Customer Reviews

The Disappearance of Childhood

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Based upon Postman's description of childhood and the reason for its being, our society may be in jeopardy of losing this long-standing concept. Postman says that childhood came into existence about the time of the printing press; it arose out of a need to become a literate society in which adults controlled the information that children could access. Children had to learn to read so they could gain this information. Thus, schools were necessary. Furthermore, the adults' control of the information established a gap between adulthood and childhood. Adults could provide information to children when they deemed it was appropriate to do so. With the growth of electonic media and the move into the information age, adults have somewhat lost their control over the information; consequently, the gap between adulthood and childhood has been narrowed. Children are exposed to those"adult" ideas and thoughts sooner now because of their access to the information, i.e. consider today's television programs as just one example. Postman even contends that adults are more "child-like" in some ways; he give examples of the lack of distinction between clothing and language for adults and children. Perhaps a bit unfairly, Postman blames many of the less than positive changes in today's society on the media. However, this is a great read and provides a lot of "food for thought." The historical perspective that Postman provides on the "invention" of childhod is fascinating. His tracing of the developments growing out of the information age are logical and make a lot of sense. While he raises our concerns, Postman offers no real solutions to the problems.

I must disagree with Postman that childhood is not a biological reality. I would be very inclined to agree, if he gave some evidence for that statement. Though, childhood may be also a social construction, as well as a biological one.

This book basically says that everyone acted the same until the printing press came along. This medium created a society where you had adults that could access information via reading, whereas kids really couldn't (not like adults anyway). Hence, we now have a separation between the people that read (adults) and the ones that don't (children). As time went on, adults' books were complicated and had things forbidden to children in them. Children's books were simple and well constructed for their age. People then started seeing children as qualitatively different from themselves; they made special laws and special clothes for children.

However, that changed with TV. Now what adults know, children also know. There is no hiding any adult type information from children (like sex), because of the ease of accessing T.V. Furthermore, unlike books, you don't need to acquire a skill to access information via TV (like being able to read). Since most people aren't blind, the 6-year-old is similar to the 60-year-old now in accessing information. Consequently, we see the disappearance of childhood. (He offers a range of proofs on how childhood is indeed changing.)

Personally, I agree with the thesis, but believe the way it was derived, was weak. However, there is a lot of information to be learned by reading this. It is also a fun book to read. That is why I give it four stars.

When browsing for other items I saw by happy accident that this book is still available. It's a pleasure to recommend this brilliant piece of argument - that the postmodern world of hyper-communication has erased the passage of development we have hitherto called childhood and replaced the child with the little adult, with access to all the "secrets" of sexuality, risk and pleasurethat once were revealed in a series of steps over time as the young grew to maturity. Postman's message, that technology has not liberated but infantalized society, puts a frame around modern problems of education, child-raising, and loss of meaning. Whatever you make of this book you will not be neutral. It's a superb polemic, and one of my favourite books. Unreservedly recommended to everyone contemplating the raging "culture wars" with confusion.

It is simply untrue to write, as Amazon Reviewer Aaron Swartz writes, that Neil Postman praised the Children's Letters "because they agreed with him". Rather, Postman praised them because they showed by their responses that they valued the declining institution of Childhood, and that they were clearly distressed by the possibilities raised in Postman's Book.

Basically, Postman in his book said: "Society no longer values the distinctiveness of Children relative to Adults, and as a result the institution of Childhood is eroding out of existence."

The Children responded by saying: "We are TOO Distinct from Adults!", and Postman praised them for valuing their declining distinctiveness enough to defend the concept that they are still distinct (a concept all too often not defended by Adults).

Postman values Childhood, and as a result he values (and praises) children who show by their words that they value childhood themselves.

And the thing that is that Postman explicitly said in his Preface to the new edition that he was praising the Children for showing they valued Childhood and for raising the thrilling possibility to Postman's mind that Children could themselves be a conserving force against the array of Adult assaults upon the Childhood Concept. Moreover, he most assuredly gave no indication that he was praising them for agreeing with him.

There is nothing difficult to understand in this, and as a result one may conclude it possible that the misreading of the Amazon reviewer (a misreading clearly intended to discredit Postman) was both willful and deceptive in its intent.

And as for the claim that Postman never explains why he considers the Disappearance of Childhood a bad thing, it is a claim devoid of merit as Postman gives many reasons for why he values Childhood and fears its destruction.

For instance, what part of the explosion in Juvenile Crime does not the Amazon reviewer understand? Or is it that he thinks crime a good thing and thus was perplexed as to why Postman make the unexplained assumption that it's a bad thing?

As Postman lays out in his book, Persons Under the Age of 15 once (1950) committed serious crimes at 1/215th the rate of persons 15 and older, but in deep and disturbing contrast, by 1979 they were up to committing serious crimes at very nearly 1/5th the rate of their elders.

And when I say serious crimes, I exclusively mean Rape, Murder, Robbery, and Aggravated Assault.

Also, does Swartz consider it a good thing that persons under the age of 19 now suffer from a much higher rate of Venereal Disease than they did in time periods that had more respect for the Childhood Construct?

But the primary reason why Postman views the disappearance of childhood as a bad thing is because he believed the rise of the "Adult-Like Child" would lead to the "Child-Like Adult", who would lamentably lack traditional Adult Virtues such as Literacy, Logical Thought, Impulse Control, the Ability to Delay Gratification, and Considerate Manners.

I'll leave it to the readers of this review to draw forth from their experience to see if they might not find some little scraps of evidence here and there that such a rise of a Child-Like Adult has actually occured.

The reason why the Adult-Child would lead to the Child-Adult is a bit too complicated for me to get into here, but suffice it say that Postman explains the whys and wherefores in excellent and logical detail in his book.

This book offers an unusual and rewarding historical perspective on childhood. I had never imagined that there would be a connection between the invention of the printing press and childhood, but Postman shows there is one.

This book from a communications professor changed the way I think about communications technology and how these techologies impact children and adults: from the printing press to television. For example, from now on, I will observe more closely the relationships between children and adults as portrayed on television and in movies.

Even though the book was written during the 1970s and refers to shows of that era, I believe that were Dr. Postman able, he would make the same points concerning many of today's television shows, especially news, commercials, and sitcoms. I wish that he had been able to update the book with his thoughts about childhood and the Internet.

The book has an excellent bibliography.

This book has punched more new ideas in it than all the other books I've read in the past few years together. This is what reading is all about. Childhood is a created category, by the mere fact of being a group separated from adults by the school system, a need necessitated by the invention of the press. He doesn't go into the psychological determinants that set children apart from adults, i.e. he doesn't define "childhood"...but mighty reading it is. The psychological influence of TV as opposed to reading strikes at my suspicion that TV is not a good thought catalyst, and the book confirms that the social sciences are way behind on in depth study of the real effects of the medium. The effects of the new media can not be proven, Postman says, but should be easier to compare the cognitive capabilities of kids, even whole families, that have grown up with as against without TV, than to compare identical twins for the many other characteristics, which the social sciences have done in such great detail. Yet there is no reference to any real detailed study material. Is it possibile there are no good scientific studies on the subject ???? Writing a book on assumptions is maybe easier. There is material here for a whole new chapter in the communication sciences. YOU HAVE TO READ IT BECAUSE YOU'LL NEVER WATCH THIS ON TV. The fact that I've never even come close to any such type of material sounds like a conspiracy of the electronic media, yet even the most avid book readers may never have thought so in depth about the mere reading activity's effects, it would make for an interesting clash of the media if each media would take on these issues more seriously. I've thrown out my TV, because you can't compare the intellectual and cognitive capacity of a kid that's grown up watching to one that's grown up reading and playing. Postman makes it convingly clear that reading is thinking in a way that TV can't be. Great news for Amazon.com. Neil seems to go a little too far in blaming almost all the evils of society on the media, indirectly of course through the disappearance of childhood, we get very high divorce rates, child criminality, crude language usage, lack of morality and religion, alienation, illiteracy, etc. Great thinking. Marc Van Gastel Taipei

This is one of Neil Postman's best books. It is also one of his shortest, and it makes a great introduction to the world of his thinking. Postman had a knack for downloading the difficult ideas of media philosophers like Marshall McLuhan and stating them plainly, directly and with very little artifice. So, for those who have attempted to approach McLuhan, but find his hyperbolic way of speaking off-putting, Postman makes a good introduction. In fact, Postman's books are probably the best introduction for the beginner to the entire field of Media Studies, which began in 1950 with the publication of Harold Innis's Empire and Communications.

Postman gets right to the point, and his point is that childhood--though a biological phenomenon--is largely a cultural construct. It is not a given. If a society regards its children as miniature adults, as they were so regarded in the Middle Ages,then it will not treat them like children, but like adults. When they are treated like adults, they act with all the knowing concupiscence and violent irascibility of adults. When they are treated as a separate category from the concept of "adult," their behavior patterns evidence a very different psychology. Thus, "childhood" in this sense is indeed a culutral construct, and it is a construct, according to Postman, that is now in full disinetegration.

In many ways, Postman's book can be regarded as a footnote to McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy, for in that book, McLuhan discussed how the advent of the printing press brought with it a whole series of new social and cultural structures and ideas that did not exist prior to its invention, such as the nation state, the idea of intellectual property, the idea of individuality itself, linear, organized thinking, etc. It made possible the invention of new literary genres such as the essay and the novel, and changed the social conditions that had once made it possible for the epic to flourish. Thus, the printing press put the epic out of business and favored the rise of the novel. Postman's book adds to this list of new Renaissance cultural modalities made possible by typography, the idea of the child as a distinct entity from an adult based on the fact of the adult's literacy and the child's lack thereof. With print, the adult came into possession of a new hoard of secret knowledge that only those who could learn how to read could have access to. Thus, knowledge regarding such matters as shame and sexuality, sin, the structure of the cosmos, morality, etc. became things which a child did not properly know about until he was of an age to be able to read. Thus, literacy and its gradually increasing mastery became identical with the idea of a responsible adult.

Postman says that this idea is now disappearing as a result of the flourishing of electronic culture, and in particular, the television. Television as a mass medium lays all the secrets of adult life bare and open and accessible for any child who wants to hear about them or see them demonstrated. Ageing, illness, death; transvestism, homosexuality, violence; all are daily subjects of commercials and talk shows, and all are readily available to the child.

Conversely, as the distinction between the child and the adult erodes, the adult, Postman says, is becoming "childified." The adults on sitcoms or soap operas or other television shows can scarcely be distinguished from children not only in the lack of difference in the clothes which they wear, but in their lack of references to cultivation, learning, books, classical music, etc. Postman says that only the character of Felix Unger on The Odd Couple comes anywhere close to representing this older Renaissance idea of the adult as a cultivated being qualitatively distinguishable from the child through the making of literary references in his convesation. "Adults" on television are no more literate than children are nowadays, and so can scarcely be distinguished from them.

Thus, according to Neil Postman, the concept of children as different beings from adults is now in full disintegration due largely to electronic media such as television. And let's face it: who can say that he is really wrong here?

--John David Ebert, author, "The New Media Invasion: Digital Technologies and the World They Unmake" (McFarland Books, 2011)

This book provides an excellent presentation of how "childhood" has not always been part of our culture. The argument is fairly well presented and argued that print culture helped to create childhood by the time required to achieve literacy.

The first chapters outline the emergence of how children emerged from where were once considered only "small adults." The argument that childhood is a product of the printed word and literacy holds together well.

What doesn't hold together well are the arguments to preserve the secrets of the world of adults. Certainly there is reasonable concern for what is presented on television but much is omitted in Postman's arguments. But his idyllic late 19th century neglects many of the realities of time that were accepted, considered part of daily life (segregation, racism, abuse, death) and were not (could not) be hidden from children.

In his introduction to this edition of the book, written in 1994, he admits he has no answers to the situation. This is partly because he remains focused in McLuhan's "rearview mirror" and does not accept that a new definition of children and adults has long been underway and could very well be a good thing.

For example that "children" can, and do, start successful careers in areas such as computer programming --or at least can come to know more than their teachers should suggest that education has to change. Postman seems tied to the many of the outdated tenants education that helped fuel the industrial revolution but are anachronisms in the present day. The fact that the homogenous, structured curriculum of public education doesn't fit the growing range of possibilities of today or that is increasingly focused on testing not thinking.

Bottom line...

This is another enjoyable work, though not as great as its reputation, especially for those interested in cultural history or the effects of print (literacy) on society.

It isn't often anymore that I read something that pops my eyes wide open. Postman is always interesting, always thought provoking, but in this book, he had me outside my own box, looking back in. So seldom am I offered new ideas, new perspectives based on intelligent rersearch and analisys. And what he has to say here is a little chilling. His history of the existance of our idea of childhood was fascinating - but his warning for the immediate future is important and powerful. I might, myself, have titled the book The Disappearance of Adulthood - Postman's points here explain so much. Coupled with David Elkind's The Hurried Child and Brizendine's The Female Brain, this book sheds huge light on why things are happening in our homes, our culture, the world. Add a little research into the new work on adolescent brain chem, and suddenly, the way we have been doing things for our children springs serious holes. An engaging, pleasant read with thorns. Highly recommended to anybody who loves kids. We need to understand what to expect from them and ourselves.

I was introduced to the writings of Neil Postman very recently and for that I am glad. He combines knowledge, great writing skills and the ability to prophesize about the future, and the result is always a powerful book that is usually way ahead of its time. This book is no exception.
This is a very disturbing book, and what exasperates things is that the author seems to be right. It is easier to agree with this book today that it was when it was first published because many things that the author mentions have actually became true. The author describes how the idea of childhood first came about and shows that it was a necessary step in the evolution of man as a social animal. The author then goes on to tell the reader how this necessary idea is now disappearing. Children and adults dress the same way, they speak the same way and most importantly they have access to the same information. Ever parent should read this book to be aware of what too much information might do to children. I know that a lot of people might not agree with the main premises of the book, but I am sure that most parents will relate to it.