This short paean to reading is not distracting from the purpose of this post but directly to the point. In Neil Postman's book The Disappearance of Childhood he makes the rather controversial claim that it is precisely the decline of print-based culture and its replacement by the image-based culture of television that is quickly killing off childhood in our culture.
For anyone who has read Postman's more famous work, Amusing Ourselves to Death, this thesis might not be altogether surprising. As Postman convincingly argues in that work, we are becoming a people addicted to entertainment, obsessed with glowing screens to the detriment of our humanity. Postman's argument here is a slight shift: here he asserts that it was precisely mass literacy that created childhood in the first place, creating a distinction between literate adults and pre-literate children. Television, with its flattening tendency, is destroying childhood and, as Postman will proceed to argue, adulthood as well.
I plan to spend some time lingering in the arguments of this book. I mentioned in the prefatory post that one thing I appreciated about Postman's introduction is its epistemic humility. He insists from the outset that he will resist offering solutions to this seemingly intractable problem. As I will argue in the concluding post, though, his solution is fairly implicit throughout.
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For right now I want to briefly expound on the crucial first step in Postman's argument: the idea that childhood was created by the dissemination of print culture in the early modern period. Before I get into his ideas I want to note that this idea is not altogether new to me. In the hand-wringing of my parent's generation over these darned millennials (that they, ahem, raised), the emergence of an understanding of adolescence is cited as developing about 100 years ago. With sentimental children's literature beginning in the nineteenth century it is clear that our understanding of childhood shifted, but Postman's argument goes deeper than that.
Postman argues that, with their emphasis on education, the Greeks came the closest to inventing childhood. Though they would be flabbergasted by contemporary ideas of child nurturing, their ideas were close enough to ours to be recognizable. Postman further credits the Romans with another indispensable link in the development of childhood: the notion of shame. He asserts that "without a well-developed idea of shame, childhood cannot exist." In particular, children must be safeguarded from adult secrets especially relating to sex.
The Graeco-Roman conception was snowed under with the Middle Ages, according to Postman's reading. Literacy was basically non-existent outside of small cadres of scribes and education, too, was mostly dead. He sums up the medieval view thusly:
What we can say, then, with certainty, is that in the medieval world there was no conception of childhood development, no conception of prerequisites or sequential learning, no conception of schooling as a preparation for an adult world. . . The seven-year-old male was a man in every respect except for his capacity to make love and war.
The entire world was open to children. There was no effort to protect adult secrets from them. While some of this is certainly attributable to high childhood mortality and the resistance, therefore, to commit too much emotional energy into any one child, but Postman claims that this argument cannot be given too much weight. For example, in England in the mid-eighteenth century half of all total deaths were children under the age of five yet the idea of childhood flourished in that dark environment.
The major difference between childhood of the post-Renaissance period and its lack in the medieval period was not death rates but the printing press.
I'll pick up there in the next post.
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