Patriarchy Stole My Education
I went to Clarks Summit University, formally Baptist Bible College, at age 21, four years after my high school graduation. After growing up in a tumultuous, violent home due to my alcoholic father, I had no dreams for the future upon my high school graduation. A good student academically with a gift for singing (I won the National School Choral Award for my high school choir), what I lacked was confidence to think I, of all people, could go to college. So, instead, I took a job as a waitress and just worked to no particular end.
Then, at 18, I heard the gospel of Jesus Christ and my life was turned upside down. My family initially rejected my decision and made life very difficult at home, so I moved out and got an apartment and a better job. Without my own plan, God led in ways I had not expected and after traveling with a Christian singing group for a year, I ended up at a Christian camp in Lake Ann, Michigan. There, I met a married couple who were professors at a Bible College in PA. I knew about the school and had had an ongoing letter-writing relationship with a young man who attended there.
By the time I went there, I had nothing to my name. I literally owned nothing but the clothes in my small suitcase and my small purse. I had sold my car and other possessions to travel with the group. I had not lived with my parents for three years and I had no income. But, even though I had been on my own for three years, the financial director insisted on using my father’s income on all my financial applications and pursuits.
My dad, although an alcoholic, held down a very good job and his income put me in a bracket that disqualified me from all financial aid. The financial director of the school simply did not know how to process me as an individual. I had no choice but to go along with his idea that I was “still” under my father’s household, and I had not a penny to my name. I begged him to understand that I had lived on my own for more than three years, but I might as well have been talking to the walls; he could not hear me and he would not process me as an individual.
When I say I had nothing, I mean nothing. I had a bar of soap I had bought in Michigan through the camp and a small bottle of shampoo. I could not call my family for help. I did my laundry by hand in the dorm bathroom, with shampoo, because I had no quarters for the washer and dryers there. I quickly began typing papers with a borrowed typewriter for other students so I could buy my necessary toiletries but I literally had no money for anything else at all. I lived in the dorm and had the food voucher, so I could eat and sleep. I scraped enough together from the typing jobs to get some cheap sheets and a blanket and pillow. Many times, the typing jobs kept me up all night long. I struggled academically for the first time in my life because the Bible was all new to me; I had not grown up in Sunday school and heard even the simplest stories from the Bible. I floundered but seemed unable to make my professors understand.
My entire tuition for that year was put into a student loan and I had no resources to pay it at the end of the year, so I had to go to work instead of return to school. I earned a simple
one-year Bible certificate. Shortly after graduation, I got married and had eight kids and have not yet been financially able to pursue further education.
My point is this: Had the financial aid office treated me as the individual I was and not under my father’s financial umbrella, I would have had many more options and qualified for financial aid.
The school’s system at the time was based on patriarchy. I was nothing if I did not claim my dad’s income. I seemingly had no other resources. If his happened now, I would fight harder, but at the time, I didn’t know how to fight such nonsense, but I knew it was nonsense.
Patriarchy left me in educational poverty.
