Some of the best advice my late father gave to me was when I was trying to teach my daughter how to read. I was frustrated because she wasn’t picking it up very quickly. She was in kindergarten at the time, and being the product of public school education, I was trying to homeschool with a public school mentality that my daughter had to fit into a predefined box. It was wrecking both of us.
My dad said to me: “Let her learn at her own pace. She will figure it out in time. I didn’t learn to read until second grade.” His words struck me deeply because my father was the most brilliant and well-read man I have ever known. My entire childhood, I can remember him sitting in his rocking chair after work with a large stack of books next to him. He mainly read philosophy, theology, current affairs, and politics. He was a philosophy major in college before going to law school.
My father, who was an avid reader, didn’t learn at the pace being forced on everyone else. In fact, the more someone is pushed to learn at a pace that is unnatural for them, the harder it is for them to learn. I needed to allow her gifts to unfold in time while understanding that she is a unique individual made by God who will not fit in the box exactly the way the world wants her to. Shortly after I let up on the reins, she became an avid reader and writer.
I was reminded of this conversation with my father recently when my daughter came to me sobbing because she did not understand chemistry. It brought up memories from my own studies in high school when I was completely miserable because I didn’t understand math beyond middle school algebra. I shed many tears. I simply couldn’t grasp it, and my math teachers seemed incapable of helping me. I hated high school my first three years because of math classes, and my grades suffered because of it.
My senior year, I achieved a perfect GPA because I no longer had to trudge through a subject my particular mind could not comprehend and was free to seek out the gifts and areas of study where I excelled. I was no longer bound by the box that was holding back someone like me who prefers the humanities.
As a homeschooling mom, I have the privilege and option of discerning if a class is doing more harm than good for my daughter. When I looked at her chemistry book, I saw immediately that I would be of no help to her. I knew better in high school than to take chemistry. It wasn’t right of me to expect something from her that I am also incapable of doing, so I dropped the class for her.
Each one of us has unique gifts and talents given to us by God. All of us have different strengths and weaknesses. I have to wonder after my own high school experience and my daughter’s struggles if many young people are miserable in school because we do not see them as unique individuals with gifts that need to be fostered, grown, and encouraged based on their particular strengths or if we have fallen for the lie that everyone needs to be in a predefined box. We force everyone to learn at the same pace or in the same way.
Education is a gift that should be enjoyed. It should help form us into virtuous individuals who then go out to lead the world to Christ through the gifts we have been given. Many European countries set high school graduation at sixteen years of age and then send people on to the trades or focused studies. We send students through classes in high school until eighteen and then make them take those same classes again for the first two years of college. We keep people trapped in a system where all they want to do is move on to the subject areas they plan to devote their lives to. We are stuck in a polarized view of right brain versus left brain with no middle ground.
I remember that, by high school, I wanted to study the subjects that interested me, which was a wide variety of classes such as literature, history, current affairs, debate, band, and psychology. I came alive in those classes because that was where my particular gifts and intellect were given room to succeed. Like my daughter’s chemistry experience, I sobbed my way through three years of math I couldn’t grasp.
To my dad’s point, by the time I went to finish my bachelor’s degree in my mid-twenties after the military, I had matured enough to at least learn algebra and statistics. I never thought it was possible. I had two amazing math professors who were very gifted at teaching. They were patient and took the time to explain the concepts. It finally clicked for me. I understood math was a language. I could finally understand it because I had trained and worked as a Russian linguist. I finally saw the patterns that I wasn’t intellectually mature enough to understand in high school.
I stayed within the math level that I could grasp and recognized my limitations. Both algebra and statistics served a practical purpose for me at that point in my life as a psychology major, and I knew not to go beyond that point. I needed time to mature, but also to accept my unique gifts and to learn not to place myself in a box where I had convinced myself that I wasn’t very smart because STEM didn’t come naturally to me. My intelligence does not fall into a cookie-cutter pattern dictated by education majors on school district boards who were also a product of the same system.
It is for this very reason that I abandoned the lie of my generation that all people must go to college. This was the driving education myth of the ’80s and ’90s. It is why college tuition has become immorally high and out of reach for many people.
Everyone thought they had to go to college, so the schools became inundated with students. They became behemoths with massive sports programs and other superfluous offerings that have made the cost so astronomical that many of my former CCM college students will never be able to own a home because their bachelor’s degree left them $100,000–$150,000 in debt. That’s what I paid for my first home. They earned a degree that will never help them make enough money to pay their loans and a mortgage payment together.
There is a point where the system becomes harmful and when it becomes clear that the call for everyone to go to college is wrong. Many people suffered through college because they thought they had to go because everyone told them so. A bachelor’s, or even a master’s degree, no longer guarantees a higher income. In fact, many young people are discovering that the debt they racked up was pointless because they could have gotten a job in the trades that pays more, and they’d be debt-free.
As Catholics, we are called to foster and encourage the unique gifts of each person for the building up of the Mystical Body and society. The culture tells us that everyone should be the same, which has made a mess of things and left many young people (and older people) hating school because they couldn’t fit the mold.
I remember the first time I watched my husband stand next to our garage and completely build something in his mind while I listened to him work through it. He has a master’s degree like me, but his degree is in a technical field. Standing next to him, I realized this was a type of intelligence that I hadn’t seen up close before. It was remarkable to me. I cannot think that way at all. Most of his brothers, many of whom work in the trades, are the same way. This is when the myth that everyone needs to go to college died in my mind. Men like this built the great cathedrals of Europe.
This myth that was hammered into my generation is not only causing great frustration and tears for many young people but also hampering religious and priestly vocations. The reason is that forcing young people to go to college for degrees they do not need shackles them with debt they cannot pay off for decades, so their religious or priestly vocation dies at the hands of usury (interest rates are a topic for another day) and a lack of discernment on all sides.
If a young person has a call to the priesthood or religious life, then the path of their education should be a part of their discernment and eventual formation. For a nursing order, it makes sense that a nursing degree be attained. For a young man who will spend eight to ten years in seminary, it makes no sense for him to get a useless degree before he enters seminary. The education he needs to be a priest will be provided in seminary.
I have told young men who are seriously interested in the priesthood to stop racking up debt as soon as they are sure they want to pursue it, or they will delay or destroy the chances of going unless they can find a scholarship or donor to help them. This is not a popular opinion in some circles, but why would we tell someone to continue amassing debt that will hamper their vocation? This is spiritually harmful, unjust, and uncharitable. It is to put the things of this world before Christ.
The same is true in religious life for orders that don’t have a required skill set (medical/education) that needs a degree. Catholic education for a bachelor’s degree can cost more than $200,000. While there are aid options available, it still leaves many young people enslaved to debt that keeps them from answering a vocational call from God or to provide a home for their family in the future. A college degree is not a prerequisite for answering a religious calling. Some of the greatest saints were uneducated.
We need to stop letting the culture dictate how we operate or understand the world. Rather than let the culture define the very narrow box for us, we should be considering how best to lead young people to the path they are called to without debt. Our starting place should be: How do we help people best answer God’s call, not the world’s?
The narrow box of education and the colossal debt that comes with it are all a part of the same problem. We have stopped discerning the gifts of each individual to help them flourish in the vocation and path they are called to by God. We’ve convinced entire generations that they are idiots because they can’t do chemistry or trigonometry. We are forcing people into the box rather than listening to the wisdom of my dad who told me to wait and allow the gifts to unfold in time. It’s time to start helping people discern and live the gifts they have been given. Let’s throw away the box.
Photo by RUT MIIT on Unsplash
