Schooling women in citizenship

Abstract

From Plato's concern in the Republic (1979) to design an education that would lay the foundations for the just state, to Dewey's assertion in The School and Society (1899/1974) that the public schools will be the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely and harmonious (p. 29), civic education has remained a foundational preoccupation of educational theorists. Central to this preoccupation is the idea that the stability, continuity, reform, and even the transformation of the social and political order depend upon the practice of a citizenship that can be learned in schools (Butts, 1980; Butts et al., 1983). That is, the school's creation of the good citizen has been seen as a way of realizing the good state and good society. Seen positively, the public school's attempt to create citizens is also an attempt to democratize the opportunities of the young to become fully entitled participants within society (Broudy, 1981). Schooling assures social continuity and political harmony by producing a network of emotional responses and intellectual dispositions toward social and political relations. Power and identity are distributed, or at least promised, to individuals who can legitimately earn it by coming to understand, accept, and act in accord with standards of belief and behavior set by the curriculum. Seen negatively, public schooling, as Foucault (1977) contends, is a disciplinary institution akin to psychiatric and correctional institutions. The schools