Chapter 26

Toward an Education for Women

·        “Most of the institutions of higher education in this country were designed by men, and most continue to be run by men” (pg. 306).

·        Patricia Palmieri wrote, “in order to design an education appropriate for women we must learn about the academic experiences of ordinary women” (pg. 306).

·        We, as a society, must take into account what it means to be a woman in today’s society.  How can we help our girls turn into self-confident, reliable, hard-working, and honest women?

·        This paper has interviewed many different women.  The different sub-topics relate to how the different women responded.

Reminiscences of College

·        Two women were interviewed for this section of the paper.  The first woman is reminiscing about one of the first courses she took at college, thirty years ago.  The second woman is in her first year of college.

·        The first woman remembers feeling lost in her first class of introductory science.  “The professor marched into the lecture hall, placed upon his desk a large jar filled with dried beans, and invited the students to guess how many beans the jar contained.  After listening to an enthusiastic chorus of wildly inaccurate estimates the professor smiled a thin, dry smile, revealed the correct answer, and announced, ‘You have just learned an important lesson about science.  Never trust the evidence of your own senses’ ” (pg. 307).

·        The first woman can now guess, thirty years later, what the professor had in mind.  She could not accept what the professor was offering.  Why?  “Her sense of herself as a knower was shaky, and it was based on the belief that she could use her own firsthand experience as a source of truth.  This man was saying that this belief was fallacious” (pg. 307).

·        The science professor was “taking away her only tool for knowing and providing her with no substitute” (pg. 307).

·        The second woman explained about a philosophy class that she was taking.  One afternoon, the teacher walked into class carrying a large cardboard cube.  This teacher asked students what it was that she had placed on the desk.  She then proceeded to ask how they knew what it was.  She asked again, “But how do you know?” (pg. 307).  Because of the way the cube was positioned on the desk, no one could see all six sides.  The professor continued, “We can’t look at all six sides of a cube at once, can we?  So we can’t exactly see a cube.  And yet, you’re right.  You know it’s a cube.  But you know it not just because you have eyes but because you have intelligence.  You invent the sides you cannot see.  You use your intelligence to create the ‘truth’ about cubes” (pg. 307).

·        “Both stories are about the limitations of firsthand experience as a source of knowledge” (pg. 307).

·        The two teachers had different ways of interacting with their classes.  The science teacher was of the frame of mind that students should trust him and he would provide them with the tools they needed to learn.  The philosophy teacher was showing students that they were colleagues and that they were on an adventure together.

·        The two lessons were similar, the science teacher wanted to teach that “experience is a source of error” (pg. 308).  Because of the way that the science teacher went about the lesson, he made students feel dumb.  The philosophy teacher wanted to teach that “although raw experience is insufficient, by reflecting upon it the student could arrive at truth” (pg. 308).  The philosophy teacher’s lesson made the student feel “more powerful” (pg. 308).

·        Teachers need to take into account the kind of learning that they are demanding of their students.  Most women in this article “lack confidence in herself as a thinker” (pg. 308).  Teachers need to make learning fun, not painful

·        Adrienne Rich wrote, “Suppose we were to ask ourselves, simply: What does a woman need to know?” (pg. 308).

·        “A woman, like any other human being, does need to know that the mind makes mistakes; but our interviews have convinced us that every woman, regardless of age, social class, ethnicity, and academic achievement, needs to know that she is capable of intelligent thought, and she needs to know it right away” (pg. 308).

·        Why do women need to know this more than men?

Confirmation of the Self as Knower

·        “In the masculine myth, confirmation comes not at the beginning of education but at the end” (pg. 308).

·        Men’s natural development includes men having to earn the right of having his idea’s respected and listened to.

·        Women, meanwhile, need to have “confirmation and community as prerequisites rather than consequences of development” (pg. 308).

·        Most women report that they often feel as though they are being talked down to, or that they are stupid.

·        This is “especially true of the less privileged” (pg. 309).

·        Could this be because less privileged women have even less confidence in themselves as knowers and intelligent people?

·        Lillian’s son had an incident with projectile vomiting.  Instead of allaying her fears and helping her understand, her male doctor dismissed her worries.  Lillian’s encounter with different authority figures over the years, “taught her that ‘experts’ usually tried to assert dominance over less knowledgeable people either by assaulting them with information or by withholding information” (pg. 309).

·        There is another model out there.  It is called “ ‘connected teaching’, in which the expert (parent, in this case) examines the needs and capacities of the learner (child) and composes a message that is, in the psychologist Jerome Brumer’s felicitous term, ‘courteous’ to the learner” (pg. 309).

·        A new clinic opened up in Lillian’s area.  This clinic catered to women and ran on the ‘connected teaching’ model.  “The director of the clinic defined the clinic’s job not as ‘teaching mothers how to raise children’ but as ‘trying to help mothers do what they need to do’ ” (pg. 309).

·        This clinic provided for the women more than health care.  It gave the women that went to it a sense of power.  The people who worked at the clinic believed in the women that came to the clinic for help.  “This clinic provided, …confirmation that they could be trusted to know and to learn” (pg. 309)

·        Because of the way the clinic operated, women that went to it began to feel that they could accomplish and do anything.

·        Even the more privileged women in society often feel inept and the “need to be accepted as a ‘person’ as opposed to being oppressed or patronized” (pg. 310).

·        “Privilege does not ensure freedom from oppression” (pg. 310).

·        “Highly competent girls and women are especially likely to underestimate their abilities” (pg. 310).

·        Even though women may have a history of doing well, winning awards, privilege, and achievement; most still doubt themselves.

·        Faith found that the more people began to tell her that she was smart, the more she began to believe it.

·        Do teachers, in high school, college, and university, need to give praise?  Do girls and women need to hear from their teacher that they are doing well?  Does this affect how they view themselves?

·        When in college, some women felt that their was a problem of whether or not a male teacher was giving praise because it was deserved or if because he had other intentions.

·        “Whenever powerful men praised relatively powerless women, the women started looking for ‘the strings,’ especially when, as many admitted, they knew that they, themselves, had used their sexuality in the past to elicit praise” (pg. 311).

Knowing the Realities: The Voice of Experience

·        “In considering how to design an education appropriate for women, suppose we were to begin by simply asking: What does a woman know?” (pg. 311).

·        Traditional courses do not begin with what the student knows, whether it be male or female.  Traditional courses begin with what the teacher knows.

·        “If the student is female, her questions may differ from the culture’s questions, since women, paddling in the bywaters of the culture, have had little to do with positing the questions or designing the agendas of the disciplines” (pg. 311/312).

·        Mary Jacobs points out, “although nineteenth – and twentieth – century feminists have sought access to education as a means of liberation, ‘this access to a male dominated culture may equally be felt to bring with it alienation, repression, division – a silencing of the ‘feminine,’ a loss of women’s inheritance’ ” (pg. 312).

·        “The larger-than-life knowledge contained in the college curriculum seemed to her at the time the only respectable form of knowledge; but now that she had more sense of herself as a woman, it struck her as a distinctively masculine perspective” (pg. 312).

·        Although many women master the “masculine mode,” they never feel that they have really jived with what they learned.  Women need to learn the “feminine mode”.

·        What is the feminine mode?

·        Most women are drawn to knowledge that they have learned firsthand, either through observation or by partaking in the learning experience.

·        “The women interviewed nearly always named out-of-school experiences as their most powerful learning experiences.  The mothers usually named childbearing or child rearing” (pg. 313).

·        The knowledge of childrearing is an example of knowledge that women value, but that the school-system does not.

·        Maternal thinking is different from scientific thinking because maternal thinking does not have to be replicated in order to be real.

·        Many women feel that there is a difference between “the kind of thinking required in school and the kind required in dealing with people” (pg. 314).

·        “Even the women who were extraordinarily adept at abstract reasoning preferred to start from personal experience” (pg. 314).

·        According to Mary Lou, Men can go into any subject with confidence because they have not been put down because of their sex.  Women cannot do this, one because they may not have had as many privileges as men, and two because they need to find one thing in the subject that relates to them personally and start form there.

·        “We are supposed to learn it the way men see it.  Men move quickly to impose their own conceptual schemes on the experience of women … These schemes do not help women make sense of their experience; they extinguish the experience” (pg. 315).

·        According to Duras, “Women have been in darkness for centuries.  They don’t know themselves.  Or only poorly.  And when women write, they translate this darkness.  Men don’t translate” (pg. 315).

·        “Women also described as ‘powerful’ the opportunities for experiential learning provided by their institutions” (pg. 315).

Freedom, Structure, and the Tyranny of Expectation

·        “Probably the most pervasive theme we found in our interviews with women of all sorts was one we called ‘inner-outer,’ encompassing issues women raised concerning the source and type of control and validation they had experienced in their lives” (pg. 315/316).

·        In analyzing women, we need to ask “Who or what, in this women’s eyes, defines the goals, sets that pace, and evaluate the outcomes of her behavior?” (pg. 316).

The Need for Structure

·        “All of the women we interviewed, even the most rebellious, wanted some structure in their educational environments” (pg. 316).

·        Women can use a structureless environment as an excuse for ‘self-indulgence’ and a ‘lack of seriousness between faculty and students’ (pg. 316).

The Tyranny of Expectation

·        “In general, there were more complaints about excessive control than about lack of structure” (pg. 316).

·        Some women complained that their colleges made decisions for them, rather than making their own decisions themselves.

·        Some women portray themselves as going to college and getting a degree as “duty rather than desire” (pg. 317).  Could this be because they are nice girls?

·        Women who attended ‘demanding’ institutions felt “in retrospect that their intellectual development was stunted rather than nourished by the incessant academic pressure” (pg. 318).

·        Institutions high standards help students strive to be at the top.  “It is in attempting to discern the standards and to meet them that the student is propelled into independent contextual thinking” (pg. 318).

·        But for girls who feel college is a duty, “the standards act more as impediments than as goads to independent thinking” (pg. 318).

·        “Women may benefit especially from systems in which the teaching function and the assessing function are separated” (pg. 318).

·        “It is not evaluation per se that subverts the aims of instruction but evaluation in the separation (impersonal, objective) mode.  … Where impersonal standards are used, the students are turned into objects, and the connection between teacher and student is broken” (pg. 319).

·        “The ‘feminine world of subjectness’ is abandoned in favor of the ‘masculine world of objectness’ ” (pg. 319).

·        “In an educational institution that placed care and understanding of persons rather than impersonal standards at its center, human development might take a different course, and women’s development, in particular, might proceed with less pain” (pg. 319).

Being Bad and Breaking Out

·        Several women mentioned that they became rebellious about what “They” wanted and began to do what they wanted.

·        Nice women try to produce what “They” want, but are they always right?  Sometimes when they are producing what “They” want, they are wrong about what “They” want.

·        Who is “They”?

·        Some women discover that teachers respect her own, authentic voice.  For some women, this discovery comes too late.

·        Women who enter one institution and conform to its standards may be fearful of entering another institution where they have to conform to the new standards in order to succeed.

The Need for Freedom

·        Some women manage to “find gold” (pg. 320). 

·        These women manage to be able to find an institution that lets them be their own boss.

·        Women who attend a high – pressure school often feel that they may “go bad” or “ go dead” (pg. 321) without the pressure.  They felt that they would begin to skip classes, sleep late, stop caring or working, etc.

·        Jeanne Block “argued that because girls in our society are raised to accommodate to existing structures, they need colleges that will help set them free.  But, for the same reason, women also need strong support in moving toward freedom” (pg. 321/322).

·        There needs to be “forms of taking care of students that make the ones we care for stronger rather than weaker” (pg. 322).

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