In recent posts we have been looking at Daisy Christodoulou’s book, Seven Myths About Education. In our previous post we looked at the myth that students can always just look up what they don’t know.
Myth 5: We should teach transferable skills
Today we are investigating the myth of transferable skills.
So what are transferable skills? As the name suggests, they are skills that can be transferred to different settings. And like the other myths, there is a certain attraction to this myth. What educator does not want students to develop skills that can be utilised in multiple areas?
Where do we see this myth?
So what does this myth look like? Christodoulou quotes Professor Gary Claxton, “…knowledge is changing so fast that we cannot give young people what they will need to know because we do not know what it will be. Instead we should be helping them develop supple and nimble minds, so that they will be able to learn whatever they need to.” This is a classic example of the myth of transferrable skills.
Today, teachers and educators seem to have bought this myth, Rote learning of facts is out, focus on skills is in. Project-based learning is in, as are theme-based approaches to learning rather than subject-based learning.
Why it’s a Myth
So what’s the problem? The issue is that skills are not as transferrable as we sometimes think. The way you analyse and problem solve in a maths problem differs to the way you would approach historical questions.
Once again, Dan Willingham, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia has a contribution to make to the debate. He points out that our brain is not like a calculator which can just perform the same function (say analysis) on different sets of data. Rather, “Critical thinking processes are tied to background knowledge.” The implication, he argues is that we need to ensure students acquire background knowledge parallel with practising critical thinking skills.
E.D. Hirsch argues that those who have and use 21st century skills effectively are those who have “domain knowledge in a wide range of domains.” Hirsch refers to a massive body of evidence that shows what we think of as transferrable skills are knowledge based. So, “Knowledge is skill: skill is knowledge.”
A great example of this is in the realm of chess. There is no evidence that chess masters demonstrate more than average competence intellectually. Their talents tend to be chess specific. Thus the acquisition of chess skills is built on recognition memory or stored knowledge.
A second example is in reading. The skill of comprehension in reading is associated with knowledge. So much so, that ‘low’ readers reading a text on baseball were found to comprehend that passage better than ‘good’ readers when those ‘low’ readers had a good knowledge of baseball and the ‘good’ readers did not.
Conclusion
So what we tend to think of as skill in experts is really a function of knowledge that experts have built up into their long-term memory and can retrieve as necessary. This means that if we focus on teaching skills at the exclusion of deep knowledge, we are actually working against the development of transferable skills.
In my daily skim of the news recently, I came across this article bemoaning the government’s response to COVID 19. Why? According to the Ministry for Women. the government’s approach favoured men and was likely to exacerbate gender inequalities.
How so? Well, apparently the ‘shovel ready’ projects benefit workforces that are dominated by men, whereas women tend to make up a larger component of industries such as retail, hospitality and tourism which have been hard hit. Now I don’t really want to get into whether the government’s response to the economic situation, that they by their actions have foisted upon us, is wise or not.
What I do want to look at is one particular quote in the article.
Impact of COVID 19 on Women in the Workforce
Professor Jennifer Curtin, the head of the University of Auckland’s Public Policy Institute is quoted in the article.
My concern about this shovel ready, Ministry of Works, nostalgic spending is that, what happens if too many women lose their jobs, then can’t find a job, and end up staying home and taking care of children?
I read this and thought. Wow, that could be great! Imagine that. An economic crisis that forces us to think about more than just money. An opportunity for families to see value in the home economy and the little lives there. But no, I obviously missed the point. Curtin continued.
Then we end up looking like we looked like in the 1950s. Back to the same old breadwinner model where the bread-winner was the guy.
It’s hardly an argument, but it seems that we must assume that if this economic crisis caused women to stay home and care for children that would be bad. Why? Reading between the lines Curtin might be arguing it is bad because it’s an old model, and gives men more power and women less opportunity to work outside the home.
What is Progress?
But what evidence do we have that the 1950s model was worse than the one we have today? From whose perspective are we making this value judgment? As a child, I appreciated the fact that my mother stayed at home and cared for me. As a teacher, I see kids starved of a mother’s love who could do with a more old fashioned hands-on approach.
Curtin herself, in questioning the budgeting process wants a gender-responsive system where government agencies have to explicitly ask who benefits from policies and address inequalities. Perhaps that thinking should be applied to our children. What benefits them? Would having Mum at home help or hinder their development as human beings? What does true social progress look like?
Well, the research is in. Having a Mum at home for young children, and being home for children when they return from school is best. If you are interested in reading further into this and are not concerned about the inconvenience it might cause your family should you be convinced, a place to begin would be Mary Eberstadt’s Home-Alone America. She looks into the impact that family-child separation has in a number of areas. The book investigates the impact of daycare, as well as other negative effects of typical modern patterns of family life. From obesity to mental health to STDs, our modern patterns of child-raising have wreaked havoc in the lives of countless children.
Unfortunately, as adults, we tend to focus on getting what we want, and the voiceless children struggle to get what they need. So when issues occur in the lives of our children, we don’t look at our lifestyles. Eberstadt notes that “the passionate desire to attribute today’s behavioural and mental problems to inanimate suspects…despite serious evidence to the contrary shows us how reflexively our society fastens on to some explanation, any explanation that does not involve parents.”
So while Curtin might disparage the return of Mums to the home as a result of COVID 19 as some kind of backwards step, perhaps a backwards step is what we need if we are to make positive social progress. C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity pointed out that progress is not always forward.
We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
Photo by Jon Flobrant
Maybe we took a wrong turn in our approach to families and childcare. The explosion of mental health issues in children surely tell us something has gone wrong. Statements like Curtin’s devalue children and those who raise children. Implicit in her thinking is that to lose a job and be forced to be at home and raise one’s own children is a backward step. But perhaps these precious little eternal souls are more important than pushing paper from one office to another. Maybe, just maybe, heading back to a more 1950s arrangement might actually be a step forward for many families.
Let’s Think Holistically
Finally, might it not be worth thinking more holistically? Instead of focussing on whether men are getting a better deal, or women are being unfairly treated, I wonder what it would look like if we started thinking of ourselves in terms of households? What if we considered the household as one team? In a team, you have a captain, and you have people playing different positions, but every player has a role to play in winning the game. If we approached the family as a team rather than in an individualistic manner, what might change? What would it look like if fathers captained their families and considered the common good of everyone in their household?
Who hasn’t heard this one? Someone displays an unusual depth of knowledge and another scornfully says, “If I wanted to know that, I could just google it.” We’ve seen hints of this in the other myths. Procedural knowledge, or knowing how is rated about declarative knowledge or knowing what.
This myth has certainly infected the classroom. Apparently teachers shouldn’t worry about their students learning facts. Given our internet age, knowledge is redundant. Rather we need to focus on teaching research skills.
How is this a myth? What is wrong with this thinking?
the first issue is that it denies what research on memory tells us. Knowledge in our long term memory is extremely important. In fact, the more knowledge we have, the greater range of problems we are able to solve. If we memorise frequently used bits of information, these will not clog-up our short term memory when we are trying to solve complex problems.
A classic case in the classroom is teaching fractions with children who do not know their multiplication tables. First times tables must be in the long term memory, then you can teach fractions. Or what about your doctor? Nobody would want their doctor googling how to do a procedure five minutes before they are due to go into surgery. They are going to need a lot of knowledge stored in their long term memory so they can be effective.
Secondly, ‘looking something up’ actually requires a certain amount of knowledge. First of all, one needs to know what one needs to find out. In addition, knowledge of what makes for a good source could be important. And these are just starting points. As Christodoulou points out, “..research skills are, on closer inspection, the function of large bodies of knowledge.” In fact, often when we describe students has having good research skills, we are actually making more of a comment on their general knowledge. Because of their good general knowledge, they are enabled to interpret research questions and approach the whole process of research in a competent manner.
So yes, we do want to teach good research skills. But it should never be an either-or thing. We want to complement this with providing children with a good body of knowledge.
In a previous post we looked at cultural blind spots and chronological snobbery. One cultural blindspot Christians often have is in the area of education. Imagine for a moment, a first-century Jew, a recent convert to Christianity was suddenly and miraculously transported into the 21st century West. Trapped in our time, unable to get back he finds a Christian home to stay in. He would no doubt be impressed by our technology, the abundance and variety of food we enjoy and our ability to travel easily and relatively cheaply. I imagine he’d marvel at the ready access we have to the apostles’ words. He might be disappointed by our zeal. There would also no doubt be many cultural differences that might make understanding difficult.
But I put it to you, that he would be absolutely shocked by our take on education.
Imagine no longer. How I managed to record the following conversation, and by what method Levi, our first century Christian Jew managed to be transported to Auckland New Zealand in the year 2020 must remain a secret. The key thing is I have the conversation. He’s chatting with his host Mike, father of a 21st century Western Christian family. Can I apologise for Levi in advance? He did not grow up in our pluralistic tolerant age. Consider that your trigger-warning.
Levi: Brother, why do your children leave the house every day and stay at school for so long?
Mike: Well, they’re going to school. It’s important. They need a good education.
Levi: What do you mean by that?
Mike: Well, our world is a complex place. To get a good job, they are going to need to understand it properly.
Levi: Well yes, I entirely agree that children need to understand God’s world. But my question is: why do you send your children to pagans to educate? Your daughter informed me yesterday, that her teacher claimed that Darwin’s theory of evolution means there is no God, and your son said his teacher was explaining the importance of accepting people’s choice of gender. I had to question him to find out what that meant!
Mike: Yes, I have to admit, we are not happy about that, but children have to go to school. It’s compulsory.
Levi: That’s incredible. I didn’t imagine that in the future people would be so fettered by the ruling authorities that they could no longer make decisions about discipling their children.
Mike: Well, there are different types of schools. There are Christian schools – but they cost money, and you can try to get an exemption to homeschool, but that would mean Mandy would have to stay at home to teach the children, and she loves her career.
Levi: But didn’t the apostle Paul say in his epistle to the Ephesians, that fathers, that’s you Mike, are to not provoke your children to anger, but to instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
Mike: How is that relevant Levi? I read the Bible to my children after dinner. I pray for them. I take them to church with me and they have a good Sunday school programme there.
Levi: Well do you think a 10 minute chat once a day and an hour on Sundays in Kids Church fulfils your obligations?
Mike: I guess I could do more. But school’s really just about learning Maths and English you know. How to write and stuff like that.
Levi: But don’t you believe what Paul says of Christ in his epistle to the Colossians? He says, “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
Mike: How is that relevant? I don’t understand. What do you mean?
Levi: Well Paul is reflecting on how the Son is the creator of all things and they were created for him, and they hold together in him. What do you mean by saying “They’re just learning Maths and English …how to write and stuff like that?” Are these things part of the created order that exist for the Son? Are they separate to it? And if not, why are you letting pagans who supress the truth about God train your young and impressionable children to do these things in a setting where the trainers deny the Lordship of Christ and his relevance to the universe he brought into being?
Mike: Hold on a minute. Yes I believe what Colossians says. But what’s the harm in getting unbelievers to teach my children how to do Maths, write a sentence…you know, that sort of thing. Isn’t that just part of the common grace that God gives to people?
Levi: Let’s grant you that point for the moment. Although I think you’ll find that what people believe necessarily taints everything. But do you really think that’s all your children learn? What about all of the incidental learning that goes on in the classroom every day? The teacher’s attitude to life, their understanding of the purpose of all learning, their approach to the issues of the day. Do you think that all of this is not going to come out in a classroom? Why, your daughter said yesterday at the dinner table that Ms Halcombe had told the class that her entire job could be summed up as enabling the students to be who they want to be?! You’d think she was the very serpent in the garden himself with words like that!
Mike: But Levi, Christ called us to be in the world. We can’t abandon the world. This way our children get to understand the world’s perspective on life, and we can show them how it is wrong. They can also be salt and light, just as Jesus wanted us to be.
Levi: Mike! Let me share you the wisdom that comes from history. We Jews have a sorry history that can teach you a lot. Do you know the story of the Judges? Do you know what led to that terrible period in our history?
Mike: Well, surely you can’t be arguing that it was because your people sent their children to non-Jewish schools?
Levi: No of course not. The story begins in Joshua. As our people crossed into the Promised Land, we set up a stone monument with stones taken from the middle of the River Jordan, which God made dry. The monument was to be a teaching tool. When our children asked what the stones meant, we were to tell them the story of God’s faithfulness in our history. Well of course, the memory of what happened lasted for a generation, but as the book of Judges says, after Joshua’s generation died out, a new generation grew up who neither knew the Lord or what he had done for Israel.
Mike: Yeah. I understand that it’s important that we pass on what God has done to our children. But I’m doing that. School’s a separate issue.
Levi: No it isn’t. Training up young minds is the single most important role you have as a parent. In the Law, we were taught the following. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” Clearly the training of a child is not a five minute a day role. It’s a process that encompasses all your life with them, day and night.
Mike: Oh, but that’s the Old Testament. That applies to Israel. We are New Covenant believers.
Levi: Do you think that being under the New Covenant places a lesser requirement of love and concern for the spiritual wellbeing of our children than it did for the children of believers in the Old Covenant? You know Jesus warned people against leading his little ones astray. He said those responsible for this would be better off having a millstone attached to their necks and being tossed into the sea. Do you think this suggests that we New Covenant believers should be less concerned about the training of our covenant children now? Do you think Jesus’ requirement to let the little children come to him is compatible with sending them away from him to be trained by those who hate him and are walking away from him?
Mike: Well like I say, I keep an eye on what they are learning, and Jesus calls us to be salt and light. My children can be salt and light!
Levi: But Mike…if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? Look at your children. They dress like unbelieving children. They talk like them. They watch the same television shows, and their role models are the same…what do you call it…’social media celebrities’. Are they salt? As far as I read Scripture, I nowhere see a command for parents to outsource the training of their children to unbelievers in the hope that those unbelievers will be brought to faith. We send missionaries to the cannibals, but we don’t serve them up our children. Besides, when your church sends missionaries to overseas countries, they have to train substantially to be prepared to bring the gospel to this context. How much more children?! Shouldn’t we spend their impressionable years developing in them a Christ-centred approach to the world around them in preparation for a life of being salt and light?
Mike: But Levi, look at the results. Hannah’s friend is now going to youth group!
Levi: Would this still be a victory if Hannah ended up going to hell? Surely you can imagine a world where you are obedient to the commands of Scripture concerning both how you disciple your children, and how you reach out to unbelievers? Surely disobedience in one realm can’t be justified pragmatically by seeming success in another?
Mike: Well I don’t think I’m being disobedient. Besides, like I said, we can’t afford a Christian education. We’d prefer it, but it’s just not doable.
Levi: What do you mean? Is obedience to Christ in this matter impossible? What do you mean you can’t afford it? I know travel is not incredibly expensive, but wouldn’t you be able to cut back on overseas travel? Couldn’t you live in a smaller house? Can’t you figure out a way of making it work?
Mike: Well I suppose we could make it work if we really cut back. But Mandy wouldn’t want to move to another part of town. This is a nice area – it’s close to the city. Our friends are nearby. Plus our house is a great size for us. It’s good for entertaining. We can have Bible study here.
Levi: So it’s not actually about the cost? It’s more about the priority you place on it. You’d rather be comfortably well off than obedient to Christ? Maybe avoiding poverty for the sake of Christ has become an idol for you?
Mike: Well, I’m not sure I’d put it that way. You are pretty blunt you know.
Levi: Well I’ll be blunter still. Paul was pretty blunt too you know. Maybe you live in an age where caring about truth isn’t as important as avoiding offending people. Why doesn’t Mandy disciple your children at home? Surely much of her income is spent on having Matthew at the inappropriately named ‘Best Start Day Care’ each day. Didn’t the apostle Paul say in his epistle to Titus that he was to train the young women to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.
Mike: Oh, don’t go there. We’ve come a long way since your day. Women are just as important as men, and we no longer believe they should just stay at home looking after the household. We’ve emancipated women.
Levi: May I remind you that in my day, the apostle Paul wrote that male and female were one in Christ. that does not mean we are all the same part of the body. We all have different roles to play. And I object to your use of the word just. What do you mean just stay at home looking after the household. How is training your children and preparing them for a life of service to Christ “just”. What is it she does anyway? Isn’t she a paralegal? Emancipated woman? What nonsense! You’ve exchanged submission to her cherished husband who loves her deeply and service of the ones she loves more than any others in the world for submission to a man she hardly knows and service of people she neither knows nor cares for.
Mike: I don’t see it that way.
Levi: Perhaps it’s inconvenient for you to see it this way. Perhaps you see the sacrifice another way might require, and you’re not willing to count the cost.
Mike: I think we’ll have to agree to disagree. You have your opinion which is good for you, and I have mine, which works for our family.
In an earlier post, we looked at the second myth (teacher-led instruction is passive) Daisy Christodoulou debunks in her book Seven Myths About Education. Today we move on to myth three.
Myth 3: The 21st Century Fundamentally Changes Everything
You’ve probably heard this myth yourself. According to this myth, back in our parents day, we stuffed knowledge into the heads of students. Now, however, this will just render our children irrelevant. Now we need to focus on the acquisition of transferable skills so our children can adapt quickly to the inevitable changes that our modern world will bring into their lives.
Some even go so far as to say that those taught under the old model of knowledge will be doomed to ever-diminishing manual jobs, while skills educated children will ‘whizz around the country problem solving.’
Trends which express this myth
There are some trends in education that spring from this myth. One of these is for a curriculum to be based around skills instead of subjects. An example is the Opening Minds curriculum which is centred around five essential skills rather than subjects. The skills are: citizenship, learning, managing information, relating to people and managing situations. All good skill to be sure. Skills that we certainly want our children to learn.
Another example is the New Zealand curriculum, which although it has subject areas, is fairly sparse in terms of knowledge requirements, focusing instead on skills. In addition, the curriculum emphasises five key competencies: thinking, using language, symbols, and texts, managing self, relating to others and participating and contributing.
Are these skills unique to the 21st century?
The problem with all of this is not that these skills are not important, but that these are skills humans have always needed to be successful. There is nothing uniquely 21st century about them at all! Creativity and problem solving are indeed 21st century skills. But they are not uniquely 21st-century skills. The world has always favoured those who were creative and able to solve problems. Did our forebears require these skills? Of course they did, just as much, if not more so than us.
But the real issue is the way we now propose our children gain these skills. The whole movement pushing the teaching of ’21st century skills’ has become a codeword for removing knowledge from our curricula. But this is perverse, as Christodoulou points out.
…removing knowledge from the curriculum will ensure that pupils do not develop twenty-first century skills.
Implications
Skills are not gained in a vacuum. Knowledge based curricula give our children what they need to develop the skills we all recognise are essential.
Secondly, we should be sceptical of those who argue that we need to toss out old ideas and knowledge. The reverse is true. The newer the idea, the more likely it is to become obsolete! Christodoulou points out that if something has proved itself useful over thousands of years, it is a good bet that it will be useful for the next 100 years. But something that has only been valuable for 5 years? In that case, we cannot be so certain. Therefore the newer an idea, the more sceptical we should be about teaching it in our schools. The older ideas have stood the test of time.
I’ve seen this in my lifetime. In my high school years, we did some learning in ICT. I learned to use programmes that no longer exist.
Recently we looked at Elizabeth Bartholet’s attack on homeschooling. There have been many excellent articles critiquing her thinking. One such, written by Kevin D Williamson appeared in the National Review. Williamson notes the reason many like Bartholet fear homeschooling and want it banned. School is an essential part of state monitoring.
Homeschooling inhibits the ability of the state to conduct surveillance on some families. “There is no way of knowing how many homeschooled children experience a childhood comparable to Tara’s,” she [Bartholet] writes. “But we do know that the homeschooling regime permits children to be raised this way.”
In addition, Williamson further highlights why Statists love public schooling, and fear homeschooling: public schooling is actually for the benefit of the State.
The economic argument is straightforward and points back to Prussia, the spiritual homeland of progressivism. From Frederick the Great and Johann Julius Hecker through the Progressive Era to today, schools have been treated as factories that produce what the state needs: able administrators and bureaucrats in the context of the emerging Bismarckian welfare regimes and, later, workers in the industrial economies. Schools organized this way do not exist to serve children or families: They exist to serve the state, and children are not the customers — they are the product.
Williamson argues that what is being fought over here is whether children are the property of the state, whether education exists for the student or the state, and whether there is any private realm.
Homeschooling is based on a radical proposition that is utterly incompatible with Professor Bartholet’s politics. Homeschoolers insist that their children are not the property of the state, to be farmed and dispatched in accordance with the state’s needs; the homeschooling ethos insists that the purpose of education is to serve the needs and interests of students rather than those of the state or of business; it insists that there exists a sphere of life that is private and not subject to state surveillance, and that this sphere covers family life and child-rearing unless and until there is some immediate pressing reason for intervention.
So what is the debate really about?
The debate about homeschooling is not really about educational outcomes — there are good and bad homeschooling practices, good and bad public schools, good and bad private schools, etc. — but about who serves whom and on what terms. Do American families serve the state or does the state serve them? Do we live our lives and raise our children at the sufferance of the state, or is the state an instrument of our convenience?
It’s sometimes helpful to use an analogy to stimulate thinking on fairness in taxation, and perhaps also the potential dangers of punishing wealthy citizens and treating them as the enemy. This one’s been floating around the internet for some time, but it’s a good one!
Restaurant Analogy
Each and every day, 10 men go to a restaurant for dinner together. The bill for all 10 comes to $100 each day. If the bill were paid the way we pay our taxes, the first four would pay nothing; the fifth would pay $1; the sixth would pay $3; the seventh $7; the eighth $12; the ninth $18. The 10th man – the richest – would pay $59. Although the 10 men didn’t share the bill equally, they all seemed content enough with the arrangement – until the restaurant owner threw them a curve.
“You’re all very good customers,” the owner said, “so I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily meal by $20. I’m going to charge you just $80 in total.” The 10 men looked at each other and seemed genuinely surprised, but quite happy about the news.
The first four men, of course, are unaffected because they weren’t paying anything for their meals anyway. They’ll still eat for free. The big question is how to divvy up the $20 in savings among the remaining six in a way that’s fair for each of them. They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33, but if they subtract that amount from each person’s share, then the fifth and sixth men would end up being paid to eat their meals. The restaurant owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each person’s bill by roughly the same percentage, and he proceeded to work out the amounts that each should pay.
The results? The fifth man paid nothing, the sixth pitched in $2, the seventh paid $5, the eighth paid $9, the ninth paid $14, leaving the 10th man with a bill of $50 instead of $59. Outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. “I only got one dollar out of the $20,” said the sixth man, pointing to the 10th man, “and he got $9!” “Yeah, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man. “I only saved a dollar, too! It’s not fair that he got nine times more than me!” “That’s true,” shouted the seventh man. “Why should he get back $9 when I only got $2? The rich get all the breaks!” “Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison. “We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!”
The nine outraged men surrounded the 10th and brutally assaulted him. The next day, he didn’t show up for dinner, so the nine sat down and ate without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they faced a problem that they hadn’t faced before. They were $50 short.
Today is Mother’s Day. And I want to use the opportunity to praise the mother who eschews career and focuses on family by running her household. I was fortunate enough to grow up with a mother of this kind. The old-fashioned kind, who knitted me jumpers with love, who made wonderful soups from scratch, who cooked healthy meals each night, who read aloud to me, who was always there. Sure we didn’t have the money two-income families had. There were no yearly overseas holidays, no fancy labelled clothes, no luxuries that the ‘cool kids’ had. But we had Mum, and we wouldn’t have traded that for the world.
And my children are blessed to have a mother of the same calibre. Motherhood is a calling that my wife has embraced with gusto. Despite having the intelligence and ability to do many things careerwise, she has instead elected to make a home. My wife stays at home and manages our household. She executes our budget ably, ensuring our single income covers our mortgage and feeds our family of 7. Every night, she expresses her love and care for us with healthy and nutritious meals. She serves our children by teaching them everything, from written English to Mathematics, from Science to baking, from how to look after a household to art. And she does this all because she loves them more than any school teacher (no matter how wonderful) ever could.
And yet, many make light of the woman who chooses this life. Somehow she is seen as inferior and unenlightened or perhaps under her husband’s thumb. She is not. We tell our young women they can have it all. But you can’t. That is a lie. The truth is, that the greatest calling for a Mum is making a home for those she loves! Young woman, if that makes you squeamish, you probably have drunk too deeply from that poisoned secular well of feminism. Young man, let me tell you from personal experience that you want a wife who wants to make a home, not a career. Only this kind of woman will create the stable anchor of love and commitment that a family needs.
Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes argues in a section on womanhood that Christians should reject the way of the world in its views on womanhood. He points out the patronizing language of those who mock the mother who gives herself to her family.
If someone talks about “economic opportunities for women,” he or she is not talking about the health and prosperity of the household, but about what money you make for yourself. Even the phrase “stay-at-home mom” is patronizing and faintly derogatory, like “stick-in-the-mud mom” or “sit-in-the-corner mom.” Do we talk about a “chained-to-the-desk mom” or a “stuck-in-traffic mom” or a “languishing-in-meetings mom”? To do fifty things in one day for which you alone are responsible, for the immediate good of the people you love, is deemed easy, trivial, beneath the dignity of a rational person, but to push memoranda written in legal patois from one bureaucratic office to another, at great public expense and for no clear benefit to the common good, now that is the life.
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So let us remember our economics. Let us remember that all of our earning money is for the sake of the home. The home is not a flophouse where we stay and recuperate so that we can go back out and earn money, much of which we burn in the very earning of it, with eating out, no frugality, the extra car, the day care center, and so on. John Senior recommends a ‘gladsome poverty’ as a remedy for the madness that subjects the home to the hamster treadmill – labor for the sake of labor, or worse, for the sake of prestige, for a desk and a title. We must say to ourselves, “We will not subject our children to the new thing in the world, having them spend vast tracts of their waking hours in the company of people who do not love them and who will not, a few years later, even remember their names. We will not hang our children by the ropes of our ambition or avarice. We will not institutionalize them at age three so that we may place them in a ‘good school system,’ that mythical beast, at age six. We will not mount the treadmill. We do not care what our ‘betters’ think. They have no great joy to show for all their sweat and grumbling.”
We all have cultural blindspots. It cannot be helped. There are certain things that each age and culture takes for granted. Unquestioned assumptions that rule us. In a previous post, we saw Elizabeth Bartholet’s unquestioned assumption that the State has the right to shape the thinking of children. In addition, we are hampered by what C.S. Lewis called chronological snobbery – the assumption that everything now is better than before. It’s often only as we confront another culture that we start to question our beliefs and even identify our blindspots.
As Christians, we must always be on the lookout for these cultural blindspots. They may be hiding explicitly anti-Christian ways of thinking or living. One way of doing this is to study History, in particular church history. As we read widely from different time periods, we get a feel for the worldviews and thinking of different ages. C.S. Lewis regarded this as very important. He encouraged people to read one old book for every new one!
It’s natural for us to fall into the trap chronological snobbery. We think we are better than our forebears. Clearly we are in some ways, notably technological ability. Yet even this rests on the discoveries of those who preceded us. But our superiority here causes us to assume our whole way of life is better. That is, if we think about it at all. But the same sinful nature that afflicted those who came before also afflicts us. People often will point to issues like slavery, or the treatment of women in past ages to show that we are superior to those who came before us.
Not at all. We just see these particular issues clearly because they are not cultural blindspots for us. Revisit our times in a history book 500 years hence, and there will be a whole new list of atrocities and sins not least of them, in my opinion, being abortion that our descendants will note, but we are on the whole largely blind to.
Maybe, just maybe, many of our patterns of life are not better than our forebears.
Chatting with my wife after a sermon today at church stimulated my thinking on this further. In Christian circles, we all know of missionaries and full-time ministry workers who have taken their ministry so seriously that it has negatively impacted family life. We’ve heard of children shunted off to another city to boarding school while their parents carry out missionary work. In history, we read of men who were so passionate about serving God that their wives and children suffered in a variety of ways.
I’d never thought of things in this light before, but today it brought to mind the passage in I Timothy 5 where Paul is helping Timothy think through provision for the needy such as widows in the church. Here he writes, “But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.“
Now in this context, we are talking about physical provision, and that provision, focussed on widows. Yet it provoked this thought in me. If it is such a gross sin to fail to provide physically for our relatives, is it perhaps also a profound sin to fail to care for them spiritually? If we parents become so focussed on serving God in our careers, could we not still be in danger if we neglect the greater priority of loving and discipling our children?
Jesus castigated the Pharisees once for their failure to honour their parents. They had come up with a tradition whereby they could gift money to God. This meant that whatever help they owed to their parents could (according to them) legitimately be refused. We read of this in Matthew 15. So here a spiritual reason was given for neglecting their physical duty of provision to their parents. They reasoned it was morally legitimate to give their money to God in such a way that rendered them incapable of helping their parents. Jesus saw through this and condemned them for setting aside the law of God (Honour your father and mother) for the sake of their traditions. Indeed he said they were only honouring him with their lips, and not their hearts.
Are we in danger of doing the same kind of thing? Parents are called to a radical programme of discipling their children.
In Deuteronomy 6 we see this radical programme in outline.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Deuteronomy 6:6-9
And in the New Testament, the apostle Paul in Ephesians holds fathers particularly responsible for the discipline and instruction in the Lord of their children. To withhold this is to provoke a child to anger.
So my question is this. Is it possible that we might set aside the law of God requiring us to nurture and disciple our children and replace (and justify this replacement) with that pseudo-spiritual tradition of men: “ministry”? What might that say about the state of our hearts? Let us search our own hearts and make sure we retain the priorities God has for us.
Does this mean we should have no other ministry obligations apart from family? Of course not! However, our priorities should be rightly ordered. It’s all too easy for something as unnoticed and pedestrian as family to be usurped by a ministry that might seem more important, seem to have greater impact, be more public and provide more excitement and fulfilment.
