Mary Wollstonecraft on education. Mary Wollstonecraft has long been appreciated as a major political thinker – but she also made important contributions to educational theory and practice.
In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft constitutes an attack on the view of female education put forward by Rousseau and countless others who regarded women as weak and artificial and not capable of reasoning effectively. She extended the basic ideas of Enlightenment philosophy to women and Rousseau’s educational ideas of how to educate boys to girls. She maintained that if girls were encouraged from an early age to develop their minds, it would be seen that they were rational creatures and there was no reason whatsoever for them not to be given the same opportunities as boys with regard to education and training. Women could enter the professions and have careers just the same as men. In proposing the same type of education for girls as that proposed for boys, Mary Wollstonecraft also went a step further and proposed that they be educated together which was even more radical than anything proposed before.
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I believe what Mary Wollstonecraft thought, about girls being taught from an early age that they are no lesser than boys, and girls and boys sharing the same type and quality of education, is extremely important. Moreover, given what I have learned through my research on how globalization and corporations impact and can destroy education, I feel that it's important to emphasize that education is a right, not a privilege. I do not believe that Mary would be pleased with globalization's impacts on education other than the fact that education is becoming more widely accessible to the developing world. On the other hand, however, globalization of education has allowed for women and girls to find more opportunities than they have in the past and I think she would be thrilled with that.
ReplyDeleteMary Wollstonecraft caused a sensation by writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). She declared that both women and men were human beings endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. She called for women to become educated. She insisted women should be free to enter business, pursue professional careers, and vote if they wished. I think she made a huge impact on women's education and the pursuit to see woman's right equivalent to men. Educated, outspoken women are important to the presentation and interpretation of issues with their meaning to society at large.
ReplyDeleteMary Wollstonecraft was a big thinker for her time. I'm glad that she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, because I believe it really sparked the minds of many of her peers, that girls could indeed learn the same things as boys and also learn in the same environment. I also believe that her writings could have begun the movement of equal learning among the sexes, which is still a big issues in many societies today.
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