Dads: It's Hard Work to Teach Hard Work

Classical Christian education goes hand-in-glove with the real world of vocational apprenticeship.

Dateline:  August 4th, in The Year of our Lord 2022

There is a classical Christian lab k-12 school at College of the Ozarks-- an amazing college dubbed "Hard Work U."  This college is actually a self-contained city in Missouri-- complete with student-run farms that supply milk to its own creameries and wheat to its own flour mills.  Student bakers go on to use the flour to create baked goods and you can buy the ice cream at the on-site hotel– ranked highly in Trip Advisor by the way. Students do all the work in exchange for a good college education.  It's no coincidence that one of the better classical educations in our nation can be had at an agrarian school.

My suburban sons have an hour of chores each week-- maybe-- in the summer.  I find some longer projects, like window washing.  But none of these projects seem to have that sense of independence or responsibility that vocational labor does.  So, the past couple of years, rather than taking our vacation at a theme park, we have done 10 days of hard labor over the summer.  So many friends of mine are in business and struggle to find employees who can work independently or serve a full 8-hour day.  If we believe that classical Christian education is about "cultivating virtue" we should look further than the classroom.  This is where fathers come in:  Historically, generational vocations used to ensure that the father apprenticed the son.  One of the biggest influences on Paideia, then, was dad.  I encourage dads to find a way to apprentice their sons starting at about age 12-- in something vocational and real– whether it’s auto mechanics, woodworking, agriculture, or even landscaping.  

This past week, my boys and I thinned forest and built roads on a piece of mountain property in Idaho.  In addition to my own sons, I hired a couple of local boys who knew how to work. When a machine went down or I wasn't around, those local boys looked around and piled slash or did whatever needed to be done-- no standing around awaiting orders.  My boys learned from these 19-year-old hired hands who were well raised.  When one of the boys tried to put a tree into the chipper with part of its root-ball attached-- it jammed.  They watched me carefully use the chainsaw and then winch and UTV to get the stump removed.  Chainsaw maintenance was a daily hassle.  They learned to do it.  But, with every small lesson in "figuring it out" they became less helpless.  All of this in 100 degree heat!   Last year, the heat drove my sons to sit in the shade.  This year, they worked through it.  Progress!

As a kid, the bus ride to school from our farm took about an hour and told a story.  At first, we picked up farm kids.  Then, we wound through town to pick up the outskirts, and then town kids.  From an early age, I remember the kids picked up from country dairies and wheat farms just seemed older.  They may have been in my grade, but they seemed like adults-- no stylish feathered hair, hash jeans, or AC/DC T-shirts (all these were a "thing" back then).  They weren't frumpy, they were just jeans-and-a-collared-shirt kids.  They weren't shy, but they were above the usual school bus foolishness.  One day, one of the two quiet brothers from the dairy farm, sitting in the back, observed a 7th-grade city boy carving his initials in the paint on the bus.  One of the brothers calmly got up, grabbed a wad of his jacket, shirt, and skin, and lifted him mostly over the seats as he bumped him all the way to the front seat.  He set him down, pointed at him, and said, "Sit here" and went back to his seat.  The driver was wide eyed, as was the 7th-grader, but both knew that the brothers were respectable.  Quiet virtue and maturity goes a long way. 

It seems that our kids lack more than a work ethic.  They lack sound wisdom.  After years of working with kids, I've noticed that edgy hairstyles, clothing, and eventually piercings and tattoos with teens are inversely proportional to how seriously they take life.  And, kids who grow up working under their dad's apprenticeship doing hard things, and doing them long past quitting time just don't seem to need the attention that the foolishness of stylish fads give them.  It's not that style is necessarily bad-- in wisdom it's just rendered small, especially among boys. 

A guy bucking bales of hay in low cut skinny jeans spends the rest of the day with chaff in uncomfortable places.  Reality is the best tutor.

What about daughters?  My daughter found work on her own.  She spent her suburban summers making crafts or doing art projects, or babysitting, or teaching violin.  A sense of stylish beauty is a virtue for young women.  Dads play a vital role here, too.  We'll talk about that in a future story.  

But boys often don't do well in the suburbs in my opinion.  So, if you have boys, work exceptionally hard to get them to work exceptionally hard.

A few years ago, at a classical conference, I rode to dinner with Vigen Guroian, a professor at the University of Virginia and author of works about reengaging the natural world.  He drove a Jeep.  The elderly gentleman still worked his small farm.  He wrote, "Rallying the Really Human Things"-- a book I commend.  It's on the moral imagination, which is cultivated through human interaction and the real world.  Vigen's commitment to real-world work is a testament to the role dads play in classical Christian education-- put your kids in an ACCS school to enrich their minds, but don't ever step away from nurturing their body and their soul.