"Abolish the Family" as a College Course?

The University of Pennsylvania is now offering a course titled, “Abolish the Family” as part of its sociology program. Lest we get ahead of ourselves, the full description of the course is:

“When we examine the narrative of the ideal family, it is often portrayed as a site of unconditional love and care. However, families can also be sites of pain, trauma, and uneven distributions of labor. For many, the concept of family loyalty can often include keeping each other's secrets and hiding harm and dysfunction from public view. In fact, many people turn away from biological families and toward "chosen" families when in need of care, love, and understanding. In this seminar, we will look at the history of family abolition and its threads through various other movements, examine variations in cultural models of family, and imagine new models of collective care together.”

The course attempts to slander the very concept of family by over-emphasizing those that are broken. But we say that such families are “broken” because they don’t live up to the ideal. In other words, it is only such a tragedy when they are malformed because we know how good it is to have a wholesome family. We know the contrasting privation caused by their absence—on the individual and the greater community.

No family will be perfect as no individual is perfect, but what we strive for is important. We’re certainly much more likely to get close to something if we reach for an ideal than if we are grasping in a different direction. Fundamentally, the family is the building block of society. It is the first community from which children learn moral values and make good use of their freedoms. It is often the principal reason that people work to strengthen civilizations and ensure peace.

The attempted destruction and marginalization of the family has been an ongoing thread in the political arena for some time. John Dewey, founder of the modern educational system, spoke extensively in the early 20th Century about the perceived ‘benefit’ of public schools in displacing the influence of parental values on children. Those parental values were traditional and Christian. Dewey imagined a new society, in which the family wouldn’t have such influence—but in which children were fully individuated from their families, getting their values from the schools (which were effectively a branch of the State). Modern movements against the family are mere echoes of Dewey’s (and Rousseau’s) evil ideas about the family unit.

A healthy family should reflect the Holy Family in that it should be a union of love, rooted in the sacrificial offering of the self, for the sake of the love of God, who made its members. It’s the outpouring of oneself, and is thus a beautiful inter-sacrificial unity. The fact that so many distort this, or don’t understand a proper family dynamic at all, cannot marginalize what is wholly good. Instead of aiming for the destruction of God’s design, we should be focused on making it more ubiquitous.

Who could say that it is bad to have a husband and wife who are dedicated to each other? Or for a child to know that he is loved by the father and mother who brought him into the world and who desire his highest good? For an adolescent to know that his parents are there to guide him through the series of confounding and error-fraught battles that he must face on his road to adulthood? For a young adult to know that loving parents will catch him if he stumbles as he takes his first steps towards independence? For aging parents to know that their children are working to protect them and care for them during their time of vulnerability?

Can any of these things be sworn off or discarded? Are any of them not good in and of themselves? History shows that no system is better. The family can only be replaced imperfectly, in scenarios that are heart-rending and which ought to be avoided.

We do not need to eradicate that which is intrinsically good because some people distort it. We need to cherish and herald the good and recognize broken families as the tragedy and privation that they are. We have a society that is far too comfortable with breaking up families needlessly, reducing marriage to a contract, divorce to a social preference, and children to an inconvenience. A healthy and accurate understanding of what the family should be is a necessary antidote to many of contemporary society’s disorders.