Centuries of Childhood : A Social History of Family Life

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Summary: A Paradigm
Review: During the sixties (those were the times!) this was probably the most influential book on education. The funny thing is, that actually it is not at all about education, but its history and how our Western understanding of childhood as a concept has evolved. For everyone who uses to take for granted the values of a sheltered childhood and a period of prolonged 'innocence', it must come as a surprise, how relatively recent, in historical terms, these developments actually had been. In such light, the medieval society and even the Renaissance look very alien, like people from a distant planet. They had a custom to exchange their children in a network of chartered apprenticeships. Once a little sucker had passed the critical age of five and was deemed to be ready to fend for itself, it became time to learn the way of the world, and to be rented out to service at the tables of a trade or of landed nobility. Only a select few received rudimentary tuition and set out on an aca!demic career, which meant years of vagrancy and the open road between Universities and urban centers of learning. As for the pre-school age, the child was a sexless, almost nameless piece of livestock and roamed the townships in street gangs, wore an undistinguished piece of garb, rummaged the garbage dumps and contributed to the family's income with petty theft and beggary. It never washed, hunkered down to torture an unfortunate beetle or wrenched a cat's tail; it learned to drink small beer, in order to escape the diarrhea that lurked in every well. It was on a race against measles, small pocks, diphtheria, and crippling polio, and the odds weren't good. Parents preferred not to involve themselves too emotionally in the frequent deaths of their small ones. A little thing had died, sad, but a replacement is already under way. Scenes from modern day Calcutta come to mind. (This condition was not necessarily class-specific. The future emperor Frederick II (1194-1250), heir t!o the most powerful dynasty of his time, one of the best educated and most enlightened rulers in history, who was fluently conversant in six languages, including Arabic, had passed his early childhood and adolescence as a thieving thug in a Sicilian street-gang. He coined the notorious phrase of the three con-men: Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. Needless to say, the popes took turns to excommunicate this man.) These days, teachers use to complain over class-sizes. I still remember my first year in primary: we first graders shared the same classroom with the second grade, and one teacher took care of both at the same time. But this is idyllic if compared to the beginnings of the modern school system in the late Renaissance! You had first graders of every age between seven and twenty-five sitting in one room with second, third, and fourth graders. Many of the most renowned educators were practising pedophiles and nobody found anything wrong with it. Only gradually, the Jesuits in th!eir colleges set a trend for stricter discipline and the separation of the ages. This was paralleled by a new understanding of parenthood. Up to this point the Church had been too busy with her own agenda of sorting out who is orthodox or an infidel, to care much about such mundane matters as marriage (see my review of Caroll's 'Constantine's Sword'). Newly wed couples used to receive without much ceremony an informal blessing under the open sky, on the stairway to the church-entrance. But now marriage had became institutionalized at last and a 'holy sacrament'. The little ones, as the fruit of such commitment, became precious, and their still frequent deaths a source of inconsolable grief. For the first time since Antiquity, we find again infants to be buried in individually marked tombs. Supervision intensified; early tuition was recognized as a means to keep kids out of trouble. Children wore the same costumes as their parents and from early on displayed the airs of their !respective social classes. They no longer exposed their genitals in public and slept in a place removed from their parent's bed. It was not exactly a world of fairies and dreaming under soaring larks, there was little time for this and no space to wax sentimental. The kids were on a mission: to grow up as soon as possible and take their share of responsibility for the family's fortunes. The nuclear family was born out of economic expedience - your own children are more loyal then a hired apprentice; and you save on the wages. The emerging educational system served to reinforce this trend and at the same time developed a new sense of parental commitment. Then came the industrial age and mobilized human resources on an unprecedented scale. The sentimental attachment deepened and in the era of Victorian hypocrisy and a growing life expectancy, the biological learning period was stretched even further and a new myth was born: the myth of innocence and of an infancy in fairyland. !The fashion recognized the need for age related clothing, the age of children's literature was born and parents learned to lie to their children on the facts of life and the birds and the bees. Has this turned out to be a blessing? History's court is still in session, and the replacement of King Arthur, Cinderella and the Dwarfs by Kermit, the Cooky-Monster and Miss Piggy might turn out to be a rather dubious piece of pedagogic progress. Monsieur Aries book certainly deserves its rank as a classic.

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Summary: The most ridiculed book in medieval scholarship
Review: Read this book to widen the scope of your learning. Do not read this book if you want the entire truth on medieval childhood. To be short - Aries is wrong. Dead wrong. He claims that there was no childhood at this time, based on depictions of children wearing adult clothes in medieval art. He disregards sources such as the coroner's records and accounts of saints' miracles which clearly show that 1. parents expected children to behave in certain ways at different ages, and 2. parents really did love their children, considering how upset they were when something bad happened to them. They weren't just mourning another worker, but their CHILD. I call this the most ridiculed book in medieval scholarship and it is true. Read any other account on childhood and his name will be mentioned as someone who was wrong. You should still read the book, though, even if it is just to avoid the pitfalls of too little research.

Rating:
Summary: Why do we read hisory books?
Review: Some are historians who judge a book by its accuracy, as a mathematician would judge a treatise on pure mathematics. Some read history for pleasure, as a tourist visits an ancient ruin and is entertained by the stories of the guide. Some (including, in this case, myself) read to answer such questions as that raised in the introduction. Are such structures as the family "hitherto believed to be invariable because they were biological" due to nature or nurture? I would not pretend to judge as a professional historian. As pure entertainment I would rate this below old-fashioned narrative history. If a general reader wants entertainment from the French annalistes then I would recommend the Braudel. It is very France-centered and never ventures outside Western Europe. The tranlation must have presented difficulties since so much depends on the nuances of such terms as "child" and "adolescent" and the use of the second person singular. Sometimes a word such as "greenhorn" is repeated many times, as if it were the usual English expression for a novice or neophyte (was Baldick translating blanc-bec or debutant or dupe? I do not envy. and have every praise for the way in which he has accomplished, his task). So has Aries proved that the special status of childhood and the nuclear family are modern inventions? I still don't know.