There is no single set of beliefs about children; childhood is a social and cultural construct. Social constructionism is concerned with ideas about children, not facts about them. Indeed, many social constructionists would deny the existence of any universal facts about children (Woodhead and Montgomery 2003:46). Ideas about children change because they are dependent on their social, cultural and historical context. The ideas held concerning children have consequences, they affect the way children are treated and thought about (James and James 2008:122). Postman (1994) believes that childhood in its’ current conception is ‘disappearing.’
https://www.123helpme.com/essay/Postmans-thesis-on-the-disappearance-of-childhood-238989
The Development of Childhood
In lucid, commonsense style, Postman begins his book by tracing the development of childhood in Greek and Roman cultures. The author searches to discover the answers to questions such as:
- Where did the idea of childhood come from?
- Why and how did it come about?
- Why is childhood disappearing?
Throughout the Middle Ages there was complete non-interest in children. Postman argues that this attitude or social tendency changed with the introduction of the printing press. He states that the printing press created a new definition of adulthood based on reading competence and a new conception of childhood based on reading incompetence (p18). There were no children because there was no means for adults to know exclusive information. The printing press created a new symbolic world that required a new conception of adulthood, one that excluded children. This invention defined childhood as the period in one’s life when one learned how to read in order to become a civilized, literate adult who could comprehend complex information. Once this initial separation was achieved, other areas followed. The clothes of children became different, their language (slang) was different, books on pediatrics were written, and children’s literature came about. Complementing this was the rich content of secrets that society began to keep from children as the idea of childhood continued to develop. Control of these secrets meant control and power over children. This control was not malicious; in fact, more often than not, such control was exerted for benevolent reasons. It is important to note that childhood did not spring full grown from the printing press; Postman acknowledges that though it is a crucial element in the formation of childhood, it is not the only one.
The Erosion of Childhood
All of this of course begs the question “Why?” If by 1850 childhood was a social principle, why and how is it disappearing now? We can trace the beginnings of the erosion of childhood back to the invention of the telegraph, which occurred in 1840. The telegraph began the process of making information uncontrollable and pointless (p 71). Childhood is an outgrowth of an environment completely controlled by adults who decide the quantity of information a child has access to; information was made known in stages they could assimilate psychologically (p 72). The maintenance of childhood rested on the control of information and sequential learning. The telegraph made information uncontrollable; quantity, not quality, became the overriding concern. Childhood would have remained intact if the electronic revolution stopped there, but of course, this was only the beginning. The way people communicated began to change: first the telegraph, then the camera, phonograph, movies, radio, television, and now the internet. The printed word requires the reader to respond to the content, but pictures usually just call for an emotional response rather than a thinking one. When communication can be achieved by pointing with a finger, the mouth grows silent, the writing hand stops, and the mind shrinks (p 74). This observation was made, believe it or not, in 1935!
Why do these inventions cause the idea of childhood to disappear? The first reason concerns the accessibility of information. Growing up is a process of finding things out. This whole system collapses with the introduction of electronic media, but especially with the invention of the television. Watching television not only requires no skill, but develops no skill (p 79). Have you ever heard of someone with a TV viewing disability? No one gets better or worse at watching TV. Television also presents information to everyone. There is full access for everyone to all the information and knowledge television has to offer. A ten-year old can watch shows intended for adults. With full access to information, there are no secrets and no shame; without these, childhood cannot exist. Just as there is no need for lawyers if everyone knew what lawyers know, so the distinction between children and adults disappears when they both know the same information. The shows our children are watching are physically causing them to lose their childhood. I am not advocating that all children should be completely sheltered and protected from all the secrets of the adult world, but simply stating that television is the absolute worst medium for children from which to learn these secrets.
https://www.christianstudylibrary.org/article/where-have-our-children-gone
In his “The Disappearance of Childhood” Neil postman distinguishes three
periods in human history when it comes to childhood.
1. Pre-childhood phase - the Middle Ages. There was no concept
of childhood, the child was a small adult, a full partner in rights and
duties, and in terms of knowledge there was no difference between adults and
children.
2. The childhood stage - the age of printing. Thanks to the
pattern, an understanding is needed, literacy is needed, a partition is
created between children and adults - adults know literacy and children do
not know and they depend on parental mediation, there is authority between
parent and child, the child needs the parent to read the book. This is the
ideal period according to Postman.
3. The stage of childhood loss - TV - As a result of its
visual nature, television is accessible to everyone - a child and an elderly
person equally, it does not require control of a particular code. In this
age, according to Postman, we lose innocence and childhood - children grow
up very quickly, parents and teachers lose their authority. Creates
maturation very fast - the child matures very quickly and the parents try to
stay young forever, blurring the distinction between the adult and the
child. This is manifested in many areas: clothing, violence, rape culture,
phenomena that have been prominent in recent years and according to Postman
it is created because television becomes a socializing agent more and more
affects children - they want to look like they are shown on TV In fact, in
the war of company agents in front of the media. With the book the situation
is different - because if a child wants to be exposed to a certain book that
is problematic in terms of content - it is more limited - you have to buy it
Of medium-level and content-level television.
https://culturalstudiesnow.blogspot.com/2020/12/short-basic-summary-disappearance-of.html
1. The Creation of Childhood & Children’s Literature
To even entertain the possibility of the disappearance of children’s literature, we have to first take notice of the fact that there was a time when childhood, as we know it, did not exist. In his now familiar observation, Philippe Aries has argued that the concept of “childhood” was unknown before the Renaissance. Until then, children (after they attained the “age of reason”) were regarded as small adults who mingled, competed, and worked with mature adults.[i]
Many people find it difficult to imagine a time when “children” did not exist because our own acceptance of the cultural construct of “childhood” has been so pervasive that it is now confused with biological fact. Our imaginations are taxed when we try to imagine a culture where children are not distinguished from adults. For us, it seems to mean imagining incongruities — say, legions of ten year-olds in business suits, swinging their briefcases downtown and talking on cell phones; or children mingling with grown-ups, say, in Las Vegas, their drinks in hand, on their way to risquè shows.
As Marie Winn has noted, it is easier to imagine a time when childhood
didn’t exist if we remember that in pre-industrial times the world of labor
meant agriculture and arts and crafts, conducted at home and with the help
of child labor.[ii] A visit to the museum is also an aid to conception
because as J. H. Plumb has observed, in the world revealed by old paintings
there is no separate realm of childhood: in a painting by Brueghel, for
example, a “coarse village festival [is] depicted, . . . showing men and
women besotted with drink, groping each other with unbridled lust, [and]
children eating and drinking with adults.”[iii]
Pieter Brueghel II (The Younger) , “Village Fair” (Village festival in Honour of Saint Hubert and Saint Anthony). Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.
The concept of “childhood,” Aries argues, first appeared in the 1600’s and gradually developed when children began to be distinguished from adults in everything from clothing fashions to norms of acceptable behavior. Speculation about the special nature of the “child” began then, and along with the development of schools and curricula. By the same token, “adulthood” became something to achieve — a guild with its own knowledge (e.g., reading) and secrets (e.g., sex) that “children” had to be prepared for or initiated into.
Childhood did not, however, arise full blown overnight. Its development was gradual and fitful. While at first a luxury of the privileged classes, “childhood” and its perquisites came to be seen (under the inspiration of John Locke and Henri Rousseau) as the birthright of any child (qua “child”). But this democratic impulse suffered setbacks along the way — for example, during the Industrial Revolution when youths, once again, found themselves laboring alongside adults; indeed, the popularity of Dickens’ novels, for example, might be said to reflect the cultural collision that occurred when “children,” trailing Wordsworthian “clouds of glory,” were seen working in mines and sweat shops. At the same time, “childhood” did not occur in all places at once; even today, in some places in the world, it seems for many to have never occurred at all.
“Snap the Whip,” Winslow Homer (1872). Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
In the United States, a pervasive notion of childhood might be reckoned to have begun in the mid-nineteenth century. While there were certainly some well-to-do parents before that time who were aware of European fashions and who had the means to coddle their offspring in that special and leisurely period of time known as childhood, for the most part (in a largely agrarian culture and in the busy beginnings of the country) children were required to quickly put childhood behind them and enter adulthood with dispatch, to help on the farm and become mature providers as soon as possible. A real interest children and in the special nature of childhood did not occur in America until after 1865 when, for example, child-labor laws were introduced, the public school movement was begun, pediatrics was accepted as a legitimate specialty in medical schools, social and governmental agencies concerned with child welfare were created, and so forth. As Neil Postman has observed, “If we use the word children in the fullest sense in which the average American understands it, childhood [in America] is not much more than a hundred and fifty years old.”[iv]
If “childhood” is a relatively new concept, “children’s literature” might be reckoned an even more recent phenomenon. Historians generally point to its origin with John Newbery, the English bookseller who in the 1740’s established the trade of publishing books directly intended for children. During that era, however, “children’s literature” was not as discrete as we have come to think of it; in addition to imaginative works, it included folklore which had always had an audience of all ages (fairy tales, ballads about Robin Hood, legends of King Arthur, and the like) and works which seem more an adjunct to child-raising than imaginative literature (ABC and toy books, volumes on courtesy and manners, exemplary spiritual biographies, and lessons about good and bad apprentices). Generally speaking, prior to the 1850’s, children’s literature was in its infancy and a feeble branch of letters; few people besides literary historians are likely to recognize, for example, the names of Hannah More and Peter Parley. After the 1850’s, however, children’s literature became a genuinely robust genre, with the appearance of such authors as Lewis Carroll, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Henry Steele Commanger explains the situation in this way. In the past, children and adults shared equally in “the great tradition of literature” — which extended from Aesop, Plutarch, King Arthur, and Perrault; through Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver’s Travels; to Scott, Austen, the Brontes and Dickens in England or, in America, to Cooper, Poe, and Longfellow.[v] But somewhere along the way, in the Nineteenth Century, arose a distinct category of children’s literature. This occurred, some scholars have suggested, when something called “adult literature” was invented and veered away from the mainstream of “the great tradition.” The remnant, “children’s literature,” arose by default.[vi]
The Disappearance of Childhood & Children’s Literature as Nostalgia
https://jerrygriswold.medium.com/the-disappearance-of-childhood-childrens-literature-as-nostalgia-9976a95d9064
Neil Postman on the Disappearance of Childhood
By Frank W. Elwell
“But once the machine is built, we discover—sometimes to our horror, usually to our discomfort, always to our surprise—that it has ideas of its own” (1982/1994:21)
Inevitably new technologies cause changes in institutional structures as well as ideas, ideologies, beliefs,and even habits of thought. This, Postman asserts, is generally true of technology; it is especially true of communications technologies. For Postman, the prime movers in sociocultural change are technology and consequent changes of the division of labor; combined, these forces change social structures and ultimately the very character of the men and women who inhabit the society.
In perhaps his most provocative book, The Disappearance of Childhood, Postman attempts to explain why the dividing line between childhood and adulthood is rapidly eroding in contemporary society, and why the social role of the child may well disappear in modern industrial society. His contribution to this topic, he points out, is not in documenting this erosion; many observers have remarked upon the disappearance in the past. Rather, his contribution is in explaining both the origin of childhood itself as well as the reasons for its decline. Specifically, Postman posits that both the rise of the social role of the child and its consequent decline is rooted in changes in communications technology (1982/1994, xii).
The invention of the printing press and the spread of a print culture is the primary causal agent in the rise of childhood. Replacing print culture with an electronic medium in which imagery is the main conveyor of information is the primary agent in its decline (xii-xiii). In a world dominated by oral tradition, Postman states, there is not a sharp distinction between children and adults. In such a world, childhood ends at about the age of seven when the child has mastered speech. At the age of seven “the medieval child would have had access to almost all of the forms of behavior common to the culture” (15).
Save for sex and war, medieval youth would fully partake in adult life, sharing in games, work, play, and stories. The culture did not have need or means of keeping information away from youth. There were few secrets between the generations; upon attaining the age of seven the youth fully entered the adult world. Because it was an oral culture, Postman asserts, there was no need to prolong the socialization process so that youth can master reading and esoteric knowledge beyond the immediate local culture; thus no need of educational institutions in which youth are segregated from adults and age graded so that they can master both reading and be gradually exposed to the harsher ways of the world; no well-developed concept of shame because all have ready access to oral information. With the invention of the printing press in about 1450 and the spread of literacy, the “communication environment” rapidly changed.
Literacy gradually became a great divide among people; to become literate was to become a fully functioning adult, to engage in a new world of facts, impressions, and opinions beyond the local milieu (28). More than this, Postman says, “typography was by no means a neutral conveyor of information.” Rather, printing changed the very organization and structure of thought. “The unyielding linearity of the printed book—the sequential nature of its sentence-by-sentence presentation, its paragraphing, its alphabetized indices, its standardized spelling and grammar” promoted “a structure of consciousness that closely parallels the structure of typography”(30 & 32).
With the spread of literacy, young and old began to live in different worlds; one now had to achieve adulthood by mastering literacy and the habits of mind it promoted. To do this, Postman adds, required the development of institutions to provide this education, which makes the creation of childhood a necessity (36). The relationship between the spread of literacy, the development of schools, and the growing conception of childhood as a part of the life cycle is incontrovertible.
Over the next few centuries adults took more and more formal control over the socialization of youth, setting forth more stringent criteria for the attainment of adulthood (39). The concept of childhood spreads with mass literacy and schooling and eventually reaches the lower classes as well. To facilitate this formal learning, youth were required to undergo the strict discipline of the schoolhouse, to sit quietly in neat rows, hands folded on the desk. “The capacity to control and overcome one’s nature became one of the defining characteristics of adulthood and therefore one of the essential purposes of education, for some, the essential purpose of education” (46-47).
At the same time, the family gradually became organized around childhood and schooling, and both the family and school promoted the idea of discipline and restraint of bodily functions. Citing Elias, Postman adds that a clear distinction was drawn between private and public behavior. Shame and embarrassment became associated with sexual behavior as well as other biological functions. There developed a whole vocabulary of words deemed too sensitive for the ears of children. Adults “began to collect a rich content of secrets to be kept from the young: secrets about sexual relations, but also about money, violence, about illness, about death, about social relations”(48-49).
This monopoly on the control of information and experience to the child was maintained by a print culture in which age graded exposure to more in-depth and complex information was carefully monitored and controlled by the family and by the school. This monopoly was easily maintained in that basic reading itselfwas difficult to master and literature dealing with adult themes and privileged knowledge was of sufficient complexity to deter children entry until they had undergone years of training in reading, vocabulary, and syntax (79). “The maintenance of childhood depended on the principles of managed information and sequential learning” (72).
But with the advent of electronic information, particularly when television was introduced directly into the home, this monopoly crumbled. Television, Postman points out, is a visual medium that requires no training and is available to be viewed and understood by all. “In learning to interpret the meaning of images, we do not require lessons in grammar or spelling or logic or vocabulary. We require no analogue of the McGuffey Reader, no preparation, no prerequisite training. Watching television not only requires no skills but develops no skills” (79). The barriers between adulthood and childhood are eroded; there is no longer the possibility of segregating information from the young. All are exposed to the adult world—murder and mayhem, lust and titillation, greed and consumerism—through television melodrama and comedy, talk shows, game shows, news shows, “reality” shows, and commercials (80).
These shows are running on hundreds of stations twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Most are competing for a wider audience and much of this competition consists of coming up with new and novel situations, information, and images to attract and hold that audience. Thus television constantly seeks to push the envelope by depicting all manner of human behavior, ideas, and lifestyles. Nothing is held back, all have access (82). And without secrets or any sense of shame, Postman adds, childhood must necessarily disappear. Groups are largely defined by the exclusivity of information and knowledge that their members share, Postman says, and adults no longer enjoy such exclusive knowledge (80).
To say that television has significantly changed the socialization process of youth is also to make the claim that it has changed the meaning and form of adulthood as well. It is in The Disappearance of Childhood that Postman first broaches the themes of electronic media changing the character of adult intellectual and emotional capacities, emphasizing emotional responses to political candidates, consumer products, and social issues as opposed to rational interest, logic, reflection, and reason (50, 63, & 98).
The electronic media reduces the complexity of any subject to simple slogans; politics becomes trivialized to personality and images. More generally Postman asks, “What is the effect on grown-ups of a culture dominated by pictures and stories? What is the effect of a medium that is entirely centered on the present, that has no capability of revealing the continuity of time? What is the effect of a medium that must abjure conceptual complexity and highlight personality? What is the effect of a medium that always asks for an immediate, emotional response?” (107). More generally still, Postman asks “What is the effect on an entire culture of a society that has given full reign to technological progress?” It is to provide answers to these questions that drives all of Postman’s writings (145-146). We will explore this theme further in a future Short Essay.
For a more extensive discussion of Postman's theories refer to Macro Social Theory by Frank W. Elwell. Also see Sociocultural Systems: Principles of Structure and Change to learn how his insights contribute to a more complete understanding of modern societies.
Bibliography:
Elwell, F. W. 2009. Macrosociology: The Study of Sociocultural Systems. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press.
Elwell, F. W. 2006. Macrosociology: Four Modern Theorists. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
Elwell, F. W. 2013. Sociocultural Systems: Principles of Structure and Change. Alberta: Athabasca University Press.
Postman, N. (1982/1994). The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Random House.
Postman, N. (1984). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Viking Penguin Inc.
Postman, N. (1992). Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Postman, N. (1995). The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. New York: Random House, Inc.
Postman, A. (2003, October 8). Eulogy for Neil Postman. New York.
To reference Neil Postman on the Disappearance of Childhood you should use the following format:
Elwell, Frank W. 2013. "Neil Postman on the Disappearance of Childhood,” Retrieved August 31, 2013 [use actual date] http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/~felwell/Theorists/Essays/Postman1.htm
Served since March, 2005.
©2013 Frank Elwell, Send comments to felwell at
rsu.edu
https://www.faculty.rsu.edu/users/f/felwell/www/Theorists/Essays/Postman1.html
Disappearance of Childhood - Free Essay Example
Childhood is a social artifact, not a biological category. Human genes do not contain clear instructions about who is a child, and who is not; the survival laws also do not require differences between the adult world and the world of children. In fact, if we consider that the word "child" refers to a special class of people aged between 7 and 17 years, requires special forms of treatment and protection, and is considered to be qualitatively different from the adults’ class - then there are many evidences to suggest that the children exist in this world at least for 400 years. In the Medieval ages, there was almost no difference between adults and children because when the latter were reaching the age of 6-7 years old, they were starting to work in factories and fields together with their parents. In many countries, the tradition of birthday congratulation appeared less than 200 years ago.
In today’s world we got used to think that children should have happy childhoods; nevertheless, the stream of research literature about childhood proclaims about gradual disappearance of the childhood category in the modern world. In order to create a general idea about the development of childhood as a period, we need historical evidence for the past two and a half thousand years.
Greek antiquity had no idea about childhood as a separate age category. Extant literary and mythological sources, which involve the young characters, do not allow thinking that they are talking about children. For example, in " Oeconomicus" Xenophon showed fourteen years girl, brought up in the idea that she has to "see less, hear less, and talk less" (Postman, 1994), that seems more like an example of a young woman and future wife, than the child. Up to the IV century BC in Greece, there were no moral or legal prohibitions of infanticide. It was very cruel, in comparison with modern standards. Even Aristotle, with some restrictions, approved the abortion practice and the "rejection" of disabled children. However, it is necessary to note that the Greeks cultivated the idea of education. Postman argued that the existence of schools can be viewed as the fact that the Greeks had already begun to develop the idea of childhood. In Roman culture, the concept of childhood was much clearer than in the Greek one. First of all, Rome picked up and developed the Greek idea of the education need for the young generation. Secondly, Roman culture made a critical step towards the institutionalization of this age group, because it proclaimed the concept of shame. With the fall of the Roman Empire and the onset of the Middle Ages the attitude towards children has dramatically changed. Important social parameters towards childhood such as literacy and shame acquired at school had disappeared:
To revive the social idea of childhood, the world had to face significant changes. In the Middle Ages there were many tragic and large-scale events - such as the plague ("Black Death"), and the invention of many important things (such as mechanical watches), but they do not significantly impact the world view of Europeans. Only the invention of the printing press in the middle of the XV century has radically transformed the whole symbolism of European culture and led to the formation of the concept of adulthood, and thus childhood. Moreover, the first book for children - "Jack - the giant-killer", was published only in 1744.
The vast spread of technology, tendency of the “flatting” world, and the appearance of huge informational streams have changed the way people think about the childhood. In modern culture these trends has led to the fact that society approved a new age of human life. Traditional life stages: infancy, childhood, adulthood (adult age) and old age gave way to the new, three-part division: childhood, child-adult, extreme old age (senility). Adult-child has intellectual and emotional capabilities that are feasible, but in our time this social type becomes the norm. Therefore, for many children aged from 7 till 17 the childhood has disappeared, because people can see the 12-13 aged girls posing for the fashion magazines in sexual poses and apparel. Clothing differences among adults and children had also vanished; the latter look like the former with cosmetics, fashion clothes, accessories, etc. Children stopped to play games, for example, the traditional “hide-and-seek” is so unpopular that many children even do not know the rules of this game.
At the end of the chapter Neil Postmen said that the childhood has slipped from people’s grasp. Disappearance of childhood is the broad topic to think about for everyone, who still thinks that it is important part of everybody’s life.
https://essayswriters.com/essays/Exploratory/disappearance-of-childhood.html
Neil Postman presents an interesting theory as to why the concept of childhood is disappearing. He takes the reader on a historical trip back to the Middle Ages where no culture of childhood existed. Children were treated as small adults. Small, helpless adults that bigger, stronger adults were at liberty to take advantage of. They were expected to work like adults and serve those stronger than themselves. They were not protected from adult themes, such as exposure to sexual situations which they either witnessed or at times were forcibly involved in.
According to Postman, the concept of childhood began with the invention of the printing press. The ability to read created a division between adults and children because adults were now keepers of information that children did not have access to. Not only did the printing press create a class of children, it also created a class of adults, something else that did not exist previously.
As a result, starting with churches, schools were raised to create a literate society. Instead of children being sent straight to work they now were expected to spend their youth learning how to decode symbols and deduce meaning from them. This exercise opened them up to a universe of concepts and ideas that developed their own intellectual capacity. Society began producing abstract thinkers.
It's interesting to note that it was first Protestant churches that began the widespread use of schools before the Catholic church which was very much embedded in the practice of reverencing images. Imagery in the Catholic church was a powerful tool in teaching congregations Biblical history and principles. Icons and other images as paintings, statues etc.. were an integral part of worship.
Nevertheless, Catholics soon got on board and are responsible for schools worldwide and can also be credited for spreading literacy and as a result, childhood.
Literacy produced a culture of children because it produced adults. Adults now possessed abilities and knowledge that children didn't have and children were expected to spend their childhood acquiring these abilities in order to become functioning adults in a society that was now shaped by a largely educated demographic.
That is not to say that literacy was immediate and it took some time to trickle down to the poorest communities. However, church schools weren't respecters of people and both Catholic and Protestant churches planted schools worldwide in every neighborhood poor or rich.
Eventually, this was taken over in Europe and North America by the government.
https://sharonhenning.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-disappearance-of-childhood-by-neil.html
Childhood, he says, is not a real thing anyway. Apart from infancy (which is clearly biological) it’s just an idea or a social role. And now that idea is obsolescent.
Before the printing press came along (C15), he says, children dressed like adults, did the same things as adults, and were exposed to all of adulthood’s violence and sexuality. Grown-ups, on the other hand, were rather child-like. Most people (even clerical scribes) were illiterate. There wasn’t really anything grown-ups knew that children didn’t know – so why make a big distinction?
But the printing press meant books became widespread. For the first time since classical times, there was social literacy. And book learning by its very nature created stages of development. Now there was a need for schools and universities. The advent of schools created a need for childhood. Society responded by making children more visibly different.
https://nathanbronx.com/2017/09/28/the-disappearance-of-childhood/
Unnatural Age-segregation in Traditional Schools
In today’s society, age segregation, where children are separated into age-specific groupings, has become increasingly prevalent. Although it is unnatural, and possibly unhealthy, children are regularly separated from adults in playgroups, daycares, and schools. These institutions further segregate children by birth year. Children live for 13 years in an age-segregated bubble. Their lives provide them very limited exposure to adults and children of other age groups. This artificial age-segregation is not found in nature and leads to a lack of understanding between ages.
Historically, age segregation has effectively diminished the understanding between people of different ages which occurred naturally. This lack of understanding of people of different ages has contributed to many of today’s social problems. Sheltered into their own age groups, children’s emotional and social growth is crippled. Children become incapable of fully understanding people older or younger than themselves because they lack familiarity with either.
Unfortunately, children and families feel the ill consequences of this age-segregated society. Children’s ability to spend time with younger or older siblings is further limited by school and activities such as organized sports and after school classes. Children are also cut off from the real daily work and concerns of their parents. Children’s lives become too busy to spend quality time with grandparents. Many of society’s problems arise from this clear-cut age-segregation. I believe much crime would decrease if children felt like they were more deeply connected to people of all ages in their community, especially crimes related to children rebelling, crimes against society, and those against elderly people.
https://american-academy.org/2020/06/25/unnatural-age-segregation-in-traditional-schools/
In today’s society, age segregation is an accepted way of life. Children are separated off from adults daily into crèches, kindergartens and schools which in turn further segregate them by birth year. Elderly people are frequently consigned to nursing homes and, to further exacerbate the isolation of each age group, families are inclined to purchase new homes in subdivisions full of families with similar age children. Their lives provide limited exposure to other age groups.
This segregation is artificial and leads to a lack of understanding between ages. It is also a modern invention. For centuries families lived together in rural societies with a mixture of ages. In large families there was a spread of ages from the oldest child to the youngest of twenty years or more. One household could contain parents and children ranging from infants to young married people with children of their own. Alternatively, the household might include an aged parent being supported by their grown children. All these people of different ages lived and worked together, adjusting to each other’s needs and abilities as required. People therefore had an understanding of the issues facing a whole range of ages. The benefits included a sense of continuum. Having younger siblings reminded people of themselves minus a few years, and older ones formed a connecting bridge between childhood and adulthood. For those children who survived the health hazards of the first five years, the dependent stage of life was over. They then entered a long period of semi-dependency in which each had their own place in the family and gradually took more responsibility as they grew. Young people had the advantage of serving a kind of apprenticeship in parenthood as they cared for their younger siblings and had their parents or older siblings as role models and mentors whilst they grew into adulthood.
The industrial revolution brought a decline in this way of life. The mass population movement to the cities broke down extended families. Initially, children accompanied their parents to work in the new factories just as they had always been involved in their rural and domestic work. Perilous factory conditions led to the Factory and Education Acts of the nineteenth century which defined children as a separate population and excluded them from adult work-places and daily company. They were henceforth confined to schools and could be admitted to adult society and work only after they had served their required years.
https://home-ed.vic.edu.au/age-segregation-is-unnatural/
Printing Press, Literacy & The Rise/Fall of the Secret Society of Adults
The Creation of a Secret Society of Adults
As we mentioned last time, the idea that childhood and adulthood represent distinct periods of life is relatively recent in origin. From antiquity through medieval times, a concept of childhood, as we know it today, was almost completely absent in most societies; children were seen as deficient, miniature adults, and were expected to begin to work and take their place in the adult world around the age of 7. Without a real concept of childhood, there was no real concept of adulthood either, as the two states act as foils for each other. Adults and children largely wore the same types of clothes, used the same language, and did the same work. And, in an oral society, the young and the old had access to, and an understanding of, most of the same knowledge. As a result, children in such cultures were rather adult-like, while the adults were somewhat child-like. The young and old were fairly indistinguishable from each other.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, childhood began to be “discovered” as a special time in which little humans are in need of a particular kind of guidance, tenderness, and emotional investment. There are a variety of theories as to why this interest in children arose, but the argument Neil Postman lays out in The Disappearance of Childhood is surely the most fascinating.
Postman argues that our modern concepts of childhood and adulthood (and the gulf between them) were birthed by the printing press. Literacy became the dividing line between these stages of life; adults were competent readers, children were not, and they thus had to become adults by mastering written language.
Typography created a much larger realm of possible knowledge than had ever been possible to learn before. In an oral culture, childhood ended around age 7 because that was the age where kids were able to assimilate most of a society’s store of knowledge. In a literate culture, on the other hand, learning how to comprehend and grapple with a vast library of knowledge took time; a 5-year-old was not ready for the same lessons and texts as a 15-year-old. Thus at the same time that books democratized knowledge, they also added a barrier to entry that had to be steadily surmounted. Step-by-step, and grade-by-grade, the child was initiated into the world of grownups. Boys and girls slowly learned the “secrets” of the adult world by progressively “qualifying for the deeper mysteries of the printed page.”
A critical understanding of the “secrets” of philosophy, faith, nature, sexuality, war, sickness, and death – an “understanding of life’s mysteries, its contradictions, its violence, its tragedies” – is what made an adult an adult, and qualified one for membership in a kind of “society of grownups.” The more degrees of ascending cognitive crafts an adult mastered, the more potential leadership positions were open to him within this fraternity.
Membership in the society of grownups is what granted adults one of their defining qualities: authority. And the desire to seek admission into this fraternity is what helped children develop one of their signature traits: curiosity.
Children were excluded from the society of the literate until they had continually knocked at the door and mastered its traditions and rituals. These qualifications not only included competency with the written word, but the art of self-discipline and civility as well. For Postman argues that literacy didn’t just inculcate the adult ability to think logically and critically, but also beget the qualities necessary for the creation of civilization itself:
“Almost all of the characteristics we associate with adulthood are those that are (and were) either generated or amplified by the requirements of a fully literate culture: the capacity for self-restraint, a tolerance for delayed gratification, a sophisticated ability to think conceptually and sequentially, a preoccupation with both historical continuity and the future, [and] a high valuation of reason and hierarchical order…
As already noted, manners or civilité did not begin to emerge in elaborated forms among the mass of people until after the printing press, in large measure because literacy both demanded and promoted a high degree of self-control and delayed gratification. Manners, one might say, are a social analogue to literacy. Both require a submission of body to mind. Both require a fairly long developmental learning process. Both require intensive adult teaching. As literacy creates a hierarchical intellectual order, manners create a hierarchical social order. Children must earn adulthood by becoming both literate and well-mannered.”
In other words, Postman argues that the printing press helped create a culture of self-restraint and civility, both because these were the qualities necessary to be a good reader, and because they were fitting for a culture that prized literacy. In practicing one’s manners, one practiced the traits necessary for disciplined study, and in studying, one honed the qualities necessary for self-controlled civility. Part of the initiation into the society of adults was learning the “secrets” of social relations, which is why etiquette books proved to be bestsellers for centuries.
To teach children to be “both literate and well-mannered,” schools were created, and this, Postman posits, is what ultimately created distinct cultures of adults and children. Schools separated out children from adults, and each developed their own language, literature (there didn’t used to be such things as “children’s books” or “YA Lit”), clothing, games, and so on. Gradually, children left behind the trappings of kid culture, as they were initiated into the rituals and traditions of adulthood.
A Return to a Pre-literate Society?
Postman observes that our modern society seems to have returned to the conditions that once characterized pre-literate, oral cultures. Adults and children are not so different as they once were; as Postman puts it, “Everywhere one looks, it may be seen that the behavior, language, attitudes, and desires—even the physical appearance—of adults and children are becoming increasingly indistinguishable.”
What has occurred to create this blurring between the different stages of life?
Postman argues that this shift is rooted in the leaving behind of the printed word for a culture that communicates largely through images. Images do not require much in the way of cognitive cultivation to understand them; children and adults can grasp pictures and videos at about the same level. Thus in an image-based society, everyone, of every age, theoretically has access to all of society’s knowledge – all of its “secrets.” No special training is required to grasp them.
The Disappearance of Childhood was published in 1982, and at the time, Postman pointed to the television as the main mover behind the cultural shift away from texts and towards imagery. What he said about TV then, applies equally well, if not more, to the Age of the Internet:
“We may conclude, then, that television erodes the dividing line between childhood and adulthood in three ways, all having to do with its undifferentiated accessibility: first, because it requires no instruction to grasp its form; second, because it does not make complex demands on either mind or behavior; and third, because it does not segregate its audience. With the assistance of other electric, nonprint media, television recreates the conditions of communication that existed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Biologically we are all equipped to see and interpret images and to hear such language as may be necessary to provide a context for most of these images. The new media environment that is emerging provides everyone, simultaneously, with the same information. Given the conditions I have described, electric media find it impossible to withhold any secrets. Without secrets, of course, there can be no such thing as childhood.”
And, we would add, without secrets there can be no such thing as adulthood either. For if “By definition adulthood means mysteries solved and secrets uncovered,” and “from the start the children know the mysteries and the secrets, how shall we tell them apart from anyone else?”
The internet is highly egalitarian, and websites aren’t generally designated as being designed for certain ages. Adults and children consume much of the same media, surf many of the same sites and forums, and watch the same YouTube videos. It is an age where, as Postman puts it, “everything is for everybody.”
Yet is it really such a bad thing that we move into a society where imagery plays a more prominent role than text? Perhaps it is good that children have access to all the world’s “secrets” at any time — that there is no barrier to any realm of knowledge other than the click of the mouse.
Yet while this open landscape certainly has its benefits, it is not without its downsides:
When media isn’t distinctly tailored to any age group it ends up getting pitched at about a seventh-grade age level, if that. Everything must be reasonably accessible, entertaining, and most of all, short. People have no patience for in-depth coverage of a subject, feel that anything worthwhile should be able to be summarized in just a few sentences, and believe that anything longer is a waste of time. Which is, of course, exactly what a seventh-grader would say.
Part of making media and learning palatable to the masses involves turning everything into a narrative – giving everything an entertaining story arc to keep childlike minds interested. “Politics becomes a story; news, a story; commerce and religion, a story. Even science becomes a story.” Of course these issues rarely fit well into neat, black-and-white narratives, and the division of things into good guy, bad guys, and a climax of suspense, simplifies complexity and leaves the facts behind.
Childlike cognition is very present-minded, and thus news and media is focused almost entirely on the now. Historical context is absent, and looking forward is boring (unless you’re sizing up potential candidates personalities for an election several years hence – now that makes for a great storyline!). Lessons that might be gleaned from the past go undiscovered, and the task of creating critical plans for the future fails to be undertaken.
Childlike minds also have trouble understanding the varying significance of different events, and the media presents the news so that rendering such a judgment isn’t necessary. Every story seems to bear an equal weight: On the front page of a news website you’ll find stories about war, right next to stories about celebrities’ nude photographs. On television, a sobering report of a school shooting is immediately followed by a cheerful commercial for cheese crackers. Hard-hitting stories are placed on the same level as ads, and every bit of media is framed as equally worthy of attention.
Media consumers cower before a wall of text, and thus all information must be broken up into bite-sized snacks for the childlike appetite of the masses. That necessitates the breaking up of points into many headings and bullet points – just like these! – for easier digestion. While such devices may make many topics more accessible (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), there are some (usually important) subjects that cannot be turned into something easily scan-able, and they consequently go unexplored and uninvestigated.
Ultimately then, while children have access to all knowledge, they receive it without context and before they may be ready to make sense of it. And adults, who have been consuming the very same media, are unable to offer any context either. Thus you have a situation where the knowledge base of both children and adults is highly fragmented, leading to a widespread deficiency in making connections between ideas, and a landscape where myopic, civilization-weakening viewpoints predominate.
The central problem can be summarized this way: in world where “everything is for everybody,” an illusion emerges that “everybody knows everything.” Which is to say, the current media landscape leads one to believe that all knowledge is out there and easily accessible, and that it can, and should be, economically summarized. Yet while breadth of knowledge has decidedly expanded (Eric Schmidt once noted that we create as much information every two days as was created in the whole of human history up to 2003), depth of knowledge has shrunk. Adults no longer acknowledge the hidden expanses lying beneath a subject that might yet be plumbed.
Kids feel the same way, and thus don’t believe that adults have any “secret” knowledge to offer. As a result, the aura of adult authority has been extinguished, and the idea of deferring to one’s elders seems faintly ridiculous.
And, at the same time that the society of grownups has been dissolving, the world of children has been disappearing as well, as Postman explains:
“To a certain extent curiosity comes naturally to the young, but its development depends upon a growing awareness of the power of well-ordered questions to expose secrets. The world of the known and the not yet known is bridged by wonderment. But wonderment happens largely in a situation where the child’s world is separate from the adult world, where children must seek entry, through their questions, into the adult world. As media merge the two worlds, as the tension created by secrets to be unraveled is diminished, the calculus of wonderment changes. Curiosity is replaced by cynicism or, even worse, arrogance. We are left with children who rely not on authoritative adults but on news from nowhere. We are left with children who are given answers to questions they never asked. We are left, in short, without children.”
In a world where “everything is for everybody” and the illusion that “everybody knows everything” prevails, the gap between children and adults evaporates. Everyone besides infants and the very old are “adult-children.” Kids issue know-it-all wisecracks (see: every show on the Disney channel); parents listen to their teenagers’ music and read their kids’ books (see: The Hunger Games). Children dress more like adults, and adults dress more like children. Everybody uses the same language; both grade-school kids and their teachers are likely to spout slang and use profanity. The cultures of grownups and children merge, and this collapse of distance is accelerated by one of the biggest consequences of the dissolution of a literate culture: the unraveling of an emphasis on manners and civility.
No discipline or self-mastery is required to watch and share images and videos, so delayed gratification and well-mannered deportment no longer serve as appropriate ancillaries to the consumption of information as they once did in text-based cultures. In gazing at images, one can shut off their mind and let it all hang out. And that is what adult-children do in their relations with others as well.
Ultimately what these changes have wrought is the disappearance of the desirability of adulthood. Rituals, traditions, and secret knowledge create identity, meaning, and exclusivity and once lent the secret society of adults an aura of mystery. Young people looked forward to the day they could be initiated into this interesting and even glamorous world where people wore special clothes, traded in special knowledge, and used the secret passwords of etiquette to gain access to special parties, dinners, and clubs.
Conclusion
While I find Postman’s theory quite fascinating, I do think it might be too jeremiad-y, even for my curmudgeonly sensibilities. In attributing the complex history of cultural change to a single factor, I feel he ultimately makes the dawn of literacy explain too much. He also does not acknowledge the potential upsides of unlimited accessibility to information (even if that potential is not often utilized). But this may be because he lived in the Age of Television, before the rise of the internet, and there was decidedly less about TV to be bullish about.
Postman’s theory is also not able to completely explain the demise of adulthood, as there were plenty of folks through the centuries (and even today) who were either barely or not at all literate, but were still very mature and adult-like in their outlook on the world and their behavior, including in their manners.
Yet Postman’s perspective does shed some incredibly insightful light on one important prong of the puzzle. Surely the shortness of all our attention spans, the strange pride some feel in dismissing anything overly in-depth as unimportant (as is evidenced by commenters on in-depth articles who note “tl;dr” – meaning “too long, didn’t read” – as a dystopian badge of honor denoting their aversion to reading something that may take more than a minute to digest), the widespread rejection of interest (and even acknowledgment) of deeper mysteries, and the simplistic nature of our news and political debates can only be called childlike.
There is an unfortunate tendency among modern adults to pridefully declare that despite their age, “they don’t know what the f**k they’re doing.” In this way, they can be honest and keep it real, while not feeling bad about continuing to screw up in the very same ways they did when they were fifteen. And it’s true, you think when you grow up you’ll have it all figured out, and then you realize most adults are still struggling to completely get their stuff together too. But every adult should have at least a few areas where their knowledge does run deep, where they’re rightly proud of the wisdom they’ve accumulated from years of study and experience. Every adult should have a treasury of insights that no Google search could ever reveal. When you’re young and confused, bewildered, and freaking out about something, there is truly nothing like coming into the presence of a real adult, partaking of their comforting steadiness and trustworthy gravitas, and walking away with counsel that gives you new insight into life’s big mysteries and simple difficulties. Not only do such interactions help the young along the path of life, they make adulthood seem not so bad after all. Young people need mentors, and they need mentors who make them want to become mentors themselves one day.
At the same time, perhaps a revival in manners and the traditions of adulthood would also offer more to look forward to in growing up. We may see the soirees and etiquette of the past as too formal and too constraining, but they certainly added texture to life. Now we proceed from infancy into adulthood in one flat, unremarkable, unvarying stretch of highway, so that many feel unmoored and bored with life when they are only a quarter-century old.
In restoring the secret society of adults, we might slough off some of the unfortunate cynicism prevalent in both children and grown-ups, rejuvenate the sense of curiosity and wonderment both camps need, impart to the older a more satisfying way of being in the world, and lend the young a worthwhile fraternity to which to aspire.
Printing Press, Literacy & The Rise/Fall of the Secret Society of Adults
https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/behavior/secret-society-of-adults/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_segregation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_segregation_in_schools
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_stage
https://crookedtimber.org/2009/06/16/the-disappearance-of-childhood/
