"Being happy is not a feminist issue"

That is not the preserve of women though, or of home life. It happens also when you are senior at work - as a senior manager you will spend most of your time devising (a) strategy and (b) coaching (ie passing on skills) to your senior management team, to fill in the gaps in their experience.

Cross-post: I expect it depends on the career, but in mine, you would never get anywhere if you did not learn from others.

Bonsoir - but that's sort of what I am saying: it's so sad when women don't feel able/allowed to go beyond certain skills because they're too busy passing them on.

You can add in the rest of your phrase (which is implicit in my response) and it changes my response not a jot.

If you want to progress in your career, you need to be able to learn for yourself. It's dog-eats-dog out there - you can't rely on anyone teaching you anything to help you get ahead!

Learning for yourself is far from meaningless. If you qualify in your 20s, as most people do, those qualifications are generally meaningless by your 40s. What counts in your 40s are the skills and experience you have acquired in your life off your own bat and can talk about and apply with knowledge and confidence. All your qualifications will have done is give you a springboard on which to launch yourself into adult life.

People who don't move beyond the skills acquired within the education system don't go far at all.

UMS - good point. Besides which, I think that attitude is so rude to my students. They give me a huge amount when tehy are learning. It is not a one-0way process!

Bonsoir, explain how I'm 'stuck'?

I like giving; I like teaching. I'm just aware that I am not a God-like repository of knowledge and must tehrefore learn from others at times.

It doesn't make sense to say adults learn without teachers and children don't. It's just not true. People who are experienced in a particular kind of learning don't need teachers. As an adult, if you try to learn, for example, a totally new language, you will make an idiot of yourself if you try to do it without human interaction. It won't work. If as a child, you didn't pick up literacy skills, you will need teaching as an adult. If I left my (adult) students to themselves, they'd take hours reinventing the wheel.

I love teaching, which is why I do it, but I don't feel that my happiness should depend on how selflessly I act as a conduit for knowledge.

I think it's slightly different, LRD: that we are expected by definition, because we are women to be fulfilled by doing these things and not to want anything else. Cue lots of pseudobollocks about male and female brains, and so on and so forth.

Growing up is largely about relying less and less on receiving from others towards gradual autonomy, and then moving forward to giving. You seem, LRD, to be stuck on the intermediate developmental stage of autonomy and cannot see that there is a next step of transmission.

I also like cooking, Mother. But I hate the day to day grind of putting a dinner on the table at the same time every night. I'd be very unhappy if it was expected of me. As it is, I generally do put a dinner on the table every night because I'm here and DH is not. I'd love to try different recipes etc, but I live with a load of fussy buggers

I think discussing who enjoys which skills is to miss the point. The point is, women are expected to be happy because practicing these skills makes other people happy. It's not meant to be about personal happiness; it's about happiness in the service of someone else.

Of course it makes sense - the whole point of education at school is to get to a point where you don't need the institution any longer and can learn for yourself. And women can pass on their education to their children (and ought to, as should fathers) - transmission of knowledge and skills is a vital part of being human - but also require it for their own negotiation in society in the world of adults, which they will need to do whether or not they are employed OH.

Bonsoir it would be selfish not to pass on skills to your children.

Not to bother communicating with them, reading to them, teaching them to climb, cook and all the rest of it.

Not delighting in those activities is not selfish, though. Not everybody enjoys the role of teacher. Same as not everybody enjoys the roles of cleaner, organiser, finance sorter, household prettifier, cook, gardener and so on. Most people enjoy some roles but not others. That does not make them selfish, it means they have a personality and are not a robot.

... well behaved NT children, I should imagine.

I do quite enjoy passing on skills when paid to lecture to journalism students.

I don't think it is naïve, and you don't need childcare in order to focus your mind and learn things - you need well-behaved children you have brought up well and who can entertain themselves (it is, of course, a skill in its own right that many parents are interested in acquiring to bring your children to be like that!).

bonsoir - I don't think that distinction between child/adult learners makes sense. You are maybe thinking of experienced versus inexperienced learners?

I know lots of parents who only tackle their own very poor literacy/numeracy when they become parents ... in a way this is lovely, and they are being good parents that they want to do this for their childrens' sake. But it is a shame if a woman thinks her education is only valuable because she can pass it on to a child, and that attitude is liable to leave women in poverty longer, IMO.

I like cooking, but would absolutely hate to be expected to do it every bloody night.