Chapter 10: Engendering Education: A Cultural Engineering Beyond Equity

As the final chapter, this chapter focuses on “engendering education” as a transformative approach to advancing gender equality. Moving beyond archetypical narratives that center on identity-focused interpretations of access and capability, it argues for embedding postgender perspectives into every aspect of education, including formal curricula, informal cognitive experiences, and relational embeddedness with societal realities. Using an optimized social justice framework, the chapter highlights three key areas: recognizing shared needs, acknowledging diverse gender expressions and experiences, and transforming educational systems to counteract institutional mediation with an inclusive alternative paradigm that emphasizes optimal value neutrality. The chapter argues that achieving true gender equality requires not only the redistribution of resources and recognition in culture but also a challenge to representation and reconciliation issues associated with archetypical notions of womanhood, which perpetuate selective and manufactured biases toward identity disparities. It underscores the importance of gradual generational activism to foster a cultural shift toward inclusivity that is both optimally neutral and intellectually comprehensive, considering both spatial and temporal contexts. The concept of “self” plays a central role in this alternative paradigm, as self-awareness and agency are critical in reshaping education as a post-Gramscian and post-Bourdieusian cultural revolution. This transformation significantly influences students' experiences with gender expressions and promotes a rethinking of empowerment. By “engendering education,” the chapter envisions a pathway to “cultural engineering,” where similarities, differences, and transformative relationships are harmonized to create a more inclusive and equitable society within the constraints of our bounded rational world.