History of Education Society

Review: [untitled]
Author(s): Charles E. Strickland
Source: History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Dec., 1964), pp. 307-309
Published by: History of Education Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/367505 .
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characterizes the history of Pennsylvania's other city, Pittsburgh, but these volumes shed no light on the question.
What was the role of the Catholic colleges in urban social mobility? Why
has Pennsylvania a mediocre record in the development of community colleges?
What has been the history of Pennsylvania State University's relations with the
state legislature and with the University of Pennsylvania? What has been the
career of academic freedom in Pennsylvania? How did the changing economic
and social life of the commonwealth shape the higher learning, and vice versa?
What does the record of higher education in Pennsylvania tell about democracy
in Pennsylvania? To what extent were the colleges and universities significantly
influenced not by conscious administrative decision but by student action? Who
taught in these institutions and what did they teach? How did the struggle between piety and intellect go in Pennsylvania? At this moment in the historiography of higher education the answers to these questions should not remain a
mystery at the end of a book that runs to more than 800 pages.
Williams

College

FREDERICK RUDOLPHR

CENTURIES OF CHILDHOOD:
A SOCIAL HISTORY OF FAMILY LIFE
Philippe Aries
Translated from the French,

L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous Yancien regime

by Robert Baldick
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962. Pp. 447. $8.50.)
"In the tenth century," writes Philippe Aries, "artists were unable to depict
a child except as a man on a smaller scale." Centuries of Childhood recounts
how, from that time until the beginning of the nineteenth century, Western
society discovered childhood. Through the imaginative use of paintings, sculpture, figures on tombstones, diaries and autobiographies, the author describes a
major transformation in thought and feeling as the child was gradually distinguished from the adult, given a distinctive dress (usually the fashionable dress or
a century earlier), assigned his own "childish" games abandoned by adults and,
most important, protected from any open reference to sexual matters. The changing attitude first affected the sons of middle-class or aristocratic families, but it
gradually spread in ever-widening circles to include the daughters as well and
finally transformed the lives of children in all social classes.
307

As the subtitle of the book suggests, however, Centuries of Childhood

is more than a social history of the child. The author is most interested in the
effect the growing awareness of childhood had on the character of Western culture.
Pinpointing an essential distinction between medieval and modern civilization,
Aries argues that "the great event was . . . the revival, at the beginning of modemntimes, of an interest in education." The emerging idea of childhood occasioned
a massive reorientation of the family and the school around the child, delayed his
entrance into adult life and created a modern world "obsessed by the physical,
moral, and sexual problems of children."
Aries locates the critical point of the educational transformation in the seventeenth century and concludes that the shift occurred as a result of efforts by
religious reformers to "moralize" society from top to bottom. Jesuits, Jansenists,
and Oratorians sought to popularize the notion that children were innocent and
must be protected from the promiscuous association heretofore enjoyed with
adults. Medieval apprenticeship and schooling had concentrated on mere instruction, while freely mixing "old or young, mature or green," whereas the reformers needed more suitable instruments for the task of quarantining the child.
The result was the modem school. Aries devotes half of the book to describing
how ages were gradually sorted out into classes, subjects graded appropriately,
the development of boarding
methods devised, discipline applied and-with
extended from the classroom to
schools among the middle classes-supervision
every waking and sleeping moment of the youngster's life. Moral solicitude
"inflicted on him the birch, the prison cell-in a word, the punishments usually
reserved for convicts from the lowest strata of society." Instruction, meanwhile,
dwindled to a mere instrument serving a larger concern for the physical, mental,
and spiritual welfare of the pupil.
The story may be a familiar one, although Aries casts the development in new
terms and substantiates the analysis with a wealth of new detail. He pushes the
thesis further, however, toward more surprising conclusions. The growing awareness that children were sui generis laid the basis for a new kind of family as well
as a new kind of school. Aries deliberately sets out to contradict a common beliet
that the family has lost its influence in modern times. While admitting that the
transition from medieval civilization brought about a weakening of the family as
a legal and economic institution, he points out that it became something far more
important. The medieval family had been devoted to nothing more than the
transmission of life, property, and names. Poets, artists, and religious reformers,
who enjoyed particular success among the middle classes, raised the modern
family to the level of a "value, a theme of expression and an occasion of emotion."
As the family became the object of a nearly religious piety, it executed a typically
bourgeois retreat from the community into the home, now increasingly designed
to promote both comfort and privacy; it narrowed in scope to include only parents
and immediate offspring; and, lastly, the family thus confined and constricted
focused on its remaining social function, the proper rearing of children. Quite
obviously, the educational revolution described by Aries produced the public
school and the liberal arts college, but it also prompted Rousseau, Spencer, and
Spock to write tracts for parents-as-educators.
Some may be surprised and irritated to discover that Aries is no partisan of
the contemporary preoccupation with children. In point of fact, the author disapproves heartily of the "great event," because he believes it marked the passing
of a society in which young and old, lowborn and highborn mingled in an easy
308

sociability. Nevertheless, a clear preference for the Middle Ages does not noticeably mar treatment of the theme, and it might well be argued that Aries sympathies have highlighted a development obscured by those who have been more
occupied with praising the rise of education in the West than with explaining it.
It is to be hoped, for example, that Aries has laid to rest the widespread belief
that a dual system of class education rose during the "illiberal" sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Aries squarely places this educational snobbery where it
seems to belong, with the rise of bourgeois liberalism in the Age of Enlightenment. Another notion that should not survive this book is that medieval masters
subjected helpless children to brutal discipline. Most medieval students were not
children and they were by no means helpless, while the systematic application of
discipline, whether brutal or gentle, appeared with the modern school. This
discovery, incidentally, may serve to deflate the importance of a very familiar
topic. Much has been made of a change from authoritarian to liberal attitudes
toward the child during early modern times. Aries confirms that parents and
teachers did turn gradually from the use of corporal punishment or warnings of
eternal damnation toward more gentle and "reasonable" methods. Nevertheless,
the shift pales by comparison with the revolution in feeling that preceded and
American examnles come to mind.
incorporated both modes of treatment.
Those famed Bostonians, Cotton Mather and Bronson Alcott, may have held
conflicting theories of education, but they agreed in their intense concern for the
welfare of the child. After all, parents or teachers who argue over "strict"
versus "permissive" methods of rearing agree much more with one another than
they do with the medieval parent or master who did not bother his head about
the question at all.
The most important contribution of this book may be the new dimension it
adds to discussions about the emergence of universal schooling, heretofore discussed largely in theological, economic, or political terms. For example, an older
line of thought virtually made the school a deduction from Protestant theology.
The doctrine of the priesthood of all believers undoubtedly provided one rationale
in Protestant lands for teaching all to read, but by probing the substratum of
feeling that underlay theory and practice, Aries comes closer to explaining the
moralistic concern for popular education that pervaded Catholic as well as
Protestant societies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His findings
also point to some modification of a more recent and more sophisticated theory
that popular schooling resulted in part from a weakening of the family and apprenticeship system, ostensibly leaving impaired their educational functions.
Aries deals with the "family and school as coordinates," as an American historian
recently advised (Richard Storr, "The Education of History: Some Impressions,"
Harvard Educational Review, 31 [Spring, 1961], 133); but Aries sees no need
to account for the development of the school as occurring at the expense of the
family. If he is correct, we may expect to find that an entirely novel responsibility for character development was laid on each and every institution touching
the child. Because Aries is preoccupied with French materials, only intensive
investigation will tell if this conclusion may be applied to Anglo-American culture
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Meanwhile, however, this French
demographic historian has persuasively illustrated the possibilities in educational
history when views of the child and the history of the family are imaginatively
joined to the story of the schools.
Emory

University

CHARLES E. STRICKLAND
309