Father Knows Best

 

A reading in a current textbook laments that fewer Britons than forty years ago want to become secondary school teachers. By a lot: college grads entertaining the thought of teaching has dropped from over 60% to 17%. I keep seeing ads in my feed urging qualified Canadian teachers to come teach in London or in Scotland. 

\The piece goes on to say that one common reason given is the impossibility of maintaining discipline in classes, compared to forty years ago. And I hear this same lament from my friends in the US. And in China.

So the next question has to be, what has changed, and changed in all these countries? Why are students more rebellious, less disciplined, than in the past? Or, how have these systems of education changed so that they can no longer effectively discipline?

My Chinese student, not bound by North American shibboleths, has an immediate insight: one reason is that so many teachers are now women.

“In the old days,” he explains, “students saw the teacher as a second father.”

And then I got it. There is an obvious and immediate difference in tone between calling someone a “second father” and a “second mother.” Seeing a teacher as a “second mother” is not going to help with discipline.

We must accept what we have been perversely denying for generations: the role of father and mother is different. The mother sees to your physical needs, that you are scrubbed and fed. The father sees to your spiritual needs, to your education, especially your education in values. To discipline.

This is not a role arbitrarily assigned by society. It is built in to the male and female soul, just as we plainly see females are physically designed to nurture the young. As little Maryanne once remarked, “Men are not mammals. They can’t feed their young with milk.”

Why would it not be? How could it not be? Maternal instinct is real. So is paternal instinct. And so are filial instincts.

Here’s an interesting example of the difference between the male and female mind: men are far better at reading maps and giving directions. This is the paternal and the teacherly role: reading the map and giving directions. Women, left to their own devices, get lost. They must ask directions of others.

I used to do this experiment with my classes; and the result was the same whatever culture or country I was in, or wherever the students came from. I would first ask all of the women in class to point north. They invariably had no idea. It was random. Then I would ask the men. Most of them could. 

QED. It is the same in spiritual matters. Men have a better sense of direction, and so are better guides.

So we are abandoning our children, denying them an education, if we give them female teachers in high school. We are letting them down with female teachers in grade school, for that matter. It stands to reason that, not getting any guidance at school, they become disenchanted with the enterprise. It also stands to reason that, not having any natural talent for the task, schools dominated by women go off the rails.

Come to think of it, this is a more serious problem than the schools. We have denied the value of fathers in the family as well, undercut their authority, encouraged family breakups, and left children rudderless. We have denied the value of men in society generally, and tried to dismantle “the patriarchy.” Not going to end well. We have, in recent decades, put women in leadership roles in all parts of society. Note the recent congressional hearing, in which the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and UPenn all spoke. And they were all women. And they had all so lost their way that they did not consider a call for genocide of a student’s entire race a case of bullying.

If women lack, at least in comparison to men, an internal compass and sense of direction and proportion, this is a sure prescription for causing all structures to begin to swerve unpredictably and wander off in odd directions.

And is that not what we have been seeing?

It is the wisdom of the ages. In the New Testament, Jesus’s ancestry is traced back through many generations to David. But this ancestry is traced back on both sides, through Mary and Joseph; even though Joseph is not Jesus’s biological father.

This is because the true inheritance on the father’s side is spiritual, not physical. The important line on the male side is the teachings and the values handed down from David; compare the apostolic succession.

Have you ever noticed, as I have, that when there is a mixed marriage, the children identify primarily with the father’s faith, and the father’s ethnicity? This is the actual distinction, in Canada, between Indian and Metis, and was enshrined in the Indian Act: father Indian, mother European, child Indian. Father European, mother Indian, child European. Or, only on the Prairies, because the father is ethnically and religiously distinct from the European majority, Metis. Metis culture is simply French-Canadian culture.

In mixed marriages when the father defers to the mother’s religion or ethnicity in the education of the children, as is often required in Catholic-Protestant marriages—the children simply grow up without a sound grounding in values or sense of their identity. 

We have been ignoring these male-female differences at our peril—or rather, to the peril of our children.