Deschooling, Feminism, and Inventing the Student as a Political Subject in the 1970s

• In Event: The Idea(l) of Deschooling: International and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on a Continuing Debate

Abstract

This paper examines how 1970s social movements and radical critiques of education-as-socialisation sought to disturb the organization and space of schooling and curriculum and, I argue, served to reconfigure the student as choice-making and a political subject. Feminism was an influential force in education in the 1970s, with – in the case of Australia and elsewhere – policies developed on equal opportunity and non-sexist education as well as substantial school-based and grass-roots activity. Within teacher unions and curriculum associations, there was an upswell of publications, dedicated committees and high-profile activism. The impact of this work was felt across curriculum and school programs and in heightened attention to ‘gender in education’ as a category of policy, pedagogical and scholarly attention. This encompassed sustained attention to the sex role, sexuality education and new constructions of the personal, evident in curriculum strategies that engaged ‘values clarification’ in which the personal became not only political but pedagogical.
The 1970s was also the era of de-schooling society, when a raft of alternatives to regular schooling were in the air, opening up the basis for defining curriculum forms, the pedagogic and affective relation between teacher and student, and placing questions of freedom at the heart of the work of schools. New embodied expressions of ‘being a student’ were cultivated, evident in the rejection of school uniforms, the legitimation of smoking in school, and a stepping back from regulating the body of students – length of hair, length of skirts, use of make-up and jewelry and so on. These pedagogies of comportment represented a cut with the rigid and conservative norms of traditional schooling – liberation of the student body was part of the freedom project. Debates about freedom and experiment played out on students’ bodies and in the organization of school space.
Feminist agendas shared many of these aspirations, seeing schools as sites for the realization and enactment of new ways of being girls and boys, women and men, freed from traditional sex roles, and as offering solutions for or mediating the social and political hopes of feminism. Yet, this paper argues that in cultural memory and more formal historical accounts of 1970s education, there is a risk of inscribing a bifurcated historical narrative, where feminism is ‘on the sidelines’. This has roots in, among others, progressive and de-schooling impulses being somewhat indifferent to feminist agendas, and equally, of accounts of feminist reform tending to tell a more introspective history of its own genesis. Taking developments in Australia as an initial prompt, this paper interrogates the juxtaposition of these two self-consciously politically progressive movements, looking to transnational networks, exchanges and ‘local’ initiatives and (re)inventions. In doing so, it sees them not simply as both instances of the 70s zeitgeist, but as also demanding to be read against and with each other, in order to unsettle and put new questions to de-schooling movements during this time and subsequently, surfacing contradictions as well as re–constructions of freedom and the political subjects of schooling.

Author

• Julie E. McLeod, University of Melbourne