Alaina Mabaso's Blog

A Catholic website devoted to resurrecting proper family values recently made some waves with a blog post titled 6 Reasons (+2) to NOT Send Your Daughter to College.

Fix the Family is “the flagship program of a lay Catholic teaching Apostolate.” It was founded in 2010 by “2 Catholic family men.” It teaches that women should not go to college or hold jobs.

“We are NOT saying that sending a girl to college or women working is a sin,” Fix the Family co-founder Raylan Alleman says to introduce the topic. “But after looking at the issues we raise, we could challenge anyone to convince us that college for girls is not a near occasion of sin.”

Because a young woman is capable of making the decision to become a wife for the rest of her life, but is not capable of making the decision to further her education for four years, this Fix the Family piece speaks solely to parents. Therefore, I worried that this important article is not accessible to the people it affects most.

So we’ll be using the original article’s subtitles and an original quote to summarize each argument, and then I’ll translate the material to speak clearly to you, the modern Catholic girl.

Here we go!

1)      “She will attract the wrong types of men.”

“…lazy men who are looking for a mother-figure in a wife are very attracted to this responsible, organized, smart woman who has it all together along with a steady paying job with benefits. So if he wants to go to work he can, but if not he can always fall back on her income.”

Girls, here’s the bottom line: Smarts don’t attract smarts. If you pull good grades so you can get a good job and manage your own health insurance, it’s, like, a dinner bell for slackers. The petroleum engineers who graduate summa cum laud and have $80,000/year starting offers from Exxon Mobile will literally be running away every time you walk your brainy butt into the room. The only guy who’ll like you is the one who still smokes weed with his band in the garage on Tuesday afternoon because you have a paycheck so why should he work? Going to college = lazy bastard husband and it’s all your fault.

2)      “She will be in a near occasion of sin.”

“Just think of the environment that college-age students live in. You have a heavy concentration of young people all living together without the supervision of parents in the most sexually charged state of life they will experience…Is a degree worth the loss of your daughter’s purity, dignity, and soul?”

Ladies, since this is an 18-and-over audience, I’m gonna get real here. We’re talking about P-R-E-M-A-R-I-T-A-L S-E-X. Now bear in mind that I’m only even mentioning this to make God’s will known to you. Wait until Mom goes shopping and you’re home alone. Then grab a make-up mirror, pull down your pants, and look at (DON’T touch) your vagina. Philosopher René Descartes thought the soul was located in the pineal gland inside the brain (that’s all college-level stuff so don’t worry about it, you don’t need to know). But he was wrong. It’s in the vagina. And if you take Psychology 101, Calculus 121 or English 400 alongside the boys, your soul will fall out under the desk like a sanitary napkin you forgot to zip into your backpack pocket.

3)      “She will not learn to be a wife and mother.”

“Nothing that is taught in a college curriculum is geared toward domestic homemaking…a career woman…faces the reality that she has no training in homemaking and often has the thought ‘What would I do at home all day.’ Stay-at-home mothers are actually very busy industrious women and do absolutely marvelous things.”

It’s impossible to take college classes and also practice cooking, cleaning and child-care off campus. And there are no academic topics that tie into housekeeping or parenting. Accounting classes will NOT help you with household budgeting and investments, literature courses will NOT help you develop a passionate, well-informed worldview to share with your family, classes in child psychology will NOT help you understand your kids’ development, and art courses will NOT help you build a fun, creative home.

All women automatically want to be wives and mothers, and trust me, being a stay-at-home mom will fill all your interests. Do you love medical science? Imagine how awesome it will be to put the occasional Band-Aid on. Dig physics or chemistry? Just imagine, like, watching an egg get all solid when you boil it for lunch. Duh of course CEOs, police officers and engineers should be men, but what tons of people don’t know is that teachers, gynecologists, social workers, lactation consultants and certified nurse midwives should all be men, too.  

4)      “The cost of a degree is becoming more difficult to recoup.”

“…we’re seeing situations where not only is the income not enough to support a family, but many are strapped with student loan debt. Add to that the possibility of not even being able to get a job with the degree and you have economic disaster for a family before they even get started.”

You might have heard newscasters blabbing about “the recession” and “the student loan crisis.” That means the country is doing kind of stinky right now and it’s hard to find a job but everything is even über-crappier because a lot of college grads are trying to pay off about $30,000 in loans and all they can get is an unpaid internship!!! Babe I know double standards are hard to understand, but do your best. Men should make the college gamble no matter what, but you should NOT.

5)      “You don’t have to prove anything to the world.”

“Often the reason for a girl going to college is the pressure of the society around her, including her parents…So parents and their daughters often beam with pride in announcing what university she will attend. Astonishingly even homeschool parents fall into this folly.”

“Folly” is kind of an old-fashioned word.  It means “foolishness” or “idiocy.” It can be hard to accept that your parents aren’t perfect. But if your parents send you to college, they are idiots. LOL! When your parents were visiting campuses with you, they were NOT doing it out of some big concern for your future. They were doing it so they could prove themselves to their ungodly feminist neighbors.

6)      “It could be a near occasion of sin for the parents.” 

“In our culture many parents feel an unnecessary obligation to pay for the children’s college tuition…So parents may avoid having more children with contraception, sterilization, or illicit use of Natural Family Planning to bear this cost.”

Don’t you want more brothers and sisters? Well if your parents pay for your degree they won’t be able to afford more kids. If you go to college, your mom might go on the pill or your dad might get a vasectomy or they’ll avoid having S-E-X while your mom is ovulating and that’s a mortal sin when it’s done for a stupid, selfish reason like educating you. Getting a scholarship, working your way through school or paying your own loans by getting a job (LOL!!) are NOT solutions. Remember, it’s the quantity of kids you have, not the quality!!

7)      “She will regret it.”

“The more we talk about this prudent option for girls, the more we have women who are willing to admit to the regret they possess for having bought into the lie of the dual-career family…neglecting their children and restricting their childbearing to such an extent that they don’t want to even think about it.”

Yeah, a man you’ve never met does have the right to decide what is best for you and your family. He’s also, like, psychic so he knows exactly how every woman’s life is going to turn out and what she will and won’t regret. As you grow up you’ll find more and more that the true joy of being a woman is that other people can make all your important life decisions for you, even if the people are strangers on the internet with a super-obvious personal agenda.

8)      “It could interfere with a religious vocation.”

“Catholic seminaries and religious orders do not accept candidates who have substantial unpaid debt.”

If you have student loans, you might not be able to become a nun. If that doesn’t convince you NOT to go to college, what would?!! *hugs*