3 - Changing childhood

Summary

How old are big people? Ten.

Girl, 7, outer-London primary school

Should we be doing things like this [Teletubbies] for 2-year-old children? … they're missing out on the next level up – the 3, 4, 5 [age group] … If we had enough space within the schedule we would define the age groups … we could get away with having a strand for 7 year olds, and a strand for 9 year olds.

Producer, BBC, on preschool TV for under-threes.

In 1982, an American education professor, Neil Postman, famously declared that, thanks to television, childhood had ‘disappeared’, and wrote a best-selling book to this effect, reprinted in 1994. (Eighteen years later, David Buckingham, too, has announced that we are now at a stage ‘after the end of childhood’, Buckingham, 2000b.) For Postman, television's weapons in the final destruction of childhood were twofold: it ‘banished shame’ by making adult sexual knowledge available to the very young, and it superseded literacy as the primary means of communication. Once television became the primary deliverer of information and entertainment to the young, the age-related and gradual acquisition of knowledge required by learning to read complex written texts was brought to an end.

According to Postman, childhood ended at 7 years of age in pre-literate societies. It was only the introduction of general schooling, which, in turn, only arose after the invention of printing made the widespread teaching of reading and writing possible, that brought about what he calls ‘the tie between education and calendar age’, that is, ‘childhood’.