Читать книгу The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Social Development - Группа авторов - Страница 87

According to the American culture critic and media specialist Neil Postman (1931–2003), the Western child started to disappear in the early 1960s (Postman, 1992). Following the beliefs of Ariès, Postman observed that without education, or rather without schools, there are no children in the modern sense of the word. After all: “In an illiterate society (like that of the Middle Ages) there was no need to sharply distinguish between children and adults, such a society harbours few secrets, and civilisation does not need to supply education in order to understand itself” (Postman, 1992, p. 22). The notion of the “child” is redundant if everyone shares the same information environment and lives in the same social and intellectual world. In the wake of many media experts and historians, Postman believed that the art of printing created a new world of symbols, which in its turn required a new interpretation of the notion of “adulthood” (Postman, 1992, p. 28).

The invention of the printing press most likely by Johannes Gutenberg (1394–1468) in 1440, resulted in “adulthood becoming a symbolic achievement, not a biological phenomenon. With the invention of the art of printing, children were required to develop, which would be effected by learning to read, by entering the world of typography” (Postman, 1992, p. 43). As a result, children needed education and were compelled to go to school. This made the notion of the “child” inevitable. We can join Postman in observing that this notion had its “finest hour” between 1850 and 1950 (more appropriately a “finest century”). Children had to work in factories as little as possible and were required to attend school. They were given their own clothes, furniture, literature, games, and social world. A process usually called infantilization took place, a historical lengthening of childhood (see Koops, 1998). In contrast, the person who according to Postman is responsible for the “childless era” starting after 1950 is Samuel Morse (1791–1872). Morse’s invention of the telegraph (demonstrated in public for the first time in 1837) further denaturalized information from “personal possession to merchandise of global value.” “Telegraphy marked the beginning of the process of information becoming uncontrollable” (Postman, 1992, p. 74). All this affected the notion of the child immensely.

The child originated from an environment in which the information in books was controlled by adults and was gradually supplied to children. However, anonymization as a result of telegraphy caused a development that would ultimately take away information from the authority of parents and the family. After the invention of telegraphy, this development was boosted by a continuous stream of inventions: the rotation press, camera, telephone, gramophone, film, radio, television (Postman, 1992, p. 76), culminating in what was not described by Postman, the launch of the internet. Mainly because these modern means of communication primarily use image language, the typical characteristic of childlikeness, illiteracy, loses its meaning. Knowing the alphabet is not a requirement for understanding images (Postman, 1992, p. 81). Television, for example, removes the dividing lines between children and adults to a large extent: “Supported by other electronic media which do not rely on the written word, television re‐creates communication conditions like those existing in the 14th and 15th centuries” (Postman, 1992, p. 82); “in the new media climate everything is available to everyone at the same time: electronic media cannot keep secrets …” and “without secrets the notion of the ‘child’ is void …” (Postman, 1992, p. 83).

Postman (1992) thoroughly demonstrated the disappearance of the child by presenting a large amount of (anecdotal) information on: the portrayal of young people as miniature adults in the media (p. 122); the disappearance of children’s songs (p. 123); the fading of the Disney view of the child (p. 125); the disappearance of children’s clothes, while adults have begun to wear clothes that were previously intended for children (p. 127 ff.); the disappearance of children’s games (p. 129), while top‐class sport has become normal to children (p. 129); and the decline of good manners (p. 132). All this together points to the decline of the notion of the “child,” said Postman, “and accordingly to a weakening of the nature of adulthood.” Postman’s book is concisely and powerfully summarized in the final sentence of the cover text: “The basic notion of this book – that our electronic information environment makes the ‘child’ disappear – can also be read as follows: an electronic information environment makes the adult disappear.”

It is important to realize that many books have been published in the 1970s that intend to free the child from the chains of its immaturity. An example of such books is that by Kuijer (1980). Other examples are Illich’s book, calling for a “deschooling” of society as it hinders children from participating in an adult society (Illich, 1973); Holt’s book, consistently pleading for freeing the child from the chains of a 300‐year‐old tradition of servitude (Holt, 1976); and Farson’s book, interpreting the rights of the child very literally and broadly, e.g., by demanding that children are given the right to vote, “because adults do not stand up for their interests and cannot vote on their behalf” (Farson, 1974, p. 179).

Interestingly, the period discussed by Postman in relation to the disappearance of childhood, the 1970s, also witnessed an unprecedented large global research effort, centering on undermining Piaget’s structural cognitive theory. In other words, the non‐inter‐convertible developmental stages, referred to as cognitive structures, were gradually replaced by continuous domain‐specific developmental processes. Neo‐Piagetian research from that time undermined the presumptions of the Rousseau‐Piaget tradition, which emphasized the inaccessibility of childlike thinking, like never before. The fanaticism with which the origins of all kinds of childlike rationality were explored, caused many a researcher to end up as an “infancy expert” (Koops, 1990, 2004). This post neo‐Piagetian research, among other things, resulted in research on the Child’s Theory of Mind experimentally demonstrating how 2–3‐year‐old children already have a command of current lay psychology, based on a simple theory of desires and beliefs. Meanwhile, the search for the increasingly younger origins of generally human means of communication has not come to an end. Onishi and Baillargeon (2005), for example, demonstrated in an article in Science that 13‐month‐old babies basically have a command of generally human, ordinary communication principles (“beliefs” and “desires”). Two remarkable books summarize the surprising cognitive abilities of very young children (Wellman, 2014; Gopnik, 2009) Remarkably, cultural historical developments – the disappearance of traditional childhood – go hand in hand with the experimental empirical scientific search for (and finding of!) generally human and age‐independent means of communication. To put it briefly, developmental psychology moves with the tides of culture.