The Urban Family and What It Means
The Urban Family and What It Means
The urban family
- Mostly a consuming unit, not a producing one.
- Work is no longer done in common: the father works away from home, the mother often works outside or keeps the house.
- Children have few responsibilities, reduced further by labour-saving devices.
What these changes mean for curriculum
- The ending of the old-fashioned community.
- The decline of the family unit.
- Reduced influence of face-to-face relationships.
- The rise of big social organizations.
- Increased instability of occupations and employment.
The rural family worked, lived, and learned as one. The urban family does almost none of that together. This change, more than any single policy, is why the modern curriculum has to take on jobs that families and communities once handled on their own.
The urban family
In the city, the work is no longer done in common. The urban family is mostly not a producing unit but a consuming one: it buys and uses far more than it makes. The members scatter during the day. The father’s workplace is away from home. The mother is often employed outside the home as well, or else her role is largely confined to keeping the house and preparing meals.
Children, meanwhile, have few responsibilities, mostly limited to assisting the mother. Even that has shrunk. Domestic conveniences and labour-saving devices have reduced household responsibility in many families almost to the vanishing point. The shared tasks that once built character in the rural family have largely disappeared from the urban one.
| Rural family | Urban family | |
|---|---|---|
| Economic role | Producing and consuming | Mostly consuming |
| Where work happens | At home, in common | Away, separately |
| Children’s responsibilities | Many, shared | Few, often minimal |
It mostly consumes rather than produces, with members scattered to work and school
The father works away, the mother often works outside or keeps house, and children have few responsibilities, reduced further by labour-saving devices. Shared character-building work has thinned out.
What these changes mean for curriculum
Step back, and a handful of consequences of the scientific and technological revolution come into view. The source lists them plainly:
- The ending of the old-fashioned community.
- The decline in the influence of the family unit.
- The reduced influence of face-to-face relationships.
- The rise of big social organizations in their place.
- The increased instability of occupations and employment.
Together these mark a deep shift. The two institutions that once formed a child’s character and outlook, the community and the family, have both weakened, and large impersonal organizations have moved into the space they left. For a curriculum developer this is the heart of the matter: if the family and community no longer do the forming they once did, then more of that work falls to the school and its curriculum.
More of the work of forming character and values falls to the school
With the old community ended, the family weakened, face-to-face ties reduced, and big organizations risen, the institutions that once formed children no longer do so fully. The curriculum inherits the task.
How was this article?