Friday, August 10, 2007 | Opinion
No kidding

Our forebears had a no-nonsense view of childhood...

Which way to Starfleet Academy? “Klingon” Debbie Hodgins hitches into Vulcan, Ontario for the town's annual Spock Days and Galaxyfest in June. CREDIT: MICHEL COMTE/AFP/Getty Images

By Bob Zaslavsky

Our forebears had a no-nonsense view of childhood as basic training, so to speak, for the battles of adulthood. In those harsher, pre-Industrial Revolution days, adulthood began somewhere between the ages of 10 and 13.

For example, at the beginning of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” Juliet is 13, going on 14. Both her mother and nurse make that seem like the verge of old maidhood, since both of them were married and pregnant by that age.

At the age of 13, Prince Hal (the future Henry V) had already been frequenting taverns and carousing with Falstaff for at least a year.

At the age of 13, little Johnny Keats and his 8th-grade classmates were translating Virgil’s “Aeneid” in their Latin class.

At the age of 13, Herman Melville and Mark Twain were both finished with their formal educations and were out earning a living.

As the tailor in “Fiddler on the Roof” sings, “At 3, I started Hebrew school; at 10, I learned a trade.”

However, in the 20th century, as adulthood was deferred, childhood was extended. No one wanted to grow up.

This was partly because the Industrial Revolution reduced the number of unskilled jobs that allowed at least a subsistence income. The easiest way to ease the competition for the remaining jobs was to bar youngsters from the labor pool—there was certainly altruism at work, but child labor laws were also passed to preserve the job market for adults. A place had to be found for these vocationally displaced youngsters. That place was school.

It is no accident that the growth of compulsory education laws in this country coincides with the first phase of the Industrial Revolution (mid-19th-century to the end of World War I). The first state to enact a compulsory education law (in 1852) was Massachusetts. It took until 1918 for all states to follow suit.

This is when C. Northcote Parkinson’s Law began to operate in our schools: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

When those who had formal schooling rarely attended beyond primary school, the primary school education was rigorous and thorough enough to provide the basis for lifelong autodidacticism. Melville and Twain—geniuses though they may have been—could become the erudite writers that they were after dropping out of school at age 11 or 12. That would be unimaginable today.

The reason is that as the “terminal” degree moved from primary school to secondary school, the same primary education expanded to fill the added time. When it stretched to a college degree, the content became even thinner, to such an extent that today’s college graduates are not typically as well educated in their early 20s as Melville and Twain were at half that age.

As childhood expanded, the language that we use to talk about youngsters changed, especially after World War II, to reflect this dumbing-down of our expectations for them. The pervasive use of the patronizing term “kids” to refer to toddlers and college students alike reflects this.

The term “teenager” is equally condescending. There were no teenagers in this country before the 1950s. The term did not exist before then. I was in the first generation to be so designated, and I have always found the term offensive.

Language matters. However, language is only the beginning. We should start to formulate our school curricula with respect for the intellectual maturity of our students. If we do not, the classrooms of Starfleet Academy, with its daunting curriculum, will go empty. SP

Bob Zaslavsky is a retired teacher of our much-neglected humanities.