The
Innovation of Childhood
|
There he played: at the
dilly dilly darling, at jog breech, or prick him for-, at bobbing, or
flirt
on the nose, at the larks, at fillipping.
|
Francois Rabelais (1495-1553)
|
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