They called it Babylon. A place without God. A place where you would lose your faith, lose your innocence, lose your soul.

We were told the professors were armored with the “liberal agenda.” We were told they hated God, that they spoke lies. College was a place where the naive were brainwashed.

For us daughters, college was off-limits. Women who went away to university would forget their calling to be wives and mothers. They would become obsessed with careers and displace men in the workplace. They would get ideas.

We were told to be afraid of being a woman alone in the world. And yes, there is truth to the danger of sexual assault on college campuses. But this danger lurks everywhere: in parking lots, in homes, in churches. And the answer shouldn’t be to keep the women away. To tell the women to go home, stay home. As if we are the problem that causes rape.

When I was still a stay-at-home daughter, I was hungry for learning. I relearned my high school math book for fun. I read college textbooks I ordered from the internet. I had a secret plan: of studying and finding a calling I could call my own.

I couldn’t shake the want of education.

And then the breaking away, almost a year after I left home at the age of twenty-five:

A corner room in a satellite building of a community college. Something called a syllabus. A small textbook that took more from my minimum-wage paycheck than I’d like to admit. The feeling of being too old, yet inexperienced.

That was my first day in a classroom since I had been taken out of kindergarten to be homeschooled. With curriculum from conservative Christian sources, I had been taught plenty of what to think instead of how to think: history that glorified colonization in the Americas and favored Southern generals in the Civil War, science that claimed to have all the answers without providing evidence. I had been taught to be wary of anyone who wasn’t a Christian. I had been taught that the feminist and civil rights movements were divisive.

And now, in college, I didn’t know what to expect. Angry atheist teachers who “persecuted” their religious students?

Instead I found myself in classrooms with teachers and students who opened my eyes to a world bigger than the one I had grown up in. I had many classes where people with different perspectives were encouraged to discuss them. I had a biology teacher who announced that science and religion don’t really contradict each other; they just answer different questions. I learned how to research and create logical arguments. I learned that every history has multiple points of view. The classroom was a place where tension and discomfort and challenges to social norms existed, and I revelled in it. I knew that the only way I could grow was by being challenged, by questioning, by being curious, by learning to think for myself.

I realize that higher education is not always a safe place for many people, and that many do not have the same positive experience that I did. But from where I was coming from, in a world where women should not be educated toward their own career goals, where a woman’s mind isn’t valued unless it is in service to men, college was a dream I never imagined would come true. It gave me opportunities to follow my own passion and the freedom to understand I did not have to be held down by a past of oppression.

Recently, the 3288 Review published an essay I wrote about my education, from kindergarten to being homeschooled to being indoctrinated in the restrictions of patriarchy. It follows my journey up until that first day of college, which I feel is my journey into freedom.

Here’s a short excerpt:

I’m fourteen, but my parents think of me as a young woman. Marriage is something we talk about now, as if it is a party we are planning. It is expected, something to look forward to.
…
Do I feel educated? I know how to cook and sew and clean. I know how to plan a surprise anniversary party for my parents. I know how to diagram sentences. I know how to make boys think I’m uninterested (or uninteresting), how to glare and raise one eyebrow. I know how to be a bridesmaid. I know how to scrapbook and keep a diary and hold a newborn and dance the Virginia Reel.
Things I have yet to learn: how to use a tampon, how sex works, how to set up my own email. I’ve never heard the f-word. I don’t know what kind of music I really love or if I actually want to get married and have children. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with the knowledge I have and don’t have.

You can find the rest at the 3288 Review.

The Education of a Stay-at-Home Daughter