A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects

Although a private education—when children are educated at home rather than at a school—has the benefit of keeping a child within the family, it also, according to Wollstonecraft, can limit the types of knowledge and experience the child acquires. Instead, Wollstonecraft says “in order to open their faculties they should be excited to think for themselves; and this can only be done by mixing a number of children together” (167). However, the only alternative to private education are boarding schools, which Wollstonecraft critiques as “hot-beds of vice and folly” (168) and where “boys become gluttons and slovens” (168). Instead, Wollstonecraft proposes “to contrive some way of combining a public and private education” (168).

Wollstonecraft argues that public schools are full of “pedantic tyrants” (171) instead of teachers committed to the education of their students and that as a result, public schools are commonly places that only successfully elevate a “few brilliant men” (172). Wollstonecraft says that “education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of mind, which teaches young people how to begin to think” (173), and so students should not be simply instructed to “recite” facts in a “parrot-like prattle” (173), and instead be taught to think for themselves. She suggests that “proper day-schools” (172) should be established so that children could still reside at home—the place they first learn domestic affection.