Coeducation and the Political Economy of Cultural Miseducation

• In Event: Curriculum Studies 10 Years After Jane Roland Martin’s Cultural Miseducation

Abstract

In A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1791) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) Mary Wollstonecraft theorized imperial monarchy’s cultural miseducation of both sexes, and in the latter work she proposed aims for its possible revolutionary correction via coeducational agency in government-funded day schools, egalitarian homes, and print media (Author, 2008). Astute to intersections of gender and class, concerned about the welfare of both children and animals, and critical of African slavery, with insights into body politics that Susan Bordo has compared with Foucault’s (1993), Wollstonecraft recognized those specific coeducational aims as existential-religious, aesthetic-ontological, political-economic, sexual-ethical, and social (Author, 2008). Her theorizing initiated a modern tradition of coeducational thought—variously imaginative, skeptical, and re-visionary—by Louisa May Alcott, Booker T. Washington, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, W.E.B. DuBois, Anna Julia Haywood Cooper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Dale Spender, Adrienne Rich, Girl Scouts USA, the American Association of University Women, bell hooks, Jane Roland Martin, and others (Author, 2008, 2009). This Anglophone tradition makes clear that even post-monarchist coeducation may become variously complicit in cultural miseducation as racism, heterosexism, militarism, corporatism, or even sexism. With reference to that tradition, the proposed cultural-book-keeping study will use Martin’s theory of cultural miseducation—amended by her recent reconfiguration of education as “encounter” and as “a maker of individuals and cultures” (2011)—as a lens through which to read women’s learning and its moral consequences for racial and sexual politics in A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and in Frederick Douglass’s oratory on women’s rights. Douglass makes clear that racial violence, educational deprivation, and women’s demoralization are material consequences of the (differentiated but undeniable) sexual appropriation of white and black women by white property-owning men. Interpreting thus a racial-sexual “problem of generations” that too often results in “cultural liabilities” transmitted via political-economic educational agency, the paper will argue that his narrative and oratory are neglected sources of coeducational thought, “cultural assets” that can make distinctive contributions to this post-Wollstonecraftian tradition in the U.S.—especially significant now for the urgent project of integrating anti-racist purposes into its definitively gender-critical aims. This analysis will close by raising questions for discussion of pragmatic critical comparison: between cultural miseducation in the plantation system and cultural miseducation in the corporatist system with which we are today so familiar. What differences must that shift of political-economic context make for coeducation if it is to aim at resisting its own complicity in cultural miseducation as racist and misogynist violence?

Author

• Susan Laird, University of Oklahoma