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McIntosh's essay shed so much light on the different types of education I have been receiving even in my different courses at Bryn Mawr and throughout my entire educational career. In APUS History, I wrote many essays I will never forget, but in the end they were really about key terms that treat the other as just that: an other. I wrote about the co-optation of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, which is pertinent, but only so pertinent UNTIL we move beyond Phase 2 Education and stop considering the history of African Americans as the history of an oppressed other - without the other, the term co-optation would be irrelevant. 

In McIntosh's discussion of the phases of education, it struck me just how stuck in Phase 2 I was all throughout elementary school, middle school, and high school, and just how stuck in Phase 3 most of my courses at Bryn Mawr have been. There is a tendency, because of the traditional pyramid structures of "winning" and "losing," as McIntosh would say, to consider discussions in class that are based on non-traditional texts, or texts that students know just as much or even more about than Professors, as unimportant discussions or unofficial discussions. I still think to myself that when I am discussing in class a work by a famous classic author, such as those books Meg read in her college career, that discussion is for some reason more important than a discussion in which immigrants share their personal literature about their histories (Phase 5). When a Professor relies on her students to learn something new, my first tendency is to think that the class is less formal or that the Professor in reality is never learning something new. I am afraid this says I am still stuck in Phase 3.

The only qualm I had with McIntosh's essay is, in the end she describes the outcome of the different women's lives, and Meg is absolutely miserable. Are the Megs of the world miserable? It seems to me that most women in the world today, at least women over 40, are Megs. And most women's hopes and dreams are not shattered when they divorce from their husbands. Is McIntosh belittling the efforts of Phase 1 education and assuming negative outcomes that are not always true?

The type of education that most spoke to me was the one that Amy received. Amy tries to "make it" as an artist, because she believes firmly in the pyramid structures of power. She thinks life is about winning. "She thinks if you're good enough you'll get recognized and that if women would only pull 'their' act together and stop bitching, her chances for recognition would improve." The result of this phase of education, even though it seems to be based on studying oppression and LEARNING from power structures, it is actually just perpetuating those structures and reenforcing the "win or lose" and "making it" syndrome. Most importantly, it causes Amy to lose faith in even her own group of "others," - women.