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kgbrown's picture

McIntosh and Derrida's Oversight

The issues that McIntosh raises questions about reforming higher level education, but seems to ignore entirely the greater issues of the "mountainous and pyramidal form of our society" (McIntosh 5).  By ignoring the larger issue and focusing on the issue of curriculum, is she saying that college based curriculum can and should be changed as a method of changing society as a whole?  I think that she also ignores the problems of education that comes before college.  We spend 13 years in elementary, middle, and high school (no doubt a pyradmidal system) and then in 4 years we are supposing that we can un-do all of the learning that has been a major part of the formation of identity.  Derrida also seems to overlook this issue, saying that the formation of a women's studies program should not fit within the existing institutuion, but should instead challgenge the institution at its very foundation.  The foundation of the institutions though, "the masuline directors of the university--masucline whether women or not," (Derrida 191) have been formed based not only upon higher level education, but, more importantly perhaps, societial education and lesser eduation.  I think that the idea of being able to change a societial system with higher education overlooks the foundations that this curriculum is based upon.  I think that we need to focus lower, in earlier education and acknowledge the contradictions of attempting to undo all that has been done in 18 years of education in 4 years of undergrad or even 5+ years of graduate or post-graduate work.  Perhaps Derrida's question about whether or not reforming women's studies programs is "a question of filling a lack in a structure already in place, filling a gap?," (Derrida 190) by which he means the gap in college curriculum, would be easier to answer if this gap did not exist on in "lower" education.  How can we apply the issues that both McIntosh and Derrida address to pre-collegiate education?  After doing so, are the questions they ask easier to answer? 

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