07.19
Esolen on Sports and Masculine Intellect
Anthony Esolen is, in my opinion, the closest thing you can get to a modern day C.S. Lewis. His article called What Sports Illustrate is packed with great insight. It’s definitely worth your time to read. I was particularly taken by this passage:
What are the obvious insights—not an oxymoron, for there are things that everybody not self-blinded ought to know—to be gleaned from what happened to me in that Calabrian town? There are many, I think, but one, the most obvious, is the most feared and denied: Boys will place their intellectual trust in men, not in women. I do not mean that women cannot teach boys. I mean that ultimately the boy will and must look to a man for the formation of his intellectual character.
That is related to the more general truth that a boy needs a father, because someday a boy has to become a man. Boys are proud to fight over the ultimate questions on a wholly intellectual level (so they believe), free of emotion. They sense that a man will allow them to do that, while a woman will not. In this cool estimation they are not entirely wrong. And so boys are drawn to a combination of competition, instruction, and male leadership. How can we have forgotten, when every culture’s educational system used to testify to it?
–Anthony Esolen, Touchstone Oct.2003
He’s spot on in this. Call me a chauvinist if you want to but I will always gravitate toward a man for my intellectual growth. Religious instruction is no exception to this. There is a reason why you don’t see many men in a Kay Arthur class. It’s hard for men to take instruction from women. Something inside of us makes it feel awkward and wants to rebel against it. It’s one of the reasons why we have always had “boys” schools, and why they have always been so successful. It’s just the way we are made. It might not fit the PC mold, but acting like something doesn’t exist doesn’t change the fact that it does.
