Education and Equality 

(P. of ph. An encyclopaedia 1996, 684-686 by Virginia Sapiro)

Equality was central to Wollstonecraft’s educational philosophy in two respects. First, she discussed equality with regard to both the natural capacity and need of human beings to become educated. Second, she discussed equality as a characteristic of the social context in which reason and virtue are learned. (684)

Wollstonecraft’s most sustained theoretical treatment of education and her program of proposals does not appear in a separated treatise on education, but in the Vindication of the Righs of Woman, a work on the baneful consequences of unnatural distinctions between women and men. Wollstonecraft believed that unnatural social distinctions create the differences in character and abilities that often appear so natural. Despite the common belief that men, the aristocracy or middle classes, or whites were more naturally capable than women, the lower classes, and blacks, respectively, Wollstonecraft saw no evidence to suggest either that God had given any one group of people less native capacity for intellectual and moral development than others or that any one group was less in need of the development of their human capacities. (684) As she argued for women, unless one could prove that women had less native capacity for reason than men, women and men must have the same need and right to education. If their capacities differ, education couldn’t make women’s condition worse than it already was. (684)

…She emphasized the need for women to learn to become good wives and mothers, but argued that these ‘accomplishments’ (p.685) had been overemphasized to the detriment of the development of reason and virtue. Unless women were educated equally with men, society as a whole could not be improved. Wollstonecraft also discussed class inequality in education, although to a lesser extent; she believed that the same arguments had been used to exclude women and the poor from education. (p.685) She thought that all classes of people needed education, and believed it more necessary to an enlightened society for all people to learn to use their reason than for a few to be brilliant. (p.685) the second role of equality in Wollstonecraft’s eductional ideas concerns the conditions and process of education and moral development… She argues against Rousseau and indeed the weitht of most expert opinion, that they should be educated together. (p.685)