ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows some detail how the contemporary philosophical analyses of the concepts of education, liberal education, and teaching placed society's reproductive processes, broadly defined, beyond education's borders. Since society's reproductive processes are at issue, one might expect feminist scholars to demand a brand new educational landscape, yet even those most interested in curriculum seldom do. Women's absence as authors of educational thought was one of several troubling issues took up in "Excluding Women from the Educational Realm." One would think that this rendering of Sophie's case would convince scholars that the exclusion of women as the objects of educational thought is a dangerous policy. In educational circles the label "Essentialist" was in the past applied to those who claimed that the school curriculum should always and everywhere be composed of the "traditional" subjects—the 3Rs, history, literature, and mathematics.
