This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 26 Aug 2008, by Wisely.
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26 Aug 08
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It’s best brought home to us in a story about St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. An abbot told Anselm of the difficulties he was having in bringing up boys in his care. The abbot was a disciplinarian, beating the boys for each and every misdemeanour. Anselm could not contain his disagreement: "In God’s name", he burst out, "I would have you tell me why you are so incensed against them. Are they not human? Are they not flesh and blood like you?" The boys, he said, need "the encouragement and help of fatherly sympathy and gentleness", not just blows.
Anselm’s views were widely known and widely quoted in the later Middle Ages. But equally the abbot had his successors: every picture of a schoolroom features a master brandishing a whip. Spare the rod and spoil the child echoes through most centuries of British history. But whatever else this debate about child-rearing shows, it puts paid to the idea, frequently cited, that in the Middle Ages, and beyond them, children were seen simply as ‘little adults’. They were not. Childhood was clearly recognised as a distinct time of life.
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Parents couldn’t begin too soon: there was a catechism for children "that are not past the breast yet" – and a four-hundred page one for a five-year-old.
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In 1693 the great philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) published Some Thoughts Concerning Education, probably the most influential British book on childhood. Its origins hardly suggested this. Locke had been tutor to a number of aristocratic children, and on the basis of this experience wrote some letters to a relative on child rearing. These circulated, and eventually Locke was persuaded to publish them. Locke, unlike the Puritans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, does not seem at all concerned about the child’s salvation. His interest, rather, is to suggest ways of instilling good habits into a child that will last a lifetime. The way to do this was not through corporal punishment, not through frightening them, as servants were inclined to with stories of ghosts and hobgoblins, but to take reason as your guide.
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The first thing babies should learn is that they shouldn’t have something because they like it, but because it is thought good for them. Locke is full of sensible advice on clothing and food for children, and on not buying them too many toys. He also thinks that learning should be made fun, and that children should "be tenderly used … and have Play-things". And he recognises that each child will have its own ‘natural Genius and Constitution’. Parents fell on Locke’s book in much the same way as they would fall on Dr Spock in the mid-twentieth century: he relieved them of many anxieties, and set them a clear agenda, for, he claimed, nine-tenths of how a child turns out as an adult, "Good or Evil, useful or not", will be the result of its education.
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