Publications

WOMEN IN THE CURRICULUM

Because schooling and education are the processes through which persons move from the domain of family--the private, to the domain of work and knowledge--the public, it is important for feminist educators to understand the relation of these domains, how the events and relations of one affect the other. Once these categories had been revealed to be cultural constructions, rather than natural or universal necessities, feminist educators began to address the ways that schooling and informal education could deconstruct, rather than reinforce this opposition of private and public experience.

Because feminists understand that the institutions of public life stand in complex structural and dialectical relationship to the institutions of private life, it becomes necessary to study schools in relationship to ways of life experienced in families, in neighborhoods, and in popular culture, as well as in other public institutions such as the economy, legal and penal systems, etc. In too many communities, schools stand as impregnable citadels, holding the children within their walls away from the families, communities, industries, and cultural resources that make up their towns and cities. In too many universities, studies in education are isolated from related work in the disciplines of arts and sciences. The reasons for the isolation of schools, and of the studies of schools, from the worlds that surround them is anchored to centuries of educational practice that isolated learning from doing, that identified learning with religious study, or with the work of women and children. Consequently, feminist educators have worked to reverse this history of seperation and to rescue education, educators, and their students from the deprivations of their exile.

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