The Aeneid

New Job, New Family

The day came that my parents never thought would come, the day that I was to leave for college. My parent had been preparing me for this new chapter in my life. My dad had taught me as much as he could about how to stay safe and what to do in certain situations. My mom taught me all she could about how to make it on my own without her always there to help me. We had a long tearful goodbye, we had a last supper, we had lots of “lasts” before I moved out. When the day came, an innocent bystander would have thought that I was going off to war to never be seen again. All this, for me to go to school thirty minutes down the road. My parents knew that this was necessary for me to do. I needed to get an education so that I could get a job so that I could make money so that I could get married so that I could have a child so that I could eventually send her off to college to do the same thing. On a more serious note, they sent me off so that I could get an education to do something that I loved. In Thomas More’s Utopia, the family set up is different than ours, but the same to a certain degree. If a child wishes to have an occupation that is different than his father’s, he must be placed into a family that is in that profession. How does this compare and contrast to our society today?

In Utopia, a child is usually expected to have the same career as his father. But what would happen if the child chooses another job? “Most children are brought up to do the same work as their father, since they tend to have the same natural feeling for it. But if a child fancies some other trade, he’s adopted into a family that practices it. Of course great care is taken, not only by the father, but also by local authorities, to see that the foster-father is a decent, respectable type” (55-56).  My father owns his own construction company. Growing up I would always love going to work with him. My favorite day was what he calls “demo day.” When he would remodel a house, we could have to tear out what he was going to replace. For instance, if he was going to completely remodel a bathroom, he would have to tear out all the tile and appliances and replace them. My dad would give the job to me and my sister to take hammers and wreck everything in sight. We loved it. I always thought that my dad had the best job in the world. However, the older I got the more I realized there was more to his job than breaking this with hammers. He spent long hours drawing blueprints and doing the math to make sure everything fit just right. He had to lift incredibly heavy things and do all the dirty work that I never really saw growing up. The older I got, the more I realized that I did not want the same job my dad had. This same idea is what is happening with the children in Utopia. They realized that they do not want to have the same job as their father. They probably grew up just like me always seeing what their father was doing and realized that they wanted to do something else. In this case, they have to be moved to a new family. In my case, I had to go to college to learn how to do my desired profession.

Most of the time when people read this section of the book, they are astonished as to how heartless a mother and father must be to send their child to live with another family. I would have to disagree with that thought. My father was not hurt when he learned that I wanted to do something different than him. He was happy for me and made sure that I was sent to the best school where I would be taken care of. The fathers in Utopia do the same thing. In the text it says that the fathers take great care in finding a good foster-father for their child. They do not simply send their child off, they make sure they receive the best care possible. They also receive help from the authorities to make sure that their child is taken care of.

A common perspective of this would be to see the lack of emotion. In this book there is a common theme of the lack of human emotion in regards to pretty much everything in their lives. However, I do not believe this is a sign of lack of emotion. I see this as a father wanting what is best for his child. He wants his child to strive for their own desires and selflessly putting them on the right track to do so. This is not lack of emotion, rather is selflessness.