Commencement-address season is upon us, bringing glad tidings about the power of grads\u2014especially young women\u2013to change the world. We live in a time of great global advocacy for girls\u2019 education, purported to be a game-changer<\/a> on many grounds. The education of young women is praised for lowering birthrates, for improving health, for advancing peace (girls\u2019 education being the bugbear of underdevelopment and extremism), for helping economies.<\/p>\n This enthusiasm is hardly unprecedented. The history of American schooling counts many champions of female education. Reformers like Emma Willard<\/a>, Mary Lyon<\/a>, and Catherine Beecher<\/a>, proceeding from religious communities, advocated girls\u2019 learning as essential for a growing republic, at once a boon to civilization and an index of it. Nineteenth-century advocates of girls\u2019 education touted it on grounds that mothers had to be able to educate their children\u2014especially sons\u2014for responsible citizenship. Later, Home Economics programs contended that women scarcely could run a home without a college degree, because keeping a household efficiently took scientific expertise.<\/p>\n While education for women may bear many benefits to women and their communities alike, focus on those benefits makes for a reductive and utilitarian approach. The practical returns we now anticipate from women\u2019s learning may sit more comfortably with us than some of the hoary obsolete reasons for it\u2014turning women into more interesting wives or cleverer mothers\u2013but they are still restrictive. Why not let college women just learn<\/em>, rather than promoting education mostly grounds that it yield broader social returns?<\/p>\n In some respects this is a problem of liberal arts education more generally, for men and<\/em> women. Liberal arts education can be a great preparation for a future profession, to equip young men and women for productive lives, but it is more than that.\u00a0 It purports to be the sort of learning worth doing just for its own sake. But who can afford to do this? College is expensive. Parents quite legitimately want to know what their daughters, no less than their sons, will have to show for it. Graduates resent repaying loans for an education that does not help them make a better living. But should men or women go to college just for that?<\/p>\n The best candidate for a liberal arts education is one who takes the subjects seriously for themselves, not just for the way they may suit a future job\u2013but for the good of knowing that thing, the way that knowledge helps one understand human life. A young woman with her whole life opening before her, including the time that may be required for raising children, can be that kind of candidate.<\/p>\n For the last decade<\/a> or so observers<\/a> have expressed worry (disgust?) over women at prestigious colleges who study hard but plan to \u201copt out,\u201d to prioritize family life over demanding careers. There may not be that many women now in college who envision their future in family light, and some might be shy admitting it. But their persistence, even in small numbers, could leaven the whole lump. Parenting exists as one of the few respectable adult activities accessible to most people that stands outside of the get-a-job world. Exactly because liberal arts education is so evidently not preparation for parenthood, and because childrearing remains a legitimate use of adulthood, those with family plans (even dim) can cushion education from the compulsion of utility.<\/p>\n The encouraging rise of women in many professions affirms our regnant solution to what Betty Friedan in the early 1960s tagged<\/a> the \u201cProblem that Has No Name.\u201d Given that many college-educated American women still do desire to raise children at some point, ongoing public argument pushes them either to \u201clean in<\/a>\u201d or concede that they can\u2019t have it all<\/a>. The June 1960 New York Times<\/em> article<\/a> that put a bee in Betty\u2019s bonnet, \u201cThe Road From Freud to Frigidiare, from Sophocles to Spock, Has Turned Out To Be a Bumpy One,\u201d merely reported what was obvious then. When college-educated women married and had children, they found themselves at a loss. Graduation required them to descend from \u201civory towers to park playgrounds.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 That descent occasioned real trouble: \u201cThe reason a college bred housewife often feels like a two-headed schizophrenic is this: She used to talk about whether music was frozen architecture; now she talks over frozen food plans.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 So jarring was the disconnect between the life of the mind and domestic cares that \u201cMany young women\u2014certainly not all\u2014whose education plunged them into a world of ideas feel stifled in their homes\u2026.They find routine lives out of joint with their training.\u201d\u00a0 For one woman the hardest lesson was \u201clearning that time is not my own and not being able to think a consecutive sentence.\u201d Another felt constant frustration and regretted that she could not \u201clead a writer\u2019s life, which ideally is regulated, passive, quiet,\u201d a composure disturbed if she had to make laundry lists or have dinner guests.<\/p>\n We should concede that many men and women who work many jobs after college, even highly remunerative ones, also still find their routine lives \u201cout of joint\u201d with their \u201ctraining.\u201d\u00a0 Ironically, those who anticipate some time home with children in the future might now be among the best suited to suck the marrow out of undergraduate life, because that \u201cworld of ideas\u201d so obviously cannot be reduced to future job payoff.<\/p>\n In fourth grade I made a friend whose house gleamed evidence of affluence, rooms ever neat and smelling faintly of Estee Lauder\u2019s White Linen. The most striking feature was a spoonrest that sat between burners on the kitchen rangetop, adorned with the words, \u201cFor this I went to college?\u201d As a child unequipped with irony, I pondered that for a long time.\u00a0\u00a0 First: a spoonrest?\u00a0 Why couldn\u2019t you just put your spoon down on a plate?\u00a0 But the words themselves confounded. What could that mean? I thought maybe it was meant to be taken straight, admitting that the owner went to college to do this,<\/em> back in the day when Home Economics still counted as a respectable major. Or it could be taken straight another way, meaning that she went to college to marry a man of sufficient means to outfit her with a standard of living that included a spoonrest.\u00a0\u00a0 Or maybe some sarcasm might lurk, \u201cfor this (this!) I went to college\u201d\u2014I went to college<\/em> and all I have to show for it is this superfluous trinket of my housewifery.<\/p>\n Probably that last was the intended meaning, and probably the spoonrest was a gag gift.\u00a0 Or a wedding present.\u00a0 But who knows.\u00a0 With transformations underway in both work patterns and fatherhood in America, that spoonrest can serve notice that education is not best evaluated by how it got \u201cused.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Commencement-address season is upon us, bringing glad tidings about the power of grads\u2014especially young women\u2013to change the world. We live in a time of great global advocacy for girls\u2019 education, purported to be a game-changer on many grounds. The education of young women is praised for lowering birthrates, for improving health, for advancing peace (girls\u2019 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2945,2944,2943],"class_list":["post-18237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-girls-educaiton","tag-lean-in","tag-liberal-arts-educaiton"],"yoast_head":"\n