How Should We Educate Our Daughters? – Part 1

The Overlooked Question

Cancel culture vultures have descended again to lay victim to yet another prey.

Harrison Butker, until recently known primarily for his accomplishments on the football field, has become the controversial man of the hour, hero to the religious and the conservative, villain to liberals, atheists, and feminists, all for saying the following in his commencement address at a Catholic college:

For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment. You should be proud of all that you have achieved to this point in your young lives. I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.

He goes on to say about his wife…

I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabelle, would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother…it cannot be overstated that all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife, and embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker.

And for this he’s been raked over the coals. A change.org petition demanding the Kansas City Chiefs fire Butker has amassed over 200,000 signatures.

Whatever your opinions may be on the matter, freedom-loving people of all backgrounds and beliefs should readily agree that he has a right to his opinion and shouldn’t be cancelled for it. Critiqued, yes. Debated, of course. But cancelled, no.

That we live in a time when prominent left-wing personalities would go to great lengths to ridicule a Catholic man, speaking to an audience of Catholic college graduates, for espousing and articulating basic, run-of-the-mill Catholic views on vocation, fatherhood, and motherhood that most Catholics would happily affirm, bodes ill for our country. Alas, tolerance is only reserved for those who espouse tolerable views.

But let’s table that disconcerting reality for the moment.

Given that this speech was made at a college graduation ceremony, and the portion of the speech that has gone viral is the part in which he addresses the young ladies specifically, what I want to address here is a question that’s been overlooked in all this commotion – How should we educate our daughters?

Or to put it more provocatively: Should we even be sending our girls to college?

Some Preliminaries

But before I brave what’s sure to be a contentious topic, let me first say that this isn’t some ploy to rile feathers, nor is it simply an impersonal thought experiment. I have a thirteen-year-old daughter who’s reaching that age when we have to think about long-term future plans, and whose happiness and success in life I obviously have a major vested interest in.

Moreover, in my line of work as a test prep tutor, I help many girls prepare for the ACTs and SATs so that they can get scholarships for college. In fact, I’d say that the ratio of females to males that I tutor is something like 8 to 1. In other words, most of my students are female. The females closest to me – my wife, my sister, and my mother – have all gotten not only bachelor’s degrees, but graduate degrees as well.

That I grew up in and continue to be a part of a milieu that takes higher education for women as a given is, if nothing else, a testament to how much things have changed for women in the Western world since, for instance, the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. So a question like “should we even be sending our girls to college?” might seem anachronistic, a step backward, even misogynistic to some.

But I ask it sincerely, not because I hate women or think less of them or want to put them down, but on the contrary because I care about them and want what’s best for them, especially for the ones I know personally – my daughter, her friends, her cousins, the girls I tutor, the girls from our church, etc.

I also know that books could be written about this subject. So I’m not looking to address the question comprehensively. What I want to do, however, is help parents think carefully through the decisions they make for each daughter’s future, educational choices being one (albeit significant) part of that equation.

That said, what I had initially planned as one article has become much lengthier. So now the plan is to divide the topic into a series of articles that will touch on various aspects of the issue. In this article, I address the fundamental question of a girl’s purpose.

In subsequent articles, I plan to address marriage, motherhood, career, and finally a college education. So if you’re looking for an answer to the question of whether we should send our girls to college, bear with me for a while. I’ll get there, and hopefully, it’ll all make sense.

My last qualifier is that I will be speaking of women in general. Of course, we can always point to exceptions – women who are unable to bear children for some reason or another or women who are celibate by choice. There’s certainly room for exceptions, but I believe we can point to things that apply to the female population in general.

Our Primary Purpose

We can’t begin to talk about a college education for our girls without first determining the purpose, not of a college education but of our girls themselves.

What is a girl’s purpose in life?

Her purpose, in the end, is the same as your purpose and my purpose.

Borrowing from the Westminster Shorter Catechism, we could ask it this way, “What is the chief end of man?”

The answer, of course, is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

It’s apropos to start here to establish the foundation and anchoring point for a complex topic. If you are not religious, you may take issue with this starting point. Keep in mind that this article isn’t mainly an apologetic for the Christian faith, but I will say that for any consideration of what is best for your daughter to be worth your while, you must begin with these existential questions: Does God exist, and did He create us for a purpose?

You are at a fork in the road and how you answer these questions will lead you down two very different paths. For me, the starting point is that God did indeed create the first humans, Adam and Eve, for a purpose, and we, as their offspring, share in that purpose.

And as we go down this path, we learn many things, like the fact that God reveals Himself through His word, the holy scriptures, which reveal to us objective and unchanging standards of good and evil, right and wrong, and that we are accountable for the way we live. Moreover, there is a judgment we face when we die, meaning we are not just physical beings with an expiration date but have souls that live on afterwards…forever.

Furthermore, there is a heaven and a hell, and where we go depends on how we measure up to those objective standards. The bad news is that we don’t. None of us measures up. Not you. Not me. Not your daughters. Not mine.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. (Romans 3:23)

The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is none who does good…They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one. (Psalm 14:1-3)

Contrary to what some people believe, even those who profess to be religious, no one is really good at his core. We are all bad. We are all failures. If life is a test, and those who pass go to heaven and those who fail end up in hell, despite what you might think about your own merits, you and the rest of us (and our daughters) are all headed in one direction, the unwelcome one.

That’s the bad news, and it really is bad. It’s actually the worst news if you think about it. The problem is most people don’t. People don’t want to think about final judgment. They will place all manner of distraction before themselves – jobs, career, family, vacations, entertainment, lovers, toys – to keep from dealing with it. They will suspend reality, convince themselves that God does not exist and live as though there is no judgment in the end. There is a word from the Psalm above for such people: fools.

I beseech you, as someone who loves your own soul, do not be a fool. Don’t let present distractions and temporal pleasures or the drive to obtain them keep you from soberly and seriously considering these matters. There is no happy ending for a fool.

So let’s think about it together for a moment.

Before the presence of God, we are all guilty, whether you’re a man or a woman. Hence, it’s foolish when man claims superiority over woman, and it’s equally absurd when woman asserts superiority over man. Yes, men are the perpetrators of horrific deeds. And yet no, the world wouldn’t be a better place if only women were in charge. The truth is we are all terrible.

But our egos can’t handle the truth. We take umbrage. We get defensive. And that’s our Achilles’ heel: we have too much self-love, we regard ourselves too highly. But remember that God “opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that we can just decide to be humble. We can’t just manufacture humility on our own. It doesn’t stop us from trying, though. What we manage to come up with, however, isn’t actually humility; it’s false humility, which isn’t humility at all but pride masked in humble garb.

Even the attempt at humility to curry favor with God is worthy of reproach. It’s conniving and calculating. It reeks of egotism and arrogance, as if you could in your own power make yourself right with God.

All of this is quite lamentable, and should, if understood properly, lead you to a genuine realization that you are in dire straits. You don’t have it within you to pass the test. Your best attempts end in abject failure. You must come to say as Paul says,

Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? (Romans 7:24)

And mean it. It is only in that state that you can actually hear the next part in a way that will be of any use to you.

The good news is that there is good news – the gospel.

You see, the scriptures are not mainly about rules and regulations. They are primarily about the Messiah, the one who would come to save his people, and we are all in need of saving because we are all sinners, and “the wages of sin is death.”

Jesus Christ is the only human to have lived without sin.

He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. (1 Peter 2:22)

And yet he laid down his life to pay for our sins.

He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. (1 Peter 2:24)

This good news, the gospel, is a gift, free to us but immeasurably costly to God. It took no less than the death of His own Son to secure salvation for you and me and our daughters, unworthy and undeserving sinners as we are. The scriptures even tell us that we are enemies of God, and yet we have now been reconciled to Him by this sacrifice, if we repent of our sins and put our faith in Christ.

The life of a christian is simply one of receiving this great gift by repenting of his or her sins and placing his or her trust for the forgiveness of those sins in the gracious work of Jesus Christ on the cross and then living out his or her life in thankful response to this gift of salvation.

This is my purpose. This is your purpose. This is your daughter’s purpose.

With that said, I’d like to revisit Butker’s words to the young women graduating that day and give it some perspective.

He says,

Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.

I get the sentiment. Marriage and children are great blessings from God, but what we should be most excited about in life (and I’m hoping Butker would agree) is that we are no longer at enmity with God because of His Son Jesus Christ, and that we are now His children, destined for eternal life with Him, to glorify Him and enjoy Him forever.

That is mine. I hope that is yours. I hope that is our daughters’.

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• Being Brave: Finding courage in challenging situations.
• Setting Goals: Understanding the importance of having aspirations and working towards them.
• Being Peacemakers: Promoting harmony and resolving conflicts with kindness.
• Doing Hard Things: Embracing perseverance and resilience.
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• Being a Listener: Developing strong communication skills by actively listening.
• Having Self-Control: Cultivating discipline and the ability to manage impulses.

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