A Political Education

Just in time for back to school, the National Review has published an attack on the academic discipline of Women's Studies. Here is a taste of the article:

Women’s studies courses are different. They tend to abandon rigorous analysis in favor of consciousness-raising exercises and self-exploration. One textbook explains that women’s studies “consciously rejects many traditional forms of inquiry, concepts, and explanatory systems; at the same time, it is developing new and sometimes unique traditions and authorities of its own.” Those “unique” traditions include providing students with “credit for social change activities or life experience, contracts of self-grading, diaries and journals, even meditation or ritual.”

Over at Campus Progress, a poster named Asheesh Siddique has written a fairly good rebuttel. Women's Studies is obviously a very serious academic subject and has produced a wide variety of scholarly research. In addition, Women's Studies positively impacts other areas of study (like Political Science) by challenging power structures and encouraging critical thinking. I was struck by this part of Asheesh's response:

Again, Luckas' article is based on some very bad assumptions about the humanities- that it is somehow Platonically isolated from the real world. No. In fact, the whole purpose of the humanities has always been to instill doubts in students about the students' own self-images and about the society they live in. That's exactly what women's studies does.

This is a fundamental difference between how conservatives and liberals approach higher education. For conservatives, students are nothing but consumers. Colleges and universities are simply providing a product and should be approached as such. Since education is a private good like any other product, it is perfectly acceptable for higher education to only be available to those who can afford it. According to conservatives, college should simply be a place where young people get skills to enter the workforce.

But education isn't simply a commodity to be bought and sold. It's an essential component of a functioning democratic society. Young people will inherit the world that our elders make. We need to be able to think critically about the challenges ahead. If education is only designed to help students make money in the future, it will be a great disservice to our nation as a whole. Women's Studies is an important part of the intellectual thought and will help prepare students to become fully participating citizens.