Thinking Through Our Mothers: An Exploration of the Positions of Women in Educational Philosophy

When reading most texts in educational philosophy, students of education generally encounter only the work of male philosophers, sometimes referred to as the “dead white guys.” (Few living philosophers of either sex are included in most philosophy texts.) Thus, the names and ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Locke, Kant, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Marx, Nietzsche, Dewey, Whitehead, and Foucault become the major focus of the course content, as students learn to reiterate the epistemology, ontology, and axiology of the basic philosophical positions of the male western world (generally the Euro-centric frame of reference also goes unstated). Thus, most texts in philosophy and philosophy of education give the impression that philosophy is primarily something that white males have done some time in the past.