How Rounded Is Your Education?

[Excerpt from Guru Kaur's blog on the Be the Woman... Private Online Community for women...]

I am passionate about women's education, which is one of the primary reasons we launched the Be the Woman You were Born to Be Course and Community online.

A BBC programme about the ground-breaking education 500 years ago of Margaret More, whose father was a chief adviser to the King, was therefore a delight to find.  As part of her studies she was taught astronomy by the Tudor equivalent of Stephen Hawkins in a trail blazing attempt at equal opportunity education, and went on to publish the first book in English of prayers by a woman causing such a stir that we can barely comprehend.

However, in the middle of the programme The Presenter PhD revealed this attitude:

"Thomas More had been well educated and he was determined to give his daughter the same education as his son.  
We take that for granted, but then it was a truly radical idea. 
At the turn of the sixteenth century the majority of women barely needed an education.  Most would have to cook and clean when they grew up so that is what their mothers taught them.  My experience is entirely different. 
 I'm a terrible cook but I got a brilliant education."

I consider myself exceedingly privileged to have received a brilliant academic education, better probably than my brother (although he might split hairs on that) and, like this presenter, was actually quite proud that it had left me devoid of culinary and domestic skills, seeing that as a positive bonus.  This education propelled me into a wonderful office-based career, as indeed Tudor education intended.  But it had only trained my mind, man in Sanskrit.  It failed to address that other part of me, the wo in woman, that creative, nurturing part which would give me the confidence and skills to run a household.

This idea that a brilliant education is purely academic, shunning traditional feminine arts and sciences, is surely to be challenged now in the face of the overriding evidence that there is a fault line in our society.  Not a day goes by when the news is not peppered by reports of failed parenting and a failure to run a healthy and happy household.  That our nation is sinking into obesity is surely symptomatic of a whole generation of women who didn't learn to cook.

They thought cooking was what you do when you're standing in front of the stove.  Wrong.  It's what you do when you're planning a balanced diet for the whole family of three square meals a day, wherever they are.   Cleaning isn't just about killing germs in the loo, it's about sanitation and stopping your family getting sick in the first place.  These are things which are passed down generation to generation, not things to be discarded and then relearned from a celebrity chef whose keen for you to cook his calorific main dishes every meal.

Until we include education for the whole woman, not just her brain, we as a society will fail.

As long as we allow the media to perpetuate this notion that being brilliantly educated excludes being a good cook, housewife, mother, backbone of society, and inspiration, we are doing the next generation of women to come up the ranks no favours at all.  They deserve better than that.  What are you doing about it?

This all inclusive approach to women's education as an embodiment of this new femininity for me has recently included Making Your Own Bra and Tempering Chocolate which undoubtedly are at the fiddly and time consuming level of sewing and cooking but ones which I have found immensely rewarding working all aspects of my creativity and tapping into my education at many levels.

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