The Innovation of Childhood

 

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

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 know of this man’s childhood as a mere street urchin in the narrow lanes of Palermo.

Frederick was heir to the most powerful dynasty of his time. In his veins rolled the blood of German emperors and the Dukes of Normandy, and despite the unpromising beginning, he became the best-educated and most enlightened autocrat known to history. That was later in life; at the moment Frederick was a typical child of the period. Like every other infant he was on a race against measles, small pocks, diphtheria, and polio, and the odds weren't good. He lost both his parents in quick succession when still a toddler. His appointed guardian was Lothario de’ Conti, the genocidal Pope Innocent III, the destroyer of Constantinople, the 5th horseman of the apocalypse for the Albigensians, the man who imprisoned the European Jews in the ghetto and put a yellow star on their garb. In other words, before the age of fourteen, Frederick was, more or less, on his own. Like the other kids in the filthy streets of Palermo he never washed and rummaged through the trash wearing a sexless, undistinguished garb, exposing the genitalia. The future emperor’s begging and thieving was not needed to contribute to a poor family's income, but he still had to eat. Drinking small beer was the only way to escape the diarrhea lurking in the fresh water wells. Had he failed to make it, an unmarked hole in the ground would have been waiting for him. Parents of this period preferred not to become too attached to the deaths of their little ones; the grieving mother was told not to worry, there soon will be a new one replacing the loss.

Once the little sucker had passed the critical age of five or seven, he was deemed ready to fend for himself and contracted out as an apprentice to the shops of a chartered guild or to attend the table of a noble in the neighborhood. If the kid was lucky, he received rudimentary tuition; as a person with academic ambitions, he would pass years of vagrancy on the open road between the universities, hoping for a minor function on the big estates, or for a career in the episcopate.

The arrival of the printing press finally created awareness for the need of better education. Until then, only in the Low Countries even the common people could read and write.

These days, I hear teachers fretting 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 was idyllic if compared to the 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, and just one tutor running the entire school.

Many of the most renowned educators of the period were practicing pedophiles. So, naturally, parents hesitated to send their daughters to school. On the other hand, the modern reader may consider the French poet François Villon (1431 – 1463) a victim of child abuse, yet Villon himself never complained, in fact felt closely attached to his abuser and benefactor. It was the Jesuits who separated the ages in their schools and set a trend for stricter discipline. Early tuition and prolonged supervision became a means to keep the kids out of trouble. It paved the way for the nuclear family. For the first time since the fall of Rome, infants were again put to rest in individually marked graves; their still frequent deaths became a source of inconsolable grief, “don’t worry we make a new one,” was no longer an acceptable way of expressing condolences. The kids were no longer allowed to expose their genitals in public and they slept in a place removed from their parent's bed. Dressed in the same costumes as their parents, these children began displaying the airs of their social class. It was not exactly fairyland. The kids were on a mission: to grow up and as soon as possible play their part in the family’s race for perks and fortunes.

Then came the industrial revolution.

The paramilitary discipline on low wages in the Victorian workhouse was a regress to an all too familiar pattern of slavery where children received the charity of getting exploited as a source of cheap labor. In turn this enforced the parental determination to rise above the mines and cotton mills.

For a child from the middle-class the period of learning now stretched way beyond the biological disposition of the species. A new myth was born, the myth of the innocence of infancy. It taught the Victorians to habitually lie to their children, and not only about the birds and the bees. This myth is still keeping parents in the dark about what is going on out there when the kid has left the house. Sweatshops are no longer deemed acceptable and therefore delegated to the third world, but with every day the industry discovers new ways of exploiting the parents, offering age related clothing, age related literature, videogames, and the absurdities of our pop culture.

© - 3/22/2009 - by michael sympson, 1,000 words, all rights reserved