2026/01/22 by Michèle Cohen
Arts and Humanities · #Historical Philosophy and Science #Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes #History of Science and Natural History
paper · doi:10.1080/00309230.2026.2614005
crossref issued 2026/01/22 · crossref published 2026/01/22 · crossref published-online 2026/01/22 · openalex publication_date 2026/01/22 · crossref created 2026/01/22 · openalex created_date 2026/01/23 · crossref published-print 2026/07/04 · crossref deposited 2026/07/27 · crossref indexed 2026/07/27 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The paper interrogates and challenges the assumptions and contradictions embodied in the representations of males’ and females’ education by comparing their education and using pedagogy as lens and frame of analysis. Examining pedagogies enabled me to explore why eighteenth-century women’s “modern” education was and often still is represented as superficial and inadequate while male classical education was and still is represented as superior and rigorous. Pedagogy is not only about the principles of teaching and learning. It is also, as Robin Alexander has argued, “a window on the culture of which it is a part, and on that culture’s underlying tensions and contradictions”. Exploring these tensions and cultural interventions brought to light the importance of the relations between pedagogies. I argue that the relations between classical and modern pedagogies in the long eighteenth century were relations of competition, resistance or compliance which eventually contributed to the establishment of the pedagogy of Latin as a hegemonic pedagogy in the early nineteenth century. The hegemony of Latin pedagogy and the devaluation of modern subjects contributed to disparagement of female education and achievement and were geared to protecting and maintaining the gender order, with male intellectual superiority an integral constituent of that order.