Why We Oppose Schools for Children

From the book Are Women People? by Alice Duer Miller, 1915

Why We Oppose Schools for Children

1. BECAUSE education is a burden, not a right.

2. Because not one-tenth of one per cent. of the children of this country have demanded education.

3. Because if we are educated we should have to behave as if we were and we don't want to.

4. Because it is essentially against the nature of a child to be educated.

5. Because we can't see that it has done so much for grown-ups, and there is no reason for thinking it will make children perfect.

6. Because the time of children is already sufficiently occupied without going to school.

7. Because it would make dissension between parent and child. Imagine the home life of a parent who turned out to be more ignorant than his (or her) child?

8. Because we believe in the indirect education of the theatre, the baseball field and the moving picture. We believe that schools would in a great measure deprive us of this.

9. Because our parents went to school. They love us, they take care of us, they tell us what to do. We are content that they should be educated for us.

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About this book: In 1915, the state-by-state battle for suffrage had won a few battles. Supporters of woman suffrage had multiplied, which also brought anti-suffrage sentiments to the surface to counter the suffrage arguments.

The author of this volume of feminist humor and satire, Alice Duer Miller, wrote many of the pieces for her column in the New York Tribune, "Are Women People?" She also wrote a sequel, published in 1917, Women Are People!

Also on this site:

• About Alice Duer Miller

• Alice Duer Miller Quotations

• Woman Suffrage - Cast of Characters 
• Woman Suffrage Articles and Links 
• Woman and the Republic: An Anti-Suffrage Argument by Helen Kendrick Johnson, 1897, with later additions: the classic arguments against woman suffrage