Shuffelton’s Prolegomenon on Educating Mothers

Abstract

With unsentimental, embodied-critical savvy and honesty, “How Mothers Divide the Apple Pie” re-opens a too-long-neglected line of revolutionary inquiry initiated in early modernity, now vital once again. Amy Shuffelton’s study of “Maternal and Civic Thinking in the Age of Neoliberalism” is a much-needed prolegomenon to broader philosophical conversation, increasingly urgent across myriad cultural contexts beyond any one Philosophy of Education yearbook essay’s possible scope: A conversation on educating mothers amid public education’s current corporatist reconfiguration. I mean that phrase “educating mothers” ambiguously, to signify culturally, economically, and politically diverse “mothers” as both subjects and objects of “educating.” Shuffelton’s inquiry could draw new theoretical attention to the parent-teacher organization as a critical public-school site for educating mothers in both those senses. Albeit perhaps unintentionally, she has also mapped out a possible undergraduate or graduate philosophy curriculum for and about educating mothers for parental citizenship.