Egalitarian Education - with Ben Blair

Breaking Down Patriarchy

Amy McPhie Allebest

History, Education, Society & Culture

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 18 March 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Amy is joined by educator Ben Blair of Newlane University to discuss actionable steps towards building a more egalitarian education system, how new technologies can expand learning opportunities across the globe, and why we should question the popularity of time-based assessments, student competition, adversarial teachers and more.

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Ben Blair holds a PhD in Philosophy and Education from Columbia University. He is a co-founder and President of Newlane University. Started in 2017, Newlane is an online university with a mission to make quality liberal arts higher education accessible to anyone on earth by breaking down barriers of cost, schedule, and geography. Ben and his wife Gabrielle have six children. After six years in Oakland, CA they now live in Normandy, France.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McPhee, All the Best. Think back to your earliest memories of school.
0:08.1	Who was in your class? What was the environment like? Okay, keep that in your mind. And now come on a little historical journey with me, where we drop in on a few schools throughout the ages.
0:23.9	In Mesopotamia, only a limited number of individuals were hired as scribes to learn reading and writing. So only royal offspring and
0:30.6	sons of rich professionals went to school. Most boys were taught their father's trade or were
0:36.0	apprenticed to learn a trade, while girls stayed
0:38.9	at home with their mothers to learn housekeeping and cooking and to look after younger children.
0:44.2	In the city-states of ancient Greece during the 5th and 4th century BCE, affluent students were taught
0:51.4	by private tutors, while the state educated young men in military training.
0:57.5	During the Islamic Golden Age, Muslims established schools next to mosques where boys were educated.
1:04.4	Girls also had opportunities for education, not just learning, cooking, and caretaking,
1:09.3	and a Moroccan woman named Fatima Alfiri
1:12.3	founded a mosque in 859 that later developed into the University of Alcaroine, which is considered
1:19.3	to be the world's first university. However, only men were admitted to that university until 1940.
1:28.3	The Aztecs educated all their youth at home until age 15 when all children, regardless of gender or social class, went to school.
1:38.3	However, at school boys were taught writing, astronomy, statesmanship, and theology, while girls were taught
1:45.0	homemaking and religion. In Europe, during the early Middle Ages, the monasteries of the Roman
1:50.8	Catholic Church were the centers of education and literacy, the primary purpose of which was to
1:56.0	train the all-male clergy. So now I want to ask you, how different would your schooling have been if you had
2:03.2	been born in a different time or place? If you are a man with high social standing, probably not
2:10.2	that different, no matter when or where you were born. If you're a man from a humble background,
2:16.3	or if you're a woman from any background, your experience and the trajectory of your life would have been vastly different.
2:24.8	Today we're going to talk about school and specifically the philosophy behind different types of schooling.
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