What about women’s education?

Having considered the heretical proposition that most women should consider foregoing schooling with a heavy emphasis on credentials and a narrowly focused professional career, it’s worth turning to the question: in what, then, does women’s education exist?

Simply pointing out the obvious fact that after a full two generation of women’s lib has not inspired all women to entrench themselves in white collar careers is seen in some circles as tantamount to wife-beating. To suggest that women might want to be mothers who spend their days with their own offspring is seen as so retrograde and inhumane. The heresy that women’s education might be unique implies to many ears that girls will be de facto slaves kept cloistered in the house and used to bear children in grim, red-robed affairs a la Margaret Atwood’s fever dream.

Here is where a modicum of nuance goes a long way. Suggesting that some high-achieving women not shackle themselves to a highly structured career is not the same as denying them an education or rendering them unemployable.

A helpful distinction can be made between schooling and education. We can think of schooling as those career-focused hoops to jump through, a predictable scaffolding of competencies required for admission to certain tiers of the academy or the professional practice. Education is more broad and not reducible to hours in the classroom and multiple-choice test scored. Education is also not geared toward a specific occupation. At its most broad, education can be thought of as the ability to learn.

As this is not a world of neat binaries, of course the two bleed into one another. The path to medical school or professorship involves plenty of reading comprehension and problem solving which could be more closely aligned with education. Nonetheless, there is a general sense of whether the education serves the purpose of credentialling or liberating the mind.

Turning schools away from the narrowly focused schooling toward a more flexible and interesting focus on education may well be beneficial to all students, but such an adjustment could surely have significant benefits for women. The modern classroom, so sympathetic to the average girl’s strengths, can foster in young women a sense that she should continue in schooling. If classes up through college were a breeze, the young lady may be prompted to pursue graduate work, a law degree, or an academic internship without regard to the long-term purpose of such a venture.

Women, who can bear children, have unique considerations about the career they undertake. The education of girls has been varied throughout history, and even in society’s that discouraged women from certain professions, select women succeeded in breaking into the ranks. We can, therefore, lay aside the concern that women will be turned back by the patriarchy from lucrative careers in medicine, law, and business management. In a society that actively seeks women to take on impressive-sounding titles, discrimination is not the issue with which young women should be concerned.

Rather, the issue that becomes most pressing for many women is how to be present in the ordinary everyday life of small children. As Anne-Marie Slaughter observed in her notorious essay for The Atlantic entitled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” how easily mothers manage their work and their felt duty to their children depends to a large degree on the type of career they have chosen. Many a work-from-home author and tenured professor has suggested how mothers can best use their time, but they sometimes gloss over the hour-long commute and rigidity of many professions that they escape with their set up.

Slaughter realized this after a grueling stint working in the bureaucracy of Washington, D.C., a far-cry from the flexibility of previous positions. Slaughter wrote, “Both were demanding jobs, but I had the ability to set my own schedule most of the time. I could be with my kids when I needed to be, and still get the work done. I had to travel frequently, but I found I could make up for that with an extended period at home or a family vacation.” She continued, “I realized what should have perhaps been obvious: having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had.”

While this rules out many careers for many mothers, it does not eliminate career as a possibility. It certainly does not call into question the importance of education. Indeed, mothers who are involved in the raising of children should have a broad and expansive education on which to draw.

What, then, can mothers do? We could stop trying to solve mothers’ problems and let them decide what to do. Women with a good education—and the virtues necessary to live well—will likely be capable of meeting the demands of life and improving their situation when they are disadvantaged, as countless mothers have done before them.

Slaughter nonsensically suggests, “We may need to put a woman in the White House before we are able to change the conditions of the women working at Walmart. But when we do, we will stop talking about whether women can have it all. We will properly focus on how we can help all Americans have healthy, happy, productive lives, valuing the people they love as much as the success they seek.” The life a mother choosing to work the night shift stocking shelves at Walmart is most likely little affected by the happenings in the White House. There is no magic fairy dust some Madame President can sprinkle down to make life simpler and decisions less complex. As messy as it is, we already live in a world in which people seek to “have healthy, happy, productive lives.” We have a better chance of moving the needle on that front by guiding young women to embrace motherhood than daydreaming about finally figuring out how to “have it all.”