The Innovation of
Childhood
|
There he played: at the dilly
dilly darling, at jog
breech, or prick him for-, at bobbing, or flirt on the nose, at the
larks, at fillipping.
|
Francois Rabelais
|
to
Dawn
We take for granted a sheltered, spoiled
rotten period of prolonged
"innocence" and supervision, and call it “childhood.” Yet this is a
rather recent innovation. In medieval society and the Renaissance this
was a
foreign notion even for the high and mighty.
The Hohenstauffen
emperor,
Frederick II (1194 –
1250) was the
Holy Roman Emperor, King of Sicily, King of Germany, King of Jerusalem,
Romanorum Caesar Semper Augustus,
Felix Victor ac Triumphator, also known to
his
contemporaries simply as “stupor mundi,”
the Marvel of the World. Few know of this man’s childhood as a mere
street
urchin in the narrow lanes of Palermo.
Frederick was heir to the most powerful
dynasty of his time. In his veins rolled the blood of German emperors
and the
Dukes of Normandy, and despite the unpromising beginning, he became the
best-educated and most enlightened autocrat known to history. That was
later in
life; at the moment Frederick was a typical child of the period. Like every
other infant he was on a race against measles, small pocks, diphtheria,
and
polio, and the odds weren't good. He
lost both his parents in quick succession when still a toddler. His
appointed
guardian was Lothario de’ Conti, the genocidal Pope Innocent III, the
destroyer
of Constantinople, the 5th horseman of the apocalypse for the
Albigensians, the
man who imprisoned the European Jews in the ghetto and put a yellow
star on
their garb. In other words, before the age of fourteen, Frederick was,
more or
less, on his own. Like the other kids in the filthy streets of Palermo
he never
washed and rummaged through the trash wearing a sexless, undistinguished
garb, exposing the genitalia. The future emperor’s begging and thieving
was not
needed to contribute to a poor family's income, but he still had to
eat.
Drinking small beer was the only way to escape the diarrhea lurking in
the
fresh water wells. Had he failed to make it, an unmarked hole in the
ground
would have been waiting for him. Parents of this period preferred not
to become
too attached to the deaths of their little ones; the grieving mother
was told
not to worry, there soon will be a new one replacing the loss.
Once
the little sucker had passed the critical age of five or seven, he was
deemed
ready to fend for himself and contracted out as an apprentice to the
shops of a
chartered guild or to attend the table of a noble in the neighborhood.
If the
kid was lucky, he received rudimentary tuition; as a person with
academic
ambitions, he would pass years of vagrancy on the open road between the
universities, hoping for a minor function on the big estates, or for a
career
in the episcopate.
The
arrival of the printing press finally created awareness for the need of
better
education. Until then, only in the Low Countries even the common people
could
read and write.
These
days, I hear teachers fretting over large class-sizes. I still recall
my first
year in primary: we first graders shared the same classroom with the
second
grade, and one teacher took care of the lot at the same time. But this
was
idyllic if compared to the classrooms in the late Renaissance! You had
first
graders of every age between seven and twenty-five sitting in one room
with
second, third, and fourth graders, and just one tutor running the
entire
school.
Many
of the most renowned educators of the period were practicing
pedophiles. So,
naturally, parents hesitated to send their daughters to school. On the
other
hand, the modern reader may consider the French poet François
Villon (1431 –
1463) a victim
of child abuse, yet Villon himself never complained, in fact felt
closely
attached to his abuser and benefactor. It was the Jesuits who separated
the
ages in their schools and set a trend for stricter discipline. Early
tuition
and prolonged supervision became a means to keep the kids out of
trouble. It
paved the way for the nuclear family. For the first time since the fall
of
Rome, infants were again put to rest in individually marked graves;
their still
frequent deaths became a source of inconsolable grief, “don’t
worry
we
make
a
new
one,” was no longer an acceptable way of
expressing condolences. The kids were no longer allowed to expose their
genitals in public and they slept in a place removed from their
parent's bed.
Dressed in the same costumes as their parents, these children began
displaying
the airs of their social class. It was not exactly fairyland. The kids
were on
a mission: to grow up and as soon as possible play their part in the
family’s
race for perks and fortunes.
Then
came the industrial revolution.
The
paramilitary discipline on starvation wages in the Victorian workhouse
was a
regress
to an all too familiar pattern of slavery where children received the
charity
of getting exploited as a source of cheap labor. In turn this enforced
the
parental determination to rise above the mines and cotton mills.
For
a child from the middle-class the period of learning now stretched way
beyond
the biological disposition of the species. A new myth was born, the
myth of the
innocence of infancy. It taught the Victorians to habitually lie to
their
children, and not only about the birds and the bees. This myth is still
keeping
parents in the dark about what is going on out there when the kid has
left the
house. Sweatshops are no longer deemed acceptable and therefore
delegated to
the third world, but with every day the industry discovers new ways of
exploiting the parents, offering age related clothing, age related
literature,
videogames, and the absurdities of our pop culture.
© - 3/22/2009 - by michael sympson,
1,000 words, all rights reserved
