In Our Time - Childhood

Episode Date: December 9, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss childhood. The 20th Century was proclaimed the Century of the Child. It has been much else but in the western world the position, the possibilities, the meaning and the story of childhood have been changed, for many, monumentally. Children join the workforce much later, they are born into smaller, usually more affluent families than a hundred years ago, they tend to spend their parents’ money rather than contributing to the family coffers, they are handed over to the school for what used to be called the best years of their lives. Children have been involved in a spectacular journey in the last hundred years. St Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: But when I became a man, I put away childish things”. But is it really as simple as that, can one always make such a clear distinction between childhood and being an adult, and is such a division even desirable?For most of this century - in the Western World - childhood has been another country with different laws and separate truths, it is something we either feel we missed or somewhere to which we long to return. Has it always been such a cherished state and do our endless machinations to keep childhood special actually help the individual? With Christina Hardyment, social historian and author of The Future of the Family; Dr Theodore Zeldin, Senior Fellow, St Anthony’s College, Oxford and author of An Intimate History of Humanity.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, St Paul wrote to the Corinthians, When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child,

but when I became a man, I put away childish things. But is it really as simple as that? And can one always makes such a clear distinction between child and being an adult and is such a division even desirable. For most of this century in the Western world, childhood has been another country with different laws and separate truths. It's something we feel either that we've missed or somewhere to which we long to return. Has it always been such a cherished state and do our endless machinations to keep childhood special,

actually help the individual? With me to discuss the enigma of childhood as social historian Christina Hardiman, author of the future of the family, and Dr. Theodore Zeldin's Senior Fellow at St. Hattiness College, Oxford, and author of an intimate history of humanity. Christina Hardiman, Rousseau's Manual of Childhood, Emile, which is published towards the end of the 18th century, was massively influential at the time.

What new idea of childhood did that introduce? He introduced ideas that we would take for granted today. He came in very strongly saying children should be free, should be allowed to discover for themselves in a quite adventurous way. We'd be pretty scared by the fact that he thought children should get as cold as possible and as hungry as possible to teach them the value of these things. But he was reacting against a very strict

and authoritarian way of bringing up children in the same way that we're reacting against one. He had the idea of a natural child. What did he mean by natural at that time a couple hundred years ago? He said don't put children in swaddling bands, dig them a little shallow place in the earth so they couldn't climb out of it

and let them be free to play in the dust and eat mud and experiment. so on. He felt that they should really just be allowed to rampage around. Charles Fox, the English politician, who was a great follower of Russo, had a little baby boy. He was absolutely adored, and at grand political dinners, this child would be brought in and would rampage around, sitting in bowls of custard and so on, to great sort of plaudits from everybody and claps. It was freedom, they've a complete reaction. You say Emil had massive influence at the time. You mean massive influence in a rather closed

section of society? I think most writers are influential only in literate sectors of society until you get to a society where everybody can read and freedom for children is very much one side of prosperity.

Was it regarded as something absurd at the time his ideas or something that people welcomed. It was an idea that was ready for its time. It was the age of the French Revolution and overturning a great many authorities and so it suited people's ideas of freedom that children should be free and indeed

they themselves. Rousseau borrowed from Locke and ultimately from the Spartans the idea that children should be hardened and you realise at the time of Rousseau, half the children born died before they were eight years old. What did hardening mean in practice at that time? Well the idea was that if you looked at nature you saw that she was prodigal. Enormous numbers of animals and children and plants died for one reason or another. They weren't perfect. They collapsed. And so it was, as you say, Spartan. They did want to strengthen them.

And really it was survival of the fittest. Theodore Zolran, what do you think about this Spartan idea and the natural idea going hand in hand as they seemed to go there? I think Rousseau was a rebel, and he thought the world was terrible, and he had a lot of trouble with it. and he's a typical sort of delinquent, mad, maverick sort of person. And so he said, let us try and stop this influence coming on to our children, and therefore let us go to nature where institutions cannot influence them.

Keep them separate. Treat children as children, which means take them out of the world, protect them. And I think what's happened with children is that for most of history, Children have been exploited, forced to be obedient. Do what you're told. And then with Rousseau, you get the idea, children need to be protected from this awful world. And now we are moving to a different age, and we are saying, let us listen to children.

And let us discover that they each have something interesting to say. And the originality of the next century may be that we have introduced. into the world a voice which has never been heard before, as in the 19th century we introduced the voice of the working class, the 20th century we introduced the voice of women, and now we're going to introduce the voice of children. And you must know that in this year,

for the first time there's been the world parliament of children, which they express themselves, and we now treat them as equals. Well, let's try to plot this path through. At the end of the 18th century, after Russo, we have the two great monuments of human rights, the Bill of Rights in America, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man in France.

How did those two bills have anything, any bearing on the way children were regarded? The Declaration of Rights of Man is very important because it said parents need no longer be obeyed. The paternal authority was destroyed. and somebody said when they cut off the head of Louis XVIth, they cut off the head of every father who had tried to be the king in his family. And this idea of paternal authority which goes back to the Chinese and so on

thought the most important thing for a father was to create a family which was his army. And now we're saying. no, children have rights of their own. How was this received? Again, the idea of the head of the house, the head of the army being no longer the head of the house. At the time, I'm just trying to sort of settle it at the end of the 18th century before we move on.

Was this just among a few intellectuals and thought of an interesting notion? No, it was very important because it meant that the younger son was the equal of the eldest son. The father couldn't decide which of his children would have what. And I suppose the final result is that children began to be protected. There was a war, you see, between children oppressed by their parents. The French Revolution, the children rebel against their parents

and get the right not to have to obey them. But the children don't win in the end because the parents' power is moved on. to teachers, social workers, doctors, and the children go into the control of institutions, and so it's in a way the state which takes over. That's one part of it. Another part of it is that the mothers take over, don't they? This is generalisation time,

but Napoleon said the future of France as the mothers of France will improve their moral values. Napoleon had a big influence, we're told. Well, huge influence in the 19th century was so admired, but his statement about the mother. being the moral force, the educative force and so on. Can you just... Yes, I don't really agree with Theodore's saying.

I think that it was much more a temporary thing, and the reaction, if anything, to the French revolutionary ideas and the bills of rights was to clamp down even more. I think the shift in authority from father to mother was a middle-class-led development because you suddenly got a growing middle class where the father earned money by leaving the house

and the mother had enough money not to need to leave it. So whereas when both parents worked, children had to, mainly in the home, then the children helped. When you've got factories and so on, children were often neglected or so on. In upper-class families, then the parents were busy doing their own things

and nursemaids were employed. But the development of the role of the mother in bringing up children was very much a mid-19th century institution, and mothers were very proud of it, and they put a great deal of religious and spiritual efforts into saving the souls of these children and thinking about their welfare and so on,

and I think that was quite a marked new development that affluence was produced. Do you see the role of the mother as strongly as Christina Theta? Well, this movement she did, describes is contemporaneous with the development of compulsory education. So the mother had to abandon control to the teacher. Not in the early 19th century. Yes, but that is the result.

And so are you saying for a number of years the mother was in charge and then ceased to be? Yes, very much so. I completely agree when you start looking at the 20th century that the role of school and children and the family is something that hasn't been examined nearly enough and is enormously important. You're saying the 19th century is the age or the mother? Very much so, because children didn't have to go to school. There wasn't compulsory schooling of such an age.

I mean, they might only go to school for a few years of their childhood or be tutored at home. There wasn't anything like the institution of compulsory schooling that has bounced through the 20th century, moving from having to stay at school in your 10 or 11 at the beginning of this century, to having to be there till 16. I wouldn't agree, because I'd say,

that in the 19th century, most children worked. The purpose of having a child, until very recently, was to get someone to help you make more money and to survive. I didn't think that was the purpose of having a child. I think children did help you make money.

Well, the more children you have, yes. I don't think that was the purpose. Well, all right. But in any case, children worked, and the mother also worked. And the originality of that was when mothers ceased to work, sorry, when mothers began working in place of their children, which is what the 20th century has done.

Children now no longer work, and instead there's the mothers who work. I think we're sort of vaulting slightly here, but I think the change is that when children went to school, for the very good reason to give them a better future, and fathers were outside the household as well, earning money, and you had domestic appliances and, you had domestic appliances and electricity and things, which meant that actually maintaining the home

wasn't something you needed. Huge staff and children and so on to help, and you didn't have to have children in charge of the poultry yard or whatever. Then the mother is at home and under-occupied and lonely, and that's what drives her out to the house. Can I just come back a little bit of, how did the sciences in the 19th century affect the view of children, whether pseudoscience is like phrenology

or the idea of science is applied to, everything in life, including family life? I think it completely shifted thinking from, or you're talking about nature, you know, prodigal and children dying and you can't do anything about it, to saying, well, with phrenology, you have the different faculties of the brain, which it was thought could be encouraged to be developed.

And so the mother had a very important role because she could actually nurture that bump of benevolence and discourage that one of cruelty by careful bringing up, and all the metaphors of childcare at that time are out of the garden, really, out of the potting shed. It's pruning up the twig that as the twig is bent so the child is inclined and this sort of thing. I'd qualify this. When Christina says children were sent to school to give them a better life,

I don't think that was quite what happened. They went to school in order to prevent them doing things which adults did not want. That gets a bit conspiratorial. Well, if you read some of the theorists, they were very concerned that they wanted to moralize children. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And Rousseau says you've got to treat children as children, you've got to make them happy and not think about the future.

Yes. In other words, get away from what they will do. The world is terrible. So at least let them have a few years of happiness. It's very difficult. It's interesting. There have been, and they almost are exactly the same. points in the centuries. The late 18th century, the late 19th century and the late 20th century,

there always seems to be a decade or two of people really falling in love with children and giving them complete freedom. And then there's always a reaction. And I think there is this sort of pattern that seems to occur. In your book, Theodore, your book, An Intimate History of Humanity, you say, I'm quoting, they have always been outside as trying to interfere between parents and children. You give one of the examples of Christianity. Could you develop that? It's an interesting thought. Yes, because people have always said

to parents, children don't really belong to you, they belong to society, or they belong to God, and in any case you don't know how to teach them to do what is right. And most people used to be illiterate, and therefore

there was some attempt by those who could read to change the behavior. People always thought that most humans were sinful or bad or stupid and had to be improved. And parents were not doing it because parents were concerned with their own economic interests. They wanted either to make the child produce as much money as possible

or to marry their daughters to advance in the world. and I think if we are talking about Rousseau as being the great innovator, one should remember that Rousseau said that girls are by nature destined to obey men, and so you must encourage nature to develop their submissive faculties. And I think we have to, in any discussion of childhood, mention that boys and girls were treated very differently. and in many civilizations to have a daughter was a mistake and this is one of the great originalities of our time that we are trying to treat them equally

and that girls are now children, children, female children are developing attitudes which are going to be quite influential. The interesting thing, one of the interesting things in that, out of that statement is that when you say interfere, you talk about Christianity doing it quite deeply.

Your father is replaced by a godfather. That's right. The spiritual father is more important than the physical father. Yes. And what you learn at home is not as important as what you learn in church. Do you see these as takeover bits, Christina Heidelman? I feel that's an exaggeration, really, and I do think it depends who you listen to.

If you actually listen to the way parents write very thoughtfully about their children and the way people who want to dictate policy right, you get a complete difference. And I think I felt very strongly, and the reason I wrote a book examining the history of baby care theories, was that in a way what we're doing now, you could say was less kind than what parents were doing in the 19th century with their children. and that in fact the core of concern, perhaps it is oppressive at times,

might have been easier for children to grow up with than a sense of being very peripheral to life, which is what children often experience now. And I think you're feeling, I'm feeling, that you, Theodore, feel that people are trying to bounce, pound down children, when, in fact, I think it's a caringness, and I think there is a qualitative difference. Well, yes, people try to change children for their own good,

and they call that care. It's very difficult to distinguish. I don't think it was as malicious of that. I mean, an awful lot of the lessons children were learnt. It's for your good. They weren't interfering that much. They were giving very strong moral lines, and children had to take the consequences of their actions.

I think there's something rather different. was going on. Well, most fathers ignored and neglected their children. No. All right. We seem to have a little disagreement here. There is a lot, well, I think one of the things that there's a danger in this conversation is that we may be talking about English fathers or European fathers. And we have to think of the whole of the world.

and today, if we're discussing what has happened in this century, we have to realize that every kind of behavior co-exist today in different parts of the world. The whole of history is still present. So we're both right? We're both right. And in many civilizations, the child is cared for and loved very much in very early childhood, in infancy, when it's fun.

And then he's put to work, and things change. There was a transformation, let's generalise the beginning of this century, let's stick to this country, a roundabout this country. In the education of children, in the simple way that it was extended, the children left school at 11, then 12, then 14, then 16, and now an awful lot of them go into 18. What was the philosophy underlying this century's extension of education? Was it simply that we need brighter people and so on,

or was there more to it than that? Well, it was very much, I think, to give the child more opportunity and what I think has been underestimated is the effect of that. We hear a lot now about how parents are failing their children and the family is falling apart and so on. And you don't often say, well, it's not really surprising because children leave home at a quarter to eight in the morning or a quarter past eight from the age of five or even four or even three now.

They get back maybe at four or five and they've got two or three hours homework. Now, where is that parental influence and? coming in. And if that's going to be thought a good thing for children and the fact that we do it is presumably because we think it's good, then I do think we have to pile in a huge amount

of resources and sort of enterprise into exactly what's happening to those children during the day. You clearly don't think it's such a good thing. I mean, from your turn, am I misinterpreting? No, I think that if you want to give every child

the best opportunity, then it ought to be freely available. But it's the quality of this thing we call education, which I think has some quite profound questions to be asked about it. Well, that's a slightly different debate. What we're talking about is that they go away at about quarter to 8 in the morning. They come back about 4, 4.15, generally speaking, pretty tired out of sorts. And then on the whole there's at least one, perhaps two people out working or out.

It's a very different sort of childhood until... Let's stick around this country, even 150 years ago, 100 years ago, 100 years ago, where most things happened around the house. And as you say in your book, people turned up at the door to sharpen knives and this, that and all that went on. It is a profound change which you referred to the very top of the programme, Theodore. Yeah. You've asked an important question, which is what's going on? And I think this means first that for the last century, the specialists have, the scientist, if you like, have obtained dominance. And they've said, this is the way you've got to deal with children.

And the result of their taking eight hours a day, whatever it is, of children, is that the family is transformed into a leisure institution. And the development of the leisure society, the leisure society, has been put under the control of parents. Parents are in charge of the leisure society. And children have been put at the center of the leisure society more or more. So we've created, on one hand, a specialist society, which will make children the kind of people we want them to be. And we then compensate for all the pain by amusing them afterwards, and it doesn't really work.

I think this is a mess we've got into. I think the leisure society is a mistake because it has allowed us to excuse the disagreeable things we do to people when they're not in leisure. and work can continue to be disagreeable because we say, oh well, afterwards you can go home and watch telly. And if we are to think of what we want in the future, I think we need to abolish the leisure society, and we have to say work itself

should be more fulfilling and not just to grind. I think it's a mistake to make a contrast too hard between the child's day as work and something in the evening called leisure. It seems to me that really what one would hope is happening to children is that their curiosity is being met by the world around it, that its parents can provide it with information and love and guidance, and then if it goes out among its peers, it can do so sort of strengthened by a sense of its own home base.

And I think the trouble with this very long school day is that there isn't enough time to get back and recoup. Well, there's just a report published about three days ago by the inspectors of French Ministry of Education who said that only 30% of children actually have much of a conversation in class during school hours. And so most children are pretty well silent as passive observers, if you like. And the conclusion from that is that after having removed illiteracy, we now have the problem of the silence of children who do not know how to talk properly. do not know how to converse.

And that is an enormous weakness because most of life now is the art of having relationship with others, and it's not certain that schools teach that, can teach that. And what is worse is I went to a congress of teachers of teachers, and they had also trouble talking also because though they knew how to give their lessons, they were a bit stuck afterwards.

I don't think I'd be too doom-laden, actually. I mean, if we sort of, you know, when you come out of a dark cinema and you see the real world, if we now pretended we were in a primary school in sort of almost any village in England, it would be a happy sort of place humming with activity and ideas, and the children would run out to their mother's arms. I feel that what's happening now is absolutely marvellous, because we're discovering how interesting children are. Yes.

And how they're asking questions which are fantastic, and very difficult to answer. Do you do think we're coming to the end of this, but do you do think that given there was such a huge transformation at the beginning of this century, and intellectually a big transformation two centuries ago, do you think what we've got now is the solution or you see something equally dramatic happening in the way that children are treated

and guided if you want or represented in our society? I've always felt that children and indeed the whole of society is very much driven by the inventions we, we, produce. And it was sort of practical changes that made us do those things happen. And I think now we're on the brink of the most extraordinary change in the way children are living with the fact that they can

corny roam on the internet and ring up their friends, they can drive in cars, they're incredibly mobile. And they are very good at being friends, as if they've created a new sort of family around themselves. I think there's a very exciting new shape to the world of the family and the child, and we're very much experimenting, but the prospects, I think, are better than they ever have been. Provided they can create their own agenda. I was invited to this Parliament of Children, and I noted that they demand of the same sort of things as adults were demanding, and what

really concerned them was what kind of future is awaiting them. And if they can create that future themselves and if their voice can not just be a request that adults should change the world, that they should do something themselves. And I tell them this and they said, we sort of forgot to say this, that we

want to do it ourselves. And the agenda for these parliaments is produced by adults. And much of what the ideas we put, we offer children are then discussed by them. The next stage,

which is, I hope, that they will think for themselves, and we will listen to them, and they will do things for themselves. Children are now almost adults, and we are no longer adults, because we are also children all the time. We never think of ourselves as being complete people. So you think that the idea of the children, father, mother, that children, because of the schooling, taking so much of their time, as it were, are building up an alternative society through.

I just wanted to develop the French, idea a bit more? I think that children do mature very early now and they have been educated and given a whole lot of ideas and access to a huge number of ideas. And so it's almost again as if we're returning to the world when there was no difference between the child and the adult because as soon as a child could earn some money,

it was out there being a little adult. And I think children enjoy that. They like work stations. So we're going back to that. You see us going back to it rather than going forward to something. It's very important that children should participate. They're being segregated. They've been segregated through by these experts,

and now it is time that they became part of the world equal. There are two billion children under 15, one third of the world, and they ought now to be considered as capable of having opinions in the same way as women now have opinions and everyone else has. How old do you think is old enough? Ten. Well, people used to go to work before they were ten. So it's rather interesting joining the workforce in another way.

That's a beguiling idea. We might come back to it. Thank you very much, Zazuli. Thank you, Christina. Ardiment. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs

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