Introduction
You live in a culture where children dress, talk, and consume media like adults, while adults often act like children. This blurring of generational lines leaves you wondering what happened to the traditional boundary between youth and maturity.
Childhood is not a biological given, but a social artifact created by print literacy that is now dissolving under the pressure of electronic media.
Neil Postman examines the historical rise and current fall of this unique life stage. You will discover how the invention of the printing press established the modern concept of childhood, and how television is actively destroying it by making all information instantly accessible to everyone.
The book answers several key questions:
- How did medieval society function without a concept of childhood?
- What specific role did literacy play in creating adult secrets?
- Why does television act as an open-admission medium?
- How does the loss of childhood alter adult authority and social order?
1. The Invention and Middle Ages of Childhood
Childhood is a social artifact that can disappear. You can observe its fading in modern culture where children and adults share increasingly indistinguishable behaviors, clothing, and legal rights. Neil Postman argues that contemporary society is witnessing the fading of childhood boundaries, citing the rise in juvenile crimes and the commercialization of children into adult-like roles across visual media.
Between 1950 and 1979, the rate of serious crime committed by those younger than fifteen increased one hundred and ten times, or eleven thousand percent.
Twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls working as high-paid models dressed and styled as knowing, sexually enticing adults.
The Medieval Oral World
In the medieval oral world, childhood did not exist as a separate life stage, and individuals transitioned directly from infancy to adulthood at around age seven. Because biology determined communication competence through spoken language and there were no hidden cultural secrets preserved in books, children shared the same games, work, physical spaces, and language as adults. Age seven marks the age at which children mastered speech, were designated by the Church to know right from wrong, and when childhood ended in the medieval world.
Brueghel's paintings show coarse village festivals where adults besotted with drink grope each other with unbridled lust while children eat and drink alongside them.
The Printing Press and Literacy
The explosion of printed information created a knowledge gap between literates and illiterates, requiring formal education and inventing childhood as a symbolic achievement. Because print vastly expanded the symbolic environment beyond local custom and memory, adults had to earn adulthood by learning to read. Children were separated from the adult world to attend schools, transforming childhood from a fleeting biological phase into a formative period of life defined by calendar age and symbolic mastery.
In 1498, an earlier pediatric book was published by an Italian named Paolo Bagellardo. In 1544, Thomas Phaire published The Boke of Chyldren, considered the first book on pediatrics written by an Englishman.
Print culture necessitated the cultivation of shame and self-control, leading adults to hide cultural secrets from children and establish strict rules of public etiquette. Because book learning required the subordination of physical desires to a disembodied mind, shame became the primary civilizing mechanism to control animal nature. As the distance between adults and children grew, adults began withholding secrets regarding sex, money, violence, and death, creating etiquette books to teach the young proper public deportment.
In 1516, Erasmus published Colloquies to set forth the manner in which boys must regulate their instinctual life. Erasmus published De Civilitate Morium Puerilium to instruct the young on regulating instinctual life, managing bodily functions like spitting and blowing the nose, and cultivating a sense of shame.
You can trace the strict rules of civilité through specific behavioral instructions:
- Turn away when spitting lest your saliva fall on someone.
- Trodden upon any purulent matter that falls to the ground, or catch the sputum in a small cloth if you cannot tread on it.
- Wipe the nostrils with a handkerchief while turning away if more honorable people are present.
2. Philosophical Foundations and Industrial Threats
Enlightenment philosophies championed by Locke and Rousseau solidified childhood, while early industrial capitalism threatened it through child labor and harsh penal codes.
Philosophical Views
John Locke established the Protestant view that children must be civilized through literacy, reason, self-control, and shame. In his 1693 publication Some Thoughts Concerning Education, he argued that the mind is a tabula rasa. This concept placed responsibility on adults to shape children through disciplined education.
You can trace this view directly to the need for total linguistic competence. Locke proposed a rigorous program of education and physical vigor to ensure obedience to the mind, along with apprenticeships for poor children.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Romantic movement introduced a different perspective. They insisted that childhood represents a precious state of nature whose virtues should be celebrated rather than deadened by civilization.
Rousseauian, or the Romantic, conception viewed deformed adults, rather than unformed children, as the true problem. In Emile, Rousseau allowed only Robinson Crusoe as children's reading to demonstrate living in a natural environment.
Industrial Exploitation
Industrial capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries posed a severe threat to childhood. Large industrial cities and factories subordinated the special nature of children for utility.
Poor children were subjected to harsh labor in mines and textile mills. Lower-class children suffered from widespread illiteracy and a lack of schools during this reign of terror.
Sarah Gooder, an eight-year-old girl, described working as a trapper in the Gauber Pit in total darkness from early morning until evening.
Legal systems exacted ferocious penalties for minor offenses. In 1780, over two hundred crimes carried the penalty of hanging.
A seven-year-old girl was hanged at Norwich for stealing a petticoat.
Reform eventually arrived through legislation prohibiting employment of children under the age of ten in mines.
3. Television as an Open-Admission Technology
Print culture created a knowledge monopoly and required years of rigorous training in literacy, self-restraint, and sequential logic. Television shatters this barrier because its pictographic information is undifferentiated in accessibility and requires no specialized instruction.
Unlike print culture which hid adult secrets behind literacy barriers, television operates as an open-admission total disclosure medium that eliminates the boundaries of childhood.
The Electronic Shift
Dynamic images on a screen are instantly graspable by anyone regardless of age. Because the medium requires no decoding skills and cannot be hidden from children, it eliminates adult-controlled secrets.
Millions of young children watch television late at night. Three million children age two to eleven watch television between 11:00 P.M. and 11:30 P.M.
Three-year-olds can easily watch and comprehend the same programs and commercials as adults. The screen shows 1,200 different images every hour. Network television shots have an average length of 3 to 4 seconds, while commercial shots average 2 to 3 seconds.
Total Disclosure
Television functions as a total disclosure medium that must continuously reveal cultural taboos and adult secrets to satisfy its insatiable demand for novelty. Operating around the clock as a speed-of-light, pictorial medium, television must move information rather than dwell on it deeply. Because its physical and symbolic form makes it impossible to segregate audiences, it relies on every existing taboo, exposing private adult matters to the entire public domain.
Vidal Sassoon casually ended a television segment by promising a return with a new diet and a quick look at incest. Phil Donahue regularly addressed subjects ranging from the defense budget to promiscuity and sadomasochism.
Unlike print, which requires literacy and formal education to access its secrets, television is an open-admission technology with no physical, economic, or cognitive barriers. The printed page creates an obstacle to availability because one must qualify for deeper mysteries through scholastic education and self-restraint. Television, however, cannot whisper, and its concrete, self-explanatory pictures mean a six-year-old and a sixty-year-old are equally qualified to experience everything it shows.
Neil Postman recalls having to find, pay for, and struggle to read Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer as a thirteen-year-old. Television presents mature content without any such hurdles.
Childhood as a social category depends on the exclusivity of adult information, a distinction that dissolves when media provide egalitarian access to the total adult content. Social groups are largely defined by the exclusivity of the information their members share. Since children are defined precisely as people who do not know what adults know, the rapid and egalitarian disclosure of the adult world by electric media eliminates one of the principal differences between childhood and adulthood.
4. The Adult-Child and the Age of Show Business
While the printing press generated the modern idea of adulthood through requirements like self-restraint and conceptual thinking, electronic media move literacy to the periphery. This produces a diminished definition of adulthood that does not exclude children, merging infancy, senility, and the adult-child.
Television creates a new life stage called the adult-child, where grown-ups possess intellectual and emotional capacities indistinguishable from those of children.
An Ivory soap commercial features an interchangeable mother and daughter in their late twenties, demonstrating that it is considered desirable for a mother not to look older than her daughter.
Television commercials abandon capitalist ideology and rational discourse, operating instead as religious parables complete with sin, redemption, and visions of Heaven. Commercials do not use verifiable propositions or logic; instead, they present products as idols. They follow a narrative structure featuring a beginning, a middle, and an end.
In The Parable of the Ring Around the Collar, a husband is humiliated by a waitress for his dirty collar, his wife uses a specific detergent to solve the problem, and they achieve serenity and forgiveness. Each thirty seconds of one's time and attention for a commercial parable relies on technological innocence and commercial man tropes.
The Adult-Child
Television transforms all aspects of public life into show business, replacing the print-driven Age of Exposition with the Age of Narration. Television must communicate through visual stories rather than abstract arguments. Programs covering science, education, or religion must adopt theatrical formats with entertaining personalities, rendering complex intellectual content secondary to visual appeal and making literacy-based distinctions obsolete.
Science programs like Carl Sagan's Cosmos present complex cosmology by having Sagan ride a bicycle and act as a storyteller surrounded by dynamic visual imagery.
The distinction between adult and child crime has drastically faded due to a staggering rise in both the frequency and brutality of offenses committed by youth. As psychological boundaries dissolve, children increasingly emulate adult criminal activity, leading to legislative changes that treat juvenile offenders in juvenile court and bypass old child savers.
In 1950, 170 persons under fifteen were arrested for serious crimes, representing .0004 percent of that population. Between 1950 and 1979, the rate of serious crimes committed by children saw an 11,000 percent increase. Nonserious child crimes experienced an 8,300 percent increase during the same period, alongside 711,142 reported cases of child abuse in 1979.
Commercials and News
A nine-year-old boy in New York City tried to hold up a bank, and four boys were charged with the sexual assault of a seven-year-old girl in Westchester County.
Individual parents can resist the cultural disappearance of childhood by treating parenting as an act of rebellion against modern societal trends. Parents who limit media exposure, enforce delayed gratification, maintain family proximity, and demand rigorous literacy create a protective intellectual elite environment through the monastery effect.
You can protect your family by applying specific measures:
- limit the amount of exposure children have to media;
- monitor carefully what children are exposed to;
- provide children with a continuously running critique of media themes and values.
10 Key Ideas
- Childhood is not a biological given, but a social artifact created by print literacy that is now dissolving under the pressure of electronic media.
- In the medieval oral world, childhood did not exist as a separate life stage, and individuals transitioned directly from infancy to adulthood at around age seven.
- The explosion of printed information created a knowledge gap between literates and illiterates, requiring formal education and inventing childhood as a symbolic achievement.
- Print culture necessitated the cultivation of shame and self-control, leading adults to hide cultural secrets from children and establish strict rules of public etiquette.
- Enlightenment philosophies championed by Locke and Rousseau solidified childhood, while early industrial capitalism threatened it through child labor and harsh penal codes.
- Unlike print culture which hid adult secrets behind literacy barriers, television operates as an open-admission total disclosure medium that eliminates the boundaries of childhood.
- Television functions as a total disclosure medium that must continuously reveal cultural taboos and adult secrets to satisfy its insatiable demand for novelty.
- Childhood as a social category depends on the exclusivity of adult information, a distinction that dissolves when media provide egalitarian access to the total adult content.
- Television creates a new life stage called the adult-child, where grown-ups possess intellectual and emotional capacities indistinguishable from those of children.
- Individual parents can resist the cultural disappearance of childhood by treating parenting as an act of rebellion against modern societal trends through media limitation and rigorous literacy.