A Slice of Sky

“The Disappearance of Childhood” by Neil Postman. Vintage Press. 1982.

This is one pessimistic book. Like most pessimistic books, it’s also a thought provoking one.

I read Elkind’s “The Hurried Child” some years ago and it spurred me to make some decisions about the way we’d raise (and not raise) our kids. Writing from the vantage point of a child psychologist, Elkind argues that children are being pushed to grow up, and are suffering for it. He identified the media and the highly competitive trend in education and parenting as the primary culprits of this epidemic. By imposing our expectations on our children too soon, parents set our children on the road to burnout and to a lifelong angst for lost childhoods, lost innocence.

Postman’s tome, written in the early-80’s, looks at the same phenomenon of a lost childhood from the perspective of a social critic. In “Disappearance of Childhood”, he deconstructs the idea of childhood as a biological category and traces its development from the Classical World to America in the late 20th century,

Postman sees childhood as a social construct, with it roots (though not necessarily its origin, says he) in Athens, specifically in Athenian schools. The word for school then denoted “leisure” for it was based on the (noble) assumption that leisure time was used for thinking and learning. Schools functioned as ‘keepers’ of childhood in the sense that they reinforced the idea that children inhabited certain ‘worlds’ that were different from that of adults’. The concept of childhood was further developed by the Romans. The barbarian invasion and subsequent collapse of the Roman Empire plunged Europe into the Dark Ages, followed by the Middle Ages. With this gargantuan upheaval, childhood came to an end.

Postman identifies three phenomena in the Middle Ages that led to this decline: the loss of literacy as a culture, the loss of education (formal schooling with literacy as its focus) and the loss of shame. Education was usurped by apprenticeship or “on the job learning” and the emphasis on literacy was replaced by an oralist culture. Children and adults therefore shared the same symbolic worlds and the same physical spaces.

The advent of the printing press again changed the landscape of the continent by consolidating the centrality of literacy as a prerequisite for achieving the status of adulthood. The printing press therefore revived the idea of childhood as a distinct category. Learning became synonymous with “book learning” and knowledge, once openly accessible to children, was now invariably tied to literacy and hence, to the adult world.

Postman traces the development of childhood through the Enlightenment, going into some detail about the philosophical treatises of John Locke, Rousseau and Hume.

The second part of the book focuses solely on America from 1850-1950, with an emphasis on the 50’s.

As technology had , in the guise of the printing press, then ushered in a new age of information, knowledge and ideas of society in the Middle Ages, new communication inventions in the early-mid 20th century– “ the rotary press, the camera, the telephone, the phonograph, the movies, the radio, television”- signaled the beginning of the end of the concept of childhood. Postman pinpoints 1950 – the year when television assumed a central role in American homes- as the year when childhood became “obsolete”. Print culture was replaced by a “graphic revolution “(Postman citing Boorstin) of images and icons.

Postman embarks on a persuasive and lengthy discourse on how, in this ongoing revolution of images, information is undifferentiated, chaotic, depersonalized and decontextualized. The effects of this “free-flow” of information creates similar conditions that precipitated the obliteration of childhood in the Middle Ages: the loss of literacy as central to education, the usurping of literacy by other means of communication –whether oral or visual, and the loss of shame that is caused by the blurring of distinctions between the worlds of the child and the adult.

As in his other books, Postman exposes the role of technology in reconfiguring the way we think about relationships, our identities and the way things should function in society.

While Postman offers his observations, he extends no promising cure for the demise of childhood. This book was written in the early-80’s. Now in the infancy of the 21st century, the tome reads almost like a history book of what has taken place. This book, as I said earlier, is a pessimistic one.

I disagree with some of Postman’s opinions about childhood. Postman authoritatively claims that childhood is a social construct, in the same way, I suspect, that gender is viewed purely as a social construct. If childhood was purely a social construct, then why defend it? A social construct rests on principles of convenience- of its use to the society which builds it, shapes it and redefines it. A social construct is bereft of absolute values and is ever-shifting with the trends and mores of society. Based on this, a social construct cannot be defended purely on the grounds of absolute values. This makes the book therefore, merely a record of observations. Perhaps that is what makes Postman’s book so hopeless in its outlook when compared to Dr. Elkind’s “The Hurried Child”. While he notes the circumstances (and the great ogre-culprit TECHNOLOGY) that propel the disappearance of childhood, he falls short in making a case for preserving it.

This is less a book on parenting and the importance of childhood than a persuasive argument against letting technology have a free hand in shaping society. It is therefore a book that must be read because it makes us more aware about the power that we unwittingly absolve to others within the confines of our homes, in deciding the courses of family, children’s upbringing and thinking.

Filed under: Exploring books on November 13th, 2008