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Education
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More from Gender in the AP World History Course
Literacy and Numeracy
Here my main recommendation is that if you know education only affected an elite, say
so; and if you know that only boys were schooled, say so. Literacy was widespread in few
cultures before 1800. Illiteracy was almost certainly more prevalent among women than men,
as it still is today in parts of the world. I can't recall any society in which boys have
been kept ignorant forcibly at home, as girls are today in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Not all education has taken place in schools; many girls, like slaves, learned to read
from brothers' or father's books, with encouragement or in stealth. These are exceptional
cases, though.
It is important for students to know that
- before 1500, women in Southeast Asia were as literate as men and believed to be more
accomplished in mathematics; or
- women in Egypt at any period of the classical era were more likely to be literate than
those in Greece; or
- the European Renaissance was primarily a male event; or
- the Chinese educational and testing system was limited to men.
Gerda Lerner argues that the demand for women's education in Europe preceded demands
for political rights and was necessary to the success of the suffrage campaigns. That is a
pattern that can also be traced in nineteenth-century Egypt, India, and China. In most
parts of the world schooling was, until quite recently, segregated by gender. One of the
notable contributions of the United States is public co-education at all levels.
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