The Innovation of Childhood

 

The Hohenstauffen emperor, Frederick II (1194-1250) was the Holy Roman Emperor, King of Sicily, King of Germany, King of Jerusalem, Romanorum Caesar Semper Augustus, Felix Victor ac Triumphator, also known to his contemporaries simply as “stupor mundi,” the Marvel of the World. Few still remember that he had passed his early childhood and adolescence as a scavenging street urchin in in the streets of Syracus.

Frederick was the heir to the most powerful dynasty of his time and certainly no upstart; his pedigree was longer than my arm. In his veins rolled the blood of German emperors and Dukes of Normandy, and despite the unpromising beginnings in the stench and filth of medieval squalor, he became the best educated and most enlightened autocrat known to history. Yet regardless of the perks of noble birth later in life, it had been a typical childhood of the period.

We take for granted a sheltered, spoiled rotten period of prolonged "innocence" and supervision, and call it “childhood.” In historical terms however, this is a rather recent innovation. In medieval society and even for the Renaissance this was a foreign concept.

The societies in the Neolithicum and in classic Antiquity had their own social divisions and segregated ages and genders. The Hellenistic “paideia” presupposed a phase of transition, of initiation rites and education that would clear the path from childhood to the life of the adults. The family unit was more of a political association, a clan or “house,” embedded in a network of bonds and obligations between clients and patrons of varying status.

A parent's affection could be as intense as in the nuclear family, but it was set in a different context, less possessive and more involving in the transactions of adult society.

The relations between the pedagogue and his charge could even be of a sexual nature, and this often seemed acceptable if the relation was between the same sexes, but it was the main cause for keeping the daughters away from the public schools. The ancients lived in a different world of gods, nobles, temples, laws, and legends; their civic values differed. A benign observer of the turn towards medieval Europe, once said: “The pagan gods gradually faded away, until the projects of Greece and Israel, Athens and Jerusalem, came together and formed a unity.” In a less charitable and more knowledgeable mood one could also say that the pagan gods got a violent send-off and in the revolutionary upheavals that followed, the “project of Jerusalem” came to replace Hellenistic humanitarianism and so caused much of the darkness and misery to come.

The difference has left a visible mark on our cemeteries.

During pre-school age, the child was a sexless, almost nameless piece of livestock and roamed the filthy and narrow lanes in street-gangs, wore an undistinguished garb, rummaged the trash dumps and contributed to the family's income with petty theft and beggary. Such child never washed, and if unable to find company with its peers, hunkered down to torture an unfortunate beetle, or crank a cat's tail. It learned to drink small beer, the only way to escape the diarrhea lurking in every water well. It was on a race against measles, small pocks, diphtheria, and polio, and the odds weren't good.

Many ended in an unmarked hole in the ground. Parents preferred not to involve themselves too emotionally in the frequent deaths of their small ones.

It was customary to hire out your kids to a network of chartered apprenticeships. Once the little sucker had passed the critical age of five to seven, he was deemed ready to fend for himself and learn the way of the world in the shops of a guild or at the tables of landed nobility. Only the lucky few received a rudimentary tuition and if they had academic ambitions, passed years of vagrancy on the open road between the universities, with a dim prospect for a minor function on the extended estates of the grandees, or for a career in the clergy.

The printing press finally became an agent of change.

It fed to the hunger of public curiosity and fueled the expression of public opinion. For an opinion to show teeth it was no longer necessary to start a riot.

The need for education, and especially for educating the young, became a concern that filtered through to the lower classes. These days, teachers fret over large class-sizes. I still recall my first year in primary: we first graders shared the same classroom with the second grade, and one teacher took care of the lot at the same time. But this is idyllic if compared to classrooms in the late Renaissance!

You had first graders of every age between seven and twenty-five sitting in one room with second, third, and fourth graders. Many of the most renowned educators were practicing pedophiles. So parents still saw no good reason to send their daughters to school. Only gradually the Jesuits' colleges set a trend for stricter discipline and the separation of the ages.

A new concept of parenthood developed.

Up to this point the Church had paid little attention to such mundane matters as marriage. Without much ceremony, newly wed couples used to receive an informal blessing under the open sky, or at best under the arch to the entrance of the local church. In fact the Church still had to develop a concept for marriage and family life that could replace the old scriptural polemics against marrying and family. Marriage became a "holy sacrament" and the couples began exchanging their vows at the altar.

The fruit of such commitment, the little ones, became precious, and their still frequent deaths was a source of increasing feelings of grief. For the first time since Antiquity, we find again infants been put to rest in individually marked graves.

Supervision intensified; early tuition was recognized as a means to keep kids out of trouble. Children wore the same costumes as their parents and from early on displayed the airs of their social class. They no longer exposed their genitals in public and slept in a place removed from their parent's bed. It was not exactly fairyland. The kids were on a mission: to grow up as soon as possible and play their part in the family’s permanent race for more perks and bigger fortunes.

Then came the industrial revolution. It gave birth to the nuclear family.

The paramilitary discipline on low wages in the Victorian workhouse was a regress to an all too familiar type of slavery where children were shown the charity of being exploited as a cheap source of labor. Which in turn enforced the parental determination to rise above the mines and cotton mills.

For a child from the middle-classes the period of learning began to stretch way beyond the biological disposition of the species. A new myth was born, the myth of innocent infancy. This myth is still keeping  parents in the dark about what is going on out there. It taught us to habitually lie to our children and not only about the birds and the bees. Sweatshops are no longer deemed acceptable, but with every day the industry discovers new ways of exploiting the parents with offers of age related clothing, age related literature, videogames, and the absurdities of our pop culture.

 

© - 3/22/2007 - by michael sympson,

1,250 words, all rights reserved