Analyzing 50 years of primary school textbooks to see how gender roles have been subtly reinforced or challenged
This case study demonstrates how a researcher can treat textbooks as cultural texts, reading them closely while also applying systematic content analysis. The focus is the “hidden curriculum”: the implicit lessons about identity, power, and social expectations that learners absorb alongside explicit academic content.
The case study is written as if a research team conducted a longitudinal analysis of primary school textbooks used across five decades. The design is realistic and replicable, but it is presented in a self-contained way so it can be adapted to different contexts, countries, faith traditions, or school systems.
The guiding assumption is that textbooks do not merely transmit neutral information. They also encode normative claims about what a “good life” looks like, who leads, who serves, who is adventurous, who is careful, and whose stories count. In primary school settings, these messages are particularly formative because they shape children’s sense of what is possible and permissible for them.
The study is guided by three questions. First, how have gender roles been represented in everyday scenes, occupations, and family structures across the last 50 years of primary school textbooks? Second, what narrative and visual patterns subtly reinforce gendered expectations, even when the text appears inclusive? Third, where and how do textbooks explicitly or implicitly challenge traditional gender scripts, and what kinds of alternatives do they offer?
The corpus consists of a stratified sample of primary school textbooks spanning 50 years. A common approach is to select a fixed interval, such as one representative year per decade, and then sample across subject areas that routinely include stories and social imagery. In this case study, the sample includes reading anthologies, language arts workbooks, social studies texts, and introductory science materials, because these genres combine narrative, illustration, and implicit moral formation.
To reduce bias toward a single publisher or region, the sampling frame includes multiple major publishers and, where possible, both urban and rural adoption lists. Within each decade, the team selects textbooks that were widely used, verified through curriculum archives and adoption records. The unit of analysis is not the entire book in the abstract, but identifiable “textual events”: a reading passage, a worked example, a chapter opening illustration, or an end-of-unit summary narrative. This makes coding manageable and allows comparisons across time and subject areas.
The research design combines two complementary traditions. The first is interpretive literature analysis, which attends to voice, plot, metaphor, point of view, and the moral imagination of a text. The second is systematic content analysis, which uses a defined codebook so that multiple researchers can identify patterns consistently. The combination is well suited to the humanities and to theology, because it treats texts as meaning-making artifacts without giving up transparency about how interpretations were produced.
The team begins with exploratory close reading of a small pilot set from the earliest and latest decades. The purpose is to identify recurring motifs and to draft a preliminary codebook. The pilot phase also surfaces ambiguities, such as whether a character’s agency should be coded from actions, narration, or illustration. After revision, the team codes the full corpus in two stages. In Stage One, coders apply surface codes that are relatively observable, such as the gender presentation of protagonists and the occupations associated with depicted adults. In Stage Two, coders apply interpretive codes that require greater judgment, such as whether a narrative frames care work as natural duty or as skilled contribution.
To keep the analysis coherent across a large corpus, the codebook is organized around four lenses: representation, agency, valuation, and moral framing. Representation tracks who appears and in what roles. Agency tracks who initiates action, solves problems, or leads dialogue. Valuation tracks whether the text treats a role as admirable, ordinary, trivial, or comedic. Moral framing tracks which virtues are attached to which characters and whether those virtues are gendered, such as courage coded as masculine or gentleness coded as feminine.
Each lens includes specific operational definitions. For example, “agency” is coded when a character sets a goal, makes a decision, or changes the outcome of the plot. “Valuation” is coded through adjectives, narrative praise, reward structures in the story, and visual prominence in illustrations. Moral framing is coded through explicit moral statements and through narrative consequences, such as who is portrayed as wise, who is corrected, and who receives social approval.
Because interpretive work is vulnerable to projection, the team uses reliability and reflexivity practices that are standard in qualitative research. Coders train on shared passages and compare decisions, revising the codebook until disagreement is reduced and traceable to clear interpretive choices. The goal is not to eliminate all disagreement, but to make the reasoning inspectable and replicable.
The team also maintains reflexive memos. Each researcher writes short notes about expectations they bring to the corpus, including theological or cultural assumptions about family and work. These memos are not treated as distractions but as data about the interpretive horizon of the researchers. Ethically, the study avoids naming individual authors for blame and instead examines the textbook as a social artifact shaped by institutions, markets, and curriculum policy.
Across the corpus, the findings show both continuity and change. The most stable pattern is that gender is repeatedly taught through the ordinary. Everyday scenes, rather than explicit lessons about gender, carry the strongest hidden curriculum. When the same kinds of domestic tasks repeatedly cluster around girls and women, while adventurous or technical tasks cluster around boys and men, children learn to experience these clusters as normal and even as natural.
At the same time, later decades show deliberate attempts to widen roles, especially in professional imagery and in the inclusion of girls in science and sport. However, some inclusive gestures coexist with subtle narrative cues that preserve older hierarchies. For instance, a text may depict a mother as an employed professional, yet still allocate nearly all emotional labor and household coordination to her, framing her competence as tireless service rather than shared responsibility.
In early-decade readers, domestic scenes often function as miniature moral tales. A common story structure centers on a girl who anticipates others’ needs, tidies without being asked, and is praised for being “helpful” or “good.” Boys in the same books are more often praised for bravery or ingenuity. The hidden curriculum is not that housework exists, but that it is a moral proving ground primarily for girls.
A representative passage from the corpus (paraphrased to avoid reproducing copyrighted text) depicts a family preparing for guests. The mother directs the activity, a daughter sets the table, and a son “runs outside” to finish an unrelated project. The narrative treats the son’s absence as neutral, even playful, while the daughter’s attentiveness is explicitly celebrated. When this pattern repeats across dozens of stories, domestic labor becomes gendered as a default expression of feminine virtue.
Over time, later textbooks occasionally redistribute tasks, showing fathers cooking or cleaning. Yet even then, the framing may preserve asymmetry. Fathers are sometimes presented as “helping” rather than sharing responsibility, and their participation is treated as noteworthy. This subtle emphasis can unintentionally reaffirm the assumption that the home is primarily the mother’s domain and that male participation is optional.
Occupational imagery is a powerful hidden curriculum because it links present learning to future identity. In the earlier decades of the sample, men dominate the roles associated with public authority and technical expertise, such as doctors, engineers, pilots, and community leaders. Women appear frequently as nurses, teachers, clerical workers, or as unnamed assistants. Even when women are shown working outside the home, their jobs often cluster around care or support.
A recurring pattern in mid-century science and social studies texts is the masculine “expert” voice. Illustrations and sidebars frequently depict a male professional explaining a concept to children, sometimes accompanied by a female figure who listens or assists. The textbook does not state that expertise is male; it demonstrates that expertise looks male. Students learn to associate authority with certain bodies and voices before they can name the association.
In later decades, the corpus shows a marked increase in women depicted in professional roles, including science and technology. Nevertheless, the analysis identifies an important nuance: when women appear in high-status professions, they are sometimes shown in relational roles, such as “Dr. Kim helps the children,” while male professionals are shown performing decisive or inventive actions. This difference is subtle but consistent enough to matter, and it shows why literature analysis needs to look beyond counts of representation to narrative function and valuation.
Narrative agency is often taught through adventure plots. In the earlier decades, boys more frequently occupy the role of the risk-taker who leaves home, explores, experiments, or fixes a problem in the public world. Girls more frequently occupy the role of the cautious companion, the observer, or the one who protects social harmony. The hidden curriculum teaches children that courage is spatial and outward for boys, while responsibility is interpersonal and inward for girls.
A representative story pattern places a mixed group of children near a riverbank. The boy is the one who climbs, tests, or builds something; the girl is the one who warns, worries, or fetches adult help. Both actions can be virtuous, but the narrative reward structure often positions the boy’s action as the exciting center of the story, while the girl’s action is treated as sensible but secondary. Over time, this shapes the imaginative map of whose initiative creates a plot.
In the most recent decade of the corpus, there is stronger evidence of role reversal and shared protagonism. Some stories explicitly position a girl as the primary problem-solver in a science investigation or as the leader in a sports narrative. The team notes that these texts are most effective when the girl’s agency is ordinary rather than exceptionalized. When a story frames a capable girl as surprising, it may still imply that competence is atypical for her gender. When it frames her competence as expected, the hidden curriculum shifts toward genuine normalization.
For readers in theology and the humanities, a crucial layer of the hidden curriculum concerns which virtues are attached to which characters and how those virtues are gendered. Across many textbooks, certain moral qualities are repeatedly coded as feminine, such as gentleness, patience, modesty, and self-sacrifice. Other qualities are coded as masculine, such as assertiveness, leadership, and rational problem-solving. The texts rarely argue for this division; they narrate it into being.
The team’s literature analysis pays special attention to how “goodness” is narrated. In several decades, girls and women are described as good when they are quiet, relationally attentive, and supportive. Boys and men are described as good when they are brave, decisive, and protective. These patterns echo wider cultural and sometimes theological scripts about service and authority. Importantly, the study does not claim that any virtue is inherently gendered; it shows how textbooks can distribute virtues unevenly, making some moral possibilities feel more available to some children than others.
The later decades include more explicit language of equality and inclusion, and some stories deliberately detach virtues from gender. Even so, the analysis finds that moral framing can lag behind surface representation. A textbook may show girls in leadership roles, but still reserve the language of “natural leader” or “born to lead” for boys. This shows why moral language and narrative reward structures are essential data in textbook analysis.
When the coded results are aggregated across decades, three synthesis claims emerge. First, gender reinforcement is most persistent where it appears most mundane: the distribution of domestic tasks, the implied default parent, and the everyday descriptors attached to children’s behavior. Second, reform efforts tend to appear first in occupational representation, especially in visual depictions of women in professional roles. Third, the deepest shift occurs when agency and moral framing change together, such that girls are not only present in expanded roles but are also positioned as plot-driving, valued, and morally authoritative without being treated as exceptions.
From a methodological standpoint, the study shows that frequency counts alone are insufficient. A textbook can achieve numerical balance in representation while still sustaining a hidden curriculum through narrative function, affective tone, and evaluative language. Literature analysis helps reveal these subtleties because it asks how a story works, not only what it contains.
For education researchers, the case study illustrates how longitudinal textbook analysis can document cultural change and institutional inertia at the same time. For teachers, it suggests practical interpretive moves: inviting students to notice who speaks, who acts, who is praised, and what kinds of work are made visible. For curriculum developers, it underscores that “inclusive” representation should be assessed not only by who appears in images, but also by whose agency drives narratives and whose labor is treated as normal.
For theology and the humanities, the study invites attention to the moral anthropology implied by curricular texts. Textbooks implicitly tell stories about what persons are for: whether care is framed as mutual vocation or as gendered obligation, whether authority is framed as service or as entitlement, and whether the social world is imagined as open to all or pre-partitioned by identity. In contexts where religious communities use textbooks or supplementary readers, the same analytic tools can be applied to catechetical materials, children’s Bibles, or moral formation curricula.
The case study has limits typical of textbook research. Textbooks are influential, but they do not fully determine classroom life; teachers and students may resist or reinterpret what they read. Moreover, “gender” in textbooks intersects with race, class, disability, and religion, and a full study would expand the codebook to address these intersections. Finally, national and regional contexts matter. A sampling strategy that works in one country’s adoption system may not transfer directly to another.
Even with these limits, the approach is transferable. A researcher can adapt the same steps to other hidden curricula, such as nationalism, economic ideology, ecological ethics, or theological anthropology. The key is to keep the unit of analysis clear, define codes with operational rigor, and pair systematic coding with close reading that can explain how meaning is produced.
Analyzing 50 years of primary school textbooks makes visible how gender roles are taught not primarily through direct instruction, but through repeated narrative and visual cues about ordinary life. The hidden curriculum operates through who is shown doing which kinds of work, whose choices drive plots, and which virtues are praised. Over time, textbooks often move toward broader representation, yet subtle patterns of agency and valuation may continue to encode older assumptions. Literature analysis, when combined with transparent coding practices, offers a rigorous way to study these dynamics across education, theology, and the wider humanities.
A researcher seeking to replicate this study can proceed through five steps. First, define a time span and establish a sampling frame that reflects actual classroom use. Second, pilot close-readings to identify motifs, then draft a codebook with operational definitions. Third, train coders and document decisions through reliability checks and reflexive memos. Fourth, code the corpus in stages, separating observable features from interpretive judgments. Fifth, write findings that integrate quantified patterns with interpretive explanation, using examples that show how the hidden curriculum is carried by plot, voice, and visual emphasis.