Daughters and Grandsons

Gender confusion in some conservative educational circles . . .

Apropos of nothing in particular, allow me just a few words about education and girls. In many ways, pastoral ministry is like playing that whack-a-mole game—one thing disappears under the mallet, and another one pops up. And it was probably one you thought you dealt with a few years before, and here is back again, durn it. One of the monstrosities that has circulated in conservative biblicist (I do not say biblical) circles is the idea that girls don't need to be educated, or that they don't need to be educated to the same level as the boys. It is the kind of thing that would get me pretty angry if I allowed myself time to think about it—which I might have to do sometime.

In the meantime, here is just a short collection of observations. The kind of men who circulate this kind of foolishness are brittle and lazy—threatened by intelligent women, and too lazy to deal with the threat by working hard, and standing tall. The right kind of man wants a woman he has to stand up straight for. From the biblical notion that men should lead their wives, these guys infer that in order to make this possible, the wives must be hamstrung so that they, the rulers of their future roosts, don't have to be challenged in any way. By way of contrast, the right response is to imagine a highly educated woman, and meditate on what it would take to win her respect.

I have told young people this many times—become the kind of person that the kind of person you would want to marry would want to marry. But some guys look at this, decide that it involves something that looks dangerously like work, and think to invert it. They think—by an ingenious system of handicapping—to make the person they will marry into the kind of person who would be willing to marry someone like them. The whole thing is just sick.

And of course, like all fool's errands, it collapses on itself. In the name of "let's have some high respect for the male, shall we?" this atrocity indulges lazy men (who have devised a pretty cozy system for themselves), and their sons, the next generation of men downstream, will be even worse. This is because the level of education you provide for your daughters will be the level attained to by your grandsons.

This is not a truth in the same category as "all triangles have three sides." But it is a truth nonetheless, and it is the kind of truth that will reveal how hard the world can be on fools.