemonic masculinity at all levels
of Jamaican society. There are many factors that contribute
to hegemonic masculinity, a term that refers to the culturally
dominant form of masculinity that is constructed in relation
to femininity as well as various subordinated masculinities.
Obviously, the mass media must share a large part of the responsibility
for how young men see themselves; how they construct their
self-identity and masculinity. But the home, peer pressure
and school curricula also play a part in sending out clues
about the preferred masculinity that young males should adopt.
This paper looks at how early history texts contributed to
the perpetuation of hegemonic masculinity. It also shows how
present-day Caribbean historians, many in the UWI’s
Departments of History, have attempted to correct some of
the gender stereotypes by answering the call for gender-differentiated
data in history texts, and the implications of their findings
for gender relations and development in the age of post-modernity.
The paper will also raise questions about the relevance of
such ‘intellectual activism’ within the current
environment of discontent with aspects of Caribbean feminism.
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