Hirschberg, S. (1996). Issues in Education. In Strategies of Argument. (pp. 637-662). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. 13 Issues in Education Our public schools are in terrible trouble and then- disarray threatens our nations ability to compete economically just as it hinders our students' ability to achieve personal fulfillment. -John Silber, President of Boston University Underlying current concerns about the quality of education and its adequacy to meet the needs of an ever-changing student population are more fundamental questions about the purposes of education in any society. Scholars and researchers have studied the problem from a variety of perspectives. What constitutes an educated person? Should education reflect changes taking place in society, maintain more traditional values, or take the lead in efforts toward reform? Questions about whether schools should reflect the status quo or play a progressive role have become the center of controversies over curriculum reform. Molefi Kete Asante maintains that an Afrocentric curriculum is crucial in helping black students achieve a greater sense of self-worth. Anne Wortham, on the other hand, argues that attempts to institute an Afrocentric curriculum are misguided. In the past, education has served a variety of objectives, including acculturation and socialization of the young, job preparation, citizenship training, the cultivation of moral values, and intellectual development. What makes arguments in education so diverse is that it has often served as an arena in which different social, religious, political, and nationalistic theories compete. Those who view current trends deemphasizing a traditional curriculum in favor of a student-centered education decry the abandonment of standards and the loss of rigorous mental discipline. For these critics, the annual declines in the average SAT scores of American students, the rising number of high school dropouts, and recent studies showing that American students perform poorly in comparison with their international counterparts serve as ample evidence that our educational system is in dire need of reform. In some schools, these reforms have focused on efforts to reflect and preserve the cultural diversity of new student populations while educating them to function effectively in American society. Efforts to 637 revise the curriculum to embrace multicultural perspectives have led educators to question basic assumptions about the underlying purposes of education. A parallel concern centers on reforms designed to bring about greater awareness of the history, concerns, and accomplishments of women. Since the 1970s many universities have created women's studies courses and departments to encourage the study and understanding of women's issues. Those in favor of these programs, like Dale Spender, argue that they are needed to remedy the current male-centered curriculum. Critics such as Karen Lehrman fault some women's studies programs for being too subjective at the expense of the development of needed academic skills in critical thinking. 638 Molefi Kete Asante The Afrocentric Idea in Education Molefi Kete Asante is chairman of the African American Studies department at Temple University. He is the leading proponent of Afrocentric curriculum reform and the author of numerous works, including Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change, second edition, 1990. This essay originally appeared in the Spring 1991 issue of the Journal of Negro Education. Many of the principles that govern the development of the Afrocentric idea in education were first established by Carter G. Woodson in The Mis-education of the Negro (1933). Indeed, Woodson's classic reveals the fundamental problems pertaining to the education of the African person in America. As Woodson contends, African Americans have been educated away from their own culture and traditions and attached to the fringes of European culture, thus dislocated from themselves, Woodson asserts that African Americans often valorize European culture to the detriment of their own heritage. Although Woodson does not advocate rejection of American citizenship or nationality, he believes that assuming African Americans hold the same position as European Americans vis-a-vis the realities of America would lead to the psychological and cultural death of the African American population. Furthermore, if education is ever to be substantive and meaningful within the context of American society, Woodson argues, it must first address the African's historical experiences, both in Africa and America.... THE AFROCENTRIC APPROACH Afrocentricity is a frame of reference wherein phenomena are 2 viewed from the perspective of the African person. The Afrocentric approach seeks in every situation the appropriate centrality of the African person. In education this means that teachers provide students the opportunity to study the world and its people, concepts, and history from an African world view. In most classrooms, whatever the subject, Whites are located in the center perspective position. How alien the African American child must feel, how like an outsider! The little African 639 American child who sits in a classroom and is taught to accept as he roes and heroines individuals who defamed African people is being actively de-centered, dislocated, and made into a nonperson, one whose aim in life might be to one day shed that "badge of inferiority": his or her Blackness. In Afrocentric educational settings, however, teachers do not marginalize African American children by causing them to question their own self-worth because their people's story is seldom told. By seeing themselves as the subjects rather than the objects of education--be the discipline biology, medicine, literature, or social studies-African American students come to see themselves not merely as seekers of knowledge but as integral participants in it. Because all content areas are adaptable to an Afrocentric approach, African American students can be made to see themselves as centered in the reality of any discipline. 3 It must be emphasized that Afrocentricity is not a Black version of Eurocentricity. Eurocentricity is based on White supremacist notions whose purposes are to protect White privilege and advantage in education, economics, politics, and so forth. Unlike Eurocentricity, Afrocentricity does not condone ethnocentric valorization at the expense of degrading other groups' perspectives. Moreover, Eurocentricity presents the particular historical reality of Europeans as the sum total of the human experience. It imposes Eurocentric realities as "universal". i.e., that which is White is presented as applying to the human condition in general, while that which is non-White is viewed as group-specific and therefore not "human," This explains why some scholars and artists of African descent rush to deny their Blackness; they believe that to exist as a Black person is not to exist as a universal human being. They are the individuals Woodson identified as preferring European art, language, and Culture over African art, language, and culture; they believe that anything of European origin is inherently better than anything produced by or issuing from their own people. Naturally, the person of African descent should be centered in his or her historical experiences as an African, but Eurocentric curricula produce such aberrations of perspective among persons of color. TRUE MULTICULTURALISM 4 Multiculturalism in education is a nonhierarchical approach that respects and celebrates a variety of cultural perspectives on world phenomena. The multicultural approach holds that although European culture is the majority culture in the United States, that is not sufficient reason for it to be imposed on diverse student populations as "universal." Multiculturalists assert that education, to have integrity, must begin with the proposition that all humans have contributed to world development and the flow of knowledge and information, and that most human achievements are the result of mutually interactive, international effort. Without a multicultural education, students remain essentially ignorant of the contributions of a major portion of tile world's people. A multicultural education is thus a fundamental necessity for anyone who wishes to achieve competency in almost any subject. 5 'The Afrocentric idea must be the stepping-stone from which the multicultural idea is launched. A truly authentic multicultural education, therefore, must be based upon the Afrocentric initiative. If this step is skipped, multicultural curricula, as they are increasingly being defined by White "resisters," will evolve without any substantive infusion of African American content, and the African American child will continue to be lost in the Eurocentric framework of education. In other words, the African American child will neither be confirmed nor affirmed in his or her own cultural information. For the mutual benefit of all Americans, this tragedy, which leads to the psychological and cultural dislocation of African American children, can and should be avoided..... 6 Why has Afrocentricity created so much of a controversy in educational circles? The idea that an African American child is placed in a stronger position to learn if he or she is centered-that is, if the child sees himself or herself within the content of the curriculum rather than at its margins-is not novel. What is revolutionary is the movement from the idea (conceptual stage) to its implementation in practice, when we begin to teach teachers how to put African American youth at the center of instruction. In effect, students are shown how to see with new eyes and hear with new ears. African American children learn to interpret and center phenomena in the context of African heritage, while White students are taught to see that their own centers are not threatened by the presence or contributions of African Americans and others. 7 Institutions such as schools are conditioned by the character of the nation in which they are developed. just as crime and politics are different in different nations, so, too, is education. In the United States a "Whites-only" orientation has predominated in education. This has had a profound impact on the quality of education for children of all races and ethnic groups. The African American child has suffered disproportionately, but White children are also the victims of monoculturally diseased curricula. 8 During the past years many White students and parents have approached me after presentations with tears in their eyes or expressing their anger about the absence of information about African Americans in the schools. A comment from a young White man at a major university in the Northeast was especially striking. As he said to me: "My teacher told us that Martin Luther King was a commie and went on with the class." Because this student's teacher made no effort to discuss King's ideas, the student maliciously had been kept ignorant. The vast majority of White Americans are likewise ignorant about the bountiful reservoirs of African and African American history, culture, and contributions. For example, few Americans of any color have heard the names of Cheikh Anta Diop, Anna Julia Cooper, C. L. R. James, or J. A. Rogers. All were historians who contributed greatly to our understanding of the African world. Indeed, very few teachers have ever taken a course in African American Studies; therefore, most are unable to provide systematic information about African Americans. AFROCENTRICITY AND HISTORY Most of America's teaching force are victims of the same system that victimizes today's young. Thus, American children are not taught the names of the African ethnic groups from which the majority of the African American population are derived; few are taught the names of any of the sacred sites in Africa. Few teachers can discuss with their students the significance of the Middle Passage or describe what it meant or means to Africans. Little mention is made in American classrooms of either the brutality of slavery or the ex-slaves' celebration of freedom. American children have little or no understanding of the nature of the capture, transport, and enslavement of Africans. Few have been taught the true horrors of being taken, shipped naked across 25 days of ocean, broken by abuse and indignities of all kinds, and dehumanized into a beast of burden, a thing without a name. If our students only knew the truth, if they were taught the Afrocentric perspective on the Great Enslavement, and if they knew the full story about the events since slavery that have served to constantly dislocate African Americans, their behavior would perhaps be different. Among these events are: the infamous constitutional compromise of 1787 which decreed that African Americans were, by law, the equivalent of but three-fifths of a person; the 1857 Dred Scott decision in which the Supreme Court avowed that African Americans had no rights Whites were obliged to respect; the complete dismissal and nonenforcement of Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (this amendment, passed in 1868, stipulated as one of its provisions a penalty against any state that denied African Americans the right to vote, and called for the reduction of a state's delegates to the House of Representatives in proportion to the number of disenfranchised African American males therein); and the much-mentioned, as-yet-unreceived 40 acres and a mule, reparation for enslavement, promised to each African American family after the Civil War by Union General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. If the curriculum were enhanced to include readings from the slave narratives; the diaries of slave ship captains; the journals of slave owners; the abolitionist newspapers; the writings of the freedmen and freedwomen; the accounts of African American civil rights, civic, and social organizations; and numerous others, African American children would be different, White children would be different-indeed, America would be a different nation today... 10 No wonder many persons of African descent attempt to shed their race and become "raceless." One's basic identity is one's self-identity, which is ultimately one's cultural identity; without a strong cultural identity,' one is lost. Black children do not know their people's story and White children do not know the story, but remembrance is a vital requisite for understanding and humility. This is why the Jews have campaigned (and rightly so) to have the story of the European Holocaust taught in schools and colleges. Teaching about such a monstrous human brutality should forever remind the world of the ways in which humans have often violated each other, Teaching about the African Holocaust is just as important for many of the same reasons. Additionally, it underscores the enormity of the effects of physical, psychological, and economic dislocation on the African population in America and throughout the African diaspora. Without an understanding of the historical experiences of African people, American children cannot make any real headway in addressing the problems of the present. 11 Certainly, if African American children were taught to be fully aware of the struggles of our African forebears they would find a renewed sense of purpose and vision in their own lives. They would cease acting as if they have no past and no future. For instance, if they were taught about the historical relationship of Africans to the cotton industry-how African American men, women, and children were forced to pick cotton from "can't see in the morning 'tit can't see at night," until the blood ran from the tips of their fingers where they were pricked by the hard boll; or if they were made to visualize their ancestors in the burning sun, bent double with constant stooping, and dragging rough, heavy croaker sacks behind them-or picture them bringing those sacks trembling to the scale, fearful of a sure flogging if they did not pick enough, perhaps our African American youth would develop a stronger entrepreneurial spirit. If White children were taught the same information rather than that normally fed them about American slavery, they would probably view our society differently and work to transform it into a better place.... AIM OF AFROCENTRISM 12 This nation has long been divided with regard to the educational opportunities afforded to children. By virtue of the protection provided by society and reinforced by the Eurocentric curriculum, the White child is already ahead of the African American child by first grade. Our efforts thus must concentrate on giving the African American child greater opportunities for learning at the kindergarten level. However, the kind of assistance the African American child needs is as much cultural as it is academic. If the proper cultural information is provided, the academic performance will surely follow suit. 13 When it comes to educating African American children, the American educational system does not need a tune-up, it needs an overhaul. Black children have been maligned by this system. Black teachers have been maligned. Black history has been maligned. Africa has been maligned. Nonetheless, two truisms can be stated about education in America. First, some teachers can and do effectively teach African American children; secondly, if some teachers can do it, others can, too. We must learn all we can about what makes these teachers' attitudes and approaches successful, and then work diligently to see that their successes are replicated on a broad scale. By raising the same questions that Woodson posed more than 50 years ago, Afrocentric education, along with a significant reorientation of the American educational enterprise, seeks to respond to the African person's psychological and Cultural dislocation. By providing philosophical and theoretical guidelines and criteria that are centered in an African perception of reality and by placing the African American child in his or her proper historical context and setting, Afrocentricity may be just the "escape hatch" African Americans so desperately need to facilitate academic success and "steal away" from the cycle of miseducation and dislocation. Anne Wortham Restoring Traditional Values in Higher Education Anne Wortham is an associate professor of sociology at Illinois State University and a continuing visiting scholar at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. This essay was originally given as a speech on February 22, 1991, at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D. C., an organization devoted to the expression of conservative social and political opinion. Before I examine the content of Afrocentric education, let me take this opportunity to be politically incorrect and say that I am not an African; calling myself African would make no more sense than a white Australian calling himself English because his ancestors were English prisoners deported to the Australian continent. Neither am I part of any "African diaspora." I am a native of this land-an indigenous American and thoroughly Western. This is my home; I desire no other, either symbolically or existentially. What exactly is Afrocentrism anyway? My comments are drawn 2 basically from Professor Malefi Asante's 1987 book, The Afrocentric Idea. He writes that Afrocentricity means 11 placing African ideals at the center of any analysis that involves African culture and behavior." The Afrocentric idea is "a commitment to a historical project that places the African person back on center" in a cultural analysis; as such it becomes an "escape to sanity." Asante argues that Afrocentrism is not just an artistic or literary movement; neither is it just an individual or collective quest for authenticity through the history of a people. Above all, he says it is "the total use of a method to effect psychological, political, social, cultural and economic change." It involves overthrowing "Eurocentric icons" and exorcising them from the life and thought of African Americans whose minds have been colonized by Europeans. The Afrocentric idea goes beyond the colonizing of the mind that began with the black power movement to something else the quest for an authentic mindset that one can speak of as Afrocentric. EMPHASIZING THE CONTRIBUTION OF BLACKS According to the Afrocentric perspective of education, the way to 3 improve the educational achievement of black children is to improve 645 their self-image by requiring that teachers include or emphasize the contribution of blacks in art, science, mathematics, language arts, social studies and music. This approach, known as the "Afrocentric curriculum," has gained in popularity and is being variously implemented around the country. In the District of Columbia, where enrollment is 90 percent black, a group of parents and businessmen founded an organization called, ironically, Operation Know Thyself, which lobbies school officials and pushes for the integration of an Afrocentric curriculum in all courses from kindergarten through high school. 4 The name Operation Know 'Thyself is paradoxical because the premise underlying the organization's promotion of an Afrocentric curriculum is that self-esteem is dependent on cultural heritage, and that the self is a group phenomenon rather than personal identity expressed in personality and character. The tragic irony in this approach is that the attempt to derive self-esteem from the knowledge of black cultural contributions requires that one's sense of personal identity be tied to the thinking and actions of people with whom one happens to share some racial ancestry and ethnic history; it is a recipe not for increasing self-esteem, but for perpetuating the kind of other-oriented dependency that is one of the primary obstacles to positive self-esteem. 5 A very controversial Afrocentric approach in education is the teaching program known as African-American Baseline Essays, an outline used by several inner-city public schools around the country The central claim of the Baseline Essays is that ancient Egypt was a black nation. One of the essays asserts that Europeans "invented the theory of 'white' Egyptians who were merely browned by the sun." According to Baseline: 1) Africa was "the world center of culture and learning in antiquity." Ancient Greece derived significant aspects of its culture largely from blacks. 2) Ramses 11 and King Tutankhamen were black. Aesop was probably black. Cleopatra was partly black. 3) "Since Africa is widely believed to be the birthplace of the human race, it follows that Africa was the birthplace of mathematics and science." TOLERANCE AND RACISM 6 According to the New York State Board of Education's 1989 Task Force on Minorities, the value of the Afrocentric approach is not only that it will cause children of minority groups to have "higher selfesteem and self-respect," it will also cause children from European cultures to have "a less arrogant perspective." This idea is an inversion of the argument made during the 1950s by social scientists, who took the position that segregated schools contributed to the low self-esteem of black school children. Together these propositions amount to saying that the self-image of black students is dependent on having white classmates who must disprove their own alleged racism by tolerating the ethnocentrism of blacks. When white students incorporate the notion that their self-esteem is tied to the approval of minorities, they come to think in the following way: "I want to be good (i.e., tolerant). Minorities tell me I am bad (a racist/ Eurocentric). A tolerant person does not contradict the assertions of minorities. So the way to be tolerant is to be racist." This is the self-fulfilling prophecy that teachers encourage when they blindly abdicate their responsibility as educators and subject their students to Afrocentrism. TOLERANCE AND UNDERSTANDING Ayn Rand's condemnation of the double standard that permeated 7 victimization politics of the 1970s is equally applicable to the promoters of Afrocentrism during the 1990s. For such people, wrote Rand: 8 "Tolerance" and " understanding" are regarded as unilateral virtues. In relation to any given minority, we are told, it is the duty of all others, i.e., of the majority, to tolerate and understand the minority's values and customs-while the minority proclaims that its soul is beyond the outsider's comprehension, that no common ties or bridges exist, that it does not propose to grasp one syllable of the majority's values, customs or culture, and will continue hurling racist epithets (or worse) at the majority's faces. Nobody can pretend any longer that the goal of such policies is the elimination of racism-particularly when one observes that the real victims are the better members of these privileged minorities. 9 The Afrocentric curriculum requires not only the complicity of whites in the denigration of the cultural origins of their ethnic groups, but also requires the estrangement of both whites and blacks from the distinct culture they have created in the United States. By using the term "African" to refer to members of the American Negro subculture and the term "European" to refer to members of the many Caucasian American subcultures, Afrocentric education completely distorts the reality of intergroup relations in America. Moreover, it deliberately defines American Negroes as outsiders to the Western experience in defiance of the fact that we are bloody well in it up to our necks! As Earl E. Thorpe pointed out three decades ago: 10 Since 1865 practically all colored Americans ... constantly have viewed this country as their home, and have not wished to be expatriated or colonized. Their political and social faith have been the traditional faith of America, and they speedily and unhesitatingly have risen to the colors when the nation was imperilled by war. By and large, they have been basically American since the early days of slavery, and their so-called racial traits are simply American traits, accentuated here and there by historic circumstance. This does not deny the survival of certain African words, dances, and similar idioms, but these survivals have become a part of the total national culture. 11 The premise of the Afrocentric curriculum is absurd, and its promise of self-esteem is doomed to fail. There is no doubt that black children have a need for positive self-esteem. They are not unique in this; the need for self-esteem is inherent in man's nature. (For an exposition on why this is so, I refer you to a work by psychologist Nathaniel Branden entitle(-] The Psychology of Self-Esteem.) Self-esteem is the reputation a person has with himself. Branden defines authentic self-esteem as the integrated sum of a sense of personal efficacy (self-confidence) and a sense of personal worth (self-respect). He says that it is "the conviction that one is competent to live and worthy of living." There is only one way that man (-an make himself competent to live, and that is by the proper exercise of his rational faculty He needs to have confidence in the reliability of his tool of cognition, and he needs to feet that he is right in his characteristic manner of acting-that lie is good and fit for happiness. "Man makes himself worthy of living by making himself competent to live," says Branden. PERSONAL WORTH 12 Since, as Branden points Out, "There is nothing a man is so likely to re- gard as irreducibly arid unalterably 'himself' as his manner of thinking," one of the primary tasks of education must be teaching children the method of thinking. They must be taught to attain intellectual independence to free themselves from the dependence on the authority of significant others. They need to achieve the personal autonomy that results from independent thinking, independent judgment and self-responsibility Afrocentric education assumes that personal worth is derived from group pride, and in so doing, promises what it cannot deliver. 13 Studies of the effects of minority status on self-esteem indicate that although it may seem logical that experiences of prejudice, discrimination arid economic failure would cause a group to have a lower selfesteem than a group that does not, it is not necessarily the case. Indeed to insist that is to generate another stereotype-that of self-hatred. 14 The assumption of a direct relationship between self-esteem arid discrimination assumes that all blacks adjust to their ethnic status in the same way and that there is no variation in the effect that ethnicity has on their self-concept. To date, Studies of the relation of ethnic identity and self-concept show that: 1) no assumptions about self-esteem can be based on race; 2) factors such as social class, school performance and reference groups appear to be more important than race in explaining self-image; and 3) that self-satisfaction, pride and self-respect are not a monopoly of those of dominant groups. 15 All students should learn about the contributions to history and I Culture made by people of different backgrounds. But it is a cruel hoax to suggest that there is my significant linkage between race or ethnicity and self-esteem. When I attended school in a segregated school system in the South, I learned about blacks who had contributed to American culture. However, I was not taught that there was anything special about them except that they were very smart, articulate, creative people who were worth knowing about because of their outstanding human qualities and achievements, because of the role they played in the making of America, and the contribution they made to the uplift of the NEGRO COMMUNITY. 16 No one told me that by having this knowledge something positive Would happen to my view of myself. The reason was that my teachers, who were black, knew that properly educating me meant teaching me how to function as a human being, not as a black person. They did not tell me this in so many words, but what they taught was a clear indication of their intent. In the face of a society that viewed Negroes only in terms of - racial stereotypes, my teachers focused not on teaching me counter-stereotypes, as Afrocentrists would, but on the things I needed to know to fulfill my human potential. In other words, I believe they understood that being a victim of racism did not entitle me to exemption from the standards of human achievement, and it would have been unthinkable for them to give me the impression that I could obtain a sense of worth by secondhand means. 17 What is more important to the self-esteem of a Chinese-American: to know that tea, paper, paper money and printing originated in China or to acquire the skills necessary perhaps to sell tea and calculate his earnings? What is more important to the self-esteem of a Negro American: knowing that Negro spirituals and folk songs gave rise to what is recognized as American popular music, or learning how to defer immediate gratification when and if necessary and to tolerate unavoidable frustration in order to achieve his goals? 18 There is no necessary conflict between making students aware of the contributions of many peoples to the culture of their society and understanding that their self-concept has nothing to do with the achievements of people who happen to look like them, or talk like them or worship God as they do. Self-esteem is not a transferable commodity, or something conferred upon one by other people's character and actions. It has to be earned by the individual himself; there is no other way. What children need to learn is the distinction between culture and personality, and between biography and history. INDIVIDUALS, NOT GROUP SYMBOLS This is not to deny the importance of teaching children about the I) history of American Negroes. But Afrocentrism does not simply claim that Negro American history has been distorted or excluded from school curricula; it wants to substitute any objective account of Negro history for its own selective and self-aggrandizing view. Moreover, in teaching students about the lives and achievements of people like Ralph Ellison, Duke Ellington or Bessie Smith the Afrocentric curriculum intends that students view such persons not as individuals but as symbolic ancestors whose works are the cultural property of Negroes and whose lives were but extensions of all Negroes. Indeed, it demands that they be spoken of not even as Americans but as Africans. 20 Take another case, that of Booker T. Washington, founder of my alma mater, Tuskegee University. All school children need to know about the life and ideas of Washington, who was an inspiring figure in American history. However, since Washington was an ardent proponent of free enterprise and championed the other ideals of Western civilization, the consistent practice of Afrocentrism requires educators to present Washington an unfortunate black leader who was a captive of Eurocentric consciousness. Surely, such a distortion of Washington's own worldview and his ideas cannot be seriously offered as education. No doubt be would be excluded from some Afrocentric curricula altogether. Karen Lehrman Off Course Karen Lehrman is an editor at the Wilson Quarterly in Washington, D. C., whose work has appeared in many national magazines. This article was published in the September/October 1993 issue of Mother Jones. It's eight o'clock on a balmy Wednesday morning at the University of California at Berkeley, and Won-Len's Studies 39, "Literature and the Question of Pornography," is about to begin. The atmosphere of the small class is relaxed. The students call the youngish professor by her first name; the banter focuses on finding a man for her to date. She puts on the board: "Write 'grade' or 'no grade' on your paper before turning it in." Students-nine women and one man-amble in sporadically for the first twenty minutes. 2 Today's discussion involves a previ ous guest speaker, feministsocialist porn star Nina Hartley The professor asks what insights the students gained from Hartley's talk. They respond: "She's free with her sexuality... I liked when she said, 'I like to fuck my friends.'. . . No body-image problems.. . . She's dependent in that relationship...." The professor tries to move the discussion onto a more serious question: have traditional feminists, in their antiporn stance, defined women out of their sexuality? After a few minutes, though, the discussion fixes on orgasms-how they're not the be-all and end-all of sexual activity, how easy it is to fake one. The lone male stares intently at a spot on the floor; occasionally he squirms. 3 1 never took a porn class when I went to college ten years ago. In fact, I never took a women's studies class and dont even know if the universities I attended offered any. Women's studies was about a decade old at the time, but it hadn't yet become institutionalized (there are now more than six hundred programs), nor gained notoriety through debates over the canon and multiculturalism. But even if I had been aware of a program, I'm certain I would have stayed far away from it. It's not that I wasn't a feminist: I fully supported equal rights and equal opportunities for women. But I was feminist like I was Jewish-it was a part of my identity that didn't depend on external affirmation. 4 Perhaps more important, as a firs t-generation career-woman, I felt a constant need to prove my equality. I took as many "male" courseseconomics, Political science, intellectual history-as I could; I wanted 652 to be seen as a good student who happened to be a woman. There were a couple of problems, though: I didn't learn much about women or the history of feminism, and like most of my female peers, I rarely spoke in class. WHAT ARE WOMEN DISCUSSING? In 1992 1 toured the world of women's studies, visiting Berkeley, the University of Iowa, Smith College, and Dartmouth College. I sat in on about twenty classes, talked to students and professors at these and other schools, amassed syllabi, and waded through the more popular reading materials. I admit to having begun with a nagging skepticism. But I was also intrigued: rumor had it that in these classes, women talked Arid they do. The problem, as I see it, is what they're often talking 1, about. In many classes discussions alternate between the personal and the political, with mere pit stops at the academic, Sometimes they are filled with unintelligible post-structuralist jargon, sometimes they consist of consciousness-raising psychobabble, with the students' feelings and experiences valued as much as anything the professor or texts have to offer. Regardless, the guiding principle of most of the classes is oppression, and problems are almost inevitably reduced to relationships of power. "Diversity" is the mantra of both students and professors, but it doesn't apply to political opinions. 7 Not every women's studies course suffers from these flaws. In fact, the rigor and perspective of individual programs and classes vary widely, and feminist academics have debated nearly every aspect of the field. But it seems that the vast majority of women's studies professors rely, to a greater or lesser extent, on a common set of feminist theories. Put into practice, these theories have the potential to undermine the goals not only of a liberal education, but of feminism itself.... CLASSROOM THERAPY 8 "Women's Studies" is something of a misnomer. Most of the courses are designed not merely to study women, but also to improve the lives of women, both the individual students (the vast majority of whom are female) and women in general. Since professors believe that women have been effectively silenced throughout history, they often consider a pedagogy that "nurtures voice" just as, if not more, important than the curriculum. 9 Women's studies professors tend to be overtly warm, encouraging, maternal. You want to tell these women your problems-and many students do. To foster a "safe environment" where women feet comfortable talking, many teachers try to divest the classroom of power relations. They abandon their role as experts, lecturing very little and sometimes allowing decisions to be made by the group and papers to be graded by other students. An overriding value is placed on student participation and collaboration: students make joint presentations, cowrite papers, and use group journals for "exploring ideas they can't say in class" and "fostering a sense of community." Because chairs are usually arranged in a circle, in a couple of classes taught by graduate students I couldn't figure Out Who the teacher was until the end. 10 To give women voice, many professors encourage all discourse- no matter how personal or trivial. Indeed, since it is widely believed that knowledge is Constructed and most texts have been influenced by "the patriarchy," many in women's studies consider personal experience the only real source of truth. Some professors and texts even claim that women have a way of thinking that is different from the abstract rationality of men, one based on context, emotion, and intuition. Fully "validating" women, therefore, means celebrating subjectivity over objectivity, feelings over facts, instinct over logic. 11 The day I sat in on Berkeley's "Contemporary Global Issues for Women" (all women except for one "occasional" male), we watched a film about women organizing in Ahmadabad, India. The film was tedious, but it seemed like grist for a good political /economic/ sociological discussion about the problems of women in underdeveloped countries. After the film ended, though, the professor promptly asked the class: "How do you feel about the film? Do you find it more sad or courageous?" Students responded to her question until the end of class, at which point she suggested, "You might think about the film in terms of your own life and the life of your mother. Women are not totally free in this culture. It just might come in more subtle ways." SELF-REVELATION 12 A previous discussion was apparent fly not much better. "We had to read an enormous amount of interesting material on reproductive rights, which I was very excited to discuss," Pam Wilson, a women's studies sophomore, told me. "But all she did in class was ask each of us, 'What forms of birth control have you used, and what problems have you had?' We never got to the assigned readings." 13 Self-revelation is not uncommon to women's studies classes. Stu- dents discover that they're lesbian or bisexual, for example, and then share it with the class. In a group journal (titled "The Fleshgoddesses") from last year's porn class, B. wrote: "There is still something about a [man] eating a [woman] out ... that freaks me out! I guess I'm such a dyke that it seems abnormal." G. recalled that her father used to kiss her on the mouth "real hard" when she was eight or nine. 14 Of course, self-discovery and female bonding are important for young women, and so, one might argue, are group therapy and consciousness-raising. Indeed, I wish I had had some when I was that age; it might have given me the courage to talk in class and to deal with abusive bosses later in life. But does it belong in a university classroom? 15 Many of the professors I talked with (including the chair of I Berkeley's women's studies department) viewed the more touchy-feely classes as just as problematic as I did. I saw a couple of teachers who were able to use personal experience, either of historical figures or students, to buttress the discussion, not as an end in itself. But even these classes were always on the verge of slipping into confession mode. 16 This pedagogy does get women talking. But they could do much of this type of talking in support groups at their schools' women's centers. Young women have many needs, and the college classroom can effectively address only one of them: building their intellects. As Ruth Rosen, who helped start the women's studies program at the University of California at Davis, puts it, "Students go to college to be academically challenged, not cared for." 17 But the problem with a therapeutic pedagogy is more than just al- lowing students to discuss their periods or sex lives in class. Using the emotional and subjective to "validate" women risks validating precisely the stereotypes that feminism was supposed to eviscerate: women are irrational, women must ground all knowledge in their own experiences, etc. A hundred years ago, women were fighting for the right to learn math, science, Latin-to be educated like men; today, many women are content to get their feelings heard, their personal problems aired, their instincts and intuition respected.... POLITICS AS USUAL Most women's studies professors seem to adhere to the following is principles in formulating classes: women were and are oppressed; oppression is endemic to our patriarchal social system; men, capitalism, and Western values are responsible for women's problems. The reading material is similarly bounded in political scope (Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon, bell hooks, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde turn up a lot), and opposing viewpoints are usually presented only through a feminist critique of them. Feminist Frontiers III, a book widely used in intro courses, purports to show readers "how gender has shaped your life," and invites them to join in the struggle "to reform the structure and culture of male dominance." 19 Although most of the classes I attended stopped short of outright advocacy of specific political positions, virtually all carried strong political undercurrents. Jill Harvey, a women's studies senior at Smith, recalls a feminist anthropology course in which she "quickly discovered that the way to get A's was to write papers full of guilt and angst about how I'd bought into society's definition of womanhood and now I'm enlightened and free." 20 Sometimes the politicization is more subtle. "I'm not into consciousness-raising," says Linda K. Kerber, a history professor at Iowa. "Students can feel I'm grading them on their competence and not on their politics." Yet in the final project of "Gender and Society in the United States," she asked students: "Reconsider a term paper you have written for another class. H low would you revise it now to ensure that it offers an analysis sensitive to gender as well as to race and class?" 21 Politicization is also apparent in the meager amount of time the classes devote to women who have achieved anything of note in the public sphere. Instead, students scrutinize the diaries and letters of unremarkable women who are of interest primarily because the patriarchy victimized them in one way or another. 22 According to professors and students, studying "women worthies" doesn't teach you much about oppression. Moreover, some added, these women succeeded by male, capitalist standards. It's time for women's traditional roles and forms of expression to be valued. 21 This may be true, but you don't need to elevate victimized women to the status of heroes to do that. It should also be noted that over the past twenty-five years feminists have been among those who have devalued women's traditional roles most vigorously I bet not many women's studies majors would encourage a peer's decision to forgo a career in order to stay home and raise children. More important examples of women who succeeded in the public sphere, possibly even while caring for a family, could be quite inspiring for young women. Instead, the classes implicitly downplay individual merit and focus on the systematic forces that are undermining everything women do. ARE "PRACTICUMS" PRACTICAL? 24 In general, "core" Women", Studies courses are more overtly political and less ),-academically rigorous than those cross-listed with a department. The syllabus of Iowa's "Introduction to Women's Studies" course declares: "As we make our collective and individual journeys during this course, we will consider how to integrate our theoretical knowledge with personal arid practical action in the world." "Practicums," which typically entail working in a women's organization, are a key part of many courses, of ten requiring thirty or more hours of a student's time. 25 Volunteering in a battered -women's shelter or rape crisis center may be deeply significant for both students arid society But should this be part of an undergraduate education? Students have only four years to learn the things a liberal education can offer-and the rest of their lives to put that knowledge to use. Courses on women don't have to be taught from an orthodox feminist perspective. Smith offers a biology course that's cross-listed with women's studies. It deals with women's bodies and medical issues; feminist theory is not included. Compare that to the course description of Berkeley's "Health and Sex in America's "From sterilization to AIDS; from incest to date rape; from anorexia to breast implants: who controls women's health?" Which course would you trust to be more objective? 27 Many women's studies professors acknowledge their field's bias, but point out that all disciplines are biased. Still, there's a huge difference between conceding that education has political elements and intentionally politicizing, between, as Women's Studies Professor Daphne Patai puts it, "recognizing and minimizing deep biases and proclaiming and endorsing them." Patai, whose unorthodox views got her in hot water at the University of Massachusetts, is now coauthoring a book on the contradictions of women's studies. "Do they really want fundamentalist studies, in which teachers are not just studying funda mentalism but supporting it?" 28 A still larger problem is the degree to which politics has infected women's studies scholarship. "Feminist theory guarantees that researchers will discover male bias and oppression in every civilization and time," says Mary Lefkowitz, a classics professor at Wellesley "A distinction has to be made between historical interpretation of the past and political reinterpretation." And, I would add, between reading novels with an awareness of racism and sexism, and reducing them entirely to constructs of race and gender.... WOMEN AS INDIVIDUALS 29 As the status of women in this country evolves, so should the goals of women's studies. It's for its own sake that women's studies -should stop treating women as an ensernble of victimized identities. Only when the mind (if each woman is considered on its own unique terms will the minds of all women be respected. Dale Spender An Alternative to Madonna Dale Spender has expressed her views on educational issues in several books, including Man Made Language, 1985, Women of Ideas, 1985, and Scribbling Sisters, 1987. This essay is reprinted from the Jnly/Augrist 1993 issue of Ms. magazine. It is reasonable to expect that those who work for a better world should be written Lip in history books as decent human beings who warrant our thanks for the contribution they make to our quality of life. Right? Well, not quite. Because being praised for a commitment to social justice applies only to some people, and feminists aren't among them. On the contrary, feminists-whose primary goal has been to provide a better deal for women and children-have been mocked and maligned throughout history. They are the recipients of some of tile worst press that there has ever been; and this raises many questions about power, about men, and about education. No books have been written on the failure of educational institutionscharged with the role of combating prejudice and presenting truth-to challenge this distorted view of women and their history. "The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself," mused Virginia Woolf in 1928 in A Room of One's Own MEN'S MISTREATMENT O WOMEN If the laws men had made in relation to women were the subject of study, few would be impressed with the male performance. They made women chattels who could legitimately be punished (wife beating was legal); who could be raped (conjugal rights were enshrined in the law and the "disobedient" wife who tried to escape was returned to her husband). Women in marriage were deprived of their identity, were not allowed to own property, and in the event of children, not allowed to be their guardians. Men even passed laws against contraception on the grounds that it would be an end to civilization if women Could control their own fertility and men's conjugal and impregnating rights were curtailed. Not a pretty story. No wonder there is such reluctance to relate it. 3 Failing also to include information on the triumphs, of women across the centuries, in spite of the treatment handed them by men, adds insult to injury. Arid it isn't just that the aspirations and attainments of women have been excised from the knowledge that is encoded in our institutions. The attempts being made by women today to reclaim and to pass on this history to a new generation of women (and men) continue to be discredited. 4 Most of the politics we teach relates to males (we concentrate on national/ international rather than local levels where women are likely to be represented). We teach about the evolution of democracy as it relates to men, and men's struggle for the vote. (In Australia we rarely make it clear that women and men stand in a different relationship to the franchise: while men's right to vote is enshrined in the constitution, women have only the of voting.) 5 Most sociology we teach is about males (urban man, rural man, man at work, man at sport-and these days with ostensible male-role changes-man at home). 6 Most of the laws we teach relate, to males (we don't teach laws men have passed to prevent women from behaving in particular ways; we don't teach the campaigns women have embarked on or the battles won in repealing, and changing, laws passed exclusively by men and intended to restrict women's liberty). 7 We don't teach the history and philosophy of ideas to show how with the scientific revolution women's wisdom was replaced by men's institutionalized know] ed ge-although there are books that deal with this transformation, and with the role played by witch-hunting in the "politics of knowledge." (We might know how Copernicus and Galileo were persecuted for their ideas-but what about the millions of women who suffered similar fates and were burnt at the stake for being knowledgeable?) 8 The history we teach concentrates overwhelmingly on wars and revolutions, rather than on peace and conciliation’s, and while it is replete with male victories there are very few texts-inside or outside educational institutions-that are critical of male power and masculinity. 9 Even such ostensibly neutral subjects as math and science have assumed the centrality of the male; the examples relate to males, the illustrations take males as the standard, and while women have a splendid history of achievement as mathematicians, it would be possible for students to graduate from advanced mathematics classes without knowing that women ever participated, let alone excelled, in this area. WOMEN ARE PORTRAYED NEGATIVELY 10 When women do get a mention, it is as a problem. Information presented in educational institutions has women as a poor and despised footnote. Nowhere is this more obvious than in relation to feminism. 11 So commonplace is this Occurrence that it inspires what has be- come a joke in feminist circles the individual who appears to be perceptive and unintimidated--and who blithely and sometimes belligerently declares, "Oh, I am not a feminist!" This person may then say, "I just believe in social justice, in equality between the sexes, in an end to discrimination, and in equal domestic duties and equal pay, and so forth." 12 In Brisbane, Australia, which now has become my hometown, I have a wonderful friend and mentor, Dr, Janet Irwin. Born a New Zealander, she was a medical doctor (she ran the University of Queensland Health Service); she was a commissioner on the Criminal Justice Commission, and has a record of fighting for justice and equality; she also has a warm face and soft white hair. And she is proudly and publicly a feminist . 13 From her I have learned a great deal.-For example, whenever she meets someone who says, "Oh, I'm not a feminist," she smartly says: Why? What's your problem? " 14 Feminism has fought no wars. It has killed no opponents. It has set up no concentration camps, starved no enemies practiced no cruelties. Its battles have been for education, for the vote, for better working conditions for women and children, for property rights for women, for divorce, for custody rights, for the right to safety on the streets. Feminists have fought for child care, for social welfare, for greater visibility for people with disabilities. And feminists have had to fight for rape crisis centers, women's refuges, reforms in the taw. Feminists have also devised some of the most spectacularly successful strategies to achieve these great goals. EVERYONE WILL WANT TO BE A FEMINIST 15 If we start teaching feminism the history of social justice, of gender equity, of the campaigns for a sane and humane world, not only will we have a society that provides a better place to live--but all the socially responsible members will want to sign tip as feminists. They will see being a feminist as an honorable way to live their lives. And all the excitement, the intellectual joys, the emotional satisfactions, and the sense of commitment that have been open to me as a feminist-will be available to them. 16 My first premise would be that half of everything taught should be about women, This is about the most radical demand that one could make; and there is no way that it could currently be met, because the curriculum materials simply have not been constructed to provide students with such a balance. 17 Gender equity demands nothing less than half the curriculum space; women comprise half the population, have half the human experiences, anti have contributed half of the energies to our society, so reason demands that they constitute half the knowledge base. This means that half the authors taught should be women, half the mathematics examples should relate to females, and half the mathematical models should be women is well. Half the science should relate to females, and the increasing prestige of biology, ecological studies, and environmental science makes this a very realistic proposition. Half the sociology, politics, and geography /anthropology disciplines should be concerned with women's lives. And of course, half the history should be about women. AN ALTERNATIVE TO MADONNA 18 Whenever I teach such information to young women, countering the misinformation they are given, there is no problem about "feminism." Offered an alternative to Madonna, they seize on it with excitement. 19 Until the day I heat, - young women talking about the way they were taught feminism in school, and how wonderful the women of the past have been; until I hear them say, "You must be really proud to be a feminist," and, "How can we get to do the same thing as you?"-until I hear such words spoken, I will know that education is not providing equal opportunity for women.