Schools influence gender roles primarily through:

Concept: A gender role is a social construct — the set of behaviours, tasks and expectations a society attaches to being male or female, as distinct from biological sex. The school is a formal agency of socialisation: besides the syllabus it teaches, it transmits these expectations through its hidden curriculum, the unstated norms carried by what is taught, how it is taught, and how people in the school treat one another.

Application: inside a school these expectations travel along three institutional channels:

• Curriculum — textbook prose and illustrations that place men and women in fixed occupations, activities and family roles, and the decision about who appears in the examples at all.

• Pedagogy — teaching methods, seating and grouping, the allocation of tasks and subjects (who is sent to do fieldwork and who is asked to tidy up), and differing discipline norms.

• Interactions — teacher expectations and the distribution of attention, praise and questioning, together with peer policing of what boys and girls are supposed to do.

All three sit inside the institution and act on every child who passes through it, which is why they are the school's principal means of shaping gender roles.

Cross-check — how the other sources named in the options stand:

• Home-based socialisation alone: the family is a real agency of gender socialisation, but it operates outside the school, so it cannot account for what the school itself does.

• Individual student preferences: preferences for subjects, games and careers are largely an outcome of socialisation, not the mechanism a school uses.

• Biological differences among learners: this is biological determinism; innate differences relate to sex, not to the socially assigned roles the question is about.

Result: schools shape gender roles primarily through curriculum, pedagogy, and interactions.