Men, Women, & K-12 Education

Philip There’s the kindling. We’ll see if the fire comes.

Sean I think what you just said is that we need to say how women do it wrong.

Philip Correct. And then —

Sean Exactly what I said. Exactly.

Philip All right, welcome to All Are Yours, episode thirty-two. Three-two.

Sean Six, seven, three, two.

Philip Close enough. So, Sean forgot to consult with his wardrobe coordinator. Today his background is his office in the church building, with all the books. And if you’re watching on video, you’ll see that it looks like he is part of the bookcase, with the shirt he’s wearing.

Sean I’m embarrassed by this, but I did actually think about it ahead of time.

Philip Okay. Wow. Yeah, that is a little embarrassing.

Sean Yeah — “I’m not sure if this is the shirt I should wear in front of all the books.” And also, maybe this is the part that gives me my man card back: I went ahead and did it.

Philip That’s right. You had a thought, and then you put that aside.

Sean Right.

Philip There you go.

Sean I don’t want anybody — there are various warnings at some movies or TV shows, I can’t remember the specific language at this point, something about “there’s going to be flashing lights, so people who are sensitive to photo-whatever should not watch this.” Maybe they should just listen to us.

Philip There you go. I mean, if your face already wasn’t a face for radio —

Sean A face for text.

Philip A face for text, even more so.

Sean So I guess we could encourage our watchers, if they have to look at my side — you know, they could just focus on your side.

Philip It’s easier.

Sean Or they can try to narrow in on just the Santa beard.

Philip There you go.

Sean I was out of town this past weekend. I got at least one or two comments about my likeness to David Letterman again.

Philip Oh, okay.

Sean And I think that is fine. I don’t mind that — except that I think David Letterman is a good twenty years older than I am.

Philip Well, I did have a guy tell me, “Hey, I saw you on that podcast with that old guy.”

Sean Yep. I feel it.

Philip I look it.

Sean I feel it. But I’m bringing the energy to the verbal parts.

Philip Bring it. There you go. So, you mentioned “man card,” and I’ll use it as a segue leading into our topic for today — to not waste any more time.

Sean Yeah, we only wasted two and a half minutes.

Philip That’s right. We don’t have time for that.

So: specifically man cards, men, masculinity, the male presence at school. Maybe focusing primarily on K through twelve education — grade school, secondary school, that area. We could touch on higher education if we get there, but primarily on educating your children, and where are the men in that.

A few points to set the context. It was — was it —

Sean You’re building the kindling.

Philip Correct.

Sean So that we can light it on fire. That’s the context you’re talking about.

Philip That’s right. That’s exactly what’s going on.

So, was it two years ago, or was it a year ago, at the fundraising feast, when you gave the talk about the trifecta?

Sean Yeah. It was fourteen months ago.

Philip Okay.

Sean Two of our school’s fundraising feasts ago.

Philip Yep. And you called it the cultural trifecta?

Sean Yeah. We were talking about our school’s mission statement. Evangel Classical School’s mission statement ends with “to carry and advance Christ-honoring culture.” So what does that culture, or enculturation, include or involve? What does that look like?

For a school — because we’re not a family, we’re not a church, we’re not a business per se, we are an educational institution — when we’re talking about carrying and advancing Christ-honoring culture in an educational or school context, what are we particularly thinking about? And for a school, in what we’re already doing, what are the enculturation flavors or ingredients that potentially distinguish us, make us different from most of the other even classical Christian schools that we know about in our area?

Not to disparage them — we’re not necessarily trying to criticize anybody. We’re talking about things that we think are distinct about our community, our school, our culture, faculty, students, and parents, administration, all of that included together. And trying to think about what distinguishes us from a bunch of other schools that would say they love Jesus, that would say they are trying to honor Christ as Lord in their own reading and writing and arithmetic as well.

Obviously public schools aren’t caring about Jesus as Lord; they wouldn’t care about Christ-honoring culture. So: Christian schools, classical Christian schools that claim “we’re doing this for Jesus” — what is it that we have, or that we’re doing? The chemicals in the water, as our headmaster likes to say. What are the intentional chemicals that we’re throwing into the enculturation water that we think make a difference for our students and, again, that define the institution?

Philip Yeah. And so, the ECS enculturation trifecta. I’ll get to number one, but number two that you had pointed out was tactical laughter. Even the school motto being Risus Est Bellum — laughter is war — where a certain kind of jovial approach acknowledges that we are in a battle and we ought to fight, and we use laughter as a strategy, as a weapon, in that battle. So ECS has that as an enculturation ingredient, a foundational element: tactical laughter.

Sean It’s at least aspirational, if not a kind of mental, spiritual discipline, to think about laughing as a weapon instead of laughing at the end of a project. You get a huge assignment, or you fail an assignment — how do you respond? What is the right way to do something?

Lots of Christians are still waiting for some kind of joy, or the ability to laugh, until the end of something, and in particular when the end has gone well. So, can a kind of humility, a kind of submission before God and his sovereignty — God knows how bad everything on earth is. In Psalm 2, he sits in the heavens, he sees all the rebels, and his response is to laugh. That is a response, but it’s a response because he knows what he’s doing.

So part of our culture should be that we don’t just wait until it’s all over before we try to enjoy what we’re doing. Even if we don’t do it as well as we had wanted to — when was the last time we did a project and got it finished and it went exactly like we had thought in our minds and succeeded in all the ways we also desired? Rare. So when can you enjoy that?

Part of what we’re trying to do is at least laugh. Work hard, sacrifice — but laugh. That kind of attitude of, like you said, the jovial warrior in the battle.

Philip Right. I think there’s a way to fight for joy, and that’s good, we should do that. But that misses the point of fighting with joy, where you’re using joy as the weapon, to be able to run into battle with that sort of attitude. So you’re not running into battle parched and dry and weary, looking for joy — you’re running in thick and rich and trained up. You’re well fed. And you’re laughing as you’re running in.

Sean And in a school context, we’re not trying to make scoffers, laughers who don’t take anything seriously or appropriately, who just turn everything into a joke. That’s not the kind of laughing we’re referring to. But in a school situation there is a lot of scoffing, cackling laughter in certain contexts. And then there’s a bunch of people who think that it’s all too precious and too important.

We are trying to avoid both of those things: dumb, foolish laughter, but also no enjoyment of the work or the process at all.

Philip Yeah. Even you, sitting with that background of books wearing that shirt — there’s some seriousness there, but also you’re not taking yourself too seriously.

Sean So basically what you’re saying is I’ve embodied tactical laughter right now.

Philip Exactly right.

The third one — again, I’ll get to number one, but the second one was tactical laughter — the third one is radical company. “Radical”: we think we know what that means, in the sense of extreme, kind of out there. But the definition of radical is actually connected with being rooted. So somebody who is radical as an extremist means he is trying to be very consistent with those roots, very consistent with where he’s sprouting out of.

And company — we’ve talked about this here before, I think, but definitely at our church a lot — the word “company” means bread shares. The people you’re sharing bread with. So, fellowship. And that’s connected with, or maybe where it was pointed out, That Hideous Strength — the company at St. Anne’s referred to themselves that way. So part of that enculturation ingredient, that foundation, is having that sort of radical company. Rooted fellowship, maybe, is a simpler way to say it.

Sean Which is only possible because of the gospel. Even our school’s name, Evangel, is just the fancy way of saying “good news,” or gospel. So if Christ is Lord, what does he want with us? He wants us to know him and love him, delight in him, have fellowship with him.

That’s what sin messed up with Adam and Eve. As soon as they sinned is when they ran from fellowship with God. So it took his Son, ultimately, as the sacrifice to reconcile, to bring forgiveness and reconciliation unto fellowship, and that love between persons.

So on one hand — should a school be concerned with fellowship, or with getting the facts across? Obviously there are facts that need to be learned, but real education should be transformation, even formation, not just a data transfer of information. And we think that as Christians we ought to be learning how to get along with each other. Turns out when you spend time with a bunch of other people all day long — and we have school four days a week — you actually run into a lot of potential conflict and opportunities to sin.

That is a reason some people refuse to send their kids to a school: they don’t want to have to deal with that. They don’t want to deal with all the other sinners. Though we think that if that’s handled the right way, you can actually learn a lot about how to be a Christian in community, practicing that with your class at school or with other classes around. So that’s actually a feature, not a bug — that we have to learn how to love and humble ourselves.

And even confess our sins when it’s we who sin, or forgive other people. That’s just as hard sometimes as confessing when we’ve sinned: actually granting forgiveness to the person who slandered us, or who cheated off of us, or who kicked us in the face with the soccer ball, or whatever it is — to actually forgive them for the sake of wanting that company. That is a radical thing.

And again, aspirational, if not actually a description of a lot of what we’re trying to do, at least at ECS.

Philip Yeah. And I think the emphasis that “radical” brings is that, one, it’s not just shared interests. It’s not just a group of people who have some kind of shared hobby, or who like spending time together. It’s principled. There’s a foundation that is strong as concrete for why we’re doing what we’re doing, why we’re building in this way.

And it’s also not simply shared grievances. It’s not that fellowship of grievances that Doug Wilson has talked about before, where it’s just a group of people sending our kids to the school because we hate what’s going on somewhere else. We’re doing this because we love something more. We want something more. So it’s not just that we’re in a community of people who are all scared of something or hate something. There’s a deeper principle here, more so than that.

Sean Absolutely. That community, that company, is something we want to actually continue beyond graduation day.

Philip Right.

Sean So if we’re going to carry and advance Christ-honoring culture, we’re going to have to do that together. Which again — whatever episode that was where we talked about private school compared to the benefits of homeschooling. Homeschooling has a lot of benefits, and there’s also a temptation that comes along with homeschooling: to forget when and why to build into something bigger than the family.

This is not the same thing as saying that a five-year-old should go be the missionary to the public school kindergarten class. But there are at some point the overlapping spheres — not just family and church, but even our business relationships. So we’re trying to help students see that the fellowship is a valuable piece, even if there are then boundaries and different kinds of relationships for different things.

Radical company is what God wants with us, and it seems to be what he calls a blessing: when brothers dwell together in unity, Psalm 133, like oil that runs down a beard onto your weird-colored shirt or whatever. It’s exactly what you need. And tactical laughter is not disconnected from radical company.

Philip Right.

Sean Even when you’re dealing with your nemesis in class, or a teacher you’re having a hard time with — that is worth also trying to work out and figure out. Again, not asking a seven-year-old to confront their first grade teacher or second grade teacher or whatever it is. But parents work on that in fellowship with teachers; a lot of our teachers are parents themselves anyway. This is a lot of good work while we’re learning our Latin declensions, or conjugations, or whatever.

Philip Yeah. And the emphasis that “company” brings, more so than just the word “fellowship,” is again that idea of bread shares. The culture that emphasizes feasting, that emphasizes food and drink. The kind of community that is built around the table is a little bit different than simply getting together to work, or getting together to do some kind of hobby or activity. The central point there is that we get together around a table and we’re able to eat together. There’s a different kind of community that is richer and more full of flavor happening around that. So the word “company” is trying to emphasize some of that as well.

Sean Sure. Which communion should be — however often a church celebrates communion; our church does it on a weekly basis. I think there’s benefit there, even though at times people wonder if you can start to take it for granted if it becomes too common. That has not, by God’s grace, happened to us yet, and praise the Lord for that. But yeah, we learn how to share our life together in Christ, even with bread and wine.

Philip Right, exactly.

Sean That ultimate company.

Philip Yeah. So: number two, tactical laughter. Number three, radical company. And both of those things, in part, I do think are connected to — and maybe even rooted in, or sourced from — the first one: masculine nerve. The kind of culture that ECS is building and developing has that at its foundation, a kind of masculine nerve.

Sean Yeah, is that —

Philip Right, exactly right. And this is all still part of the kindling. So we’re twenty minutes in, and this is all just the kindling for the episode. We haven’t yet lit it.

Sean That was at least little sticks, though. Not just paper straws.

Philip Exactly right. It’ll be a big fire.

Sean Not wasting anybody’s time with that kindling.

Philip That’s right. So, masculine nerve has to do with the sort of approach — maybe at the level of principle, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s not simply hypothetical or abstract, but very practical and literal. We do try to emphasize having men on staff, having a manly presence at the school, both with the school board and with the headmaster and with a good percentage of the teachers, and then that setting the course and the flavor and the tone of how the school is operating, where it’s going, what it’s doing. So: having a masculine nerve there for the school.

Sean Yeah.

Philip So that’s the kindling. I’m going to let you respond in a little bit.

Sean No, keep going. We’ll throw some gas on, whatever.

Philip There you go. Or maybe I’ll dig some trenches around the fire and pour some water on it.

So, at ECS it’s been intentional, and by God’s grace we’ve been able to have a lot of masculine presence involved in educating our kids. A lot of fathers — even fathers who are not involved in the school in any way.

Sean Other than your kids going there, yeah.

Philip Right. I mean on staff in any way.

Sean Yeah.

Philip But a lot of fathers are very interested and engaged in their children’s education, and so that is reinforced in that culture as well. That masculine nerve, I think, is within the school, but it’s also surrounding the school, in the community that it attracts.

And then I had a conversation recently with a different guy who was sending his kids to a different school, not connected to Marysville. One of the things he had concern with — I don’t know if “lamenting” is too strong a word — is that ninety-five percent of the staff at the school his kids were going to, including the headmaster, are women. And he was having some trouble with how the culture of the school was clashing with the way he was trying to raise his boys. What kind of approach he had, and what kind of approach they had, how they thought even about things like test scores, things like a certain kind of rigor that kept misunderstanding what a six-year-old or seven-year-old boy’s frame would be. It led this father to pull his kids out of that school and go to homeschool.

So I’ve heard of a lot of schools that don’t have much masculine presence. And with all of that, we wanted to talk a little bit about: where are the men? Why, how — why are women dominating education, kids’ education, K through twelve education? Whether it’s brick and mortar or homeschool, still a lot of the time the mom is the one taking initiative, driving that part of it. Where are the men? How do you get the men involved? Why aren’t they involved? And what can we do about that?

So there’s the kindling. We’ll see if the fire comes.

Sean I think what you just said is that we need to say how women do it wrong.

Philip Correct. And then —

Sean Exactly what I said. Exactly.

So — interesting, because all three of your kids are in school now. You are not even a college graduate.

Philip Correct.

Sean You dropped out. You quit college.

Philip There were too many women there.

Sean Probably, actually.

Philip Yeah.

Sean So why do you care about education, or your kids’ education in particular?

I am part of the school. I have taught something at the school every year of our existence. I am on the school board. When we went on our East Coast trip this past spring and we had to get academic ID cards so we could potentially get education discounts in some of the places we went, our administrative assistant printed me a card that said “Founder.” Not “teacher,” not “board member” — “Founder.” Which I laughed at, because I am one of the founder/board member kind of people. But “Founder” is just funny. Anyway, I apparently had some reasons why I thought the whole institution needed to be.

But from your perspective — why do you care at all, as a man who’s running a bunch of businesses? Because you do care a lot, as evidenced by sending your kids to a school where you have to pay tuition, where you could just homeschool them and pay for books and other resources. Obviously that’s not free either. Or send your kid to a public school.

Why all the hassle of driving your kids in, or having your wife drive your kids in, from North Marysville? Why all the time you spend, even though you’re not a board member at ECS? What’s your masculine motivation for giving a rip?

Philip Because God said train up your kids in the paideia of the Lord. That paideia, that Christian culture, the all-encompassing idea of Christian thought, Christian values, a Christ-honoring way of thinking — the approach to enculturating my kids is not something I’m allowed to abdicate. It’s not something I’m allowed to not think about. I ought to have a plan of attack for that from the day I find out I’m going to have a kid, that I’m going to be a dad — even before that.

The responsibility to enculturate your kids is given to the father in particular. It’s the father’s job to figure out how he’s going to do that, what he’s going to do with it. And whatever happens, however his kids are enculturated — because they will be enculturated one way or another, whatever environment you send them to, whether by the government, by the women in the government schools, or in your homeschool environment, or in a brick-and-mortar private school, and there’s a spectrum, a variety, even of brick-and-mortar private schools — the father is not allowed to simply send them and not think about it for thirteen years until the kid graduates. That is an active positioning, an active front, that the father ought always to be manning.

So enculturation is at the foundation of why we’re sending our kids to ECS and what we’re trying to do there. And intermixed in all of that — it’s part of the culture we’re after, so it’s not the only part, but a big part of it — is training our kids that thinking is important. Teaching them how to think.

When the Bible says to love the Lord with all your mind, our minds ought to be engaged in our love for the Lord. God created us as thinking beings. How we think about God, how we think about his creation, how we think about the life he has given us, the dominion taking he’s mandated us to perform — all of that requires a certain kind of thinking, and that thinking ought to be trained, ought to be taught, and ought to be valued. Enculturation is more than just thinking, but it’s not less than that. So learning how to think, learning to think properly, is part of the reason why we’re doing what we’re doing.

Sean Yeah, I think that’s good. And we’re talking in a context of Christian living — and even in that context, it doesn’t seem that most men care about that part. Whether that’s because they hated their own time in school, they don’t see it as having benefited them. In cases like mine — my generation, my old-man-beard generation, your young-man-beard generation — a lot of people’s experience was government school, which was less bad maybe when I graduated than it is today, but it still wasn’t any kind of exciting.

The guys who thought that school was exciting were nerds. The guys who thought school was exciting for reasons other than books and education didn’t need school — school was just a place where they found the girls, or they could play sports, or whatever. So I don’t remember thinking that thinkers were cool. There was no exaltation of learning, especially by men, that made me think, “I want to be more like that.” Not growing up.

But some of it can get all the way back to just: what does it mean to be a man? What is God’s blessing? If a man is being blessed by God, what does that look like? That would include clarity. That would include wisdom, being able to recognize patterns, being able to — like you said — think, to love God with their minds. That would be part of a man’s blessing, to grow in wisdom and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. But then, extended past himself, would be with a wife to have fruit, and fruit in children, and wanting to see those children shaped and sharpened and strengthened and equipped and ready.

I’ve looked it up a couple of different times, and I think this is the case: even the word “education” has “duc” in it, D-U-C. That’s a word in Latin that relates to a leader, like a feudal lord kind of person. So to educate someone is actually to prepare them to do some kind of leading, ruling, being responsible for other people. And that is in particular what men are assigned to do — they’re assigned to have the leadership roles, in general.

So education is not just “let’s learn the details.” It’s actually preparing a person to know how to be a blessing to those he’s responsible for. That’s part of being a man. And part of being a man, then, is knowing how to do that for others — and if God gives kids, to raise your kids to do that.

Your kids are not just accidental byproducts because you got to have sex that wasn’t sinful because you got married. I don’t know if I ever would have put it exactly like that when I was younger, but it seemed like the reason you got married as a dude was so that you could have sex and it’d be righteous, and the kid part — let alone the grandkid part — was just something you had to deal with. It wasn’t like kids were strategic. It wasn’t fruit that you would want, “Hey, by God’s grace, give us some blessing of fruit.” And men are the ones who are supposed to care about that first.

And in general, Christian men have been shown that thinking is nerdy, or that thinking is effeminate. A lot of pastors have shown that in their own ministry and in their own teaching. They have shown, in a church context, that guys who like to read are guys who aren’t good for anything else. I think that’s a struggle, because guys who like to study, who want to study languages, who want to read big theology books — we do actually need those people. But they need to know what they’re doing it for.

And in our context, where people even like the truth and they value reading the Bible, that’s kind of become the end, as opposed to: how is the Bible equipping me to be more blessed in my fruitfulness, which is when I’ve shut the book and gone to do the next thing? So churches and pastors are some of those who, for generations, have made thinking as Christians look girly.

And then you add to that the practical part of why men are uninvolved, which is that lots of them, by God’s grace, are giving thanks to God for the job he’s given them — the job that in most cases today takes a man outside of his house. We’re not talking about farmers, or some kind of household business or household property that’s paying the bills. So the man is thanking God for the good job he’s got that hopefully is paying his bills, and he is spending himself trying to build a good thing. Even as Kuyperians, we would say that’s right for him to do that. But then he comes home tired, or he comes home and he thinks that that part is less of his responsibility.

So practically speaking, even if he wants to spend a bunch of time helping raise and educate his kids, he’s busy with a bunch of his hours doing other things. Even if his motivations are correct, a lot of women then are the ones who get that assignment. Best case, they get that assignment delegated. In a lot of cases they take it over as what they think is their responsibility primarily.

Even in my own life, I had to repent — and I would put it that strong. I had to repent of the sin of basically thinking that my kids’ education was my wife’s responsibility. When we talked about the homeschool/private school comparison before, I think I said: my wife was homeschooled, I was public schooled, she said she wanted to homeschool, I said, “Great, you homeschool.” And then as our oldest started getting toward school age and my wife reasonably was saying, “No, Sean, you need to be involved in this,” I was like, “No, I agree — I am involved, by saying you can homeschool our kids.”

I was a teacher at another Christian school. I was by default on the board of that Christian school, because I was an elder at the church and that was one and the same. And still I had no vision of education being a strategic thing with my own kids, let alone with the other students I was teaching. I was teaching Bible classes, which I knew were good. But I didn’t have any kind of bigger Kuyperian ability to see how that all fit together.

Anyway, then when my wife was like, “Well, you need to know what we’re doing,” and basically encouraged me to read a book or two about classical Christian education — by God’s grace it was at a time when I was also realizing from God’s word that his definition of what he thought was good was way bigger than mine. And then it’s like, well, I want my kids to get better than that. So I had to get involved, and get involved as the man, and know what we are doing, because that is part of God’s blessing on me: to see that kind of fruitfulness.

I’ve been ranting now. There was not really a lot of fire in that, except maybe a little bit of fire to say that a lot of pastors have not made the life of the mind look manly, and a lot of wives, best case scenario, are trying to do what their husbands who are gone at work can’t do. But that has led to a lot of men, as fathers, not really being involved, or even knowing what they want for their kids to learn.

Philip Yeah. I do wonder how much of that — because even your point about education being connected with leadership, connected with being some sort of ruler. That was always the case historically, where the officers and the generals were the ones who were educated; the uneducated ones were the front line. Again, we’re not distinguishing between what is more important or less important — all are yours in that way.

But education being popularized is more current in our history. In the history of humanity, the fact that everybody can read and write is pretty new. And the degree to which different men have expectations or desires or ambitions for the life of the mind, for themselves and for their kids, I think will naturally vary — even according to their ambition for rule, their level of being a paterfamilias for their own household, or for their community, or maybe broader than that. Their ambition for the life of their own mind, and their ambition for the life of the mind of their kids, specifically their sons, will expand to fit that.

So a lot of guys in this current culture of education being popularized still have the same mindset guys three hundred years ago had: I need to get to work, I need to do this thing, I’m not as interested in these bigger structures of the mind. Which again, I don’t think is necessarily wrong. To take all of that into context, we have different measures of faith, different plate sizes; God gives different gifts to different people. We need both front line and officers, all of that together.

But in popularizing it, I wonder how much we diluted the expectations for what education is supposed to accomplish. Diluted the outcome of our education, to the point that — and whoever’s listening to this, hear what I’m saying — to the point that men are fine with other women teaching their kids simply how to read and write. That’s the standard. The standard of my education is that my kids know the basics of arithmetic, how to read and write, maybe some history; let them graduate and move on. So the expectation of the outcome of the education of my kids is diluted, and anybody could do that, so I’m just going to outsource it. I don’t need to pay much attention.

When education is “I’m training up a ruler, I’m training up a leader in the community, I’m training up this future senator or statesman or whatever it is” — the fathers two hundred years ago who were involved in their kids’ education, that was their end, that was their vision for their children, and they were training them in that way. So I wonder how much the popularizing of education has caused the dilution of the expectation dads have for their kids, such that their level of involvement isn’t as important.

Sean Sure. Because at some point — I forget the years, and obviously there have been cycles where this has been more important than at other times — but even based on how much work was available in certain industries or certain locations, you wanted the guys to stay in school. Because if they weren’t in school, they’d either be competing for jobs with their dads, or with other families’ dads who needed the paycheck for food on their table. Or, if there weren’t jobs and they weren’t in school, then the dudes would be out being destructive and causing trouble.

So mandatory, compulsory schooling through a certain age is not noble in all of its ways. It has intended to compensate for some other problems. And in the meantime, the people who have gotten most excited about it almost always seem to be the ladies.

Not that there aren’t men in some of the upper decision-making rooms of the federal Department of Education and whatever, but in general it’s a very ladylike concern for safety. It’s a ladylike concern for equality and fairness. It’s a ladylike concern for acceptance. The fathers two hundred years ago wanted more for their kids than for their kids to feel accepted.

Philip Right.

Sean I’m not even really trying to be derogatory, but how many guys — I’m thinking of one — really are thinking, when they send their kids to public school as the default, “I need them to teach my kid how to read”? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like it, based off how bad public testing is. Obviously it would depend case by case, dad by dad. But ladies are the ones who have more time to think about it, in general, because they haven’t been — at least in previous generations — off working their own full-time job.

Maybe today there’s more of that. There’s not as much of that in a Christian context. So in an environment like ours, where we value women as wives and mothers, homemakers, like Scripture even talks about — well then, in general, they’re not out working full-time jobs, which means a lot of the families we care about are single income. Which we think is great in so many ways. But that also means they don’t have lots of extra money to pay tuition, which means the amount of money a private school can pay teachers is less, which means a single-income dad has to actually wonder: is this the best way for me to provide for my family, to take a lesser paycheck?

A bunch of the layers and factors going into that just mean the budget is smaller in most Christian schools. So even if the community thinks you can be a man and use your mind and read papers and be in a classroom — even if you can convince the community that that is a fruitful and God-honoring thing — you still have a lack of dollars in many cases to be competitive as an institution for hiring qualified, excited dudes.

So lots of schools are dominated by the ladies who are getting a secondary paycheck. Their kids maybe have grown up enough that they’re in school, so the lady has a different kind of availability than her husband does. And she doesn’t need as much money, because her husband has a job.

So Christian private schools, due to all those factors — before we even get to bad motivations, ladies wanting to control other people, before we even get to anything that would actually be destructive like that — there are just practical reasons why so many places are not able to pay men in a way that they could buy their own house and pay tuition for their kids to go to the school, and then have that sort of masculine nerve. So there are problems all along, at every level of that discussion, starting with whether or not you can even be a man and read a book and have people think that’s manly, masculine.

Philip Yeah. And to whatever degree the life of the mind is beneath some men, or whatever — generally men live in their thoughts. Thinking is, generally speaking, the man’s world, where feeling is the woman’s world. So in institutions where thinking is to be taught, where thinking is to be at the level of the foundation, not having any men present there does change the way the next generation is taught to approach thinking. Feelings do start to dominate — even what you’re talking about: we’re concerned about our kids being accepted, or “how does this make you feel,” or whatnot.

That level of feeling is more the world of chaos. It’s more the world of storm. And the mind, the thought, is the world of order. So having that institution unraveling our culture into chaos, into the storm of feelings, is very much connected to women being predominant in those roles, leading and training up generations in how to approach all of it.

Sean Yeah. It’s my guess that it wasn’t a dude who decided that grading papers in red ink was too aggressive and therefore you needed to use purple or green.

Philip Oh, I didn’t know that was a thing.

Sean That has been a thing, yeah. You use red, it’s too mean.

Philip You use red because it’s mean.

Sean Right. I’m guessing that was not a warrior poet who decided we can’t grade in red anymore.

So it is a challenge. The nerve part of the masculine is also being able to deal with one’s emotions or feelings, having a vision for where you want to go, being able to make sacrifices and even to stand when other people are being critical. You can’t actually keep learning and sharpening your mind if you can’t learn how to take good criticism — and maybe some of the things that come along with that are bad criticism, but even learning how to handle that as well.

As Christians, if we want to live in the world and be slandered, which Jesus says is part of our blessing — if we want other people to say false things about us — then we need to learn how to handle that. Which would include people saying true things: that our idea was dumb, or our answer was wrong, or our grammar was mistaken and it got highlighted in red ink. Learning how to receive that and accept that is a thing we can grow in as we’re learning how to honor Christ as Lord, and men having nerve.

It’s not that women can’t have any nerve. It’s not that men don’t have feelings. But men in particular, who are ideally adventurous, going forward, doing hard things — men should do that first. And when they do that, women also seem to thrive. It’s not either/or.

Occasionally in these kinds of conversations people bring up that it would be ideal to have your K–12 schooling be an all-girls school or an all-boys school. I think people who make that case have some interesting arguments; I’m not saying there’s nothing valid about that whatsoever. But there are also some good things to learn where guys who are acting like idiots should not get respect from the girl classmates just because they’re a guy. The girl actually doesn’t owe the guy anything just because he’s a guy.

So we’ve had criticisms of that before, where girls aren’t honoring the men. Okay — well, if I was looking at that situation, I don’t think those men were acting honorably. But when the men are acting honorably, then that should be appropriate, for the sake of helping the ladies in the class or in the school. That works on the faculty level, and it works at the classroom level among students themselves.

So that kind of opportunity to learn how to have masculine nerve in a way that is uncomfortable for the ladies — as opposed to “we’ve made sure that the ladies must be comfortable and their feelings must be acknowledged in every way, and therefore the dudes need to dial it back.”

This is a thing you can’t necessarily make simple five rules for and then it’s solved. On a regular basis you actually have to figure out which is appropriate. But vision-wise, you do need men to know what manliness looks like, and then to protect or even put the young men in positions where they can aspire to that. Which includes knowing how to sit your butt in a chair when it’s time. It also includes knowing how to run your guts out when it’s time for that.

Philip Yeah, for sure.

Sean I do actually think it’s possible, in a lot of ways — not in every way — to have boys and girls in the same class and not have to treat them exactly the same way. There are some rules that are the same, and then there are some expectations that are not the same. Teachers need to understand that. Men need to understand that. And we have had a bunch of men who have been desiring to do that on our campus, at least.

It seems like there are a bunch of schools — again, based off those practical reasons — that don’t have a bunch of dads, guys, involved on the teaching and administrative level. And I definitely can see how that would cause a variety of problems, especially for dads who have students there, let alone if those students are boys, like the conversation you were saying you had. I do think it is an ongoing challenge, but one that masculine nerve is a key piece of what we’re trying to do about — even if that doesn’t always happen to the degree we aspire for it.

Philip Right. And I think even having the men who are more of the thinkers — pastors, teachers, administrators — be men whom boys would aspire to be like, as opposed to being weak or effeminate. Or maybe even not effeminate, but showing how the life of the mind produces results. A lot of boys and young men are attracted to results, attracted to things getting done. So: seeing other men who are living in the life of the mind, producing results, showing how the mind does actually do things.

This is why a lot of guys like watching what Elon Musk is doing. He is a mental kind of person. He’s living in his mind and he’s producing results with his mind.

Sean Actual rockets. A trillion dollars.

Philip Exactly right. So I think showing that, having more men in that role, making it look good, making it look manly — this is fitting for a man to be in this role — so that other boys and young men could see that and be drawn to it.

Sean Yep. So, trying to think about any kind of counsel to give to people in other places.

Philip Mm-hmm.

Sean Let alone making sure that people in our own church and school community are thanking God for what good he has given us, and continuing to protect that and pursue that. But especially thinking of people in other places: what should they do?

I do think men need to require — in the manly way — they need to require that more men get involved. Maybe that is a guy who takes a pay cut to join the school. He figures out how to make those sacrifices so that he can be a teacher. Maybe that is encouraging pastors — who we think should be men — to make sure they are making the appropriate sacrifices, whether to teach or to be part of a school board, to make sure they are not just handing it all over to women.

We do have a lot of women as part of our faculty, helping to lead different parts. It is better when they don’t have to feel the weight of all the responsibility. They are able to adorn the vision and the direction they’ve been given by someone else, in particular by the board or the headmaster.

But getting men involved — in a community or in a church where the guys actually know what they’re talking about when it comes to the education their kids are supposed to get. Read a book about education. Get together with some other guys and talk about what it would look like to have more of the masculine influence at that school. It’s not trying to fire the ladies, but it is trying to make sure that there are men who are there, who know what’s happening, who are involved, and who are helping set that direction and even the temperature of the school.

So maybe you can’t quit your job and become a teacher, but you could make sure you’re getting enough guys together who are able to pay enough for hiring a breadwinning sort of male teacher. What does it cost to buy a house and pay the bills in your area? How much can you pay a dude so that his wife doesn’t have to work, so that he can come teach at your school full time and give himself to that? And then, what do you encourage him toward? What kind of guy are you looking for?

Again, there’s nothing wrong with being a nerd. But like you said: what kind of guy do the students want to be like? Who would they like hanging out with? Who would they see and want to imitate in some way? Because a teacher is supposed to be imitable. They’re supposed to be a model, and you want the dudes who are teaching to be able to do that.

So there’s not just a three-step process to fix it, but by God’s grace it absolutely is able to be more flavored toward masculine nerve.

Philip Yeah, right.

Sean It’s absolutely possible.

Philip Right. And I think that if your church is closely connected to a school — whether the church helped found the school or in whatever way — it’d be good for the elder board of that church to consider giving money to the school, or subsidizing in some way, so that the school is able to afford to hire more men. I think there is an important enough, connected enough responsibility for the elders of the church in training up the next generation in that church, to make progress in faith for those young men, those boys, to have a place where they can be trained to be cultural builders and fighters. They need men involved in their education.

Sean If your church is girly, get your church to stop being girly. If your elders are girly, get your elders to stop being girly first. If your worship is girly — if guys are not interested in singing the songs — and obviously any given song in any church’s library of songs could be less good than others. But in general, if the tone is girly, then you’re not going to get a masculine school.

Philip There’s the fire from heaven right there.

Sean Yeah. Dudes have to be manly Christians, male image bearers, wherever they’re at. And the church is the place where most men are being discipled to do that. And the songs are a key part of what we’re told is our worship. So it’s not surprising that our schools are girly, because our worship singing is girly.

Philip Right.

Sean That’s not necessarily A to A1 on the outline, but it definitely can’t be disconnected either.

And women pastors and women teachers are not the same. I do think there’s a place to have women teachers. There’s no place to have women pastors that is good. But in our society these things are too close to each other, and men need to step up in all kinds of places.

It’s been a while since I’ve watched some of the videos and some of the statistics about how so many fields, so many spheres, are being more and more dominated by women — law, politics, business, not just education. But where it definitely should not be happening is in the church. Pastors especially have some responsibility there, to be exalting what is right and embodying masculine nerve. And then a school really should just be the outreach, the next piece, of helping the church or churches carry and advance Christ-honoring culture. The school is just an intellectual place getting that sort of training.

Philip Right. So if your church is lacking masculine nerve, that’s where you start. Maybe even more so than the school.

Sean Yeah. Find a church.

Philip Right.

Sean Or encourage the men at your church. Or if you are a man at your church —

Philip Mm-hmm.

Sean — be a man.

Philip Right. There you go. All right, well, there you have it. Men in education.

Sean Is your computer smoking? The fire got lit, you know.

Philip I put it out. All right. Out.