(Tim) Over on ClearNote Ladies Blog, our daughter, Michal Louise Crum, did a post titled, Do Women Need Less Education Than Men?
If Samuel Johnson was right in his observation that you know you've hit
your mark when you get a response, Michal hit the bull's eye.
At
the center of her post were three questions she recommended to her
readers in connection with the decision whether or not to go to college:
education itself, a profession, money, status, the glory of God?
energy? If God leads me in a different direction two years down the
road, will the debt incurred prevent me from obeying God’s call?
Pretty calm, huh? It's hard to imagine these questions eliciting
screeches and howls--from women who claim the Name of Christ no less.
But elicit they did. May I say how much I admire the women of our
congregation? If you read the comments under Michal's post, you'll
better understand why. For one thing, what grace under fire!
So what about ye olde college education?
I've read all the screeches and howls, and this is by far my favorite...
Our society runs on education. Voting, interacting with the community,
and even raising families is being done on a level like never before.
It's difficult to sit in your house with your kids and not interact with
the outside world, and even if you manage to somehow pull this off, you
have to at least understand what's going on around you (instead of just
buying in to whatever you're fed by talk show hosts and news networks).
Education is the key to better lives, to self-discovery, to
understanding. It's what our very government is built on!
A gentleman would refrain from dissecting the corpse publicly, but a couple things demand to be whack-a-moled.
If
we equate getting an education with getting a college degree, it's true
"our society runs on education." The most beautiful building in
Bloomington houses the IU Foundation. Perfectly sculpted Indiana
limestone surrounded by a manicured landscape illustrate the fact that,
other than government, higher education alone has the money to burn on
such extravagance. Which is to say the real wealth of the Western world
has been confiscated by the Academy. This is true financially, but when
we stop to consider influence and leadership, also, the case becomes
watertight.
So yes, "our society runs on education" and "even
raising families is being done on a level like never before"--all thanks
to our intellectual superiors.
We have them to thank for the
slaughter of untold millions of the unborn. We have them to thank for
the corruption of the morals of our sons and daughters in their dorms
and frat houses and classrooms. We have them to thank for the sodomitic
propagandizing of our elementary school students by graduates of their
Schools of Education. We have them to thank for the lies streaming
through our airwaves broadcast by our so-called public radio shows
always appealing to those terminal degreed. We have them to thank for
Christian mothers who give their best time to "changing the world"
outside the home while their children lie dead in our sanitary landfills
or in bondage at their day care centers, waiting for Mommie to come
home. We have them to thank for Daddy being a house-husband, browbeat
into it by his wife and all those Christian college profs who fomented
her rebellion against God's Created Order. We have them to thank for the
corruption of our children that is the necessary fruit of the absence
of fathers' discipline and protection--a state of affairs that grew out
of impotent sermons preached by pastors gelded by the academics they
paid to give them a seminary education; by seminary profs who formed
their students' ministerial affect and posture in such a way as to
promote a form of Christian faith and discipleship that is devoid of the
masculine principle, in which holiness is equated with womanliness.
Without doubt, "our society runs on education" and "even raising families is being done
on a level like never before."
So by all means, send your
impressionable daughter, fresh from your dining room table and kitchen,
off to Wheaton where she may, without godly hindrance, be browbeaten
until she willingly submits to the feminist shrills who love her and have
a wonderful plan for her life. Upon graduation, you'll have the joy of
seeing her travel three weeks a month, internationally; not wasting her
time changing diapers, but rather looking for a cure for malaria and
changing the whole wide world. Pursuing excellence, you know. This will
allow you to look back, smugly patting yourself on the back for paying
the tuition that allowed those feminist shrills and their willing helpers
to beat all her feminine beauty out, replacing it with feminine
leadership and authority and power and control and pride and command and
self-direction and self-esteem and self-respect and self-worth and
self-motivation and boundaries. Yes, don't forget those boundaries
without which the Christian life would be not worth living.
Wasn't
it P. T. Barnum who said no one's ever gone bankrupt underestimating
the average intelligence of the American people? So let us march on,
with eagle eye. Let us listen to and obey our superiors, paying our rightful patriotic allegiance to Wheaton and Taylor and Gordon and Covenant (both
College and Seminary) and Calvin (both College and Seminary) and
Westmont as, together with all their own pagan superiors at our nation's
colleges and univeristies, they hold out their money and power and
influence-grubbing hands, joining the refrain:
Not like the brazen (male) giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Let
us acknowledge that all honor and glory and wisdom and power and might
flow from and through Lady Education. Let us join in her worship with
many thousands of our tax dollars each and every year, with our full
attention when she deigns to speak or write, ex cathedra; with the human
sacrifice of our sons and daughters; with a hundred thousand in tuition
for each of our children; with million dollar bequests or charitable
remainder trusts honoring our alma mater when we die; in fact, let us
hold nothing back in our great devotion to Lady Education.
Didn't the Apostle Paul tell us man's wisdom is superior to the Word of God?
I sit writing in a coffee shop just up the tracks from
Wheaton. And that bit about the woman who's traveling three
weeks a month, internationally, doing science to find a cure for
malaria? It was what her boyfriend just told me--word for word. He was sitting in the next seat over and we got talking. He loves
her and waits for her to come home. He told me he earns $150 to $200
per week cleaning carpets.
And that bit about changing the world instead of changing
diapers? It's a woman who graduated from Wheaton. And that bit about the
pursuit of excellence? It's the president of a Christian college.
I wonder whether any woman in the middle of childbirth ever called her Christian college prof to
let him in on the agony of her particular pursuit of excellence? Do Wheaton's
female grads send in notes for the alumni magazine telling of the birth
of each of their children, or do editors limit such announcments to female grads who get terminal degreed, tenure or a
Templeton Genius grant?
Dear brothers and sisters, I couldn't be more proud of Mary Lee and each of our daughters--including Heidi. These godly women have chosen the Kingdom of
God and its righteousness over the Kingdom of Man and its wickedness. And I think it worth noting that Michal was a National Merit scholar, but she didn't get a colleage degree. Instead, she chose to waste
her life changing diapers and waiting for her husband to come home. He wrote with tears.
