Feb 20 talk: Toward a Feminist Analysis of the Collapse of Public Education

Toward a Feminist Analysis of the Collapse of Public Education
Mari Matsuda Law School, UHM

--Co-sponsored with Department of Political Science--

February 20 (Friday)12:30pm-1:30pm, Saunders 541

Abstract: This talk brings a feminist theory/critical race theory perspective to the analysis of the collapse of public education. Universal, quality public education as an ideal is an accepted part of liberal discourse in the United States, belied by the reality of large numbers of children with no access to minimally decent education. The actual expectation and experience of most American families is that finding adequate education for their children is a significant challenge. In Hawaii, educated parents are increasingly unwilling to send their children to public schools, a trend mirrored in other urban areas, and exacerbating a have vs. have-not education system. There are many material and ideological reasons for the decline of the public school. This talk will focus on the gendered aspects, considering, for example, the effect of teaching as “women’s work,” the abandonment of the feminist strategy of comparable worth, “private sphere” and privatization, and the third shift that women work in order to maintain functions – such as team mom and fundraiser – that shore up the defunded system of public education. I would like to make a tentative link to the larger problem of public quietude in the face of completely unacceptable social realities. Why do we accept largely inadequate public services, whether in health care, education, mental health, elder care – any number of areas that we all need, desperately, at one time or another? What is it about late-capitalist patriarchy that imposes the collective sense that created problems are intractable realities, and that organizing for change is futile?