Aunt Dorcas Advises: When Your Mennonite Child Wants to Go to College

No one asked this specifically, but Aunt Dorcas decided to dispense some advice. It seemed appropriate after her son Ben's guest post from April 18, which you might want to read now.

Ben's post--22 Miles Down Peoria Road

Ben with his Doctorate

Traditionally, Mennonite young people finish eight, ten, or maybe 12 grades of school, then follow their parents into a construction trade or farming, or maybe pursue teaching. Many women work in retail or teaching before taking on marriage and homemaking.

College has been less forbidden than unnecessary. Why get an education when you can earn a fine living building houses or welding? Indeed, why even finish high school?

We are a practical and pragmatic culture. School is both required by law and necessary for basic skills of Bible study and running a business or household, but academia, with its detailed study of subjects with little relation to everyday tasks, seems frivolous. Mennonites love to tell stories of the lawyer or professor they worked for who couldn’t unclog his bathroom sink or change the oil in his car.

Culturally, we have almost no context for children who want to go to college, and little knowledge of majors, applications, credits, or financial aid. Even more, we don’t quite know what to do when one of our own pursues an education. Often, there is no place for them in the community, even when we and they want them to belong.

Here's Amy getting her Associate's

So, as a conservative Mennonite parent, how should you respond if your child or teenager says they want to go to college someday?

Ben, who wrote the post about living in two worlds, has a Ph.D.  Matt and Jenny have Master’s degrees, Amy and Emily have Bachelors, and Steven has two Associates. Matt’s wife Phoebe and my husband Paul also have Bachelor’s degrees, and I attended college for two years but don’t have a degree.

College kids in 2024 have a stereotype, especially among conservative people, as blue-haired snowflakes with six-figure student loans who lecture their parents about socialism and systemic oppression.

In contrast, our six all love Jesus and their parents and have retained the work ethic, frugality, and good sense of their Amish and Mennonite ancestors despite studying at secular universities. Their political views are nuanced rather than extreme in any direction, they all outwork me by a long way, and together they have less than $6,000 of student debt remaining despite paying for college themselves.

I share all this not only to brag shamelessly but also to establish my credentials. The truth is that Paul and I didn’t plan or orchestrate this outcome, and as with every good thing I’ve ever accomplished, it was accidental and unintentional. However, a few decisions seem significant, and our children have sometimes shared what they feel we did right, God bless them. I’m happy to pass that on as advice for others.

1.       Give your children a solid foundation: love them like crazy, believe in them, encourage, laugh, make your home a warm, safe place.
Get help if you have issues.
Model honesty, growth, repentance, sacrifice, and changing your mind now and then.
If they have a solid core and know who they are, they are far less likely to find the college alcohol culture a temptation, or to want to be like the cool people, or to change who they are so they can be accepted.
One daughter said it didn’t take long to figure out that most of the cool people were just pretending, and the partyers just wanted to escape real life.

Steven gets an Associate's in firefighting

2.       Choose a congregation that doesn’t outright forbid college. My dad, the first Amish person to get a Master’s degree and stay Amish, had his church’s permission to do so even though it was wildly outside the traditional box. I suspect his bishop in Oklahoma recognized his bright mind and endless curiosity as well as his love of being Amish.
The Beachy Amish church of my teen years didn’t forbid me or my sister from going to high school and college. They didn’t understand or relate in the slightest, which was unfortunate and made my faith crises worse than they needed to be, but I think they also recognized my giftings.
A church that forbids college classes of any kind, even online or at a local community college, has deeper issues that are likely to frustrate young people whether they are interested in college or not.
And, let’s be honest, anything totally forbidden can be secretly tempting. It’s counterintuitive, but absolutely insisting on one way is more likely to lead to them choosing another.

3.       At the same time, appreciate the Amish/Mennonite work ethic, and don’t elevate being a professor above cleaning grass seed or being a welder. Both can support a family. What are your child’s interests, giftings, and callings? How can they combine enjoyment, making a living, and serving God and others? The details aren’t as important.

4.       Encourage learning. We Mennonites already have a tradition of being self-taught, from farmers reading about fertilizer in Farm Journal to housewives watching YouTube videos on making the perfect cheesecake that doesn’t crack to preachers studying the Matthew Henry on Saturday night.
It’s not a huge leap from that kind of learning to taking college classes.

5.       Encourage reading. Go to the library. Read to your children. Talk about what they’re reading. Let them follow their interests. When Harry Potter was wildly controversial in the Christian world and Emily was a teenager, she borrowed the book, read it, and discussed it with me, analyzing the details as only she can. It was a great exercise for both of us.

6.       Let them ask questions. Lots of questions, on every subject. Discuss things. Look up answers in the dictionary and online and in the Bible. Ask people who know more. Admit it up front if you don’t know. Also admit that certain Mennonite practices are tradition more than Scripture.
Ask them questions right back. Make them think.
Some questions are terrifying for parents, but you can do hard things.
“Letting us ask hard questions” is the #1 answer I get when I ask my kids what we got right. Emily said, “I knew what I believed and why, and I could explain it, because of all the discussions we’d had.”
Amy said, “You let us ask questions and we regularly pushed back on things, so we knew what we believed by the time we got there.”

7.       Teach them that that God’s Kingdom is bigger than our family, our neighborhood, our church, and our nation. This is how we understand and practice Scripture. Other people do it differently. Maybe they baptize babies or play drums in church. But if they also believe in Jesus, we are part of the same family, we can learn from them, and God has a role for all of us.

8.       Show them how to live with contradiction and nuance and tension.
Don’t throw them pat answers and expect them to be ok with that.
Look up Bible passages. Look up other passages that seem to say something different. God’s judgment and his mercy. Free will and being chosen. God’s goodness and human suffering. It is possible to live in this in-between place, to be honest about seeming contradictions, to learn as you go, to not know how it all works, to trust God to show you eventually.
The same is true for reconciling evidence for an old earth with the Biblical account of Creation. We don’t know everything yet. We can still learn about dinosaurs and rock layers, and it doesn’t have to destroy our faith. We can read Answers in Genesis periodicals, but they aren’t going to explain every possible situation. Be ok with uncertainty. This is God’s world. He has things well in hand. We don’t know that much, honestly. There is a lot left to learn.
I recognize that people and families are different, and some think a lot deeper than others or are more sensitive to suffering or have a greater need for certainty.
But you can set the example of loving God and others without absolute certainty about every possible question.

9.       Ben says “humility” in his family was a big influence on him. When the kids were very insistent with their opinions, I made them say, “But I could be wrong.”
I tried to say it myself.
I admit this was a reaction to an annoying person in my life who shut down every discussion or question with “Scripture makes it very clear that. . .”
Well. Sometimes Scripture didn’t make it very clear, but the real issue was that this guy was afraid of having his opinions examined and found wanting, so the conversations ended right there. I wanted to put a comic-strip balloon script over his head: “But I could be wrong.” Since I couldn’t do that, I made sure my family knew how to say it.

10.   Remember that having your children’s beliefs tested is not a bad thing. I’ve known parents who didn’t ever want their children in a situation where they were different from the people around them. One mom didn’t even want her child to attend an ACE [Christian curriculum] convention because the other girls might wear makeup and jewelry and wouldn’t wear head coverings. And their poor child would have to stand alone.
Obviously, you supervise appropriately and you don’t ever throw your young child to the wolves, but if your teachings are so fragile that you can’t send a teenager to an ACE convention for fear they’ll fall away, you have issues far worse than makeup and jewelry.
In the book, Circle of Love, a young Mennonite man leaves home for 1-W service and gradually spirals into the ways of the world around him, with heartbreaking results. How sad that he had to leave home and go out into the world, right? But what if he had always had such a weak faith but no one including himself ever knew, and he stayed in his home church and community all his life, and his faith was never tested and exposed? Would that really have been better?

Jenny giving her presentation for her Master's in Math

11.   “College is an adult decision and an adult responsibility, so they can pay for it themselves.” That’s what my husband used to say.
While we didn’t pay for college except for the tax write-offs their freshman years, we tried to help in other ways.
They were free to live at home as long as they wanted, either paying rent or helping around the house for half an hour a day.
We hired them to work at the warehouse or around the house, since Paul felt that it wasn’t fair to pay teen/adult  boys but not their sisters, just because they couldn’t sling 50-lb bags of seed.
We also helped them save money for their futures, whether college or cars or homes.
All the kids had summer jobs while in college, and some worked through the school year as well.
Most of them didn't get much for scholarships until grad school, when both Ben and Jenny got generous packages that paid for tuition plus a stipend to live on. Matt’s Master’s degree was covered by the Navy. Amy and Emily waited until after age 24, so they qualified for more financial aid.
We note that financial help is much more common in STEM fields [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math] than in the humanities.
[While she attended Oregon State, Emily noticed that the students who advocated for socialism were also the ones who were persuaded to sign up for huge student loans as naive 18-year-olds and had no feasible prospects for paying them off.]

Emily getting her Bachelor's

12.   Along with taking financial responsibility, let them be adults in other ways as well. They will likely make choices different from the ones you made. This is true whether they pursue an education or not.
They are now adults. They get to choose.
Pray a lot and be quiet unless they ask.
If they come home with blue hair and talking about equity and inclusion, remember that they might be practicing Micah6:8 better than the neighbor in the plain suit who won’t help his unmarried sister with housing costs and doesn’t pay his seed sackers what they deserve.

13.   Don’t pressure your children because of what others think and say. Your children are allowed to choose. Other people are allowed to choose their responses. That is part of the consequences of one’s choices.
Ben occasionally likes to grow his hair long. His grandma doesn’t like this and tells him so. That is how it should be. Grandma goes to him directly with her concern and doesn’t tell me to tell him. Ben can decide when to get a haircut.
People will also think and say things about you as the parents. They are allowed to do that. You will survive.

14.   “Recognize that you are choosing to enter their world, and you know it’s going to have a secular perspective, so be respectful and don’t be a crusader or sit in the front row and argue with professors about evolution or whether or not God exists. They have a job to do. It’s your job to learn and do a good job and show your faith by your life.” That’s what my cousin Truman’s wife Marietta told me her children decided when they went to nursing school. I thought that was awfully wise.
I don’t know that my kids articulated it like that, but they certainly lived it out.

15.   Recognize that the challenges to your kids’ faith will not come from the sources you expect. Sometimes a Christian college mocks real faith more than a secular university will. Sometimes the abusers in the Mennonite church back home do more damage than the atheist professors in college. In my experience, literature classes introduce more bizarre anti-Christian ideas than biology classes. You never know. Prepare them with a solid foundation. Don’t raise your eyebrows or gasp when they come home and tell you what they’re facing.
Listen.
Ask questions.
Pray a lot.
Also: support and encouragement will come from unexpected sources. Ben’s supervisor during grad school was a supportive and understanding, but never proselytizing, Latter-Day Saints man who obviously was comfortable with both engineering and faith.

16.   As best you can, make peace with this: Anabaptist communities do not have a strong academic tradition, so your child will be something of an anomaly and may never fit in, either because there is no job for him or her in the community, or because no one understands their way of thinking. They may not find someone to date or marry.
You might think the obvious answer is for your child not to go to college. The truth is, we often don’t have room for a scholar of any kind.
My dad tried hard to fit into the Amish and Beachy communities, but it didn’t work well. Even without his degrees, he would have had a hard time fitting in. One of my brothers was much the same, with a brilliant mind and a somewhat frail body, neither one suited for the rigors of farming and the utterly practical mindset of the community.
The last 25 years of his life, Dad had a safe and accepting place at their Beachy church in Minnesota. God bless them.
But I remember as a child when people made mocking comments to me about how poor we were or how ineptly Dad farmed.
So your child might need to leave your community to find their own place in the world. It’s hard. It’s also ok. Most of the time. The alternative, of staying and never fitting in, is even harder. Better to use the gifts God gave you and find a place outside the community than forever be trying to fit in but not succeeding, forever dreaming of more than the community can offer, never valued for the gifts you bring but mocked for the ones you lack.

17.   Remember that you can’t control the outcome. These are things we tried to do, and we had a good outcome. But these are not recipes or guarantees. A thousand influences factor in, as well as luck and personality and the grace of God and the tides of history.
The only factor you control is yourself. So work on being the best and healthiest and humblest you.
These days, my enormous pride in my children is balanced by the humility of being the least-educated of the bunch. I used to know the most. Now I know the least. It’s good for me.

18.   Back to #1—keep providing a solid foundation, long after they’re grown and gone. They will always need a safe place to come home to.

That's what I think.

Aunt Dorcas