A reasonable question raised on one of my Catholic discussion lists:
"Why would a young woman spend three or four years to get a specialized degree that she won’t ever be using?" In other words, is education wasted on the at-home mother?
Really, for those of us whose vocation is marriage and motherhood, and who believe that we should concentrate on raising our own children—what good is university education at all?
After my first response (I HAVE A PH.D. IN ENGINEERING AND HOW DARE YOU SUGGEST I WASTED TWELVE YEARS GETTING IT) I had a chance to actually think about it for a while.
First, an analogy to another vocation. Let’s say a man got a university education as, say, a computer programmer or an electrical engineer, worked for a little while, then realized his vocation was to the priesthood, so entered the seminary and became a priest. Choose one:
(a) The young man’s first education was wasted and will be useless to him now.
(b) God will be able to use his university-gained knowledge in his priesthood:
- his practical skills in the administration of a parish
- his mental skills in his homiletics and decision-making
- his particular understanding of the human condition in his pastoral care.
Isn’t (b) more likely?
Now, let’s suppose there is a young Catholic woman who looks for a good value for the education dollar and who assembles as much financial aid as she can, so that debt is not a large concern. Then, suppose she desires to pursue an education that is either specialized and useful OR ordered towards the proper development of an educated mind (i.e. a CLASSICALLY liberal arts program).
Further, let us suppose that what she desires most is to marry and raise a family. That is, her vocation is foremost in her mind. (When you find this young woman, by the way, in about 15 years, please let me know so that I can arrange marriage to one of my sons.)
Question: Does a postsecondary education, either classically liberal or specialized, serve her vocation as a wife and mother? I say, absolutely, yes.
The classical-liberal education, of course, is a gimme. I can hardly think of anything that would prepare a woman better to educate her own children; and it would surely serve her in her interior life. Motherhood can be sanctifying even if it is nothing but self-sacrifice and submission to drudgery; but a rich interior life—contemplation, analysis, reading—builds sanctification and satisfaction at the same time. When a woman’s works as a wife and mother inspire her mind to reach surprising conclusions, and when her contemplation animates her works as a wife and mother, then she is a more integrated person. And, probably, a better wife and mother, and a better intellectual, than she would have been otherwise.
Specialized training is a more difficult question. Some kinds do feed the interior life, although the classically educated may find this difficult to imagine. A woman who had, say, medical training would be given lots of material to contemplate about the nature of the human person. Legal training sharpens one’s ability to analyze issues of ethics and morality as well as issues of politics and government.
I know from personal experience that training in the physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering has produced a mode of thought that gives me great enjoyment and encourages me to contemplate the physical Creation—and anyway, some have said that mathematics is the real language of God, at least when he’s speaking about the Stuff he has made (that is, everything other than Persons).
But besides enriching the interior life, specialized training has practical uses in the vocation of wife and mother. Most people, if they imagine this is possible at all, imagine that it means that a medical doctor can employ her skills in putting band-aids on boo-boos, or that a psychologist can analyze her family and so safeguard their mental health, or that a master carpenter can save money by building the deck herself instead of hiring someone else.
But this is to reduce marriage and motherhood from a vocation to a "job" that has a specific "skill set," one that can draw upon the skills one has developed in one’s previous "job." A vocation demands not the application of specific skills, but the donation of the whole person. So specialized training, like the classically liberal education, serves the vocation insofar as the part of the person it develops can turn over all that developed part of themselves to the service of the marriage and the family.
Specialization is not a bad thing. It is a kind of uniqueness. I turn my developed engineer-self over to my family and create one kind of family. A medical doctor turns her developed medical-doctor-self over to her family and creates a different kind of family.
There is one final dirty little secret that we women with specialized training have about the use of our training in the home. We often turn it over to our husbands so that they may better perform their "jobs" which serve our family by providing for our material needs. A highly trained woman in the home is a twenty-four-hour-a-day professional consultant. She brings to this "job" (and in this case I would call it a job) all her skills and mental powers.
If husband and wife are, as in my family, trained in the same or related fields, the benefits of this aspect of marriage are nakedly apparent. Mark and I talk about very specific engineering problems that arise in his job all the time.
But even if they are trained in different fields, I suspect that the wife’s education bears fruit. She can be his sounding board, his editor, his "different perspective" that helps him see some other side of the issue he might not have considered. This applies to almost any job the husband might have that itself requires a postsecondary education. In this way she serves the family by increasing the husband’s power to support the family outside the home—and does all this from within the home.
It is a dirty little secret because it is shocking to the world that an educated woman, today, would submit her education to the service of her husband’s career, letting him get all the so-called "credit" in the outside world. Yet it is a peculiarly rewarding kind of submission, and it has an actual economic payoff, if a difficult-to-measure one, for the family.
The thing to tell your daughters is not "Don’t bother with an education, because it doesn’t help you as a wife and mother." The thing to tell your daughters is, "While you are getting your education, always keep in mind that someday you will turn it over to God in the service of your vocation, whatever it may be."
I think God can use a priest’s whole education, whatever it is, in the service of the priesthood. And I would expect no less for the service of matrimony.
UPDATE: Welcome, readers of The Anchoress!
While you’re here, consider: What is a vocation anyway? Check out my recommendations to a friend looking for good books to read during her first pregnancy. Ask yourself what it means to bathe your feet in the blood of the wicked. Do the math about women in top-tier technical faculties. Or take my quiz and try to tell the difference between what is random and what is designed.
UPDATE AGAIN: More on challenging common assumptions about family roles.
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