Should we teach children about sexism/feminism?

There is more than enough awareness of this - any more and you will just cause resentment amongst boys and young men, who had nothing to do with this, and will feel undersupported.

It will filter through if we teach children to treat everyone equally. It takes time - almost completely turning around a thousand years of prejudice in a hundred years is pretty quick as it is.

No, I'd say rather teach them good values and the way things should be. As they grow older, they can get more information about the injustices that are being done. It will seem wrong to them then as they see the contrast.

I'm afraid it'll just turn in to nagging. It certainly does for me. If they are taught about sexism, the focus should be on Third World countries, where women are really suffering.

I can't see this being given a whole slot in the timetable every week, but it might do good for students to discuss current events and learn about women's rights amongst many other things by gaining an awareness of the world around them.

I don't know if classes on feminism would be particularly effective, especially to a group of teenagers who don't give a rat's ass and just want it to be lunchtime already.

I think extra classes on related topics should be added for awareness - though like the above poster said, it's often incorporated into Citizenship and whatnot - but the biggest thing I think that needs to be sorted out is attitude. There should be stricter crackdowns on disgusting/ sexist/ harassment behaviour, because most kids make their final perceptions of men and women and their roles in society during adolescence, when they're at their most impressionable. More emphasis on highlighting the importance of consent and teaching why slut-shaming/ victim-blaming is bad etc.

Just generally teach a more respecting attitude.

Don't teach it - rather anti-teach it. If a child never experiences sexism, they'll not be sexist.

I'm not quite sure how telling students that women are paid less/are less represented in politics will do anything.

Do we not already cover this in Citizenship from years 7 to 11? I know I did. That being said, it was a subject very few people cared about, so I doubt any education would be effective.

No

Our generation face the same kind of situation our parents did as we reach adulthood. By that I mean, women are still paid less. We're still less likely to be awarded promotions. We still form only a small minority of MPs...

My theory is, to dramatically change things for the next lot, we need to teach them about the prejudices women face, predominantly in the workplace, but also in wider society, and how feminism acts to prevent this.

Education does a lot of good, so could it help in this case?

@ Bold

what about male sexism? Or are we going to treat that as a non-issue?