EDUCATION

Overview

Chair:
Martha Colquhoun, Executive
Member, CCLOW; Manitoba.

Speaker:
Mary Beth Dolin, MLA, Manitoba,
for Education Minister, Maureen
Hemphill

At the outset, I want to congratulate the cosponsors, the Canadian Congress for Learning Opportunities for Women, the Canadian Federation of University Women, the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, for arranging such a demanding and pertinent conference as this.

Its theme was anticipated by Alvin Toffler some years ago, in his thought-provoking book, Future Shock, when he predicted such major, radical and swift-changing events in the human condition. Add to this technological and sociological turmoil the dramatically changing role of women in society, and you get some idea of the major issues that confront us.

It is appropriate that your conference is held at this time of year, when young people are just graduating from our educational institutions, and are being confronted with challenges of major proportions. I think very few sights are as satisfying, or as hopeful for the future, as that of witnessing these young people, with proof of academic achievement, completing a major stage in their education. But we must constantly remind them that education is a continuous, lifelong process. Never before have high-school, community-college and university graduates been subjected to such powerful and sweeping changes, and the need for constant education is urgent.

Sometimes it is difficult to persuade children that they really do need to look upon education, and re-education, as a life-long process. We can all sympathize with the father who hung a sign on his front porch: "For sale, new set of encyclopedias, never used. Teen-age son knows everything."

That respected anthropologist, Margaret Mead, succinctly defined the situation. "We must create," she wrote, "new models for adults who can teach their children not what to learn but how to learn, and not what they should be committed to, but the value of commitment."

When it comes to computers and the technology they represent, it is easy to see no one is doing much to encourage women to make a commitment to "own this field of learning and achievement. Most of you have probably seen the ads for the computer games manufactured by Atari and Intellevision. Whom do you see operating the games? Fathers and sons, and in one case, a daughter. Mother is shown, if at all, as hovering in the background. The Intellevision ads with George Plimpton don't even show women on the screen at all.

Anyone who understands how these slick, expensive ads are made will tell you that they are based on careful market research. The attitudes of the market are known, before the ads are made. In other words, the people who make computer games know they can sell them to upper middle class dads, not moms. Just think about where this leaves women, and more important, their daughters. It is men who buy the games, the home computers; and it is the boys, following the role-model behaviour of their fathers and peers who dominate their use, not just at home, but in the electronic game parlours as well.

So, the ads reinforce this pattern. I personally find it I amazing how quickly these subtle patterns of role-playing, based on sex stereotypes, come into play. The time to challenge these stereotyped images, of course, is now, before they grow deep roots.

An effective place of challenge is the school. In Manitoba, we have scarcely begun. Two microcomputer pilot projects are currently being sponsored by the department and school divisions. In Brandon School Division, children in grades 4 to 9, involving a total of 160 students, are gaining computer literacy by direct interaction with machines which have a variety of learning games. Forty-one per cent of the students in this program are female, but that figure does not represent any bias; it is simply the number of girls in the classes that are taking part.