Madeleine R. Grumet

Voice: the search for a feminist rhetoric for educational studies∗

∗Presented to the symposium, Studying Words at Work: Rhetorical Analysis of Educational Research, at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, 19 April 1990, Boston, MA.

Curriculum as Theater: Merely Players

Liberation makes me wince. It is a term I never use. I am far more comfortable with freedom or even emancipation. Freedom feels familiar. Lincoln freed the slaves; he did not liberate them. Simon Bolivar, there was a liberator, and liberators still appear in my imagination as bearded revolutionaries, preferably Spanish. Che Guevara, but not Lincoln. Maybe Garibaldi. The liberation of France, D-Day, now that is a liberation I can live with so long as I imagine the French as being delivered from the oppression of one alien force by another. Liberation from Vichy, of Algeria, they are another matter. The Symbionese Liberation Army-I am not sure whom they are delivering from what. Them from me? Me from them? Well, I too would prefer freedom for them and me, but without the backing of the burning bush I am reluctant to deliver anyone but myself. It is a presumptuous and patronizing altruism that aspires to give to another that which he already possesses. I can tolerate Womens Lib, for the amputation of the last three syllables permits us to travel lighter. The diminutive does not demean the project but permits us to see the Womens Movement as an expression of a wider intention, just as the nicknames we give to our children infer an easy familiarity derived from the power and depth of our family relations. Womens Lib implies the presence of siblings, Mens Lib, Gay Lib, and a surname that binds them all-human freedom.

Feminism and curriculum: Getting our act together

We bring together feminism and curriculum to examine the possibilities of their mutual influence. Based on a recognition of the achievements of girls in education and elsewhere, we begin with consideration of liberal feminism, its advances, and its limitations. Basic to limitations of liberal feminism is the hierarchical, dualistic structure of gender that pervades western life. Attention to dualisms as they connect to the history and theorizings of feminism follows. Arguing that curriculum is overdetermined by the dualism which feminist theory addresses, four categories descriptive of the feminist analysis of dualism are offered: experiential, categorical, psychoanalytic, and deconstructive. A further thesis is that these categories organize human experience and education in terms of the relationships of self to language, and of intentionality to reflexivity: evident cultural and educational interactions of these four are offered, leading to the argument that only formulations that connect self and language, reproduction and representation will effect curriculum.

The play of meanings in the art of teaching

HE VIRTUAL [according to Suzanne Langer] draws our attention to the organization of experience, the tensions, polarities, forces that are at play in every perception, act, form. So it is that music makes time itself perceptible by giving form and expression to its elements of duration, interruption, extension, repetition, and painting makes space visible by giving form and expression to its elements of presence and distance, continuity and separation, enclosure and expansion. It will always be easier to think of music and painting as art forms than it will be to think of teaching as an art form. This distinction is lodged in the material status of the art object and our tendency to isolate it from our existential worlds. (Grumet, 1988, pp. 121-122)

The Lie of the Child Redeemer.

This essay describes the image of the child in educational theory and argues that the image of the child redeemer is, in its emphasis on isolation from others and from the surrounding world, a spurious image for reform. It suggests that we attend to the redeeming lies of our daughters instead of the pronouncements of our innocent sons. It argues, however, that both innocence and deceit are properties of relations, not of individual persons. Curriculum and teaching must acknowledge the childs experience rather than constraining it in innocence or labeling it a lie.

In Search of Theatre: Ritual, Confrontation and the Suspense of Form

Schooling comprehends three forms of theatre. Theatre as ritual is associated with the formal school culture. Theatre as confrontation is associated with the counter-school culture. These first two forms emerge in the daily interactions of school life, the former providing the ground for the latter. The third form, theatre as a deliberate aesthetic enterprise, most often collapses into the ritual of the school play that legitimizes the formal school culture. Creative dramatics programs celebrate feeling and fantasy but avoid the school situation, severing action from the situation from which it is derived. Finally, the possibility of developing theatre in education that will support the transformation of the school culture is explored. It is theatre that contains the richness of ritual but merges confrontation with critique.

The Paideia Proposal: A Thankless Child Replies

This is an essay in ingratitude. Taking Goneril rather than Cordelia for my model, I choose the elders voluble hypocrisy to the youngers silent constancy. For although I have been the loyal daughter of the humanities, The Paideia Proposal, a recent set of suggestions for the improvement of schooling developed by dedicated humanists, provokes me to repudiate the intellectual traditions that have shaped my own schooling and scholarship. When I was a student at Barnard College, commuting from Brooklyn to Morningside Heights, I would climb up out of the IRT subway into the morning light of 116th Street and Broadway like one of Platos cave dwellers, escaping from subterranian error into the bright, if blinding, light of reason. Eventually, I secured a room in Johnson Hall, Columbia Universitys dormitory for graduate women. Then, freed from the cave, I became accustomed to the light, attending Barnard classes as well as lectures by Columbia professors Hadas and Highet, Trilling, and Van Doren.

Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts

Introducing a new hobby for other people may inspire them to join with you. Reading, as one of mutual hobby, is considered as the very easy hobby to do. But, many people are not interested in this hobby. Why? Boring is the reason of why. However, this feel actually can deal with the book and time of you reading. Yeah, one that we will refer to break the boredom in reading is choosing beware of greeks bearing gifts as the reading material.