Heeding Woolf’s Great Teacher: Uncovering and Defusing an Education in “Unreal Loyalties”

In her 1938 epistolary novel and educational treatise, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf discusses “freedom from unreal loyalties” as key to educating for peace rather than for war, as was the concern in Woolf’s time and remarkably remains of serious concern seventy-odd years later. This essay analyzes how modern-day, post-9/11 U.S. public education is influenced by a whole range of unreal loyalties and, in fact, how we as educators reify and reinscribe these. The argument uses Woolf’s text as a theoretical frame to analyze select aspects of U.S. public education, concluding with an exploration of the meaning and value of giving up, moreover, defusing, incendiary unreal loyalties present within the U.S. school curricula