Summary

Motherhood is the institution on which state and society have traditionally depended for preparing a well-socialized populace even before formal educational systems begin to have an effect. Mothering has taken a new urgency in a 21st-century globalized, neoliberal, and intricately connected world in which the social contract between the state and the individual has been in profound revision. Mothers are being expected to adapt to rapidly changing educational environments with on-site school systems disrupted in response to global health crises and homeschooling assuming spectacularly new meanings. New blended roles for tutoring, mentoring, and counseling while also nurturing the child are now the newest normal for mothers. Considering the pivotal role played by mothers in a human being’s birth, socialization, and education, perhaps educational research can progressively encourage a more nuanced incorporation of motherhood studies. It might be useful to examine the relationship between motherhood and education within a framework of familial power relations combined with a global studies in education perspective. The different facets of motherhood as well as the entangling of care and power are critical to the project of education. Motherhood as institution, motherhood as identity, and motherhood as experience thus become crucial coordinates for an interdisciplinary engagement with motherhood’s relationship with education. While educational technologies and online communication platforms have incrementally transformed the field of education, the mothers role has evolved and mothers often need to be educated so they may best guide their digital native wards. Parents jointly take many decisions regarding children’s education and future, but it is most often the mother who follows through with the agenda. This close personal involvement brings additional responsibilities, authority, and power—all of which have epistemological consequences, highlighting areas that might help establish nuanced connections between motherhood and education.