Philippe Ariès and the History of Childhood

I'm Hugh Cunningham.

I'm emeritus professor of social history at the University of Kent.

When I first became interested in the history of childhood,

there was one book that stood preeminent, and that was Philly.

Barriers is centuries of childhood, first published in French in 1960

translated into English in 1962

without

nearly 60 years on from that.

And yet areas,

astonishingly is still a very good starting point for anyone studying childhood.

I think one reason is that he covers a long period of time. He starts

in the early Middle Ages in the 10th century,

and he goes up to 17 89 the outbreak of the French Revolution,

and then he can't resist actually going on a bit to tell

us about the 19th and the first half of the 20th century.

The other thing, which I think still inspires historians,

is by looking at the range of sources he uses.

He uses fiction, poetry,

theological tracts,

pictures,

sculptures,

legal texts, anything,

and that's a very good piece of advice for anyone.

Starting looking at childhood don't get trapped into one academic discipline.

Now the book falls into three parts.

The first consists of essays,

slightly speculative on things like Children's games and Children's pastimes

and Children's dress.

The third I'll come back to the second looks at the privatisation

of family life in France in the 17th and 18th century,

sometimes said that it takes a village to raise a child.

But what was happening in France amongst

the bourgeoisie in the 17th and 18th century

was at the household was becoming the centre of family life and child rearing,

the household and the school.

Because the second part of Arianna's book and it takes

up nearly half the space is on the scholastic life.

And here Arias has an interesting argument. He says.

If in the early Middle Ages you felt you needed to learn to read or to write,

you go to a reading school or writing school,

and the students there might be of any age.

And what he says happens is that

moralists begin to argue that there should be more than just learning a skill

there should be in schools, moral training,

But this you need really to have people at the same age in the same classroom,

so you would have

seven year olds altogether eight year olds all together

in a way we are entirely familiar with and rather take for granted.

And

if you did this

and all the pictures of classrooms

in the Middle Ages and early modern centuries show this is a master,

and next to him,

a birch rod you needed to impose corporal punishment on the Children.

Arias also says that

if you look at the ages of life, that's the way the way people imagine the life course

you realise there's no great sentimentality

about Children in the Middle Ages,

and he quotes as many people do a passage in Shakespeare's As You Like It,

the infant, mewling and puking in his nurse's arms,

the whining schoolboy creeping snail like unwillingly to school.

There's no sense that childhood is a good period in life. You want to get through it

and get into adulthood before you go down.

So there's a kind of picture they have,

and they often picture it where you start down here, get up to the height

and then declined until you become a corpse.

That was how areas depicted life for Children in the Middle Ages.

Now there was one critic of areas a man called Lloyd Demos,

who was a psycho historian.

He believed that advances were made by psychological advances in humans thinking.

And he, in a famous sentence, said that the history of childhood is a nightmare,

and the further back in time you go,

the more likely it was that Children would be killed, abandoned, terrorised,

beaten, sexually abused.

And his was a progressive narrative lasting going into the 19 seventies,

he said. My thesis is the opposite of that

of areas.

This is interesting because I think many people

who looked at areas, many rather carelessly,

and so he talked about the scholastic life and the spread

of schooling thought that areas must be pushing a progressive narrative.

But there's a very telling sentence right towards

the end of the centuries of childhood.

Well, Areas says, I'll just read it out.

Schooling deprived the child of the freedom he had hitherto enjoyed among adults

it inflicted on him.

The birch,

the prison cell

schooling

for areas

school,

is a prison.

Arias wasn't the first person to think of that.

William Wordsworth,

the poet in the early 19th century

looking back on his own childhood,

talks about the shades of the prison house beginning to creep upon the growing boy.

And just after areas, John Holt began to write a series of books,

one of which was entitled Escape From Childhood,

in which he argued that not only school but

actually the whole idea of childhood was a prison,

and we should try to escape it.

And he was a strong influence behind child liberation movements in the 19 seventies

and 19 eighties

so that we have areas

and his influence is still strong.

But there's some things we need to note about him.

He's writing about childhood

and not about Children.

Childhood is what adults

think about

Children of what should happen to them and the policies which they pursue.

In pursuit of that,

Children

would be about how Children feel about all

that happens to them about their own lives,

about their own experiences

and a lot of the history of childhood.

Most of what I'm going to be saying in these talks

is actually going to be about childhood and not Children.

The other thing that areas was fully aware of

is that the schooling, the spread of schooling, which he described,

was primarily for boys

and for boys of militantly rich backgrounds,

Most Children aren't going to school at

all before the before the French Revolution.

But areas is quite aware that over the 19th and 20th century,

schooling is going to become compulsory for all Children,

and the kind of patterns which had been developed in

the earlier centuries would follow through into subsequent centuries.