Women and Education

The reading from Susan Douglas’ “Lean and Mean” chapter led me to think about two experiences I had in elementary school (related to the “mean” part of the chapter). The first was near the beginning of second grade, when my teacher called the names of about twelve people in my class (about ten girls and two boys), told us that we had to go out in the hallway, and proceeded to ask us if we knew what the word “clique” meant (she explained that she was not talking about “the click of a switch”). My classmates and I had no idea what she was referring to. So she proceeded to ask us, “Who is friends with ‘Samantha’?” and those students stood by ‘Samantha.’ Then she asked, “Who is friends with ‘Kristin’?” and I and a few other students stood by ‘Kristin.’ Two students were left standing in the middle, unable to “choose” which girl they were closer friends with. The teacher explained that it isn’t nice to be friends with someone and not let other people join your friend group, or something to that effect.

I felt horrible after the experience (as evidenced by my memory of the experience at this point in my life) and felt guilty, even though I had no reason to be guilty. I had gone to nursery school with ‘Kristin‘ and we were in the same kindergarten class. I had never been in a class with ‘Samantha’ before and therefore hadn’t even had a chance to get to know her yet. I don’t know how my classmates felt about the experience but, reflecting on it now, I believe that the teacher imposed her own interpretation of what the dynamic was within this subgroup of students in the class, implying that we were purposefully excluding and hurting our classmates, when I would argue that this is rarely a goal for most seven-year-old girls. Instead, it is more related to upper-elementary and junior high school aged girls, which leads me to my second experience in sixth grade.

One evening, my parents asked me if I had heard anything about ‘Kristin’ receiving emails and phone calls from random girls in Long Island. I had not, and they explained that her mother called, saying that some girls from our class made arrangements with girls they knew outside of school in Long Island, who harassed ‘Kristin’ with rude comments (even though they didn’t know ‘Kristin’). The whole concept of “cyber/phone bullying” was unfamiliar to me and I thought it was ridiculous (I asked my mother, “Why should ‘Kristin’ care what they say? They don’t even know her,” when it was probably a horrible experience for ). I had distanced myself from most of these girls at this point in my schooling (which my parents and ‘Kristin’s’ mom were aware of; therefore, I was not associated in any way with the Long Island girl situation) and continued to distance myself, blissfully unaware, in some ways, of the drama that surely ensued in junior high and high school.

Media portrayals of “mean” girls certainly affect how pre-teen and teen girls act (or how people think teen girls act) and I found it interesting that my teacher did predict what would come in the future, but I don’t think she handled the situation well because (a) we were too young to fully understand what she meant and (b) she did not address what she perceived to be the “problem” in any other manner other than talking to us in the hallway for five minutes, which was accompanied by questions from other classmates about what happened in the hallway (I didn’t really know how to explain it to those who asked). Obviously being identified as participators in “clique-like” activity did not discourage some from engaging in exclusionary and harmful practices.

The quote from Douglas’ chapter that “Americans spend more money on dieting products than on education” (Douglas, 2010, p. 229) was disturbing to me. It is interesting to find out where priorities lie, but disappointing that more superficial concerns receive more attention and funding than more significant concerns. In the chapter by Fausto-Sterling, she mentions the early reasons why women and men received different levels of education. This topic was included in my American School class, in which we discussed that women were perceived to have a lower capacity to possess/retain knowledge, were inherently weak, nervous, and emotional, and would be limited in their reproductive capacities if they “endured” too much strenuous education. In the 1800s and early 1900s, women were traditionally educated in domestic tasks and did not engage with mathematical or scientific concepts, which would exceed the female capacity to understand.

I find it interesting to investigate what role schools and education can play in the lives of women, whether it be participating in the oppression of women, encouraging oppression and antagonism between women, or, in some cases (not mentioned much in these readings), empowering women and female intellectual abilities.