The Reuters storyline seemed so simple: a Baptist seminary in Texas has created a new women-only concentration in homemaking. Just another example of those crazy fundamentalists and their insistence that women be kept barefoot and pregnant, only leaving the kitchen to bring their male overlords supper. I'll admit to cringing a bit at first, mostly because a revitalized home economics major seemed a perversion of the academic ideal: housekeeping shouldn't be the business of higher education.

But then I got to the description of the program and saw this:

It's a ... four-year program. Two years of classical Latin, two years of classical Greek. It requires them to read almost all of the great books of the Western world.

I did my undergraduate work at Oregon State University, a state school with close to 20,000 students, and it was impossible to get such an education there. Latin and Greek weren't offered. Reading the great books of Western civilization was generally discouraged. Even if the teaching at this Baptist seminary is fourth-rate (and it is probably better than that), these poor, oppressed homemakers being groomed to serve the patriarchy will be far more erudite and intellectually informed than any graduate of a women's studies program.

The benighted Baptists are teaching their future housewives the classic intellectual languages and having them read the great literature, and philosophy of our culture. The progressive feminists are teaching their future liberated, independent women to vapidly mouth liberal platitudes and having them read jargon-cluttered banalities.