Neil Postman - The Disappearance of Childhood

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The Invention
of Childhood

The Disappearance
of Childhood

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. From a biological point of view it is inconceivable that any culture will forget that it needs to reproduce itself. But it is quite possible for a culture to exist without a social idea of children. Unlike infancy, childhood is a social artifact, not a biological category. Our genes contain no clear instructions about who is and who is not a child, and the laws of survival do not require that a distinction be made between the world of an adult and the world of a child. In fact, if we take the word children to mean a special class of people somewhere between the ages of seven and, say, seventeen, requiring special forms of nurturing and protection, and believed to be qualitatively different from adults, then there is ample evidence that children have existed for less than four hundred years. Indeed, if we use the word children in the fullest sense in which the average American understands it, childhood is not much more than one hundred and fifty years old. To take one small example: The custom of celebrating a childs birthday did not exist in America throughout most of the eighteenth century

To take a more important example: As late as 1890, American high schools enrolled only seven percent of the fourteen-through seventeen-year-old population. Along with many much younger children, the other ninety-three percent worked at adult labor, some of them from sunup to sunset in all of our great cities.

But we must not confuse, at the outset, social facts with social ideas. The idea of childhood is one of the great inventions of the Renaissance. Perhaps its most humane one. Along with science, the nation-state, and religious freedom, childhood as both a social structure and a psychological condition emerged around the sixteenth century and has been refined and nourished into our own times. But like all social artifacts, its continued existence is not inevitable. Indeed, the origin of this book is in my observation that the idea of childhood is disappearing, and at dazzling speed. Part of my task in the pages to come is to display the evidence that this is so, although I suspect most readers will not require much convincing. Wherever I have gone to speak, or whenever I have written, on the subject of the disappearance of childhood, audiences and readers have not only refrained from disputing the point but have eagerly provided me with evidence of it from their own experience. The observation that the dividing line between childhood and adulthood is rapidly eroding is common enough among those who are paying attention, and is even suspected by those who are not. What isnt so well understood is where childhood comes from in the first place and, still less, why it should be disappearing.