Pulling Back the Curtain

Relearning the History of the Philosophy of Education

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8924724
AutoresConnie Titone (Villanova University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2007
Volumen41
Número2
Páginas128-147
Fecha de publicación2007-05-25
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaEducational Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0013-1946 • E-ISSN: 1532-6993
EditorialTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00131940701312454
OpenAlexW1969583803
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas27

Women have played an undeniable part in shaping the history of philosophy and philosophy of education for at least 1,000 years. Yet, current anthologies, encyclopedias, and textbooks in the field rarely recognize large numbers of women's works as consequential to our understanding of the development of educational topics and debates. This article, using the work of Herrad of Hohenbourg (1100s), Julian of Norwich (1342-c.1429), Christine de Pisan (c.1364-c.1430), and Mary Astell (1666-1731) traces women's early philosophical arguments concerning their own nature and the purposes of education. The author argue that having access to this tradition will help to remediate false perceptions of women's thought and serve as an empowering legacy for all teachers and students. Notes 1. This phrase is laden with meaning. Early in the 17th century, Anna Maria van Schurman was allowed to attend lectures at the University of Utrecht but she was also required to remain out of view. The solution was that she had to stay seated behind a curtain (CitationKournay, 1998, p. 18). 2. See, for example, Kaminsky's A New History of Educational Philosophy (1993), Dupuis and Gordon's Philosophy of Education in Historical Perspective (1997), Chambliss' Philosophy of Education: An Encyclopedia (1996), Rorty's Philosophy of Education: New Historical Perspectives, and Ornstein and Levine's Foundations of Education (2003). 3. See Mary Ellen Waithe's excellent 4 volume series entitled A History of Women's Philosophers (1987–1995). The earliest women Waithe presents are early Pythagoreans including Themistoclea, the priestess of Delphi and Theano of Crotona, Phythagoras's wife. 4. See de La Forge's The Circle of Women Scholars (1663), Buffet's New Observations on the French Language...with the Elogies of Illustrious Women Scholars Ancient as Well as Modern (1668), Stanley's 3-volume A History of Philosophy..., (1687), and Ménage's The History of Women Philosophers (1690). 5. If the reader is interested in understanding the contours of this same debate and how it was playing out in the American Colonies, one might begin with the letters between John and Abigail Adams and the work of Judith Sargent Murray. Also, see Lerner's The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993) for an introduction into the stated purposes of John Rush's Young Ladies Academy in Philadelphia, which opened in 1787. The young ladies were to be educated to prepare for their roles as mothers. Girls did not have the same course of study as boys. 6. An analysis of Macaulay's work including her own well-articulated, pre-Wollstonecraft responses to Rousseau, as well as Macaulay's intellectual life context can be found in Titone's Gender Equality and the Philosophy of Education: Catharine Macaulay's Forgotten Contribution (2004). See also, Hill's fine biography The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (1992). 7. Macaulay (1790) calls the unquestioned, customary sentiment the public voice, and argues that it could have a stultifying effect on human thoughts and actions. In her Letters on Education (1790), Macaulay examines, for example, one of the public voice's most insidious, dual assertions: that the female is naturally identified with weakness, passivity, and emotion—specifically sympathy—and the male with strength, activity, and reasoning ability. For a fuller discussion, see Titone's "Virtue, Vice, and the Public Voice: Catharine Macaulay's Philosophy of Moral Education" in Educational Philosophy and Theory (in press). 8. The only known copy of the manuscript was destroyed during the Prussian siege in 1870, but the work has been reconstructed by using incomplete copies of its pictures and texts (CitationGibson, cited in Waithe, 1989, p. 87). 9. The term quadrivium is said to have been first used by Boethius in his De arithmetica. He also used the word in De musica (CitationDunn, 2005, p. 93; McInerny, 1990, pp. 6, 42). 10. The use of this word, anchoress, is interesting. The anonymously authored The Ancrene Wisse (1955) says: "Recluses who live under the eaves of the church...ought to be so holy in their lives that....Christian people may lean on them. ...It is for this reason that an anchoress is called an anchoress, and anchored under a church like an anchor under the side of a ship, to hold it, so that the waves and storms do not pitch it over" (p. 63). 11. In their introduction to a reprinting of the work, Colledge and Walsh provides their assessment of Julian's rhetorical skill. They say: "In Showings the evidence has been set out in detail; Julian became such a master of rhetorical art as to merit comparison with Geoffrey Chaucer" (Julian of Norwich, 1978, p. 19). 12. In the medieval and early modern sense, the word clerk often denoted a male individual in religious orders, such as a monk or priest. 13. In 1693, she began her philosophical writings by engaging in correspondence with John Norris, a Cambridge Platonist, on the topic of God's role in the causation of pain and mankind's duty to love only God (CitationAtherton, 1994, p. 97). This correspondence entitled Letters Concerning the Love of God was published in 1695. Astell, like Norris, believes that God ought to be the only object of a human being's love. 14. The title page lists the author as "A Lover of Her Sex

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