read them bedtime stories early on and thereby provide them with a certain advantage over other children who do not enjoy this privilege. But disallowing such practices to level the field would have serious negative side-effects. A weaker position on this issue does not demand full equality but holds instead that educational policies should ensure that certain factors, like race, native language, and disabilities, do not pose obstacles to the equality of opportunity. A closely related topic is whether all students, both high and low performers, should be treated equally. According to some, more resources should be dedicated to low performers, to help them get to an average level, while others recommend a preferential treatment for high performers in order to help them fully develop their exceptional abilities and thereby benefit society at large. A similar problem is the issue of specialization. It concerns the question of whether all students should follow the same curriculum or to what extent they should specialize early on in specific fields according to their interests and skills. Marxist critiques of the school systems in capitalist societies often focus on the inequality they cause by sorting students for different economic positions. While overtly this process happens based on individual effort and desert, they argue that this just masks and reinforces the underlying influence of the preexisting social class structure. This is sometimes integrated into a wider Marxist perspective on society which holds that education in capitalist societies plays the role of upholding this inequality and thereby reproduces the capitalist relations of production. Other criticisms of the dominant paradigms in education are often voiced by feminist and postmodern theorists. They usually point to alleged biases and forms of discrimination present in current practices that should be eliminated. Feminists often hold that traditional education is overly man-oriented and thereby oppresses women in some form. This bias was present to severe degrees in earlier forms of education and a lot of progress has been made towards more gender-equal forms of education. Nonetheless, feminists often contend that certain problems still persist in contemporary education. Some argue, for example, that this manifests itself in the prominence given to cognitive development in education, which is said to be associated primarily with masculinity in contrast to a more feminine approach based on emotion and intuition. A related criticism holds that there is an overemphasis on abilities belonging to the public sphere, like