This is very long so bear with me lol
Mary Wollstonecraft on education
So why should Mary Wollstonecraft be of any great importance as an educational thinker?
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is more often than not regarded as a
purely political treatise. However, like Plato’s Republic and
Rousseau’s Emile, it can be seen as both a political and an educational
treatise.
It is above all a celebration of the rationality of women. It
constitutes an attack on the view of female education put forward by
Rousseau and countless others who regarded women as weak and artificial
and not capable of reasoning effectively. Mary Wollstonecraft rejected
the education in dependency that Rousseau advocated for them in Emile. A
woman must be intelligent in her own right, she argued. She cannot
assume that her husband will be intelligent! Mary Wollstonecraft
maintained that this did not contradict the role of the woman as a
mother or a carer or of the role of the woman in the home. She
maintained that ‘meek wives are, in general, foolish mothers’.
Reason was her starting point. For Mary Wollstonecraft, rationality or
reason formed the basis of our human rights as it was our ability to
grasp truth and therefore acquire knowledge of right and wrong that
separated us, as human beings, from the animal world. Through the
exercise of reason we became moral and political agents. This world-view
was acknowledged by all progressive thinkers of the time. However, it
was essentially a man’s world and the work of Rousseau was typical of
this. What Mary Wollstonecraft did was extend the basic ideas of
Enlightenment philosophy to women and Rousseau’s educational ideas of
how to educate boys to girls.
She set about arguing against the assumption that women were not
rational creatures and were simply slaves to their passions. Mary
Wollstonecraft argued that it was up to those who thought like this to
prove it. She described the process by which parents brought their
daughters up to be docile and domesticated. She maintained that if girls
were encouraged from an early age to develop their minds, it would be
seen that they were rational creatures and there was no reason
whatsoever for them not to be given the same opportunities as boys with
regard to education and training. Women could enter the professions and
have careers just the same as men.
In proposing the same type of education for girls as that proposed for
boys, Mary Wollstonecraft also went a step further and proposed that
they be educated together which was even more radical than anything
proposed before. The idea of co-educational schooling was simply
regarded as nonsense by many educational thinkers of the time.
It was fashionable to contend that if women were educated and not docile
creatures, they would lose any power they had over their husbands. Mary
Wollstonecraft was furious about this and maintained that ‘This is the
very point I aim at. I do not wish them to have power over men but over
themselves’.
The most perfect education, in my opinion, is such an exercise of the
understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the
heart. Or, in other words, to enable the individual to attain such
habits of virtue as will render it independent. In fact, it is a farce
to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise
of its own reason. This was Rousseau’s opinion respecting men: I extend
it to women.
Mary Wollstonecraft – A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary Wollstonecraft favoured co-educational day schools, lessons given
by informal conversational methods, with lots of physical exercise both
free and organised. She had a picture of an ideal family where the
babies were nourished by an intelligent mother and not sent away to
nurses and then to boarding school and fathers were friends to their
children rather than tyrants. Essentially family members were all
regarded as rational beings and children should be able to judge their
parents like anyone else. Family relationships therefore became
educational ones.
