Class Notes

Historical Foundations of Education — second meeting

The readings for yesterday’s class were the first part of Gerda Lerner’s Why History Matters, “History as Memory” and Susan Moller Okin’s article “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” We began by watching the short film The Art of Farewell.

The impact of the film was hard to follow, but that was the point. There was much covered, many details and boardwork, but, as I noted earlier, there is something about this small five-person class that is comfortable but not too comfortable. This continues to standout.

In many ways this class was an exercise in doing a reading together and I think it paid off. Next week we’ll begin to read the historical nuts and bolts (and commentary) of the genesis of the Common School Movement in the US: the Whig social reformist movement that created compulsory schooling.

I selected the combination of readings and the film to try and show some of the deeper historically-embedded ideas operating in descriptive and normative discussions of feminism and multiculturalism. The key to this was an understanding of the inner tension at the foundation of an encounter between ethical truth-claims (e.g. “Women are the moral equivalent of men.”) and a social constructivist denials of such claims. A robust, historical understanding of liberalism, of course, is needed to make some sense out of this and to recognize the unifying, feminist ideology in both Lerner and Moller Okin.

The film goes even deeper into the affective and existential motivations for the modern political project of liberalism: the same project that invented compulsory schooling. 

SR