ABSTRACT
Education lies at the centre of professional work and expertise and therefore occupies a pivotal position in the shaping of occupational culture and the politics of nursing. Far from being a value-neutral and disinterested activity, education represents a powerful vehicle for socialisation and the transmission of culture. But nursing education has been characterised by the inculcation of moral values and virtues rather than intellectual prowess. Indeed ‘virtue’ has been at the ‘heart’ of nursing education since it began to be codified in the midnineteenth century. So close has this connection been that early nurse education could be described as training in virtue itself. But if nurses have benefited from association with virtue, they have also been burdened with it too. The construction of nursing as an essentially, if not essentialist, ‘moral’ metier has undermined attempts by nurses to acquire access to the prestigious centres of learning and institutions through which social privilege and rewards are distributed. The result has been that a self-confident intellectual culture in nursing has been slow to develop and nurses’ capacity to innovate and exercise leadership has been severely curbed. The dilemma for nurses, as Reverby rightly points out, has been the order to care in a society which refuses to value caring.1 But it is a dilemma which extends beyond the value and character of caring; it derives from a deep antiintellectual prejudice attached to women’s work in general, and to the gendering of skill more particularly.
