Over the past few years, we have witnessed what Weiner, Arnot and David (1997) refer to as a "moral panic" over claims, largely promulgated through the media, that boys are suffering from new forms of educational disadvantage. Common representations are "girls are outperforming boys"; "girls are succeeding at the expense of boys"; "boys are struggling"; "boys are in deep trouble".

This What about the boys! refrain is echoing internationally. The report (Elgqvist-Saltzman, 1995 ) of an international conference on gender and education held in June, 1995 at the University of Umea, Sweden noted

In Australia, the NSW debate has focussed almost exclusively on HSC results, in what Gilbert (1996, 8) refers to as "a narrow reading of assessment figures". Moreover, a rapidly developing academic literature is providing an analysis and critique of claims of male disadvantage (for example, Connell, 1994; Foster, 1995, 1996a, 1996b; Gilbert and Gilbert, 1995; Weiner, Arnot and David, 1997; Yates, 1996). An entire 1995 issue of the Swedish journal, Lararutbildning och forskning i Umea (Teacher education and research in Umea) was devoted to the subject and at least two international collections are planned or recently published (Mackinnon, Elgqvist-Saltzman, & Prentice, 1998; Stone). This literature demonstrates that there is very little common ground between academic research and populist discussions of gender differences in schooling and its outcomes.

That there is such a populist discourse has been demonstrated by Weiner et. al. (1997, 1). A common theme, as the academic literature observes, is that in the new populist discourse male failure in education is posited as a corollary of female success. Weiner et. al. (1997) note, however, that "although there is little evidence that girls' improvement in examinations has been at the expense of boys, the predominant gender discourse in the mid 1990s is that of male underachievement (authors' emphasis).

The construction of boys' continuing advantage in education, particularly in relation to curriculum participation, use of a range of school resources and post-school outcomes, as disadvantage is a rhetorical twist which has been used to great effect in simplistic and emotive accounts. These accounts have been stated and restated by a handful of very vocal individuals, who have been content to argue their case through the media, rather than in academic or other professional forums. Gilbert (1998:21) describes this as "a conservative and potentially divisive men's movement, which rejected feminism and wanted boys' work to be seen as separate from the broader project of the democratic reform of schooling". The result is a climate in which the notion of male disadvantage can be stretched to extremes. For example, Michael Brown who teaches at a prestigious boys' independent school, argues in the journal, Gifted, (1994) that we are creating a new "underclass": gifted males! He urges that advocacy is needed for the white, male, Caucasian, non-migrant child.

Connell (1994:2) describes this process in the following way:

Further, Connell (1995:208) persuasively argues that this process which he calls "masculinity therapy" relies on "a redefinition of power by shifting from the public world to the inner world of emotion" and (p.210) "a preoccupation with emotional relationships, a speculative method and a satisfaction with snippets of evidence".

Media statements such as "girls are outperforming boys" have become commonplace. They are inaccurate in several ways. First, they confuse performance or measured achievement, with participation, that is the number and composition of students. Second, they ignore the question of the inequities in post-school rewards for girls for the same or better achievement at school. These claims are typically based on the outstanding achievements of a small, select group of girls, not representative of the diverse female population, and ignore complex within-gender differences for both boys and girls. Most important, they obscure the crucial point that to date, girls' school achievement has had no positive impact on post-school career prospects for them. The latter have in fact deteriorated (Daniel, 1993; Korosi, Parkinson, Rimmer and Rimmer, 1993).

The fact that nearly one-third of girls face extremely limited post-school career prospects was underlined by Dr Ken Boston, the NSW Director-General of the Department of Education and Training, in a 1998 speech to NSW Secondary Principals. He noted (1998:4) that "the young people least likely to be participating in education and training are in fact 15-19 year old females. In 1996, 28% of girls were neither in education nor training nor full-time employment and this is compounded by socio-economic status and the perpetuation of intergenerational poverty".

There has been a public debate in New South Wales which has tended to focus narrowly on Higher School Certificate Tertiary Entrance Rank scores. The theme that "girls are succeeding at the expense of boys" was strongly put earlier in 1996 at the time of the HSC results. However, the precise nature and reasons for observed gender differences are extremely complex and require caution in their interpretation. Because of the complex interaction between student choice, changing scaling procedures and other factors such as the collapse of the youth labour market in 1991 causing an unprecedented increase in male retention, and its differential effects on (different groups of) boys' and (different groups of) girls' perceptions of the relevance of schooling credentials to post-school life, any conclusions must be speculative. The selective use of statistics as well as a narrow definition of achievement have encouraged simplistic conclusions and the mythology that girls-as-a-bloc are now beating boys-as-a-bloc.

The 1996 Report on the Scaling of the 1995 Higher School Certificate (Cooney, 1996a) shows that contrary to a popular view, the charge of a serious gender gap is unfounded. In fact, until 1995 girls were under represented in the top 2% of the distribution, being 5% below their enrolment share of 52.8% of the candidature, which occasioned no charges of gender bias. In 1995, girls were 53% of the top 5% of the distribution, equivalent to their enrolment share. 1997 was the first year that a girl topped 4-Unit Mathematics in NSW, which led to media charges of "girls beating boys in maths".

Overall there is a mean TER difference of 8 points in favour of girls, which remained the same from 1994 to 1995, despite popular accounts of a "widening gender gap". In the overall candidature, the female:male ratio is 1.12:1 and the average female:male TER is 1.32:1.

The reasons for girls' slightly stronger average performance are not clear. Possible explanations include differential recession-induced retention patterns (Cooney, 1996b; Foster, 1995; Weiner, Arnot and David, 1997); gender differences in motivation for subject choice (Elsworth and Harvey-Beavis, 1995; Foster, 1995; Teese, Davies, Charlton and Polesel, 1995) and consequent overall changes in boys' and girls' orientation to schooling as a "critical filter" in post-school life chances and choices (Foster, 1995; 1996b). Weiner et. al. (1997: 627) identify "a crisis within middle-class masculinity that is fuelling the educational discourse of male disadvantage ... when 'proper' jobs do not appear, male students take refuge in a counter-culture of misbehaviour in schools". Conversly, girls' schooling achievement is greatest in areas of high unemployment (NSW Board of Studies, 1996). The literature review conducted for this report shows that these differences constitute international trends.

It is clear, however, that there has been little change in girls' participation in subjects such as Physics, higher level Maths and Technology subjects, that there are vast differences within gender and that girls' higher average schooling achievement is having no impact on post-school employment patterns. These points are discussed briefly below.

There has been a tendency for simplistic claims based on unexamined assumptions about gender differences to be offered in place of more rigorous inquiry. For example, generalisations such as "girls are better than boys at English", "girls are more conscientious than boys", "girls are taking more leadership positions in school and getting more out of school", "all boys care about is sport; they have no interest in schoolwork" ignore the complexities of the lives of different groups of students and their orientation to schooling. These claims are rarely well substantiated, if at all. These kinds of "data-free" claims also ignore research in the field. For instance, Martino (1995:74) challenges the common assumption that boys have more reading and literacy problems than girls. He cites a range of recent research which shows that in fact, there is no significant difference in the prevalence of reading disability between boys and girls. He notes that while boys' overt and disruptive behaviours mean that they are referred more often for assessment, reading recovery programs and counselling (in the Sydney region they are 80%-90% of such referrals), recent research "highlights the need to examine educational and teaching practices in terms of their capacity to make invisible the extent of girls' reading difficulties".

At the time of the 1995 HSC, it was widely believed that the inclusion of one unit of English and one Humanities subject from KLA Group Two would produce a discriminatory advantage for girls. For instance, the NSW Green Paper (McGaw, 1996:110) makes two incorrect generalisations in the following statement:

In fact, an analysis by the Head of the Technical Scaling Committee (Cooney, 1996b) shows that the new rules relating to English and KLA Group Two did not affect the gender balance in results significantly, and indeed, in 3 Unit English the boys' mean of 30.8 is slightly ahead of the girls' mean of 30.6. Indeed, one might conclude from the Sydney Theatre Company's decision in 1996 to include in twenty-one productions, only three plays written by women and one directed by a woman, that men have far greater English-related aptitude than women!

Possible reasons for the expected gender differences not eventuating are a reduction in the impact of the strong intercorrelation of male-dominated subjects such as Maths and Physics which previously has advantaged boys (Cooney, 1996b; MacCann, 1993:22; Teese et.al. 1995) and, not surprisingly, as Cooney (1996b;2) suggests "the new rules produced changes in the effort expended by boys in English and their KLA Group Two subject(s)".

An extensive NSW evaluation of the outcomes of girls' schooling (Department of School Education, 1994:ii) concluded that

The Evaluation (1994:ii) identified some of the factors contributing to continuing unequal outcomes for girls as being: girls' greater family and domestic responsibilities; the fact that few teachers have a strong understanding of gender equity, and gender issues are nor widely addressed in classroom practice; that although girls reported a wide range of incidents of sex-based harassment, the majority of school executive believe that sex-based harassment does not exist in their schools.

Because they are a small, select group, the girls who do take male-dominated subjects achieve well. However, their levels of participation continue to be far lower than those of boys. Girls' participation in higher level Maths and Physics has actually declined from 1991 to 1995 (McGaw, 1996:137 and 139). Their participation in Technology-related subjects remains at about 5% of that of boys. They are virtually absent from classes in Electronics, Industrial Technology and Engineering Science.

Research by Daniel (1993) and others in a number of professions and occupations reveals that women have not made advances towards equality in the public sphere at all, and may have gone backwards in some fields. For instance in higher education, the proportion of women above Senior Lecturer remained static at 13% from 1988 to 1996 (Probert, Ewer and Whiting, 1998:21). Australia has the lowest proportion of women in business and management in the industrialised world, and at 13% one of the lowest representations of women in parliament. In the domestic sphere, Australian government research (Bittman, 1995; Wolcott and Glezer, 1995) and Poole and Langan-Fox, 1997) show that unpaid work continues to fall disproportionately to women regardless of wage rates, education or husband's income. In employment fields with a strong masculine culture, the percentage of women remains extremely low. For example, the number of women in Engineering has plateaued at 13% (National Centre for Women, 1995). Butler (1997) shows that while full-time work declined more for women than for men, women continue to be clustered in a narrow range of part-time, less well remunerated occupations.

Women's full-time earnings rose by only 2%, from 76% to 78%, between 1982 and 1996, and the earnings of all female employees fell from 66% to 65% in the same period (Probert et.al. 1998:5). There are also large gender differences in income for young Australians (Korosi, Parkinson, Rimmer and Rimmer, 1993). Although the degree of gender-based occupational segregation decreased from 1988 to 1993, the pay gap between young men and women has actually widened, especially among the young rich, where the gender difference is marked.

Readers are directed towards the extensive research reported in the NSW Evaluation (DSE, 1994); a report of the National Board of Employment, Education and Training (1995); Teese et.al. (1995) and NSW Board of Studies (1996) to gain a comprehensive picture of the differences experienced within gender and of the disparities between gender which continue to advantage boys. The consensus of this research is that girls' success at the end of schooling is not general across the whole state or across all groups of girls. For example, girls from lower socio-economic groups and Aboriginal girls experience marked disadvantages in educational outcomes. The improved school performance of some girls is so far not translating into improved employment opportunities for women. Boys continue to derive better quality rewards from schooling than girls, despite lesser performance at school. Girls' greater retention at school is not benefiting them, partly because they are over-represented in subjects which lack effective vocational linkages. Girls are not gaining advantages over boys through superior performance in English, for example, or say, Life Management or Languages.

Both the recent Australian and international research literature indicates that gender differences have emerged in students' orientation to schooling as a credential, and in post-school rewards. Girls are deriving inferior post-school rewards for the same or better achievement than boys. Thus, in judging the value of students' use of schooling, it is necessary to distinguish three different aspects: performance/achievement, participation and post-school outcomes.

The collapse of the youth labour market has affected boys and girls in different ways. Kenway and Willis (1995,14) note that "there has been a severe decline in full-time teenage employment opportunities for girls so that the majority of teenage girls who are not in school are either unemployed or underemployed".

Teese, Davies, Charlton and Polesel (1995, 107) point out

Teese's and other research shows that girls' greater use of and reliance on school is not benefiting them, partly because they are over-represented in subjects which lack effective vocational linkages. This research makes the point strongly that subject choice within the curriculum hierarchy is crucial.

Teese et.al. (1995, 3) further point out

Girls are less confident than boys either about jobs at the end of school or careers after further training -- despite the fact that girls complete school more often and have a somewhat higher rate of transition to university.

There is very possibly a link between this comparative lack of confidence in the vocational outcomes of school and the widely anecdotally reported broader view which girls take of school life and the role of the school. Girls are more likely than boys to endorse developmental, ethical and enrichment goals, while boys concentrate on the "main game" of academic results and mapping out a career. These differences are mirrored in the different orientations of men and women to the concept "career" and to the notion of a life path (Poole and Langan-Fox, 1997).

(Teese et.al., 1995:3) conclude:

In the same vein, Yates and Leder (1996, 41) provide a critical analysis of the use of HSC results as an indicator of success at school:

A consideration of Year 12 results against changing education/employment patterns on the one hand, and different gendered life patterns on the other, gives one vivid illustration of some of the complexity that lies behind that seemingly innocuous term 'outcome indicator'. One conclusion is that we need informed discussion and debate about the measures we use as indicators.

Yates (1993, 32) elaborates on the relationship between gender and social class in relation to post-school employment patterns:

Yates cites Williams' (1987, 115) finding that the participation rates of transition to higher education declined for those from less well off families between the late 1970s and early 1980s, and declined more for females from low socio-economic status families than for any other group.

And more recent work by Williams (1993, 27) shows that females enter higher education at lower rates than males. Much of the apparent improvement in female participation rates has been due to the "upgrading" of nurse education and teacher education through their transfer into higher education. If nursing enrolments are discounted, female participation rates from 1980 to 1989 actually declined from 47% to 44%. Male rates have remained fairly stable. Female enrolments in NSW Technical and Further Education have actually declined.

Graetz (1991, 8) observes that "gender differences in higher education are more apparent and persistent than in basic schooling". Teese et.al. (1995), Yates and Leder (1996) and Graetz (1991, 8) have all demonstrated that for males, ability determines length of tertiary study and qualifications. For females, on the other hand, ability in basic schooling is less important than social background. Thus while basic schooling shows the effects of educational expansion and efforts to maximise participation and retention, it is in tertiary attainments that the greatest gender differences remain, even without taking into account qualitative differences in the types of courses undertaken. Further, women generally receive lower returns for ability, especially language ability.

It appears, then, that for many boys, unlike girls, the 'critical filter' for getting a job is no longer at the level of schooling which seems increasingly to be irrelevant to many boys' aspirations, but is delayed beyond school to the job market itself. On the other hand, neither the critical filter of school, nor that of the employment market, is rewarding a large number of girls commensurate with their school achievement, if at all.

We need to identify the barriers to girls' full participation in the whole range of curriculum areas offered in schooling. Further, we need to understand why there is no clear nexus between schooling achievement and post-school pathways for girls and why these pathways remain so restricted and limiting for girls, even the highest achieving. To this end, the new critiques of masculinity and schooling are welcome. These include theoretical analyses of the concept of male advantage as opposed to the populist view of male disadvantage (Eveline, 1998), Connell's (1994:4) concept of the resulting "patriarchal dividend" that accrues to men and Mac An Ghaill's (1994) analysis of schooling as a "masculinizing agency" which reflects "a concept of hegemonic masculinity which is constructed in relation to, and against, femininity and subordinated forms of masculinity".

Gilbert (1998:28) questions the popular view that boys' performance in literacy and English constitutes a real disadvantage for boys:

In addition, the concept of the "lived curriculum" of schooling (Foster, 1994) suggests that girls and boys are engaged in rather different projects at school -- that they live ostensibly the same curriculum in somewhat differing ways. Many boys see school primarily as the avenue to paid work, whatever that may be. The present overwhelming instrumental emphasis on work-related competencies (where the nature of "work" is not interrogated) is not helping to broaden that view. Girls, on the other hand, see a range of present and future priorities. They seem to see participation in school life and its responsibilities, including learning, as more relevant and important than boys do. Boys, on the other hand it seems, want to distinguish their masculinity from girls' diligence, to dissociate themselves from the "good girls". On this point, the NSW Evaluation (1994:61) observes that in some schools "there is a pervading culture of anti-intellectualism fuelled by significant numbers of boys, resulting in severe disruption of learning and denigration of the academic achievements of both boys and girls". Further, girls said they would not answer questions in class, or appear to try to succeed, as they were inhibited by the likely reaction of boys.

Echoing the idea that education into the twenty-first century is "dangerous terrain" for women (Mackinnon et.al., 1998), Gilbert (1998:29) suggests that current issues of gender and schooling are located in "dangerous territory". She comments (p.29):

Certainly a significant factor in the recent politicization of these issues is the nature of the contested areas themselves and the casting of girls as interlopers in high status educational terrain assumed to be the natural preserve of males, namely mathematics and science (Foster, 1996a; 1998). One wonders about the news value of girls beating boys in Life Management or Child and Family Studies, for example!

Elsewhere, (Foster, 1997), I explore the implications of gender and schooling issues for the emerging field of civics and citizenship education. They are, however, issues which need a great deal more investigation at the student level. They also need to be comprehensively addressed in curriculum change and in school-community programs. Most important, both male and female students have a right to constructively explore questions of gender relations in society in programs which are informed by the work of leading educational theorists in this field.

The remainder of this paper explores the argument, elaborated in Foster (1994; 1996), that for women and girls, pursuing equal educational and citizenship rights, entails entering a particular space - social, psychological and existential - between and beyond that which is prescribed for women, that is, women's "place", and that which is proscribed to women. This is a space of lived experience, mediating between private and public spheres, where women and girls attempt to negotiate the conflicting, contradictory (at best), or violent and destructive (at worst) demands of a neo-liberal framework of equality, a framework which retains a masculinist subject at its centre (Leck, 1987; Martin, 1991). Both the individual learner-subject and the epistemological foundations of the curriculum are male-defined (Martin, 1981a, b; 1988). Girls are to be given equal opportunity to achieve parity in an education system which is normatively masculine.

The notion of a space is particularly applicable to a discussion of educational equality reforms. This space embraces both the actual, physical space of social relations, and a conceptual space which has cultural, ideological and experiential dimensions. "Space" evokes meanings of sexual politics, of interconnection, and of positionality. It has a further sense of physical admission: allowing entry or access, and making room for, in an enclosed space. This is the sense inferred in equal opportunity provisions for women and girls, for example, in employment and education. There is a second more conceptual sense of space as representation and validation: to be admitted is to be fully recognised, acknowledged, and further, accepted as legitimately having a place. Feminist theorising of difference, however, has shown that the first sense of admission in no way guarantees the second sense, of actually having a place.

Women's lived experience in the space-between revolves around two conflicting discourses: first, the neo-liberal discourse of equality with men-'a woman's place is everywhere' and, second, the discourse of male supremacy which constructs women as transgressors on male territory-'this is not your place'. The conflict of these two discourses makes the space-between a site of both desire and threat for women: the desire evoked by the promise of equal opportunities in a man's world, and the threat of punishment and violation which inevitably accompanies women's attempts to make that promise reality, to live the discourse of equality. Schoolgirls are aware of this contradiction when they make statements such as 'I believe that girls can do anything' and 'I believe in equality for women', but I wouldn't want to do it', speaking of careers in traditionally male-dominated fields (Foster, 1984). Of course, now many young women will easily say, 'sure women have equality', believing in 'presumptive equality' (Foster, 1995). However, that belief does not match up with the reality of most young women's lives.

The patriarchal power relations of schooling, and their connection with the public-private dialectic in society make the lived curriculum of schools a complex site of both desire and threat for girls. Equality-directed curriculum reforms require of girls that they attempt to transpose themselves from private realm status to a relatively different position as the equals of males in the public realm of the school. In this process, girls' status is defined and redefined as the "other" in relation to males, in various ways which frequently define girls physically or sexually in terms of their bodies, and constitute reminders of difference. This central aspect of the space-between is a phenomenon distinct from, although clearly related to, the issue of girls' experience of a paradigmatically male-centred overt curriculum (Foster, 1992; Gilligan, 1990:6; Rich, 1977:232;), and distinct also from the "malestream" epistemological foundations of the curriculum (Martin, 1981a; O'Brien, 1984).

A spectrum of prohibition constrains women's movement away from private realm status, or what is here referred to as "women's place": the sphere of the personal, the domestic and intimate, so-called "private life", of care and nurturance of others, characterised by unpaid and undervalued work.

The barriers women encounter when they attempt to move beyond their "place", suggest clearly that such a move is in fact prohibited at profound psychic, structural and institutional levels of society (Cockburn, 1991). Prohibition occurs across a range of experiences, encompassing male employment bastions, to the area of sexuality, for example, the prohibition on women's refusing sexual exploitation, sexual harassment, and sexual violence. It is hardly surprising then, that Australian Bureau of Crime Statistics show that women's reporting of rape did not increase in the decade from 1983 to 1993, despite the efforts of the Bureau and many other organisations to encourage the reporting of rape. And women surveyed in the Australian study, "A woman's view" (1992) believed strongly that violence, in particular domestic violence, was the price to be paid for changes in their status in society towards greater equality.

Both the idea and the concrete reality of public woman violates public-private norms, requiring women to give up the (dubious) protection of the private sphere, and expose themselves to the threat of violence in the public sphere. Similarly, for girls to take up the promises of reforms towards equality in education, in their present form, entails the threat of violence in one form or another. The space-between describes the relationship between women's attempts to gain equal entry to male terrain, and the prohibition exercised against these attempts. There is also an important epistemological dimension concerning the implications of women's and girls' experiences in the space-between for issues of knowledge and curriculum change. And finally, the space-between is an analytic construct developed to concretise and explore girls' experiences of schooling, and to give them a place. This construct has several themes or dimensions, which include both normative and behavioural aspects, and which are reinforced by ideological and symbolic structures of power, and relations of ruling which alienate women and their experience (Smith, 1990). These themes are elaborated in Foster (1996; 1997). This chapter takes up one theme in detail, and it is the idea that girls' and women's place in education fundamentally centres on the expectation that they will be caretakers of males, and of masculinity, supporting the maintenance of male primacy and privilege in education.

Women's responsibility for unpaid domestic work and childcare is fundamental to the space-between. However, the critical aspect of the notion of a woman's place concerns caretaking. Although there has been a blurring of the public-private distinction, the contemporary imperative for women to take primary responsibility for caring work, which I refer to as "caretaking" is the direct product of the public-private distinction.

The phenomenon of girls as caretakers of boys in the classroom, has not received any extended, formal discussion in Australian education policy, although Lewis (1990) discusses this dynamic in relation to the university classroom setting. It is, however, one of the most powerful, albeit subtle, determinants of girls' day-to-day schooling experience. It is powerful because of its location in the public-private nexus, and specifically, as part of the unspoken sexual contract whereby the patriarchal meaning of femininity entails the provision of service, sexual and otherwise, to men (Pateman, 1988:126). Within the sexual contract, the functions of caring, nurturance and emotional support are seen as women's functions. Women, as Benhabib (1987:95) puts it, are the "housekeepers of the emotions". Men may carry out these functions but they are valued differentially according to whether they are done by men or women. Regrettably, curriculum reform in Australia has neglected an examination of the public-private dialectic in the curriculum, either in terms of curriculum content areas, or in the curriculum as it is lived by both female and male students.

The injunction placed upon girls to be caretakers of the learning environment, as well as persons in it, has a further normative sense which results in adverse consequences for girls and women when the norm is flouted. Furthermore, the equality discourse in girls' education produces what I will go on to describe as desire for equality which is tantamount to a flouting of the caretaking norm.

That male power and privilege are taken to be both subjective and objective reality explains why, despite a wealth of documented Australian evidence of girls' subordinate status to that of boys in education, the interests of males nevertheless continue to be of prior importance to those of females. This has been dramatically demonstrated in Australia over the past few years by a media-led campaign spearheaded by a handful of men, which incorrectly asserted that girls are now beating boys at maths and science. The possibility that girls might be outstripping boys on their own terrain was one which could not be tolerated and quickly led to a parliamentary enquiry (which had never been instigated to address the inequalities evident in girls' education), a widespread push for a "Boys Education Strategy", and a plethora of programs to address boys' "educational disadvantage" and help them to regain their supremacy in the high-status curriculum areas. By contrast, boys' lesser skills in, for example, the care of children and domestic work, have never been identified as a problem for them, or for women.

These discussions of boys and their education are atheoretical (Foster, 1996), ignoring the social and educational context of gendered power relations. Instead, they rest on the shaky ground of presumptive equality (Foster, 1995).

The refrain,What about the boys! is effectively achieving a swift reassertion of male educational interests as prior, in the face of girls' perceived advances into male terrain. By contrast, male interests had earlier been strongly bolstered by a construction which emphasised girls as lacking, rather than viewing boys themselves as being advantaged (Eveline, 1994).

The curriculum and practices of schooling maintain a social reality which endorses the injunction that women should be the providers of care. The pervasiveness of this social reality means that a perceived conflict with the rights and interests of men is created in any educational setting, which seems to advocate in a major way, the needs and interests of women. This conflict is often keenly felt by women themselves, and it has been a significant aspect of the What about the boys! campaign in Australia. This has resulted in a recasting of the issues concerning gender in education, primarily in terms of resources and benefits: too many are going to girls at the expense of boys, who are constructed as equally the victims of patriarchy as girls. This construction has succeeded despite the well-documented comparative positions of boys and girls in schools, including matters of differential resourcing, in terms of teacher time and attention, physical space, and equipment and facilities.

It is, however, the unexpressed subtext of the What about the boys! refrain which is important, and relates directly to the expectation that women will be caretakers of men. In this subtext, notions of equality for girls entail taking something very crucial away from boys. What is seen to be taken from boys is their supremacy as learners, as well as the caretaking resources of women and girls, to which boys are assumed to be entitled.

So an unspoken question is, what would happen to boys if girls do become boys' equals and stop being their caretakers? Interestingly, during this backlash period in Australia, there has been no acknowledgment that girls' equal or better achievement in male-dominated subjects would actually be beneficial for boys in that it would give them an opportunity to see girls in a new, healthier light as peers and equals. This issue raises one of the most profound aspects of the space-between: that girls' and boys' schooling experiences are situated in what Alison Griffith and Dorothy Smith (1987:96) refer to as a mothering discourse. This discourse, they suggest, operates according to a "paradigm of the ideal mother", which can be traced back to Rousseau's prescriptions for Sophie's primary function as Emile's helpmate and nurturer in Emile.

For Australian schoolgirls, this paradigm is expressed in a constellation of required activities, for example, moderating the behaviour of boys, softening the classroom atmosphere, being "good girls", and not exhibiting the kinds of undisciplined behaviours which are taken to be "natural" for boys and which often gain sympathetic attention and resources for them. By contrast, there is no similar expectation for boys to be carers or nurturers. Indeed, it seems that boys and girls are involved in two quite different projects in education, in relation to issues of care and caretaking. For instance, it is current wisdom in Australia that a measure of girls' attainment of equality is their greater participation in leadership and positions of responsibility in schools. While boys see this kind of work as simply unnecessary as a qualification for what Teese (1994) calls "the male career trajectory", this extra work is not paying off for girls post-school.

The expectation placed upon women to take responsibility for males in the classroom can be seen on one level to be a transfer of the practices of the private, domestic sphere into the public setting of the school's learning situation, the classroom. Specifically, "private" imperatives relating to women's perceived primary functions in the areas of sexuality, motherhood and caretaking are brought into the micro-public domain of the school. On another level, however, the injunction can also be seen to be a particular feature of educational settings. At this second level, there is a profound sense in which despite the discourse of educational equality, it is still widely believed that boys' interests and their learning are of prior importance to girls'.

There are many examples of the greater importance placed on boys' learning and associated problems, such as the greater amount of teacher time devoted to boys, the attention given to boys' learning difficulties and discipline problems, the greater amount of physical space and school sporting facilities used by boys, and boys' domination of technical and computer equipment. In New South Wales up to 90% of specialist education resources currently go to boys. These barriers to girls' equal status in education have been repeatedly documented in Australia since the 1975 Report, Girls, School and Society.

The persistence of these barriers is the outcome of deeply held and largely unexamined assumptions about the relationship of women to education, assumptions which are endemic in educational philosophy and schooling practices. They lead easily to the expectation that girls are responsible for making the learning environment a positive one for boys, rather than making that environment work for themselves. An especially clear example of this expectation in practice is that of the coeducation debate in Australia, where it has emerged clearly that it is expected by both boys and girls that girls should perform a function in the classroom quite distinct from that of learners. This has been variously described as "socialising" boys and regulating their behaviour, providing a civilising atmosphere and helping boys with learning difficulties. It is not surprising then that boys prefer co-education and feel that their capacity to learn is enhanced by the presence of girls (Regan, 1993). On the other hand, many girls both prefer and perform better in single-sex classrooms, a finding which surprisingly has so far not been investigated in Australian research.

It is because of the priority placed on boys' learning that little serious attention has been given to the fact that the climate of the coeducational school is a negative and hostile one for many girls, characterised by endemic sexual harassment, and that girls' learning very likely suffers in coeducational classrooms (Australian Education Council, 1992), and conversely, is enhanced in girls-only learning situations (Regan, 1993; Quality Assurance Review, 1994). Great importance has been placed on the "social benefits" of co-education, largely related to the school's perceived function of preparing students for the "realities" of a co-educational, that is, gendered society, rather than how the educational interests of girls would best be served.

These "social benefits" and "realities" of the coeducational school setting are, however, conflated with the injunction on women to take care of and nurture the interests of others, in particular those of males, to the exclusion of important educational arguments. Furthermore, the caretaking injunction placed on girls becomes intensified and more threatening the more strongly sexually delineated the particular learning context. For example, girls in home economics classes are usually expected to help boys to pick up unfamiliar skills. No such expectation is made of boys in technical classes, where girls frequently report harassment which results in their discontinuing the subject.

Girls know that the ostensibly public space of the school is not equally shared by boys with girls. Girls accommodate boys' domination of the physical, especially teaching and learning, spaces of the school in various ways (Foley, 1993; Australian Education Council, 1992). A few girls act out, and as a consequence, are labelled as troublemakers and resisters, often in sexually explicit terms (Samuel, 1983). In relation to sex-based harassment, which many boys regard as natural and normal (Quality Assurance Review, 1994), the Australian Education Council (1992:5) states that in the cases of the majority of girls,

Girls frequently accommodate their lack of space by withdrawing and creating their own cherished "girls' spaces" (Australian Education Council, 1992:8). Girls "are not inclined to compete with outsiders for public social space. Instead they create space for themselves within their subjective group culture" (Foley, 1993:2). The Australian Education Council (1992:8) reports on the ways in which girls, from an unequal position, negotiate for space in schools:

It is deplorable that for many girls, the toilets are the only "public" space which they feel safe to occupy. In one school, the girls ate their lunch in the toilets, rather than the playground.

The space-between has the potential to challenge the norms just described. For girls to engage the curriculum equally with boys alters the dynamics of accommodation and negotiation, and makes the curriculum and the school setting itself, a site of both desire and threat for girls. The final section of this chapter examines the nexus of desire and threat in girls' schooling experiences.

The following discussion offers an interpretation of girls' experiences of the curriculum and the school setting, drawing on Grosz' (1989) discussion of philosophical approaches to the question of desire. Elsewhere (Foster, 1994a), philosophical approaches are contrasted with two other theoretical interpretations of desire: the material-sexual interpretation, exemplified by Young (1993) and Spivak (1987), and the poststructuralist interpretation, exemplified by Davies (1990).

Grosz (1989:xv), describes desire as a pivotal concept having two quite different intellectual traditions. The first tradition, which encompasses Plato, Hegel and Lacan, conceives of desire as a "fundamental lack in being, an incompletion or absence within the subject which the subject experiences as a disquieting loss, and which prompts it into the activity of seeking an appropriate object to fill the lack". Grosz notes that for Lacan, "desire is an ontological lack which ensures the separation of the subject from the immediacy of its natural and social environment, and the impulse of that subject to fill in this space through, in the first instance, the desire of the (m)other; and in the second, through its access to language and systems of meaning".

In the second tradition which Grosz (1989:xvi), sees as encompassing Spinoza, Nietzsche, Foucault and Deleuze, desire is conceived not as a lack but as a positive force of production and self-actualisation. In this second sense, at the level of the subject, desire functions insofar as the subject "desires the expansion or maximisation of its power... it is not an unactualised or latent potential; it is always active and real".

A crucial question is: what desire(s) do girls actually experience in and of schooling? There are very good reasons to believe that girls desire to learn, that they value their schooling and the learning environment. During the past decade in Australia, there is no doubt that this desire has been encouraged and nurtured by girls' education policies which in particular have stressed the need for girls' greater achievement in male-dominated subjects.

Policy discourse concerning the desirable educational achievements of girls has at different times philosophically encompassed both the senses of desire which Grosz has delineated. Earlier, girls were constructed as lacking the necessary masculine learner subjectivity as well as the necessary male-defined knowledge. The very meaning of "girl" included a negativity or lack (Jones, 1993:12). In this construction, the lack was to be removed by increasing girls' access to masculine knowledge areas, but not it transpired, by enhancing their achievement relative to boys in those areas. This first platonic sense of desire as lack resonates with the philosophical and social construction of femininity as "other" to the masculine. Thus, it could be argued that for girls, the philosophical construction of desire in this first sense would have a logical consistency to which they could relate, given the normative climate of the school in relation to its curriculum, and its material-ideological practices.

The second sense of desire referred to by Grosz is, however, much more problematic for girls, because it invokes a more inherently masculine orientation to desire, that of actively seeking and pursuing achievement, and to an extent, power. To date, even more problematically for girls, that achievement has centered specifically on masculine curriculum areas and subject domains. Although the discourse of reform is couched philosophically in Grosz's first platonic sense, the implications for girls of following that discourse, as well as the outcomes, relate directly to Grosz's second sense of self-actualisation. In concrete terms, this has resulted in the perception that girls are interlopers or "space invaders" (Foster, 1996) in male educational terrain, depriving boys of their rights. The crucial point here then is that for girls to desire in this second sense places them not only in a contradictory position as "educated women" (Martin,1991), but also in a position of threat, which is both actual in school, and potential in relation to post-school life. It is significant that theWhat about the boys! movement emerged at the precise moment (and not a moment earlier) that girls were perceived to be outstripping boys in the the areas of male power and privilege. Prior to that, boys' education was only an issue for feminists and educationists concerned with improving gender relations. This point is obvious if one asks whether there would have been such concern about boys and their schooling if the contested areas had been different. What if the newspapers had reported, "girls beating boys at childcare and home management!"?

The first construction of desire as lack, and girls as lacking masculine learner subjectivity, can be seen to pose no particular threat to hegemonic masculinity. In fact, it could be argued that the construction of girls as lacking in relation to hegemonic masculinity might have the effect of reinforcing that hegemony. It might further be argued that the earlier construction of girls as lacking essential knowledge in a paradigmatically masculine curriculum would have the effect of reinforcing that paradigm in the curriculum. Until mid-1993 in Australia, that was the case. The first sense of desire (as lack), in which girls are seen as disadvantaged, is relatively safe for girls, posing no threat to hegemonic masculinity and possibly reinforcing it. It is the second self-actualising sense of desire in the educational setting which, by challenging male privilege, becomes threatening for girls and women. This is the sense which comes into play when women refuse to be constructed as lacking as in the first sense of desire and actively pursue their educational and occupational goals.

This discussion of desire and threat in girls' schooling raises several questions. For instance, what might happen if girls move outside the frame of their construction as lacking in relation to boys? How could girls be the caretakers of boys if they are equal (or better?) achievers? Such a prospect could be very threatening for girls and their education. For example, the current reaction to girls' perceived advances in maths and science may well make it very difficult for girls to pursue excellence in those subjects, if they are seen as depriving boys of their rights as the high achievers in those areas. In fact, girls' performance in those subjects actually declined from 1993 to 1994 (NSW Board of Studies, 1996), when the backlash period was beginning to gain momentum. The interesting question is also raised of whether, and to what extent, girls and women use caretaking as a means of controlling the threat against them which is posed by greater equality? Finally, given that the value-added dimensions (to use an economic rationalist concept) of care and caretaking are vastly different according to whether they are done by men or women, where does this leave care as a curriculum issue? This question is very pertinent in Australia where care-related matters have been relegated to the bottom of the curriculum hierarchy.

The mere existence of policies on girls' education has begun to provoke indignation about the harm they may do to boys' interests. These policies together with their success in terms of girls' improved participation and performance in specifically male-defined areas, have produced a subtle shift from the perspective of girls as lacking, into Grosz's second sense of desire, in which girls can be seen to be actively seeking educational success. It might be predicted, then, that this shift could prove in the near future to be a threatening one for girls. The rush to develop compensatory programs for boys is the beginning of a threatening response to girls and to policies concerning their education.

Education for women is both contradictory (Martin, 1991) and inasmuch as it entails movement into male terrain, potentially threatening and dangerous. Noting that it is not uncommon for women to experience male violence in connection with educational participation, Rockhill (1987:316) observes that "we know little about how it is lived in women's lives". Specifically discussing literacy, Rockhill (1987:315) notes that for many women, education is a means of becoming "somebody", and that it has functioned as a primary site of both "regulation and of rebellion". In the Australian context, some recent research reinforces these themes. Narelle Glass (1993), in a study of nurses who gained tertiary qualifications, found that these nurses believed they had a lot to risk if they continued to further their careers. The experience of hostility from their male partners, and the feeling that they risked losing their family relationships made them reluctant to pursue career advancement. Cheryl Hercus (1993:3) conducted a follow-up study of forty-five women who attended a weekend workshop on feminism. She found that "many of the women experienced subtle and not so subtle attempts to not only circumscribe their involvement in terms of active participation, but to prevent them from speaking of their experiences in feminist language".

This paper has raised questions about the ways in which girls may experience and resolve for themselves the simultaneous desire to be "somebody" which education offers, and the potential threat to them from those who in turn feel threatened by girls' living out of this desire. This last statement contains two important points: the mutuality of threat in the space-between, and the fact that this threat is itself the product of girls' desire for learning. This is not at all to suggest that girls themselves cause this threat or bring it upon themselves. Rather, both desire and threat are in turn produced by the neo-liberal equality framework, and that they form a dialectical relationship, in that framework. That relationship is described as dialectical because of the apparent opposing connotations of the notions of desire and threat, and because of the dynamic interplay of them in girls' schooling lives. Far from being unaware of the conflicting nature of these forces, girls are keenly aware of both, and of their dialectical influence on their schooling and its outcomes. And it is this awareness that leads to girls' self-regulatory behaviour, for example, in relation to male-dominated occupations.

The elaboration of the space-between, however, reveals a potentially better space of experience for girls. It is a space in which it now becomes possible for them to investigate and take greater command of their relationships with public and private life, and through the curriculum, to build positively and creatively on female difference.

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