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.