ABSTRACT
Not only feminists but also other educational theorists have neglected Alcott's narrative studies of teaching. Oblivious to the feminist pedagogy movement, the past decade's reformers of teaching in U.S. schools have even ignored girls' miseducation more generally, and they have yet to acknowledge that problem's significance in light of the nineteenth century's enduring legacy of a feminized schoolteaching profession.6 The coeducational, in loco parentis context of U.S. schooling seems utterly to have escaped reformers' consideration in the myriad "crisis" reports which have found copious fault with schoolteachers, schoolteaching, and teacher education. Although
the teaching reformers have justly questioned some long taken-for-granted classroom practices, their gender-blind ideal of "interactive teaching" is largely classical. It reflects the anachronistic and technical-rationalistic influence of their consultations with analytic philosophers,7 who constructed their "standard" definitions of teaching upon the paradigm case of Socrates' dialogue with Meno's slave boy concerning a geometric theorem.8 Thus, lacking both conceptual and historical insights into girls' miseducation, such as Alcott's popular fictions of teaching might have offered them, today's "reformers" of teaching have contributed nothing to contemporary discussions of feminist pedagogy and, ironically, have proposed no new concept of teaching.~
In an attempt to correct both feminists' and educators' harmful oversights, therefore, the American Association of University Women's Education Foundation has recently sponsored several reports of empirical research on girls' miseducation in U.S. schools. Peggy Orenstein's SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap, the latest of these AAUW reports, is a journalist'S participant-observer account of the painfully difficult and often self-destructive lives culturally diverse girls have led while attending suburban and urban middle schools in late twentieth-century California. lo The other AAUW reports-Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America; How Schools Shortchange Girls; and Hostile Hallways-rely upon bona fide social-scientific research, as do the teaching reformers' reports, and therefore offer readers a bewildering mass of factual and technical details to think about regarding coeducational pedagogy and policy. I I Orenstein's narrative makes vividly coherent those statistical details' profound, collective significance in adolescent girls' lives. But none of the AAUW reports, including Orenstein's, explicitly considers philosophical questions about teaching posed by girls' miseducation, nor do they acknowledge past thought about teaching girls or past women's thought about childrearing and teaching youngsters. In her afterword enthusiastically endorsing Orenstein's expose, however, AAUW president Jackie DeFazio has prominently cited Alcott's Little Women, albeit dismissively and with little apparent expectation of controversy:
We live our lives through stories, says feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun. To date, too many stories tell girls to become "Little Women." While I once wept over Louisa May Alcott's beloved story of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, today I weep for a different reason. "We are only girls," says the high-spirited Jo, and to become a "little woman," she must conquer her independent nature and learn to be agreeable-all the while cursing her fate at being born female. (SG 277)
Although Little Women is almost universally ignored by contemporary reformers and philosophers of teaching, DeFazio easily takes for granted her readers' familiarity with this unlikely school text. And well she might, for this bestselling girls' book has never fallen out of print since first published in 1868-69, has been revised for film several times,12 and, despite its critical status as "the American female myth,"13 has also been considered "subversive. "14 A confessed inspiration for feminist existentialist Simone de Beauvoir,15 Little Women dramatizes the plucky tomboy-hero 10 March's coming of age to reject a rich young man's marriage proposal. She subsequently makes her living as an independent young woman teaching and writing in New York City, then finally becomes a creative working mother by founding and running an experimental "home-like school" with a poor but accommodating professor-husband.16 10's brainchild-school, Plumfield, begins small and racially desegregated, but sex-segregated, in Little Womennot for girls, but for boys only, many of whom we would today label as needing "special education," thereby making imaginable some women's possible strengths as teachers even of difficult boys. But in Little Women's 1871 sequel, Little Men, 10's Plumfield becomes an experiment in equal opportunity for white girls and boys, an innovative attempt at coeducational teaching.
