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 know that this man in his childhood was 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. Regardless of the perks of noble birth later in life, Frederick was a typical child of the period. He had lost both his parents in quick succession when still a toddler. His appointed guardian was Lothario de’ Conti, the infamous Pope Innocent III, the 5th horseman of the apocalypse. In other words, before the age of fourteen Frederick was more or less on his own. Like the other kids in Palermo’s filthy streets he never washed and rummaged through the trash wearing a sexless, undistinguished garb, exposing the genitalia. The future emperor’s begging and thieving may not have been needed to contribute to a poor family's income, but he still had to eat. Every infant was on a race against measles, small pocks, diphtheria, and polio, and the odds weren't good. Drinking small beer was the only way to escape the diarrhea lurking in every water well. Failing to make it was leading to an unmarked hole in the ground. Parents of this period preferred not to involve themselves too emotionally in the frequent deaths of their little ones, the grieving mother was told to take comfort in a possible replacement for the loss.

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 even for the Renaissance this was a foreign concept. A parent's affection could be as intense as in the modern nuclear family, but it was set in a different context, less possessive and more involved in the transactions of adult society.

Once the little sucker 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. If lucky enough to receive a rudimentary tuition, a person with academic ambitions passed 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. However most children didn’t receive formal schooling anyway and were hired out to a network of chartered apprenticeships. The arrival of the printing press finally created an awareness for the need of better education, especially of the young. At that time only in the Low Countries basic literacy was common and even had filtered through to the peasantry.

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 was 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 of the period were practicing pedophiles. So parents saw no good reason to send their daughters to school. 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 benefactor. It was the Jesuits who separated the age-groups in their schools and set a trend for stricter discipline. The middle classes began using early tuition and prolonged supervision as a means to keep kids out of trouble. It paved the way for the nuclear family. For the first time since Antiquity, infants were again put to rest in individually marked graves, their still frequent deaths became a source of inconsolable grief to which, “don’t worry we make a new one,” was no longer an acceptable answer. The kids no longer exposed their genitals in public and 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 more perks and bigger 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 began stretching 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 also keeping parents in the dark about what is going on out there. 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.

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