Aug 16 2009
How to Quote Out of Context
I can see religious conservatives pulling this quote from a science article out of context already -
In the past nearly four decades, black women have made great gains in higher education rates, yet these gains appear to have come increasingly at the cost of marriage and family.
Perhaps they’d even mention that the source of that sentence was a professor of sociology at YALE University.
Yep, look what happens when women leave the kitchen and go to college: their marriage and family suffers!
But wait, careful minds want to know, how do their marriages and family suffer? The answer: they don’t. Huh? How could this be? Well, you’d have to look no farther then the title of the piece to find out. Or read the entire article, but who does that?
It seems that the rate of marriage and child-bearing is going down for educated black women. The way their education is “costing” marriage and family is that less black women are getting married and having a family. So it is not actually marriages or actual children that are suffering, but potential marriages and potential children.
Does education abort a family? Should it be outlawed?
As you might guess, I applaud the news. Education is a good thing, even if it leads to fewer marriages and children. The second of those two I would actually include in the benefits of education to society. But not because I am anti-children. I am anti too many children.
