ABSTRACT
I originally developed the production model of education that figures so prominently in “Sophie and Emile: A Case Study in the History of Educational Thought” and plays a leading role in Reclaiming a Conversation as a way of introducing Plato to my philosophy of education students at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. It was only after working out the details for a paper on his theory of female education and then studying Rousseau’s Emile that I realized the model could illuminate philosophies besides Plato’s.
Written while I was a Fellow at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, this paper served as the basis for a colloquium I gave there in March 1981 as well as for the lecture I gave at the Ontario Institute for the Study of Education the month before. That February 1981 speech was the very first occasion on which I publicly presented my research on women.
