Democracy in America: Education of Young Women in the United States 11 - 4 - 2010

 What sounds old -fashioned seems still relevant. With all the studies showing a decline in female students' abilities, this reads as having current importance:

I have been frequently surprised and almost frightened at the singular address and happy boldness with which young women in America contrive to manage their thoughts and their language amid all the difficulties of free conversation; a philosopher would have stumbled at every step along the narrow path which they trod without accident and without effort. It is easy, indeed, to perceive that even amid the independence of early youth an American woman is always mistress of herself; she indulges in all permitted pleasures without yielding herself up to any of them, and her reason never allows the reins of self-guidance to drop, though it often seems to hold them loosely.

Maybe I am comparing apples and oranges. Maybe modern studies with all their dull language prove de Tocqueville was misled, for all of his wondrous prose.

Read and ponder de Tocqueville, ask if this modern American women, then why not. A change in education changing its goals? Our society changed its expectations for women? In this paragraph I see a world of changes:

Although the Americans are a very religious people, they do not rely on religion alone to defend the virtue of woman; they seek to arm her reason also. In this respect they have followed the same method as in several others: they first make vigorous efforts to cause individual independence to control itself, and they do not call in the aid of religion until they have reached the utmost limits of human strength.

We certainly no longer wait to call in the aid of religion - now we add the backing of the law. What is the requirement of abstinence-only sex education but a religiously imposed law? We do not rely on reason, and that may be a reaction to the Twentieth Century when reason lost its allure at Auschwitz and in the Gulag and Rwanda, and too many other places. Beyond that history looms the superstitions of the Victorian Age and the Age of Aquarius. We have lost a world of common sense to a world brimming with information.

Would anyone think this describes modern American education for either gender?

As they could not prevent her virtue from being exposed to frequent danger, they determined that she should know how best to defend it, and more reliance was placed on the free vigor of her will than on safeguards which have been shaken or overthrown Instead, then, of inculcating mistrust of herself, they constantly seek to enhance her confidence in her own strength of character. As it is neither possible nor desirable to keep a young woman in perpetual and complete ignorance, they hasten to give her a precocious knowledge on all subjects. Far from hiding the corruptions of the world from her, they prefer that she should see them at once and train herself to shun them, and they hold it of more importance to protect her conduct than to be over-scrupulous of the innocence of her thoughts.

She shares a confidence with her community where I see a society having exchanged the community for laws and the school for prison.

Do rate reason higher reason higher than obedience? Our society gives no relief to many, leaving them to the evils of the world. We do not face up to that fact - as rational people should. Education does not promote the training of rationality.

Education aims at inputting a skill set for an economic cog. that is, training children for the best possible job without giving a thought to their roles of citizen and human being. Jerry Falwell killed off all humanism. Nietzsche wrote something about the danger of becoming what one fought. We ought to have paid more attention to what we are doing to ourselves.

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