Hidden Inequities In Urban Primary Education Study

The education fairness is the core of the democratization of education. In today's China, the education has gone through two stages from right fairness to beginning fairness. It is how to eliminate the hidden potential unfairness in the process of education that becomes the new topic in education. A number of education unfairness causing by gender difference could be found under the superficial education right fairness, if we scrutinize education through gender perspective.Drawing lessons form a large number of research results at home and abroad, I consider that the gender stereotypes existing in the field of education is one of the crucial reasons which cause the hidden education unfairness led by gender difference. Gender stereotypes are implicit. It is difficult to get an accurate description and convincing proof if we just use qualitative or quantitative research methods separately. Therefore, the best way is using both together. This paper will mainly use quantitative methods assisted by qualitative methods, and regard gender stereotypes through the perspective of education fairness. Gender stereotypes have an important impact on the undertaker's (mainly primary students' in this paper) academic confidence which is an explicit manifestation of self-consciousness. Therefore, gender stereotypes also have an important influence on the undertaker's self-consciousness. In the same education circumstances, it is one kind of unfairness for the undertakers who are suffered negative impact from it. In order to show the gender stereotypes existing in the field of education, the empirical part of this paper is primarily a quantitative research aimed at urban primary school teachers' gender stereotypes which affect students' academic confidence. Based on the importance of primary education and the weakness of current situation in urban education study, I will set the sights on the level of urban primary education to explore the implicit unfairness of urban primary education caused by urban primary school teachers' gender stereotypes.Through an empirical research, the paper gets its finding like this. Firstly, in the current stage of China's primary education, urban primary school teachers still have fairly obvious gender stereotypes in the teaching process. Secondly, those teachers' gender stereotypes affect students' academic confidence in a negative way, especially for girls whose academic confidence is far below boys, in sharp contrast to the traditional view that primary school girls are usually outstanding in scores. Thirdly, teachers' gender stereotypes embody concentratively in the distinction of concern and praise to male and female students. Based on the above findings, this paper argues that teacher's gender stereotypes is the primary cause of the difference of academic confidence and self-consciousness of primary students, affect girls' self-confidence negatively, and is a hidden unfairness existing in education. In order to change the current gender stereotypes of urban primary school teachers and gradually improve the unfair education received by boys and girls at school because of gender differences, we should approach it from the multi-aspects: improve the external environment to gradually eliminate urban primary school teachers' gender stereotypes; attach importance to internal factors to do a good job for a systemic and scientific training on gender education to urban primary school teachers'; improve the way of education to eliminate the differences of concern to boys and girls; carry out the reflection to education research to consider the research of gender stereotypes into the vision of education fairness.