Modern Education Is Failing Young Women

Patricia Patnode

Our education should not only teach us civil facts that are necessary to know in order to live in society, but it should help us understand personal relationships and our place in the world. This is an essential duty of both private and public school educators.

There’s a conservative tendency to withdraw from public institutions when they are failing us. This, to an extent, is a good market solution to problematic schools. Bari Weiss’ University of Austin venture is an example. I delayed going to graduate school because I didn’t want to deal with the progressive political bias from professors anymore. When I finally applied, I only pursued two programs that I thought would be less politically charged. Now, I’m not certain this was the best course of action. 

General education standards can help the state spot and correct bad parenting. Some parents are not very good and school is an important way that state child protective services can be alerted to abuse. Still, terrible or even neglectful parents can produce well-adjusted children. But they are the exception, not the rule.

School also allows children with bad parents to chart a path to stability, productivity, and purpose. It is unclear if our public education system can cultivate real meaning, but it's a start.

In 1932, Edith Stein wrote, “The subjects which trained the emotions constituted the principal aim of the education of young women. Such formation corresponded to feminine nature. But there was a neglect of the indispensable complement, the practical training and activation of the intellect. This kind of education produced a type of woman who lives on illusion, a woman who either denies realistic duties or surrenders herself helplessly to fluctuating sentiments and moods, who consistently seeks excitement..”

That complaint applies today. According to Stein, we have been failing women in the classroom for several hundred years. 

I attended public school for K-12 then a private Catholic college. Now, I am enrolled at a secular state school for my graduate degree. Not until this year, at my ripe age of 25, did I reject my previously held belief that, “Higher education is mostly useless and people should stop going.”

Except for the courses required for my philosophy major, I found most of my education pretty arbitrary, mostly due to the pervasiveness of Diversity Equity and Inclusion language. Also, the coddling of college students by American universities is indeed strange. We are treated like teenagers with no self-control, governed by tyrannical student union groups. Yet, we are responsible for paying back large sums of money and finding a real job at the end of four years of alcohol and drug abuse.

Rather than feeling an intense devotion to books and studying, my peers were more interested in getting by in classes they didn't care about. The learning material wasn’t helpful for real life. 

Failures of education for women

Women are on average doing better than boys in school, at all levels, across all subjects. Richard Reeves, who I recently interviewed, wrote an entire book about how American society is currently leaving young men behind. An increasing number of scholars and education activists are looking for solutions on how to reach the boys that are falling behind in school. 

Experts are overlooking how we are failing young women too— but not in a way that manifests in test scores. We are failing to educate them on what it means to be a woman and how to develop their uniquely feminine virtues. 

In kindergarten through high school 

In the K-12 system, secular and private schools are unable to describe what is unique about women, aside from childbirth. Public, otherwise known as secular, schools are limited in their ability to teach about the natural realities of personhood outside of biological differences. And they even struggle to articulate those.

How would a teacher who is discouraged from talking about God or pointing out that only women can give birth, answer the question, “What’s good about being a woman?” It’s impossible to answer. The safest thing to do would be to refer the student to ask a woman in their personal life. But what if there is no one to give a sufficient, or positive answer? The government facilitates much of education in the country and yet, you'd be hard pressed to find an educator equipped to answer essential questions about womanhood. 

The solution is not to pull your children out of public schools and send them to religious schools, however. They may not be working either, considering how many attendees abandon their faith after leaving.

There is a greater movement away from objective truth to subjective truth, often expressed as “my truth” or “lived experience.” A college freshman-level class on logic or a basic study of Aristotle— formerly the bedrock of Western education—could easily remedy this confusion. But we're moving further away from a shared understanding of reality.

The focus on equality of representation

Stein wrote that “the choice of profession will usually resolve itself.” 

Women in STEM and law have an advantage in getting jobs because they are noticeably underrepresented. Consider that women make up 20 percent of engineering graduates, but about 40 percent of women who earn engineering degrees either quit or never enter the field. Only 22 percent of women hold jobs at big law firms, even though they outnumber men in law school. Lots of people switch jobs— but such a major life decision should be seriously contemplated before a person takes out loans and wastes time on an advanced degree. 

Ignorance of tradeoffs

A narrow focus on career suppresses the consideration of important life decisions, like having children and getting married. Having children comes with realistic duties and constraints, like finding a suitable partner, conceiving, and child-rearing itself.

Teaching selfishness

The shallow focus on the self, whether it is vague personal fulfillment or money focused career development. The situational excitement that comes from a career, traveling, or a variety of other activities found under the DINC (double income no children) TikTok tag, delays the despair felt from being alone. However, it always manifests later, when it is more difficult to solve.

Feeling alone is inevitable. My grandmother, who has a loving family, feels alone constantly because most of her friends and family, except for her children, are dead. With shrinking family sizes, the loneliness pandemic will only worsen. 

Marriage rates are also declining. A new study published in Global Epidemiology found that marriage reduced mortality by a third for women, including for women who later sought a divorce.

Sexualization as an end

Sex is treated as a given activity for young people today. College is an assumed sexual playground. Sex is a right of passage, an experience to be gossiped about with friends. It is no longer solely about family formation.

There is also a counterintuitive under-sexualization of sex that is directly connected to porn. Porn removes the requirement of another person for the sexual experience.

Simple truths

Although men and women each possess masculine and feminine traits, women are uniquely feminine and men are uniquely masculine.

Women, if given a sufficient education, are uniquely able to empathize and relate to others. Due to their nurturing instinct, women are often inclined to seek jobs in caretaking fields like social work, nursing and teaching. 

All women are born feminine, just as babies are born capable of speech. Femininity, like any language, must be taught and developed by a community. 

The crisis of meaning that young women face is solvable through an understanding of their nature and relationship with God.

Education is essential for happiness

Women’s education is absolutely necessary for motherhood and marriage. The idea that women are not worth educating because they are only needed for breeding and cleaning has been hard to shake. 

Regularly in conversations with women my age about graduate school, someone usually says, “Well do you actually want to work when you have children?” 

We need to do better by our daughters and recommit to feminine education. 

Advocating for single sex education sessions in co-ed schools is a start, as is getting involved in religious education at your house of worship. More importantly, we need to be the example to young women that we want to see. 

We must challenge people when they give a vague observation about femininity. A simple, “what do you mean?” Or “what is that?” When someone talks about the divine feminine, feminine energy or feminine power. What does any of that actually mean without a spiritual power? Without acknowledging that women and men are different by design?

Women require a different education than men because women have a different nature than men. Rational demands for gender specific education should be heard by school boards and given special attention at private schools that have the freedom to tailor their education. 

Let’s stop tolerating nonsense.

Patricia Patnode is a columnist at The Conservateur and a Junior Fellow at the Independent Women's Forum. She can be found on Twitter @IdealPatricia.