Melissa Bray

April 2019

Childrearing in Utopias

          My first research post and my midterm both focused on why educators should teach utopian texts in secondary education. Unfortunately, there is not much information or research about how to do so effectively or why it is so important. I feel like I made a solid argument for it in my assignments, though, and that we have touched upon it quite a bit in our seminar discussions. The utopia genre is essentially a “literature of ideas that sparks discussion” and consideration about how mankind can improve their environment and live more harmonious lives, with themselves, others, and our world (Dr. White). While I ran into a dead end concerning utopias in education, one thing it did inspire me to start considering is how our utopian texts contribute to a literature of ideas about how we can improve childrearing practices (and essentially the fundamental education) of our youth.

          Before I go into what utopian texts illustrate about childrearing, I want to point out relevant information regarding it today. As an educator, I know that the type of environment and people that a student is around outside of school affects how they perform in school and further on in life. For example, a student who has two parents at home who are involved in and place value on education are more successful in school and extracurricular activities than those students who lack that kind of support at home, and they generally go on to be more successful individuals. The Inside Higher Ed website discusses a study that found that “students who grow up in single-parent homes complete fewer years of education and are less likely to earn a college degree” (2015). It is not always the parents' fault, because many of my students come from single-parent households where the parent has to work all the time just to keep afloat, and often that student either has to work also or help take care of the family, which sometimes causes school to be put on the backburner. The Pew Research Center has also done multiple studies on household dynamics, and they have found that less than 50% of children are raised in a household where both of their biological parents are present; 26% live with a single parent, usually the mother, and another 5% don’t live with either parent at all (2015). Other similar factors we have discussed in class include: people are waiting longer to get married (if at all), approximately 50% of these marriages are ending in divorce, people are having fewer children, and those children who are born are raised in drastically different ways than within the “traditional nuclear” family.

         While there is a general belief in society today (and even studies that prove) that children who are raised by two involved parents are more successful in life, it would seem as though many of our utopian texts disagree. In Rand’s Anthem, men and women are kept separated and are only brought together in order to mate. The book does not provide much detail about the childrearing practices of this society, except the narrator, Equality, explains how he remembers going to school and sleep each night with all of his “brothers,” all the while being brainwashed into believing that his entire life is focused on the “we.” (Instead of having individual interests, they were taught that everything they do is for their brothers.) On the other hand, Gilman introduces readers to a completely different kind of procreation in society in her work Herland. In the fictional country of Herland, women have been without men for so long that they started to reproduce and give birth without requiring male fertilization of an egg, which is known as parthenogenesis. Once the baby is born, it is not necessarily raised by its mother, but instead, only the women who have proven to be the best caretakers and teachers are permitted that highest honor. Just as in Rand’s society, Gilman’s is another example of grouping and raising children based on their age, and teaching them the rules and their roles within the society. Callenbach’s Ecotopia was altogether a different type of society than the previous two because it allowed free love between numerous men and women to occur simultaneously, and when a child was born, it seemed to be more or less raised and educated by the community. Callenbach’s society is the closest I have seen to what we have seen in our own reality, such as the intentional communities like Twin Oaks, Oneida, and Kibbutzims. It seems as though these communities, like the utopias, have taken an emphasis away from traditional families, and instead promote a community coming together to raise and educate their next generation.

          In Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, especially on Anarres, men and women were allowed to sexually interact, reproduce, and create families almost as they saw fit. Granted the narrator’s mother was more absent than not, but children had families and would go to school for their education. The Dispossessed was honestly very long, confusing, and hard for me to follow, so I do not feel too comfortable going into a lot of detail, but these more recent course texts are where it seems as though another major change in the family dynamics occurs. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale presents us with a society where successful births are rare, so the women that have had successful pregnancies, births, and matured children are “valued.” By valued I mean captured, brainwashed, and used for breeding purposes. These women are forced to have sex with high-up, important men in the society that have barren wives, and bear their family a child. The handmaid is not allowed to do any more than give birth to and nurse the infant, and then it is the “traditional family” that takes over the baby’s care afterwards while the handmaid goes on to try to give another family a baby. There are even more differences in the show created based on Atwood’s novel, and you see girls separated into their own school where they are raised and educated once they have grown older. Since I know how family dynamics affect a child in the educational setting, birth, childrearing, and educational practices in utopias has become my newest interest that I would like to continue to delve into for the final exam. I am interested to see if there is a preference for the traditional family, or rather a “community” raising of children in place of the family, and if their practices and education they use with their children support or challenge the way we do things in our modern society.

Works Cited

Callenbach’s Ecotopia

Gilman’s Herland

Rand’s Anthem

Dr. White – UHCL Literature Department

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/02/25/report-marks-growing-educational-disadvantage-children-single-parent-families

https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/17/1-the-american-family-today/