The Disappearance of Childhood

On the forty-second page of “The Disappearance of Childhood” author Neil Postman wrote (hyperlinks & some emphasis added):

became synonymous with the world child. Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt express it this way:

Whilst under the tradtional system [of apprenticeship], "childhood" effectively ended at the age of seven... the effect of organized formal education was to prolong the period during which children were withheld from the demands and responsibilities of the adult world. Childhood was, in fact, becoming far less a biological necessity of no more than fleeting importance; it was emerging for the first time as a formative period of increasing significance.¹⁴

What is being said here is that childhood became a description of a level of symbolic achievement. Infancy ended at the point at which command of speech was achieved. Childhood began with the task of learning how to read. Indeed, the world child was frequently used to describe adults who could not read, adults who were regarded as intellectually childish. By the seventeenth century, everyone assumed, as Plumb tells us, that "the process of a literate education should develop with the developing child: reading should begin about four or five, writing follow, and then gradually more sophisticated subjects should be added.... Education [became] tied almost inflexibly to the calendar age of children."¹⁵

But the tie between education and calendar age took some time to develop. The first attempts to establish classes or grades of students were based on the capacities of students to read, not on their calendar ages.¹⁶ Differentiation by age came later. As Ariès explains, the organization of school classes as a hierarchy of reading competence brought the "realization of the special nature of childhood or youth and of the idea that within that childhood or youth a variety of categories existed."¹⁷ Ariès is expressing here a principle of social perception, alluded to earlier: When a group—any group—is formed on the basis of a single characteristic, it is

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