The Disappearance of Childhood

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THE DISAPPEARANCE OF CHILDHOOD

Neil Postman

Chapter 1

When There Were No Children

As I write, twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls are among the highest-paid models in America. In advertisements in all the visual media, they are presented to the public in the guise of knowing and sexually enticing adults, entirely comfortable in the milieu of eroticism. After seeing such displays of soft core pornography, those of us not yet fully conditioned to the new American attitudes toward children yearn for the charm and seductive innocence of Lolita.

In cities and towns throughout the country the difference between adult crimes and children’s crimes is rapidly narrowing; and in many states the punishments are becoming the same. Between 1950 and 1979 the rate of serious crime committed by those younger than fifteen has increased one hundred and ten times, or eleven thousand percent. Old-timers may wonder about what happened to “juvenile delinquency,” and grow nostalgic about a time when a teen-ager who cut class to smoke a cigarette in the school lavatory was considered a “problem.”

Old-timers will also remember when there existed an important difference between the clothing of children and adults. Within the past decade the children’s clothing industry has undergone such rapid change that for all practical purposes “children’s clothing” has disappeared. It would appear that the idea put forward by Erasmus and then fully accepted in the eighteenth century—namely, that children and adults require different forms of dress—is now rejected by both classes of people.

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Like distinctive forms of dress, children’s games, once so visible on the streets of our towns and cities, are also disappearing. Even the idea of a children’s game seems to be slipping from our grasp. A children’s game, as we used to think of it, requires no instructors or umpires or spectators; it uses whatever space and equipment are at hand; it is played for no other reason than pleasure. But Little League baseball and Pee Wee football, for example, not only are supervised by adults but are modeled in every possible way on big league sports. Umpires are needed. Equipment is required. Adults cheer and jeer from the sidelines. It is not pleasure the players are seeking but reputation. Who has seen anyone over the age of nine playing Jacks, Johnny on the Pony, Blindman’s Buff, or ball-bouncing rhymes? Peter and lona Opie, the great English historians of children’s games, have identified hundreds of traditional children’s games, almost none of which are presently played with any regularity by American children. Even Hide-and-Seek, which was played in Periclean Athens more than two thousand years ago, has now almost completely disappeared from the repertoire of self-organized children’s amusements.1 Children’s games, in a phrase, are an endangered species.

As, indeed, is childhood itself. 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. No doubt this is why there exists a growing movement to recast the legal rights of children so that they are more or less the same as adults’. (See, for example, Richard Parson’s book Birth-rights.) The thrust of this movement, which, among other things, is opposed to compulsory schooling, resides in the claim that what has been thought to be a preferred status for children is instead only an oppression that keeps them from fully participating in society.

I will discuss later the evidence supporting the view that childhood is disappearing, but I want to note here that of all such evidence none is more suggestive than the fact that the history of childhood has now become a major industry among scholars. As if to confirm Marshall McLuhan’s observation that when a social artifact becomes obsolete, it is turned into an object of nostalgia and contemplation, historians and social critics have produced, within the past two decades, scores of major works on childhood’s history, whereas very few were written between, say, 1800 and I960.2 Indeed, it is probably fair to say that Philippe Aries’s Centuries of Childhood, published in 1962, created the field and started the rush. Why now? At the very least we may say that the best histories of anything are produced when an event is completed, when a period is waning, when it is unlikely that a new and more robust phase will occur. Historians usually come not to praise but to bury. In any event, they find autopsies easier to do than progress reports.

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But even if I am wrong in believing that the sudden preoccupation with recording the history of childhood is, by itself, a sign of the waning of childhood, we can at least be grateful for having available, at long last, accounts of where childhood comes from. Such accounts make it possible for us to learn why an idea like childhood was conceived, and to make conjectures as to why it should become obsolete. What follows, then, is the story of childhood as a careful reader of much of the available material can best piece it together.

Of the attitudes toward children in antiquity, we know very little. The Greeks, for example, paid scant attention to childhood as a special age category, and the old adage that the Greeks had a word for everything does not apply to the concept of a child. Their words for child and youth are, at the very least, ambiguous, and seem to include almost anyone between infancy and old age. Although none of their paintings have survived, it is unlikely that the Greeks thought it worthwhile to portray children in them. We know, of course, that among their surviving statues, none is of a child.3

There are references in their voluminous literature to what we might call children, but these are clouded by ambiguity, so that one cannot get a sure view of the Greek conception, such as it was, of a child. For example, Xenophon tells of the relationship of a man to his young wife. She is not yet fifteen and has been brought up properly “to see as little, and hear as little, and ask as few questions as possible.” But since she also reveals that she has been told by her mother that she is of no consequence and that only her husband matters, we cannot clearly judge if we are learning about the Greek attitude toward females or toward children. We do know that among the Greeks as late as Aristotle’s time, there were no moral or legal restraints against the practice of infanticide. Although Aristotle believed there should be limits set upon this ghastly tradition, he raised no strong objections to it.4 From this we may assume that the Greek view of the meaning of a child’s life was drastically different from our own. But even this assumption fails on occasion. Herodotus tells several stories that suggest an attitude recognizable to the modern mind. In one such story, ten Corinthians go to a house for the purpose of killing a little boy who, according to an oracle, would grow up to destroy their city. When they arrive at the house, the mother, thinking they are making a friendly visit, places the boy in the arms of one of the men. The boy smiles and, as we would say, captures the hearts of the men, who then leave without performing their dreadful mission. It is not clear how old the boy is, but he is obviously young enough to be held in the arms of an adult. Perhaps if he had been as old as eight or nine, the men would have had no trouble in doing what they came for.

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One thing, however, is clear enough. Though the Greeks may have been ambivalent, even confused (by our standards), about the nature of childhood, they were single-mindedly passionate about education. The greatest Athenian philosopher, Plato, wrote extensively on the subject, including no less than three different proposals on how the education of youth ought to be conducted. Moreover, some of his most memorable dialogues are discussions of such questions as whether or not virtue and courage can be taught. (He believed they can.) There can be no doubt that the Greeks invented the idea of school. Their word for it meant “leisure,” reflecting a characteristic Athenian belief that at leisure a civilized person would naturally spend his time thinking and learning. Even the ferocious Spartans, who were not strong on what their neighbors would call thinking and learning, established schools. According to Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus in the Lives, the Spartans enrolled seven-year-old males in classes where they did exercises and played together. They also were taught some reading and writing. “Just enough,” Plutarch tells us, “to serve their turn.”

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As for the Athenians, as is well known, they established a great variety of schools, some of which became vehicles for the spread of Greek culture to many parts of the world. There were their gymnasiums, their ephebic colleges, their schools of the rhetor, and even elementary schools, in which reading and arithmetic were taught. And even though the ages of the young scholars—let us say, at elementary school—were more advanced than we might expect (many Greek boys did not learn to read until adolescence), wherever there are schools, there is consciousness, in some degree, of the specialness of the young.

Nonetheless, the Greek preoccupation with school must not be taken to mean that their conception of childhood parallels our own. Even if we exclude the Spartans, whose methods of discipline, for example, would be regarded by the modern mind as torture, the Greeks did not approach the disciplining of the young with the same measure of empathy and understanding considered normal by moderns. “The evidence which I have collected on methods of disciplining children,” notes Lloyd deMause, “leads me to believe that a very large percentage of the children prior to the eighteenth century were what would today be termed ‘battered children.’ “5 Indeed, deMause conjectures that a “hundred generations of mothers” impassively watched their infants and children suffer from one source of discomfort or another because the mothers (and, emphatically, the fathers) lacked the psychic mechanism necessary to empathize with children.8 He is probably correct in this conjecture. There are certainly parents living today who do not have the capacity to empathize with children, and this after four hundred years of child-consciousness. It is, therefore, entirely plausible that when Plato speaks in Protagoras of straightening disobedient children by “threats and blows, like a piece of warped wood,” we may believe that this is a considerably more primitive version of the traditional warning that if we spare the rod, we will spoil the child. We may also believe that for all their schools, and for all their concern to impart virtue to youth, the ancient Greeks would be mystified by the idea of child psychology or, for that matter, child nurturing.

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After saying all of this, I think it fair to conclude that the Greeks gave us a foreshadowing of the idea of childhood. As with so many ideas we take for granted as part of a civilized mentality, we are indebted to the Greeks for this contribution. They did not quite invent childhood, but they came close enough so that two thousand years later, when it was invented, we were able to recognize its roots.

The Romans, of course, borrowed the Greek notion of schooling and even developed an awareness of childhood that surpassed the Greek idea. Roman art, for example, reveals “a quite extraordinary sense of age, of the young and growing child, which was not to be found again in Western art until Renaissance times.”7 Moreover, the Romans began to make a connection, taken for granted by moderns, between the growing child and the idea of shame. This was a crucial step in the evolution of the idea of childhood, and I shall have occasion to refer to this connection in discussing the decline of childhood in both medieval Europe and our own times. The point is, simply, that without a well-developed idea of shame, childhood cannot exist. To their everlasting credit, the Romans grasped this point, although, apparently, not all of them and not enough of them. In an extraordinary passage in his discussion of education, Quintilian reproaches his peers for their shame-less behavior in the presence of noble Roman children:

We rejoice if they say something over-free, and words which we should not tolerate from the lips even of an Alexandrian page are greeted with laughter and a kiss. . . . they hear us use such words, they see our mistresses and minions; every dinner party is loud with foul songs, and things are presented to their eyes of which we should blush to speak.8

Here we are confronted with an entirely modern view, one that defines childhood, in part, by claiming for it the need to be sheltered from adult secrets, particularly sexual secrets. Quintilian’s reproach to adults who neglect to keep these secrets from the young provides a perfect illustration of an attitude that Norbert Elias in his great book The Civilizing Process claims as a feature of our civilized culture: that the sexual drive is subjected to strict controls, that great pressure is placed on adults to privatize all their impulses (particularly sexual ones), and that a “conspiracy of silence” concerning sexual urges is maintained in the presence of the young.9

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Of course, Quintilian was a teacher of oratory and rhetoric, and in the work by which we best know him, he gives an account of how to educate a great orator, beginning in infancy. Thus, we may assume that he was far more advanced than most of his contemporaries in his sensitivity to the special features of the young. Nonetheless, there is a traceable line between the sentiment expressed by Quintilian and the first known law prohibiting infanticide. That law does not come until a.d. 374, three centuries after Quintilian.10 But it is an extension of the idea that children require protection and nurturing, and schooling, and freedom from adult secrets.

And then, after the Romans, all such ideas disappear.

Every educated person knows about the invasions of the northern barbarians, the collapse of the Roman empire, the shrouding of classical culture, and Europe’s descent into what is called the Dark and then the Middle Ages. Our textbooks cover the transformation well enough except for four points that are often overlooked and that are particularly relevant to the story of childhood. The first is that literacy disappears. The second is that education disappears. The third is that shame disappears. And the fourth, as a consequence of the other three, is that childhood disappears. To understand that consequence, we must examine in some detail the first three developments.

Why literacy should have disappeared is as deep a mystery as any of the unknowns concerning the millennium that spans the fall of Rome and the invention of the printing press. However, the question becomes approachable if put in a form similar to the way it is posed by Eric Havelock in his Origins of Western Literacy. “Why . . . after the fall of Rome,” he asks, “did it come about that the use of the Roman alphabet contracted to the point where the general population ceased to read and write so that a previous socialized literacy reverted to a condition of virtual craft literacy, once more reversing history?”11 What is so useful about Havelock’s question is his distinction between “social literacy” and “craft literacy.” By social literacy he means a condition where most people can and do read. By craft literacy he means a condition where the art of reading is restricted to a few who form a “scribal” and, therefore, a privileged class. In other words, if we define a literate culture not on the basis of its having a writing system but on the basis of how many people can read it, and how easily, then the question of why literacy declined permits some plausible conjectures.

One of them is given by Havelock himself, who indicates how, during the Dark and Middle Ages, the styles of writing the letters of the alphabet multiplied, the shapes becoming elaborated and disguised. The Europeans, it would appear, forgot that recognition, which was the Greek word for reading, must be swift and automatic if reading is to be a pervasive practice. The shapes of letters must be, so to speak, transparent, for among the marvelous features of alphabetic writing is that once the letters have been learned, one need not think about them. They disappear psychologically, and do not interpose themselves as an object of thought between the reader and his recollection of spoken language. If calligraphy calls attention to itself, or is ambiguous, the essential idea of literacy is lost, or, to be more accurate, is lost to the majority of people. Havelock writes: “Calligraphic virtuosity of any kind fosters craft literacy and is fostered by it, but is the enemy of social literacy. The unlucky careers of both the Greek and Roman versions of the alphabet during the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages sufficiently demonstrate this fact.”12 What happened in Europe—to put it simply—is not that the alphabet disappeared but that the readers’ capacities to interpret it disappeared. To quote Havelock again: “Europe, in effect, reverts for a time to a condition of readership analogous to that which obtained in the pre-Greek Mesopotamian cultures.”13

Still another explanation for the loss of literacy, by no means contradictory to the first, is that the sources of papyrus and parchment became scarce; or if not that, then that the severity of life did not allow for the energy to manufacture them. We know that paper did not come to medieval Europe until the thirteenth century, at which time the Europeans began at once to manufacture it, not in the time-honored way—by hand and foot—but by water-powered mills.14 It is surely no accident that the beginnings of the great medieval universities and a corresponding renewed interest in literacy coincide with the introduction and manufacture of paper. It is, therefore, quite plausible that the scarcity of writing surfaces for several hundred years created a situation inimical to social literacy.

We may also conjecture that the Roman Church was not insensible to the advantages of craft literacy as a means of keeping control over a large and diverse population; that is to say, of keeping control over the ideas, organization, and loyalties of a large and diverse population. Certainly it would have been in the interests of the Church to encourage a more restricted access to literacy, to have its clerics form a scribal class that alone would have access to theological and intellectual secrets.

But whatever the reasons, there can be no doubt that social literacy disappeared for close to a thousand years; and nothing can convey better the sense of what that means than the image of a medieval reader tortuously working on a text. With few exceptions, medieval readers, regardless of age, did not and could not read as we do. If such a person could have seen a modern reader whisk through a page, silently, eyes rapidly moving, lips in repose, he might have interpreted it as an act of magic. The typical medieval reader proceeded something like one of our own recalcitrant first graders: word by word, muttering to himself, pronouncing aloud, finger pointed at each word, hardly expecting any of it to make much sense.15 And here I am referring to those who were scholars. Most people did not read at all.

What this meant is that all important social interactions were conducted through oral means, face-to-face. In the Middle Ages, Barbara Tuchman tells us, “The average layman acquired knowledge mainly by ear, through public sermons, mystery plays, and the recital of narrative poems, ballads, and tales.”16 Thus, Europe returned to a “natural” condition of human communication, dominated by talk and reinforced by song. For almost all of our history, that is the way human beings have conducted their affairs and created culture. After all, as Havelock has reminded us, biologically we are all oralists. Our genes are programmed for spoken language. Literacy, on the other hand, is a product of cultural conditioning.17 To this, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the great advocate of the noble savage, would readily agree, and he would add that if men are to live as close to nature as possible, they must despise books and reading. In Emile he tells us that “reading is the scourge of childhood, for books teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.”

Rousseau is, I believe, correct, if one may take him to mean that reading is the end of permanent childhood and that it undermines both the psychology and sociology of oralism. Because reading makes it possible to enter a non-observed and abstract world of knowledge, it creates a split between those who cannot read and those who can. Reading is the scourge of childhood because, in a sense, it creates adulthood. Literature of all kinds—including maps, charts, contracts, and deeds—collects and keeps valuable secrets. Thus, in a literate world to be an adult implies having access to cultural secrets codified in unnatural symbols. In a literate world children must become adults. But in a nonliterate world there is no need to distinguish sharply between the child and the adult, for there are few secrets, and the culture does not need to provide training in how to understand itself.

That is why, as Ms. Tuchman also notes, medieval behavior was characterized by childishness among all age groups.18 In an oral world there is not much of a concept of an adult and, therefore, even less of a child. And that is why, in all the sources, one finds that in the Middle Ages childhood ended at age seven. Why seven? Because that is the age at which children have command over speech. They can say and understand what adults can say and understand. They are able to know all the secrets of the tongue, which are the only secrets they need to know. And this helps us to explain why the Catholic Church designated age seven as the age at which one was assumed to know the difference between right and wrong, the age of reason. It also helps us to explain why, until the seventeenth century, the words used to denote young males could refer to men of thirty, forty, or fifty, for there was no word—in French, German, or English—for a young male between the ages of seven and sixteen. The word child expressed kinship, not an age.19 But most of all, the oralism of the Middle Ages helps us to explain why there were no primary schools. For where biology determines communication competence, there is no need for such schools.

Of course, schools are not unknown in the Middle Ages, some of them associated with the Church, some of them private. But the complete absence of the idea of a primary education to teach reading and writing and to provide a foundation for further learning proves the absence of a concept of a literate education. The medieval way of learning is the way of the oralist; it occurs essentially through apprenticeship and service—what we would call “on-the-job training.” Such schools as existed were characterized by a “lack of gradation in the curricula according to the difficulty of the subject matter, the simultaneity with which subjects were taught, the mixing of the ages, and the liberty of the pupils.”20 If a medieval child got to school, he would have begun as late as age ten, probably later. He would have lived on his own in lodgings in the town, far from his family. It would have been common for him to find in his class adults of all ages, and he would not have perceived himself as different from them. He certainly would not have found any correspondence between the ages of students and what they studied. There would have been constant repetition in the lectures, since new students were continuously arriving and would not have heard what the Master had said previously. There were, of course, no females present, and as soon as the students were loosed from the discipline of the classroom, they would have been free to do whatever they wished on the outside.

What we can say, then, with certainty, is that in the medieval world there was no conception of child development, no conception of prerequisites or sequential learning, no conception of schooling as a preparation for an adult world. As Aries sums it up: “Medieval civilization had forgotten the paideia of the ancients and knew nothing as yet of modern education. That is the main point: It had no idea of education [italics mine].”21

Neither, one must add at once, did it have a concept of shame, at least as a modern would understand it. The idea of shame rests, in part, on secrets, as Quintilian knew. One might say that one of the main differences between an adult and a child is that the adult knows about certain facets of life—its mysteries, its contradictions, its violence, its tragedies—that are not considered suitable for children to know; that are, indeed, shameful to reveal to them indiscriminately. In the modern world, as children move toward adulthood, we reveal these secrets to them, in what we believe to be a psychologically assimilable way. But such an idea is possible only in a culture in which there is a sharp distinction between the adult world and the child’s world, and where there are institutions that express that difference. The medieval world made no such distinction and had no such institutions.

Immersed in an oral world, living in the same social sphere as adults, unrestrained by segregating institutions, the medieval child would have had access to almost all of the forms of behavior common to the culture. The seven-year-old male was a man in every respect except for his capacity to make love and war.22 “Certainly,” J. H. Plumb writes, “there was no separate world of childhood. Children shared the same games with adults, the same toys, the same fairy stories. They lived their lives together, never apart. The coarse village festival depicted by Brueghel, showing men and women besotted with drink, groping for each other with unbridled lust, have children eating and drinking with the adults.”23

Brueghel’s paintings, in fact, show us two things at once: the inability and unwillingness of the culture to hide anything from children, which is one part of the idea of shame, and the absence of what became known in the sixteenth century as civilité, which is the other part. There did not exist a rich content of formal behavior for youth to learn. How impoverished that content was in the Middle Ages may be difficult for moderns to grasp. Erasmus, writing as late as 1523, gives us a vivid image of a German inn in his Diversoria: There are eighty to ninety people sitting together. They are of all social classes and all ages. Someone is washing clothes, which he hangs to dry on the stove. Another is cleaning his boots on the table. There is a common bowl for washing one’s hands, but the water in it is filthy. The smell of garlic and other odors is everywhere. Spitting is frequent and unrestricted as to its destination. Everyone is sweating, for the room is overheated. Some wipe their noses on their clothing, and do not turn away when doing it. When the meal is brought in, each person dips his bread into the general dish, takes a bite, and dips again. There are no forks. Each takes the meat with his hands from the same dish, drinks wine from the same goblet, and sips soup from the same bowl.2*

In order to understand how people could have endured this—indeed, not even noticed it—we must understand, as Norbert Elias reminds us, that “such people stood in a different relationship to one another than we do. And this involves not only the level of clear, rational consciousness; their emotional life also had a different structure and character.”25 They did not, for example, have the same concept of private space as we do; they were not repelled by certain human odors or bodily functions; they were not shamed by exposing their own bodily functions to the gaze of others; they felt no disgust in making contact with the hands and mouths of others. Considering this, we will not be surprised to know that in the Middle Ages there is no evidence for toilet training in the earliest months of the infant’s life.26 And we will perhaps expect, as was the case, that there was no reluctance to discuss sexual matters in the presence of children. The idea of concealing sexual drives was alien to adults, and the idea of sheltering children from sexual secrets, unknown. “Everything was permitted in their presence: coarse language, scabrous actions and situations; they had heard everything and seen everything.”27 Indeed, it was common enough in the Middle Ages for adults to take liberties with the sexual organs of children. To the medieval mind such practices were merely ribald amusements. As Aries remarks: “The practice of playing with children’s privy parts formed part of a widespread tradition. . . ,”28 Today, that tradition will get you up to thirty years in prison.

The absence of literacy, the absence of the idea of education, the absence of the idea of shame—these are the reasons why the idea of childhood did not exist in the medieval world. Of course, we must include in the story not only the severity of life but in particular the high rate of mortality among children. In part because of children’s inability to survive, adults did not, and could not, have the emotional commitment to them that we accept as normal. The prevailing view was to have many children in the hope that two or three might survive. On these grounds, people obviously could not allow themselves to become too attached to the young. Aries quotes from a document that records a remark made by the neighbor of a distraught mother of five children. In order to comfort the mother, the neighbor says, “Before they are old enough to bother you, you will have lost half of them, or perhaps all of them.”29

It is not until the late fourteenth century that children are even mentioned in wills and testaments, an indication that adults did not expect them to be around very long.30 In fact, probably because of this, in some parts of Europe children were treated as neuter genders. In fourteenth-century Italy, for example, the sex of a child who had died was never recorded.31 But I believe it would be a mistake to give too much importance to the high mortality rate of children as a way of explaining the absence of the idea of childhood. Half the people who died in London between 1730 and 1779 were under five years of age, and yet, by then, England had already developed the idea of childhood.32 And that is because, as I shall try to show in the next chapter, a new communication environment began to take form in the sixteenth century as a result of printing and social literacy. The printing press created a new definition of adulthood based on reading competence, and, correspondingly, a new conception of childhood based on reading incompetence. Prior to the coming of that new environment, infancy ended at seven and adulthood began at once. There was no intervening stage because none was needed.

That is why prior to the sixteenth century there were no books on child-rearing, and exceedingly few about women in their role as mothers.33 That is why the young were part of most ceremonies, including funeral processions, there being no reason to shield them from death. That is why there was no such thing as children’s literature. Indeed, in literature “the chief role of children was to die, usually drowned, smothered, or abandoned. . . ,”34 That is why there were no books on pediatrics. And why paintings consistently portrayed children as miniature adults, for as soon as children abandoned swaddling clothes, they dressed exactly like other men and women of their social class. The language of adults and children was also the same. There are, for example, no references anywhere to children’s jargon prior to the seventeenth century, after which they are numerous.35 And that is why the majority of children did not go to school, for there was nothing of importance to teach them; most of them were sent away from home to do menial work or serve as apprentices.

In the medieval world, childhood is, in a word, invisible. Tuchman sums it up this way: “Of all the characteristics in which the medieval age differs from the modern, none is so striking as the comparative absence of interest in children.”36

And then, without anyone’s suspecting it, a goldsmith from Mainz, Germany, with the aid of an old winepress, gave birth to childhood.

Chapter 2

The Printing Press and the New Adult

It is obvious that for an idea like childhood to come into being, there must be a change in the adult world. And such a change must be not only of a great magnitude but of a special nature. Specifically, it must generate a new definition of adulthood. During the Middle Ages there were several social changes, some important inventions, such as the mechanical clock, and many great events, including the Black Death. But nothing occurred that required that adults should alter their conception of adulthood itself. In the middle of the fifteenth century, however, such an event did occur: the invention of the printing press with movable type. The aim of this chapter is to show how the press created a new symbolic world that required, in its turn, a new conception of adulthood. The new adulthood, by definition, excluded children. And as children were expelled from the adult world it became necessary to find another world for them to inhabit. That other world came to be known as childhood.

There are at least seven cities that claim to be the birthplace of the printing press, each of them designating a different man as the inventor. Such a dispute, all by itself, provides us with an example of one of the most astonishing effects of the printing press: It greatly amplified the quest for fame and individual achievement. “It is no accident,” Elizabeth Eisenstein remarks in The Printing Press As an Agent of Change, “. . . that printing is the first ‘invention’ which became entangled in a priority struggle and rival national claims.”1 Why no accident? Because, she suggests, the possibility of having one’s words and work fixed forever created a new and pervasive idea of selfhood. The printing press is nothing less than a time-machine, easily as potent and as curious as any one of Mr. H. G. Wells’s contraptions. Like the mechanical clock, which was also a great time-machine, the printing press captures, domesticates, and transforms time, and in the process alters humanity’s consciousness of itself. But whereas the clock, as Lewis Mumford contends, eliminated Eternity as the measure and focus of human actions, the printing press restored it. Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown. With the printing press, forever may be addressed by the voice of an individual, not a social aggregate.

No one knows who invented the stirrup, or the longbow, or the button, or even eyeglasses, because the question of personal accomplishment was very nearly irrelevant in the medieval world. Indeed, prior to the printing press the concept of a writer, in the modern sense, did not exist. What did exist is described in detail by Saint Bonaventura, who tells us that in the thirteenth century there were four ways of making books:

A man might write the works of others, adding and changing nothing, in which case he is simply called a “scribe.” . . . Another writes the work of others with additions which are not his own; and he is called a “compiler.” . . . Another writes both others’ work and his own, but with others’ work in principal place, adding his own for purposes of explanation; and he is called a “commentator.” . . . Another writes both his own work • and others’ but with his own work in principal place adding others’ for purposes of confirmation; and such a man should be called an “author.” .. .2

Saint Bonaventura not only does not speak of an original work in the modern sense but makes it clear that by writing, he is referring in great measure to the actual task of writing the words out, which is why the concept of individual, highly personal authorship could not exist within a scribal tradition. Each writer not only made mistakes in copying a text, but was free to add, subtract, clarify, update, or otherwise re-conceive the text as he thought necessary. Even such a cherished document as the Magna Charta, which was read twice a year in every shire in England, was by 1237 the subject of some controversy over which of several versions was authentic.3

After printing, the question of who wrote what became important, as did the question of who did what. Posterity became a living idea, and which names could legitimately live there was a matter worth fighting about. As you can infer from the last sentence in Chapter One, I have accommodated an established tradition by settling on Johann Gensfleisch Gutenberg as the inventor of the printing press with movable type, although the earliest dated example of such printing is, in fact, the Mainz Psalter printed by Johann Fust and Peter Shoeffer, two of Gutenberg’s partners. But whoever is truly entitled to the claim—Gutenberg, Laurens Coster, Nicolas Jenson, Fust, Shoeffer, et al4—this much is clear: When Gutenberg announced that he had manufactured a book “without the help of reed, stylus, or pen but by the wondrous agreement, proportion, and harmony of punches and types . . . ,”5 he and any other printers could not have known that they constituted an irresistible revolutionary force; that their infernal machines were, so to speak, the typescript on the wall, spelling out the end of the medieval world. Although many scholars have given expression to this fact, Myron Gilmore’s statement in The World of Humanism sums it up most succinctly: “The invention of printing with movable type brought about the most radical transformation in the conditions of intellectual life in the history of Western civilization. … Its effects were sooner or later felt in every department of human activity.”6

To understand how those effects have a bearing on the invention and growth of childhood, we may take as a guide the teachings of Harold Innis. Innis stressed that changes in communication technology invariably have three kinds of effects: They alter the structure of interests (the things thought about), the character of symbols (the things thought with), and the nature of community (the area in which thoughts develop).7 To put it as simply as one can, every machine is an idea, or a conglomerate of ideas. But they are not the sort of ideas that lead an inventor to conceive of a machine in the first place. We cannot know, for example, what was in Gutenberg’s mind that led him to connect a winepress to book manufacturing, but it is a safe conjecture that he had no intention of amplifying individualism or, for that matter, of undermining the authority of the Catholic Church. There is a sense in which all inventors are, to use Arthur Koestler’s word, sleepwalkers. Or perhaps we might call them Frankensteins, and the entire process, the Frankenstein Syndrome: One creates a machine for a particular and limited purpose. 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; that it is quite capable not only of changing our habits but, as Innis tried to show, of changing our habits of mind.

A machine may provide us with a new concept of time, as did the mechanical clock. Or of space and scale, as did the telescope. Or of knowledge, as did the alphabet. Or of the possibilities of improving human biology, as did eyeglasses. To say it in James Carey’s bold way: We may find that the structure of our consciousness has been reshaped to parallel the structure of communication, 8 that we have become what we have made.

The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable. There are many instances where a “Frankenstein’s monster” was created who, upon waking, looked around, judged himself to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and went back to sleep. In the early part of the eighth century the Anglo-Saxons had the stirrup available but no genius to see its possibilities. The Franks had both the stirrup and Charles Mattel’s genius, and as a consequence employed the stirrup to create a new means of war, not to mention an entirely new social and economic system, i.e., feudalism.9 The Chinese and the Koreans (who invented movable metal type prior to Gutenberg) may or may not have had a genius available to see the possibilities of letterpress printing, but what they definitely did not have available were letters—that is, an alphabetic system of writing. Thus, their “monster” returned to its slumber. Why the Aztecs, who invented the wheel, thought its possibilities were exhausted after attaching it to children’s toys is still a mystery, but nonetheless another example of the noninevitability of technology’s infusing a culture with new ideas.

Lynn White, Jr., in using still another metaphor to make this point, remarks: “As our understanding of the history of technology increases, it becomes clear that a new device merely opens a door; it does not compel one to enter. The acceptance or rejection of an invention, or the extent to which its implications are realized if it is accepted, depends quite as much upon the condition of a society, and upon the imagination of its leaders, as upon the nature of the technological item itself.”10

In the case of Gutenberg’s press, we know, of course, that European culture was ready to receive it. Europe not only had an alphabetic writing system of two thousand years standing but a fairly rich manuscript tradition, which meant that there were important texts waiting to be printed. The Europeans knew how to manufacture paper, which they had been doing for two hundred years. For all of the widespread illiteracy, there did exist scribes who could read and write, and could teach others to do so. The revival of learning in the thirteenth century, and the rediscovery of the wisdom of classical culture, had whetted appetites for books. Then, too, the growth of commerce and the beginnings of the age of exploration generated a need for news, for durable contracts, for deeds, for reliable and standardized maps.

We may say, then, that the intellectual condition of Europe in the mid-fifteenth century made the printing press necessary, which accounts, no doubt, for the fact that so many men in different places were working on the problem at the same time. To use White’s metaphor, the printing press opened a door upon which European culture had been anxiously knocking. And when it was finally opened, the entire culture went flying through.

No geniuses were required to discern some of the implications of printing. Within fifty years after the invention of the press more than eight million books had been printed. By 1480 there were presses in a hundred and ten towns in six different countries, fifty presses in Italy alone. By 1482 Venice was the world’s printing capital, and Aldus Manutius, a Venetian, was probably the busiest printer in Christendom. The sign outside his shop indicated a flair for the apt pun as well as the state of his business: “If you would speak with Aldus, hurry—time presses.” Half of Aldus’s employees were Greek exiles or refugees, so that at the time of his death, in 1515, every known Greek author had been translated and printed.11

At about the time of Aldus’s death the printing press launched the career of the first journalist, the first literary blackmailer, and the first mass-producer of pornography, all in the person of Pietro Aretino.12 Born of lowly origins and without education, Aretino understood intuitively that the printing press was an instrument of publicity—that is to say, he invented the newspaper, and it is to him we may also ascribe the origin of confessional writing. With few exceptions, e.g., Saint Augustine’s Confessions, there was no literary tradition of intimate disclosure, no established “voice” or tone by which private thoughts were expressed publicly. Certainly there were no rhetorical conventions for addressing a throng that did not exist except in the imagination.13 Receiving instruction from no one (for there was none to be had), Aretino rushed ahead in print with a stream of anticlerical obscenities, libelous stories, public accusations, and personal opinion, all of which have become part of our journalistic tradition and are to be found still thriving in the present day. His invention of “yellow” journalism and a style in which to express it made him both rich and famous. He was known in his time as the “scourge of Princes,” the Citizen Kane of his day.

If the work of Aretino represents the sordid side of a new literary tradition that addresses a mass but unseen public in intimate terms, then the work of Montaigne represents its more wholesome side. Born in 1533, when Aretino was already forty-one years old, Montaigne invented a style, a form of address, a persona, by which a unique individual could, with assurance and directness, address the unseen living, as well as posterity. Montaigne invented the personal essay, which is to individualism what ballads were to collective consciousness—personal history, as against public history. For all of its modesty, humor, and high intelligence, Montaigne’s writing does not celebrate community but celebrates only himself—his uniqueness, his quirks, his prejudices. When, four hundred years, later Norman Mailer wrote Advertisements for Myself, he was merely continuing, and giving an apt name to, a tradition established by Montaigne—the writer as self-publicist, and discloser, the writer as individual in opposition to the community. As Marshall McLuhan remarked in his characteristic way, “With print the discovery of the vernacular as a PA system was immediate.”14 He had in mind not only Aretino and Montaigne but especially Francois Rabelais, who was second to none in his capacity for self-assertion and celebration. He boasted, for example, that his Gargantua had sold more copies in two months than the Bible in ten years.15 For this remark he was denounced as ungodly and blasphemous, the entire episode calling to mind similar denunciations, made more recently, of John Lennon for his remark that The Beatles were more influential than Jesus Christ. The point is that scribal culture had worked against the idea of intellectual property rights and therefore of intellectual individuality. As Elizabeth Eisenstein notes, “The conditions of scribal culture . . . held narcissism in check.”16 Print enabled it to break free.

At the same time as the printing press unleashed a heightened and unabashed self-consciousness in writers, it created a similar attitude in readers. For prior to printing, all human communication occurred in a social context. Even such reading as was done used as its model the oral mode, the reader speaking the words aloud while others followed along.17 But with the printed book another tradition began: the isolated reader and his private eye. Orality became muted, and the reader and his response became separated from a social context. The reader retired within his own mind, and from the sixteenth century to the present what most readers have required of others is their absence, or, if not that, their silence. In reading, both the writer and reader enter into a conspiracy of sorts against social presence and consciousness. Reading is, in a phrase, an antisocial act.

Thus, at both ends of the process—production and consumption—print created a psychological environment within which the claims of individuality became irresistible. This is not to say that individualism was created by the printing press, only that individualism became a normal and acceptable psychological condition. As Leo Lowenthal remarks, “the prevailing philosophy of human nature since the Renaissance has been based on the conception of each individual as a deviant case whose existence consists very largely in his efforts to assert his personality against the restrictive and levelling claims of society.”18

Following Innis’s lead, i.e., his insight that a new communication technology alters the structure of our interests—we may say, then, that the printing press gave us our selves, as unique individuals, to think and talk about. And this intensified sense of self was the seed that led eventually to the flowering of childhood. Childhood did not, of course, emerge overnight. It took nearly two hundred years to become a seemingly irreversible feature of Western civilization. But it could not have happened without the idea that each individual is important in himself, that a human mind and life in some fundamental sense transcend community. For as the idea of personal identity developed, it followed inexorably that it would be applied to the young as well, so that, for example, by the eighteenth century the acceptance of the inevitability of the death of children (Aries calls it the concept of “necessary wastage”) had largely disappeared. In fact, near the end of the sixteenth century the death of a child began to be represented in various ways on parents’ tombs. A macabre fact, perhaps, but indicative of a growing awareness that everyone’s life counts.

But individualism alone could not have produced childhood, which requires a compelling basis for separating people into different classes. For that, something else needed to happen. And it did. For want of a better term, I shall call it a “knowledge gap.” Within fifty years after printing had been invented, it became obvious that the communication environment of European civilization was dissolving and reconstituting itself along different lines. A sharp division developed between those who could read and those who could not, the latter being restricted to a medieval sensibility and level of interest, the former being propelled into a world of new facts and perceptions. With print, new things to talk about proliferated. And they were all in books, or at least in printed form. Lewis Mumford describes the situation this way: “More than any other device, the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local. . . print made a greater impression than actual events. … To exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world tended gradually to become more shadowy. Learning became book-learning [italics mine] . . . ,”19

What sort of information was in books? What things were available to learn? There were, first of all, “how to do it” books: books on metallurgy, botany, linguistics, good manners, and, at long last, pediatrics. The Boke of Chyldren by Thomas Phaire, published in 1544, is generally considered to be the first book on pediatrics written by an Englishman. (An Italian, Paolo Bagellardo, published an earlier one in 1498.) In his book, Phaire recommends the use of teething rings, and provides a comprehensive list of “grevious and perilous diseases” of children, including “apostume of the brayne” (probably meningitis), terrible dreams, itching, bloodshot eyes, colic and rumbling of the stomach.20 Publication of books on pediatrics as well as those on manners is a strong indication that the concept of childhood had already begun to form, less than a century after the printing press. But the point here is that the printing press generated what we call today a “knowledge explosion.” To be a fully functioning adult required one to go beyond custom and memory into worlds not previously known about or contemplated. For in addition to the general information, such as was found in “how to” books and assorted guides and manuals, the world of commerce was increasingly made up of printed paper: contracts, deeds, promissory notes, and maps. (Not surprisingly, in an environment in which information was becoming standardized and repeatable, mapmakers began to exclude “Paradise” from their charts on the grounds that its location was too uncertain.21)

In fact, so much new information, of so many diverse types, was being generated that bookmakers could no longer use the scribal manuscript as their model of a book. By mid-sixteenth century, printers began to experiment with new formats, among the most important innovation being the use of Arabic numerals to number pages. The first known example of such pagination is Johann Froben’s first edition of Erasmus’s New Testament, printed in 1516. Pagination led inevitably to more accurate indexing, annotation, and cross-referencing, which in turn either led to or was accompanied by innovations in punctuation marks, section heads, paragraphing, title paging, and running heads. By the end of the sixteenth century the machine-made book already had a typographic form and a look—indeed, functions—comparable to books of today. But even earlier in the century printers were concerned with the aesthetics and efficiency of book formats. The printer of Machiavelli’s First Decennale bitterly complained about a pirated edition of that highly successful book. He described the spurious edition as “a miserable cheapjack . . . badly bound, with no margins, tiny title pages, with no endpapers front or back, crooked type, printer’s errors in many places.”22 And this a mere fifty years after the invention of the press.

Here it is worth recalling Harold Innis’s principle that new communication technologies not only give us new things to think about but new things to think with. The form of the printed book created a new way of organizing content, and in so doing, it promoted a new way of organizing 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—led to the habits of thinking that James Joyce mockingly called ABCED-mindedness, meaning a structure of consciousness that closely parallels the structure of typography. This effect of printing is a point that both Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan extravagantly asserted; but even such a cautious scholar as Elizabeth Eisenstein believes that the emerging format of books, its particular way of codifying information, “helped to reorder the thought of all readers, whatever their profession.”23

There can be little doubt that the organization of books into chapters and sections came to be the accepted way of organizing a subject: the form in which books presented material became the logic of the discipline. Eisenstein gives an interesting case in point from the field of law. The medieval teacher of the Corpus Juris could not demonstrate to either his students or himself how each component of the law was related to the logic of the whole because very few teachers had ever seen the Corpus Juris as a whole. But beginning in 1553 a print-oriented generation of legal scholars undertook the task of editing the entire manuscript, including reorganizing its parts, dividing it into coherent sections, and indexing citations. By so doing, they made the ancient compilation entirely accessible, stylistically intelligible, and internally consistent, which is to say, they reinvented the subject.24 Similarly, as Eisenstein notes, “The mere preparation of differently graded textbooks for teaching varied disciplines encouraged a reassessment of inherited procedures and a rearrangement of approaches to diverse fields.”25 In other words, the availability of different texts on the same subject required that there be consistency in how parts were sequenced; and in determining which things came first and which last, textbook writers were recreating their fields.

At the same time, and inevitably, sixteenth-century editors of books became preoccupied with clarity and logic of organization. “The . . . doctrine that every subject could be treated topically,” writes Gerald Strauss, “that the best kind of exposition was that which proceeded by analysis, was enthusiastically adopted by publishers and editors.”26 What they were adopting, of course, was a value as to the best way of organizing one’s thinking on a subject. It is a value inherent in the structure of books and typography. But by no means the only one. As calligraphy disappeared, so that there was a loss of idiosyncratic script, the impersonality and repeatability of typescript assumed a certain measure of authority. To this day—and notwithstanding the individuality of authors—there is a tendency to believe what appears in print. Indeed, wherever the mark of a unique individual is absent from the printed page, as in textbooks and encyclopedias, the tendency to regard the printed page as a sacrosanct voice of authority is almost overwhelming.

What is being said here is that typography was by no means a neutral conveyor of information. It led to a reorganization of subjects, an emphasis on logic and clarity, an attitude toward the authority of information. It also led to new perceptions of literary form. Prose and poetry, for example, became distinguished from one another by the way in which words were distributed on the printed page. And, of course, the structure of the printed page as well as the portability and repeatability of the printed book played a decisive role not only in the creation of the essay but also in the creation of what became known as the novel. Many of the earliest novelists were themselves printers, such as Samuel Richardson. And in writing what we might call our first science fiction novel (his Utopia), Sir Thomas More worked at every stage with his printer. All of which is to say that we can never underestimate the psychological impact of language’s massive migration from the ear to the eye, from speech to typography. To be able to see one’s own language in such durable, repeat-able, and standardized form led to the deepest possible relationship to it. Today, with written language all around us so that we cannot manage our affairs without the capacity to read, it is difficult for us to imagine the wonder and significance of reading in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So powerful—perhaps even magical—was the capacity to read that it could save a man from the gallows. In England, for example, a petty thief who could read a sentence from the Bible merely had his thumbs scarred; one who could not met a different fate. “The said Paul reads, to be branded; the said William does not read, to be hanged.” This from the judicial record of the sentencing of two men convicted of robbing the house of the earl of Sussex in 1613.27

Print made the vernacular into a mass medium for the first time. This fact had consequences not only for individuals but for nations. There can be little doubt that fixed and visualizable language played an enormous role in the development of nationalism. Indeed, linguistic chauvinism coincides exactly with the development of printing: the idea of a “mother tongue” was a product of typography. And so was the idea of Protestantism. There is no upheaval more directly and uncontestedly associated with printing than the Protestant Reformation. For this assertion we have no better authority than Martin Luther himself, who said of printing that it was “God’s highest and extremest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward.” Lutheranism and the book are inseparable. And yet for all of Luther’s astuteness in the use of printed pamphlets and books as a means of religious propaganda, even he was surprised on occasion by the unsuspected powers of print. “It is a mystery to me,” he wrote in a letter to the Pope, “how my theses . . . were spread to so many places. They were meant exclusively for our academic circle here. . . . They were written in such a language that the common people could hardly understand them.” Perhaps Luther would not have been so mystified if he had known of Socrates’ warning about writing, as expressed in the Phaedrus. “Once a word is written,” Socrates said, “it goes rolling all about, comes indifferently among those who understand it and those whom it nowise concerns, and is unaware to whom it should address itself and to whom it should not do so.” And Socrates did not have in mind the printed book, which compounds the problem a hundredfold. For surely what Luther overlooked here was the sheer portability of printed books. Although his theses were written in academic Latin, they were easily transported throughout Germany and other countries, and printers just as easily had them translated into vernaculars.

Luther, of course, was a great advocate of vernacular printing and exploited the fact that the written word goes rolling all about “unaware to whom it should address itself.” He wrote a German edition of the Bible so that the Word of God could reach the largest number of people. It would take us some way off the track to discuss here the many interrelations between print and religious rebellion, but it is necessary to stress the obvious fact that the printing press placed the Word of God on every family’s kitchen table, and in a language that could be understood. With God’s word so accessible, Christians did not require the papacy to interpret it for them. Or so millions of them came to believe. “Christianity,” writes Lawrence Stone, “is a religion of the book, namely the Scriptures, and once this book ceased to be a closely guarded secret fit only to be read by the priests, it generated pressure for the creation of a literate society.”28 The Bible became an instrument to think about, but also an instrument to think with. For if ever there was an instance of a medium and a message precisely coinciding in their biases, it is the case of printing and Protestantism. Not only did both reveal the possibilities of individual thought and action, but polyglot versions of the Bible transformed the Word of God as revealed in the medieval Latin Bible into the words of God. Through print, God became an Englishman, or a German, or a Frenchman, depending on the vernacular in which His words were revealed. The effect of this was to strengthen the cause of nationalism while weakening the sacred nature of scripture. The eventual replacement of love of God with love of Country, from the eighteenth century to the present, may well be one of the consequences of printing. For the past two centuries, for example, Christians have been inspired to make war almost exclusively in the interests of nationhood; God has been left to fend for Himself.

The replacement of medieval, Aristotelian science by modern science may also be attributed in large measure to the press. Copernicus was born at the end of the fifteenth century, and Andreas Vesalius, Tycho Brahe, Francis Bacon, Galileo, Johannes Kepler, William Harvey, and Descartes were all born in the sixteenth; that is to say, the foundations of modern science were laid within one hundred years after the invention of the printing press. One may get a sense of how dramatic was the changeover from medieval thought to modern science by contemplating the year 1543. In that year both Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus and Vesalius’s De Fabrica appeared, the former reconstituting astronomy, the latter, anatomy. How did the new communication environment produce such an outpouring of scientific discovery and genius?

In the first place, print not only created new methods and sources of data collection but vastly increased communication among scientists on a continent-wide basis. Second, the thrust toward standardization resulted in uniform mathematical symbols, including the replacement of Roman with Arabic numerals. Thus, Galileo could refer to mathematics as the “language of Nature,” with assurance that other scientists could speak and understand that language. Moreover, standardization largely eliminated ambiguity in texts and reduced error in diagrams, charts, tables, and maps. By making available repeatable visual aids, print made nature appear more uniform and therefore more accessible.

Printing also led to the popularization of scientific ideas through the use of vernaculars. Although some sixteenth-century scientists—Harvey, for example—insisted on writing in Latin, others, such as Bacon, eagerly employed the vernacular in an effort to convey the new spirit and methods of scientific philosophy. The day of the alchemists’ secrets ended. Science became public business. Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, published in 1605, is the first major scientific tract written in English. A year later, Galileo published a vernacular pamphlet that he apparently printed in his own house. Galileo was not insensible to the power of vernacular printing as a means of self-publicity, and, in fact, used it as a method of establishing his claim as inventor of the telescope. Then, too, printing made available a wide assortment of useful classical texts that medieval scholars were either unaware of or had no access to. In 1570, for example, the first English translation of Euclid became available.

By the end of the sixteenth century, not only Euclid but astronomy, anatomy, and physics were available to anyone who could read. New forms of literature were available. The Bible was available. Commercial documents were available. Practical knowledge about machines and agriculture and medicine was available. During the course of the century an entirely new symbolic environment had been created. That environment filled the world with new information and abstract experience. It required new skills, attitudes, and, especially, a new kind of consciousness. Individuality, an enriched capacity for conceptual thought, intellectual vigor, a belief in the authority of the printed word, a passion for clarity, sequence, and reason—all of this moved into the forefront, as the medieval oral environment receded.

What had happened, simply, was that Literate Man had been created. And in his coming, he left behind the children. For in the medieval world neither the young nor the old could read, and their business was in the here and now, in “the immediate and local,” as Mumford put it. That is why there had been no need for the idea of childhood, for everyone shared the same information environment and therefore lived in the same social and intellectual world. But as the printing press played out its hand it became obvious that a new kind of adulthood had been invented. From print onward, adulthood had to be earned. It became a symbolic, not a biological, achievement. From print onward, the young would have to become adults, and they would have to do it by learning to read, by entering the world of typography. And in order to accomplish that they would require education. Therefore, European civilization reinvented schools. And by so doing, it made childhood a necessity.

Chapter 3

The Incunabula of Childhood

The first fifty years of the printing press are called the incunabula, literally, the cradle period. By the time print moved out of the cradle, the idea of childhood had moved in, and its own incunabula lasted for some two hundred years. After the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries childhood was acknowledged to exist, to be a feature of the natural order of things. Writing of childhood’s incunabula, J. H. Plumb notes that “Increasingly, the child became an object of respect, a special creature with a different nature and different needs, which required separation and protection from the adult world.”1 Separation is, of course, the key word. In separating people from one another, we create classes of people, of which children are a historic and humane example. But Mr. Plumb has it backward. Children were not separated from the rest of the population because they were believed to have a “different nature and different needs.” They were believed to have a different nature and needs because they had been separated from the rest of the population. And they were separated because it became essential in their culture that they learn how to read and write, and how to be the sort of people a print culture required.

Of course, it was not entirely clear at the beginning what reading and writing could or would do to people. As we might expect, the prevailing understandings of the process of becoming literate were naive, just as today our grasp of the effects of electronic media are naive. The merchant classes, for example, wanted their children to know their ABC’s so that they could handle the paper world of commerce.2 The Lutherans wanted people who could read both vernacular Bibles and grievances against the Church. Some Catholics saw in books a means of instilling a greater sense of obedience to scripture. The Puritans wanted reading to be the main weapon against “the three great evils of Ignorance, Prophaneness, and Idleness.”3 Some of them got what they bargained for, some much more.

By the mid-sixteenth century the Catholics began to pull back from social literacy, perceiving reading as a disintegrating agent, and eventually prohibited the reading of vernacular Bibles, as well as the works of such writers as Erasmus. Reading became equated with heresy, and the Index followed inexorably. The Protestants, who obviously were partial to heresy of a sort, and who, in addition, hoped literacy would aid in dispelling superstition, continued to exploit the resources of print and carried this attitude with them to the New World. Indeed, it is in Presbyterian Scotland that we find the most intense commitment to a literate education for all. In the First Presbyterian Book of Discipline of 1560, there is, for example, a call for a national system of education, the first such proposal in English history. When the Presbyterians were at the height of their political power, they enacted legislation toward that end (the Act of 1646); and in 1696, after their power was restored, they renewed and strengthened the legislation.4

One result of the Catholic defection from print and the Protestant alliance with it was an astonishing reversal of the intellectual geography of European culture. Whereas in the medieval world the level of cultivation and sensibility was higher in the Mediterranean countries than in northern Europe, by the end of the seventeenth century the situation had turned around. Catholicism remained a religion of the image. It continued and intensified icon worship, and gave extraordinary attention to the elaboration of its churches and service. Protestantism developed as a religion of the book, and, as a consequence, discouraged icon worship and moved toward an austere symbolism. It was observed by Joseph Kay in the nineteenth century that to attract the poor to religion, one must either “adorn the spectacle,” as did the Catholics, or “educate the people,” as did the Protestants.5 While Kay may have a point about how to attract the poor, we must not overlook the fact that a reading people develop the capacity to conceptualize at a higher level of abstraction than do the illiterate. Image-centered and lavishly embellished Catholicism was not so much an appeal to the poor as an accommodation to a public, of all levels, still habituated to concrete, iconographic symbolism. The simplicities of Protestantism emerged as a natural style for a people whom the book had conditioned to think more abstractly.

Among other things, what this meant was that childhood evolved unevenly, for after one has sifted through the historical complexities, a fairly simple equation emerges: Where literacy was valued highly and persistently, there were schools, and where there were schools, the concept of childhood developed rapidly. That is why childhood emerged sooner and in sharper outline in the British Isles than anywhere else. As early as the reign of Henry VIII, William Forrest called for primary education. At age four, he proposed, children should be sent to school “to lerne some literature” so that they might understand God’s ways.6 A similar idea was put forward by Thomas Starkey in his Dialogue, which proposed parish schools for all children under seven.7 In a relatively short time the English transformed their society into an island of schools. During the sixteenth century hundreds of bequests were made by villages for the establishment of free schools for the elementary instruction of local children.8 A survey by W. K. Jordan reveals that in 1480 there were 34 schools in England. By 1660, there were 444, a school for every 4,400 people, one school approximately every 12 miles.9

There were, in fact, three kinds of schools that developed: the elementary or “petty” schools, which taught the three R’s; the free schools, which taught mathematics, English composition, and rhetoric; and grammar schools, which trained the young for universities and Inns of Court by teaching them English grammar and classical linguistics. Shakespeare attended a grammar school in Stratford, and his experience there inspired him to express a famous complaint (for he had probably been required to read Lyly’s Latin Grammar).

In Henry VI, Part II, Shakespeare wrote:

Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar-school. … It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun, and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear.

But most Englishmen did not agree with Shakespeare that the creation of schools corrupted the youth of the realm. Indeed, the English were not even averse to sending females to school: the free instruction given at Norwich was available to children of either sex. And although it must be understood that schooling was largely a middle- and upper-class preoccupation, there is evidence that even among the poor some women could read.

But, of course, many more men. Of 204 men sentenced to death for a first offense by Middlesex justices between 1612 and 1614, 95 of them pleaded “benefit of clergy,” which meant that they could meet the challenge of reading a sentence from the Bible and, therefore, would be spared from the gallows.10 Professor Lawrence Stone concludes from this that if forty-seven percent of the criminal classes could read, the literacy rate among the total male population must have been much higher. (It is possible, of course, that the “criminal classes” were much cleverer than Professor Stone gives them credit for, and that learning to read was high among their priorities.)

In any case, literacy rates are difficult to pin down. Sir Thomas More guessed that in 1533 over half the population could read an English translation of the Bible. Most scholars agree that this estimate is too high, and have settled on a figure (for males) somewhere around forty percent, by the year 1675. This much, however, is known: In the year 1642 more than 2,000 different pamphlets were published. In 1645 more than 700 newspapers were issued. And between 1640 and 1660 the combined total of both pamphlets and newspapers was 22,000.u It is possible that by the mid-seventeenth century “England was at all levels the most literate society the world had ever known.”12 Certainly by the beginning of the seventeenth century its political leaders were literate. And this was apparently the case in France, as well. In England the last illiterate to hold high office was the first earl of Rutland. In France it was the Constable Montmorency.13 Although the achievement of literacy in France (that is to say, the development of schools) lagged behind that of England, by 1627 there were approximately 40,000 children being educated in France.

What all of this led to was a remarkable change in the social status of the young. Because the school was designed for the preparation of a literate adult, the young came to be perceived not as miniature adults but as something quite different altogether—unformed adults. School learning became identified with the special nature of childhood. “Age groups … are organized around institutions,” Aries remarks, and just as in the nineteenth century, adolescence became defined by conscription, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, childhood became defined by school attendance. The word schoolboy became synonymous with the word child. Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt express it this way:

Whilst under the traditional system [of apprenticeship], “childhood” effectively ended at the age of seven … the effect of organized formal education was to prolong the period during which children were withheld from the demands and responsibilities of the adult world. Childhood was, in fact, becoming far less a biological necessity of no more than fleeting importance; it was emerging for the first time as a formative period of increasing significance.14

What is being said here is that childhood became a description of a level of symbolic achievement. Infancy ended at the point at which command of speech was achieved. Childhood began with the task of learning how to read. Indeed, the word child was frequently used to describe adults who could not read, adults who were regarded as intellectually childish. By the seventeenth century, everyone assumed, as Plumb tells us, that “the processes of a literate education should develop with the developing child: reading should begin about four or five, writing follow, and then gradually more sophisticated subjects should be added…. Education [became] tied almost inflexibly to the calendar age of children.”15

But the tie between education and calendar age took some time to develop. The first attempts to establish classes or grades of students were based on the capacities of students to read, not on their calendar ages.16 Differentiation by age came later. As Aries explains, the organization of school classes as a hierarchy of reading competence brought the “realization of the special nature of childhood or youth and of the idea that within that childhood or youth a variety of categories existed.”17 Aries is expressing here a principle of social perception, alluded to earlier: When a group—any group—is formed on the basis of a single characteristic, it is inevitable that other characteristics will be noticed. What starts out as a category of people who must be taught how to read ends up as a category perceived as unique in multiple dimensions. As childhood itself became a social and intellectual category, stages of childhood became visible. Elizabeth Eisenstein sums up the point: “Newly segregated at schools, receiving special printed materials geared to distinct stages of learning, separate ‘peer groups’ ultimately emerged, a distinctive ‘youth culture’ . . . came into being.”18

What followed from this was inevitable, or so it seems in retrospect. For one thing, the clothing of children became different from that of adults. By the end of the sixteenth century custom required that childhood should have its special costume.19 The difference in children’s dress, as well as the difference in adult perception of children’s physical features, is well documented in paintings from the sixteenth century forward, i.e., children are no longer depicted as miniature adults. The language of children began to be differentiated from adult speech. As noted earlier, children’s jargon or slang was unknown prior to the seventeenth century. Afterward, it developed rapidly and richly. Books on pediatrics proliferated too. One such book, by Thomas Raynald, was so popular that it went through seven editions before 1600, and continued to be published as late as 1676. Even the simple act of naming children underwent change, reflecting the new status of children. In the Middle Ages it was not uncommon for identical names to be given to all siblings, distinguishing one from the other by birth-order labels. But by the seventeenth century that custom had disappeared, and parents commonly assigned each child a unique name, often determined by parents’ expectations of the child.20 Lagging somewhat behind other developments, children’s literature began to appear in 1744, when John Newbery, a London publisher, printed the story of Jack the Giant Killer. By 1780, many professional authors had turned their attention to the production of juvenile literature.21

As the form of childhood took shape, the form of the modern family also took shape. The essential event in creating the modern family, as Aries has emphasized, was the invention and then extension of formal schooling.22 The social requirement that children be formally educated for long periods led to a reorientation of parents’ relationships to their children. Their expectations and responsibilities became more serious and enriched as parents evolved into guardians, custodians, protectors, nurturers, punishers, arbiters of taste and rectitude. Eisenstein provides an additional reason for this evolution: “An unending stream of moralizing literature penetrated the privacy of the home. . . . The ‘family’ [became] endowed with new educational and religious functions.”23 In other words, with books on every conceivable topic becoming available, not only in school but in the marketplace, parents were forced into the role of educators and theologians, and became preoccupied with the task of making their children into Godfearing, literate adults. The family as educational institution begins with print, not only because the family had to ensure that children received an education at school, but also because it had to provide an auxiliary one at home.

But something else happened to the family that has a bearing on the concept of childhood and that ought not to be neglected. In England, to take the most obvious example, there emerged a visible and growing middle class, people with money and a desire to spend it. According to F.R.H. Du Boulay, here’s what they did with it: “They invested it in larger homes, with additional rooms for privacy, in portraits of themselves and their families, and in their children through education and clothing. The surplus of money made it possible to use children as objects of conspicuous consumption [italics mine].”24

What Du Boulay wants us to take into account here is that an improved economic condition played a role in intensifying consciousness of children and in making them more socially visible. Just as it is well to remember that boys were, in fact, the first class of specialized people, we must also remember that they were the boys of the middle class. Unquestionably, childhood began as a middle-class idea, in part because the middle class could afford it. It took another century before the idea filtered down to the lower classes.

All of these developments were the outward signs of the emergence of a new class of people. They were people who spoke differently from adults, who spent their days differently, dressed differently, learned differently, and, in the end, thought differently. What had happened—the underlying structural change—was that through print and its handmaiden, the school, adults found themselves with unprecedented control over the symbolic environment of the young, and were therefore able and required to set forth the conditions by which a child was to become an adult.

In saying this, I do not mean to imply that adults were always aware of what they were doing or why they were doing it. To a considerable extent developments were dictated by the nature of both books and schools. For example, by writing sequenced textbooks and by organizing school classes according to calendar age, schoolmasters invented, as it were, the stages of childhood. Our notions of what a child can learn or ought to learn, and at what ages, were largely derived from the concept of a sequenced curriculum; that is to say, from the concept of the prerequisite.

“Ever since the sixteenth century,” Elizabeth Eisenstein remarks, “memorizing a fixed sequence of discrete letters represented by meaningless symbols and sounds has been the gateway to book learning for all children in the West.”25 Professor Eisenstein is here describing the first step toward adulthood—the mastery of the alphabet—which it was determined ought to occur somewhere between the ages of four and six. But the point is that the mastery of the alphabet and then mastery of all the skills and knowledge that were arranged to follow constituted not merely a curriculum but a definition of child development. By creating a concept of a hierarchy of knowledge and skills, adults invented the structure of child development. In fact, as J. H. Plumb observes, “. . . many of the assumptions that we regard almost as belonging to human nature itself were adopted during this time.”26 And since the school curriculum was entirely designed to accommodate the demands of literacy, it is astonishing that educationists have not widely commented on the relationship between the “nature of childhood” and the biases of print. For example, a child evolves toward adulthood by acquiring the sort of intellect we expect of a good reader: a vigorous sense of individuality, the capacity to think logically and sequentially, the capacity to distance oneself from symbols, the capacity to manipulate high orders of abstraction, the capacity to defer gratification.

And, of course, the capacity for extraordinary feats of self-control. It is sometimes overlooked that book learning is “unnatural” in the sense that it requires of the young a high degree of concentration and sedateness that runs counter to their inclinations. Even before “childhood” existed, the young, we can assume, were apt to be more “squiggly” and energetic than adults. Indeed, one of the several reasons why Philippe Aries has deplored the invention of childhood is that it tended to restrain the high energy levels of youth. In a world without books and schools, youthful exuberance was given the widest possible field in which to express itself. But in a world of book learning such exuberance needed to be sharply modified. Quietness, immobility, contemplation, precise regulation of bodily functions, became highly valued. That is why, beginning in the sixteenth century, schoolmasters and parents began to impose a rather stringent discipline on children. The natural inclinations of children began to be perceived not only as an impediment to book learning but as an expression of an evil character. Thus, “nature” had to be overcome in the interests of achieving both a satisfactory education and a purified soul. 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. “The young child which lieth in the cradle is both wayward and full of affections,” wrote the Puritans Robert Cleaver and John Dod in their book A Godly Form of Household Government in 1621. They went on: “And though his body be but small, yet he hath a [wrongdoing] heart, and is altogether inclined to evil. … If this sparkle be suffered to increase, it will rage over and burn down the whole house. For we are changed and become good not by birth but by education.”27

Notwithstanding Rousseau’s influential reaction against this sentiment, centuries of children have been subjected to an education designed to make them “good,” that is, to make them suppress their natural energies. Of course, children have never found such a regimen to their liking, and as early as 1597, Shakespeare was able to provide us with a poignant and unforgettable image of the child who knows that school is the crucible of adulthood. In the famous “ages of man” passage in As You Like It, Shakespeare speaks of “the whining schoolboy, with his satchel/And shining morning face, creeping like snail/Unwillingly to school.”

As self-control became important as an intellectual and theological principle, as well as a characteristic of adulthood, it was accordingly reflected in sexual mores and manners. Among the early and most influential books on the subject of both was Erasmus’s Colloquies, published in 1516. Its intention was to set forth the manner in which boys must regulate their instinctual life. It is fair, I think, to regard this work as the first widely read secular book that takes as its theme the subject of shame. By our standards it does not quite appear that way, since Erasmus discusses matters that by the eighteenth century were already forbidden material in books for children. For example, he describes a hypothetical encounter between a youth and a prostitute, during which the youth resists the solicitations of the prostitute and instead shows her a pathway to virtue. Erasmus also describes a young man wooing a girl, as well as a woman complaining about her husband’s wayward behavior. The book tells the young, in other words, how to regard the problem of sex. At the risk of permanently injuring his reputation, one might say that Erasmus was the Judy Blume of his day. But unlike that popular modern author of widely read books about the sexuality of children, Erasmus’s intention was not to reduce a sense of shame but to increase it. Erasmus knew, as did John Locke later, and Freud later still, that even when stripped of its theological connotations, shame is an essential element in the civilizing process. It is the price we pay for our triumphs over our nature. The book and the world of book learning represented an almost unqualified triumph over our animal nature; the requirements of a literate society made a finely honed sense of shame necessary. It is stretching a point only a little to say that print—by separating the message from the messenger, by creating an abstract world of thought, by demanding that body be subordinated to mind, by emphasizing the virtues of contemplation—intensified the belief in the duality of mind and body, which in turn encouraged a contemptuous regard for the body. Print gave us the disembodied mind, but it left us with the problem of how to control the rest of us. Shame was the mechanism by which such control would be managed.

By the end of the sixteenth century there existed a theology of the book, a new and growing commercial system based on print, and a new concept of the family organized around schooling. Taken together, they fiercely promoted the idea of restraint in all matters and of the necessity to make clear distinctions between private and public behavior. “[G]radually,” writes Norbert Elias, “does a [strong] association of sexuality with shame and embarrassment, and a corresponding restraint of behavior, spread more or less evenly over the whole of society. And only when the distance between adults and children grows does ‘sexual enlightenment’ become an ‘acute problem.’ “28 Elias is saying here that as the concept of childhood developed, society began to collect a rich content of secrets to be kept from the young: secrets about sexual relations, but also about money, about violence, about illness, about death, about social relations. There even developed language secrets—that is, a store of words not to be spoken in the presence of children.

There is a peculiar irony in this because, on the one hand, the emerging book culture broke up “knowledge monopolies,” to use Innis’s phrase. It made available theological, political, and academic secrets to a vast public that, previously, had no access to them. But on the other hand, by restricting children to book learning, by subjecting them to the psychology of the book learner and the supervision of schoolmasters and parents, print closed off the world of everyday affairs with which the young had been so familiar in the Middle Ages. Eventually, knowledge of these cultural secrets became one of the distinguishing characteristics of adulthood, so that, until recent times, one of the important differences between the child and the adult has been that adults were in possession of information that was not considered suitable for children to know. As children moved toward adulthood we revealed these secrets to them in stages, culminating in “sexual enlightenment.”

That is why, by the end of the sixteenth century, schoolteachers were already refusing to allow children to have access to “indecent books,” and punishing children for using obscene language. In addition, they were discouraging children from gambling, which in the Middle Ages had been a favorite pastime of the young.29 And because children could no longer be expected to know the secrets of adult public behavior, books on manners became commonplace. Erasmus, again, led the field. In his De Civilitate Morium Puerilium, he set down for the edification of the young some rules on how to conduct oneself in public. “Turn away when spitting,” he says, “lest your saliva fall on someone. If anything purulent falls to the ground, it should be trodden upon, lest it nauseate someone. If you are not at liberty to do this, catch the sputum in a small cloth. It is unmannerly to suck back saliva, as equally are those whom we see spitting at every third word not from necessity but from habit.”

As to blowing one’s nose, Erasmus insists that “to blow your nose on your hat or clothing is rustic . . . nor is it much more polite to use your hand. … It is proper to wipe the nostrils with a handkerchief, and to do this while turning away, If more honorable people are present [italics his].”

Erasmus was doing several things at once here. First of all, he was inducing a sense of shame in the young, without which they could not gain entry into adulthood. He was also assigning the young to the status of “barbarian,” for as childhood was developing there arose the idea, noted earlier, that children are unformed adults who need to be civilized, who need to be trained in the ways of the adult. As the school book revealed to them the secrets of knowledge, so would the etiquette book reveal the secrets of public deportment. “As Socrates brought philosophy from heaven to earth,” Erasmus said of his book, “so I have led philosophy to games and banquets.” But Erasmus was not merely revealing adults’ secrets to the young. He was also creating such secrets. It is important to know that in his books on public conduct Erasmus was addressing adults as well as children. He was building a concept of adulthood as well as a concept of childhood. We must keep in mind Barbara Tuchman’s observations about the childishness of the medieval adult; that is to say, as the book and school created the child, they also created the modern concept of the adult. And when later I shall try to show that in our time childhood is disappearing, I mean to say that inevitably a certain form of adulthood is disappearing as well.

In any case, as childhood and adulthood became increasingly differentiated, each sphere elaborated its own symbolic world, and eventually it came to be accepted that the child did not and could not share the language, the learning, the tastes, the appetites, the social life, of an adult. Indeed, the task of the adult was to prepare the child for the management of the adult’s symbolic world. By the 1850s the centuries of childhood had done their work, and everywhere in the Western world childhood was both a social principle and a social fact. The irony, of course, is that no one noticed that at about the same time, the seeds of childhood’s end were being planted.

From: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF CHILDHOOD

BY Neil Postman

Vintage Books, 1994