YaleCoursesThe Ship of State - Purposes of College Education, Lecture 13
YaleCourses
Citizenship and coeducation 0:00
The lecture turns to citizenship through Virginia Woolf and the question of women’s education. It recalls the speaker’s own family story to show how recently women were barred from ordinary academic and civic roles. At the University of Toronto in 1963, his mother could be elected president of the Students’ Administrative Council and still enter a private club only through the women’s entrance. That kind of restriction frames Woolf’s case for coeducation and equal access.
Woolf and Judith 3:00
Woolf’s life and writing are set out next. Born in 1882 into an upper-middle-class intellectual family, she did not attend university, though her brothers and later her husband did. She became a major novelist and essayist, and A Room of One’s Own, first given as lectures at Cambridge women’s colleges, argues that women need education, money, and room to work. Her imagined Shakespeare’s sister, Judith, shows how a gifted woman could be blocked, shamed, and driven to despair before she could write.
Women and education 15:33
Woolf’s discussion of the funeral oration is used to show the old limits placed on women. The line about a woman’s greatest glory being to be talked of as little as possible points to Athenian attitudes, and the same issue reaches into the Renaissance and into early twentieth-century debates about women’s schooling. Woolf writes at a time when women still cannot attend Oxford or Cambridge on equal terms, or Yale and Harvard except through Radcliffe.
Citizenship and Plato 21:34
The talk then turns to citizenship. College can help women and African-Americans take part in public life, especially in leadership, the learned professions, voting, jury service, and other forms of civic duty. The next question is how education prepares you for democratic life, not just for casting a ballot. Plato’s Republic and the image of waking up frame that question, and the lecture ends with the need for philosopher-kings and the problem of how such rulers could ever be made.
Philosopher kings and character 31:03
Plato’s philosopher-king should know truth, have experience, and be virtuous. He must dislike falsehood, be honest, moderate, and unconcerned with money. The speaker ties this to the old idea that character is formed in boarding schools, through sport, dorm life, and other shared rituals. He points to English public schools, then Yale, Harvard, and Hogwarts, where bravery and character matter as much as raw intelligence. That leads to a hard question from the Tobin report and from university life: academic talent and leadership skill do not always match, and there is no clear link between intelligence and virtue. Adeimantus voices the complaint that long study can make people useless to cities, and Socrates answers with the ship of state, where the true pilot knows seasons, stars, and winds, not just how to seize the helm.
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