[LMB] Women and education

[Matija Grabnar]

On 11/09/2021 15:10, Matthew George wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 8, 2021 at 10:59 AM tidsel via Lois-Bujold <
> lois-bujold at lists.herald.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> Everyone should have education, men and women, societies run on it.
>
> =Modern= societies run on it.  And they are a very new thing, compared to
> the entire scope of history.  They're no more than a hairsbreadth compared
> to the scope of human experience, prehistory included.

Balderdash. Reading is a superpower when it comes to learning. It 
enables one to learn from teachers who are in far away lands, or dead, 
or teachers the reader can not afford to hire. The better one is 
educated, the better one is able to cope with one's circumstances (and 
to see alternatives to them, which is precisely what those keeping one 
down want to avoid).

Preventing people from literacy has been a well practiced way of keeping 
lower ranks/undesirables/women down. It is not a coincidence that in 
most confederate states, teaching slaves to read was a crime (and in the 
rest it was frowned upon) 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-literacy_laws_in_the_United_States

And while you pretend that women reading is a recent thing, it isn't 
really. Women in ancient Egypt knew how to read and write, as did , 
IIRC, the women in ancient Rome.

Women in ancient Assyria knew how to read and write, and conducted 
business - and that is as close in time to the invention of writing as 
we're likely to get.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210111-the-secret-letters-of-historys-first-businesswomen