Silenced Voices and Extraordinary Conversations: Re-Imagining Schools

by Michelle Fine, Lois Weis

This volume is a collection of classic essays - as urgently needed now as when they first appeared - on social class, race, gender, and schooling crafted over the course of two decades. The authors invite all of us to take a serious look at the paradox of public education - the ways in which urban schools reproduce social inequalities while, at the same time, serve as sites for learning at its most transformative and compelling. A must-read for all those educators who believe that "we can no longer afford to cede this space to policymakers who know little of the life of a classroom, the curiosity of a child, and the moral imperatives of teaching for critical citizenship."

Genres: Education

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 2003

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a good book. It provides a quick look at some research by two seriously interesting educational researchers. I'm only going to look at a chapter by one of these two authors, mostly because I've written quite a lot about the other, having reviewed many of Lois Weis's books before. The research Weis talks about here is directly taken from her 'Working Class Without Work', (but it would also be good to read her 'Class Reunion' if you were on a roll with her stuff) - I've reviewed both of those books here and found both well worth reading and would recommend them without hesitation.

Now, mostly I want to talk about the second chapter of this one, 'Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The missing discourse of desire'. I've never really thought too much about how sex education is presented to students in schools. When I was in the first year of high school - aged 12 or 13 (god, how many lifetimes ago does that feel?) - we had a science teacher who took us for sex education. He looked like a surfer and had long blonde hair and a long blonde beard - sort of a shock of white. He said it was likely that we had lots of questions about sex but that we were too embarrassed to ask any of those questions in front of the other kids in the class. So, he got us all to write something on a piece of paper, even if we had nothing to ask, and to then hand these up to the front of the class, and then he sat reading over our questions. And as he read his face became increasingly red, which was pretty amusing being framed amongst all that white hair. Something we laughed about after the class.

Sex education when I was at school invariably presented sex as exclusively heterosexual. In fact, I don't remember any discussion of homosexuality at all in any subject at high school. All of which strikes me as a little odd now. But one of the things this chapter makes clear is that even while discussing heterosexual sex as 'normal', sex education often presented sex as something young women must both protect themselves from and, by implication, also protect young men from too. Masculine sexual desire is presented as both normal and as all-consuming. The implication being that once aroused these young men are barely responsible for their actions. And since the consequences for young women are potentially so great - pregnancy, rape, social stigma, death - sex education for young women focuses exclusively on the threat that sexuality and desire (always someone else's desire) presents to them.

Now, I have daughters. You don't need to tell me the reality of these concerns. The point is, however, that we are doing a huge disservice to young women by discussing sexuality only as a threat. Not least because this will most likely be significantly different from their lived experience of sexuality. And even in leaving aside the forms of sexuality that are not the straightest of the straight - even purely for hetero-normative young women, their early experiences of sexuality are likely to be rather nice and not felt as purely a threat. And ignoring this lived reality doesn't make it go away.

This chapter is written about the US and so it is about a much more conservative country than Australia. I guess it is possible that in some of our private or Catholic schools abstinence could be presented as the only form of sex education… but even then I would be very surprised. This part of the chapter was just another of those 'dear god, America…' experiences for me. And doesn't America give the rest of the world so many of those.

In other ways the chapter was too clearly identical to Australia. Making women responsible for male desire is as Australian an attitude as it is an American one. But what is interesting here is that even while women are made responsible for male desire, they are not taught that they can be agents of their own desire - that is, that they can say yes, and that they can have some control over what they say yes to. I think this is key. By denying that women should be agents of their own desire (and be taught this as normal and worthwhile), and not just the objects of someone else's desire, we deny them their humanity.

And it is worse than that too, because we are also teaching them that being objectified is, in fact, normal. That means girls are constructed as needing to be constantly focused on responding to male sexuality, when we would have a much better world if they were more concerned about their own sexuality - including their own needs and desires. Because young women are presented as passive objects of male sexuality the excuse that is presented that males 'thought' they had consent seems almost reasonable. But such questions of consent would hardly be an issue if we understood women as being active agents of their desire. That is, our sexist notions of the sexual roles of male and females go some way to explain the social consequences of dysfunctional sexual interactions. The denial of female desire can only then make females objects of male sexual desire and therefore the discourse of sexuality that is presented as normal is that desire is normal for males and a threat to females as the human binary - and that such 'common sense' is designed to be taught to females as a way for them to be safe. Whereas, they would be much more likely to be safe if the normality of their own desire was discussed with them and of their right to act up to the limits of that desire fully informed of how to control the consequence of such - that is, contraceptive advice, as well as teaching boys that their desire does not justify rape.

The best of this book is how it shows both the worst and then the best of what can happen in schools around what are difficult conversations - here I've focused only on sexuality, but they also discuss gender, race and class. This book shows that many teachers and schools are doing remarkable work trying to overcome the silences that are perceived as normal in educational discourses and also to provide those silenced with voices.