Thoughts On College, Part One

My parents have a very simple request of me, in exchange for allowing me to live under their roof until I am married. I have to be "moving forward." Unfortunately, my parents and I have a very different idea of what moving forward is.

All I want to do in this world is be a wife and mother. I feel God calling me to such a life every day. I've got a bit of a deficiency in a lot of the arts of homemaking. I can clean, I can sew passably, and I can follow recipes, but outside of that I don't know much. Budgeting, diaper changing, menu planning, and a number of important aspects of keeping a home are things I've never learned.

In my mind, if my chosen life path is to be a wife and mother, then moving forward toward that goal would be learning to do these things proficiently. I also wish to spend my time becoming a more mature Christian by attending church functions, helping the needy, serving my parents, and assisting a family of eight I know any way I can in exchange for knitting lessons and experience with infants.

My mother doesn’t think that being a homeschooling mother is an illegitimate occupation. It’s just not for her baby girl. In the same way many parents say, “I don’t mind *insert belief or lifestyle here* people, as long as my child isn’t one,” my mother doesn’t mind stay-at-home mothers. Just as long as I don’t aspire to become one.

Enter the reasons and arguments that I should spend my unmarried years preparing for a “worst case scenario” by attending college and developing a résumé.

Firstly, my parents are more than a little disconcerted by the fact that I’m really not interested in spending large amounts of time with my peers. I have a few good friends that I see from time to time, and I would not be adverse to making more Godly friendships or finding a homemaking mentor, but I really do prefer to spend time with my family. My parents are my favorite people in the world, and we share so many interests that it seems silly to spend time with people I can learn little from in comparison.

By and large, I don’t care for interaction with my peers. There are many exceptions, yes, but as for the people I would most likely meet in college? Boys, parties, and careerism are not my primary interests. By that same token, I would prefer not to be meeting a husband who belonged to the perpetually adolescent environment of a college. I want a man of vision, unafraid of entrepreneurship, deeply rooted in his ancestry, who will want to blaze a trail down a forgotten path of family life.

Furthermore, my mother thinks that “children need to go to school.” It escapes her, having grown up in a world where government schools are the norm, that for several hundred years of American colonial and national history, children didn’t go to school. They were educated at home by their parents, and brought up in the family business. America was not illiterate before the dawn of public schools; on the contrary, books like the New England Primer and the Blue-Backed Speller illustrate that the average twelve year old in the 1700s was far more educated than most high school graduates today.

That is not to say that public school is an entirely negative thing. But it started out as an option for parents who didn’t have time or means to teach their own, not a compulsory requirement for life in modern society. If I have the time and the means to educate my children, why on earth should I not do so?

I don’t think I need an education degree to teach my children about the world, about the Lord, and about the universe. I think that all I need is the wise counsel of older experts who have tried and true methods and the personal willingness to sacrifice my time and energy for their benefit.

It’s true that children need time to interact with others and learn social skills, but I personally think that adequate interaction can be provided by attending church functions and meeting up with other families at parks. Not to mention, if I have multiple children of different ages, my children will experience first-hand how to interact, cooperate, and respect their peers.