"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.
I grew up in Detroit and let me tell you .... a LOT of families are broken. Many have no fathers in the household. Many have working mothers who are hardly home. When I was living in Detroit in the 70's and 80's I was hard pressed to find a Detroit girl who did NOT have a kid by the time she was 16.
Instead of abolishing the family, maybe we should look at FIXING THE FAMILY. Families are strong when they have both a biological father AND mother living in the same house, preferably married, with the father working full time. Families are best served when the mother cares for the children while the father works.
Of course, this model can change up as needed. Father stays home and mother works full time. But the point is, 2 parent households like this are capable of providing stability. In addition, there are relatives such as grandparents who play an IMPORTANT ROLE.
We have to be careful when they talk about abolishing the family. I have a gut feeling the replacement would be having your children raised by the state. Children need to be raised by those that brought the INTO this life. Not by strangers. Not by the state. Not by "friends as family." They need to be raised BY FAMILY.
And yes, families are NOT PERFECT. They have problems. But it's better to face those problems AS A FAMILY rather than throw the whole concept of what a family is OUT and allow the state or some other foreign entity raise your children.
We would do well to look at strengthening the family. Grandparents are an excellent resource for helping to raise children and helping to manage families. Why don't we get back to strengthening these relations inside the family rather than looking to destroy the family altogether.
The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent, thought and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.
H.L. Mencken 1880 – 1956