The article examines how philosophical ideas about gender and rationality have shaped education from antiquity to the contemporary classroom. It starts from the premise that fundamental questions about who is regarded as rational, what counts as valid knowledge, and what education is supposed to lead to have historically been strongly gendered.
The article analyzes thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, Mary Wollstonecraft, Emma Goldman, Nel Noddings, bell hooks, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. It shows how Kant and Rousseau legitimized gender-segregated education by appealing to innate differences between women’s and men’s rationality, whereas Wollstonecraft and early feminists argued that differences between women and men are socially constructed through upbringing. Goldman’s anarchist pedagogy, Noddings’ ethics of care, and hooks’ and Mohanty’s radical conceptions of education are used to develop a model in which care, embodied experiences, and critical voices are central.
The authors conclude that the education system can both perpetuate and challenge structures of power and gender, and call for a more inclusive, relational, and democratic understanding of knowledge.