[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]such as custodial care, selection, indoctrination, and learning. We could make a client analysis and verify which of
these latent functions render a service or a disservice to teachers, employers, children, parents, or the professions. We
could survey the history of Western culture and the information gathered by anthropology in order to find institutions
which played a role like that now performed by schooling. We could, finally, recall the many normative statements
which have been made since the time of Comenius, or even since Quintilian, and discover which of these the modern
school system most closely approaches. But any of these approaches would oblige us to start with certain
assumptions about a relationship between school and education. To develop a language in which we can speak about
school without such constant recourse to education, I have chosen to begin with something that might be called a
phenomenology of public school. For this purpose I shall define "school" as the age-specific, teacher-related process
requiring full-time attendance at an obligatory curriculum.
1. Age School groups people according to age. This grouping rests on three unquestioned premises. Children belong in
school.
Children learn in school. Children can be taught only in school. I think these unexamined premises deserve serious
questioning. We have grown accustomed to children. We have decided that they should go to school, do as they are
told, and have neither income nor families of their own. We expect them to know their place and behave like children.
We remember, whether nostalgically or bitterly, a time when we were children, too. We are expected to tolerate the
childish behavior of children. Man-kind, for us, is a species both afflicted and blessed with the task of caring for children.
We forget, however, that our present concept of "childhood" developed only recently in Western Europe and more
recently still in the Americas.*
Childhood as distinct from infancy, adolescence, or youth was unknown to most historical periods. Some Christian
centuries did not even have an eye for its bodily proportions. Artists depicted the infant as a miniature adult seated on
his mother's arm. Children appeared in Europe along with the pocket watch and the Christian moneylenders of the
Renaissance. Before our century neither the poor nor the rich knew of children's dress, children's games, or the child's
immunity from the law. Childhood belonged to the bourgeoisie. The worker's child, the peasant's child, and the
nobleman's child all dressed the way their fathers dressed, played the way their fathers played, and were hanged by the
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neck as were their fathers. After the discovery of "childhood" by the bourgeoisie all this changed. Only some churches
continued to respect for some time the dignity and maturity of the young. Until the Second Vatican Council, each child
was instructed that a Christian reaches moral discernment and freedom at the age of seven, and from then on is
capable of committing sins for which he may be punished by an eternity in Hell. Toward the middle of this century,
middle-class parents began to try to spare their children the impact of this doctrine, and their thinking about children
now prevails in the practice of the Church.
Footnote: * For parallel histories of modern capitalism and modern childhood see Philippe Aries, Centuries 0f
Childhood, Knopf, 1962.
Until the last century, "children" of middle-class parents were made at home with the help of preceptors and private
schools. Only with the advent of industrial society did the mass production of "childhood" become feasible and come
within the reach of the masses. The school system is a modern phenomenon, as is the childhood it produces.
Since most people today live outside industrial cities, most people today do not experience childhood. In the Andes you
till the soil once you have become "useful." Before that, you watch the sheep. If you are well nourished, you should be
useful by eleven, and otherwise by twelve. Recently, I was talking to my night watchman, Marcos, about his
eleven-year-old son who works in a barbershop. I noted in Spanish that his son was still a "ni-o," Marcos, surprised,
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