Youthland and Everything After, continued

Gazette: The proposition that gets the most attention in your book is AriËs’ assertion that, as you put it, “modern youngsters live in an isolated enclave unto themselves.” Could you explain that?

Zuckerman: In both domains there have been people who have been wondering whether this is a good thing, to have made children so central, so beloved, to have isolated them from adult life. That’s the real core of the AriËs proposition: that the modern middle class and modern Western life in its entirety is really predicated on the preservation of childish innocence from the corruptions of the world. It’s an attempt to create a purer place, where children can be insulated from the contaminations of adult society.

So you begin to get the enshrinement of children as angelic creatures in their own right, and you begin to get the withdrawal of the family from immersion in the wider society.

Gazette: How does that manifest itself?

Zuckerman: You begin with the child being parked in places where his innocence can be protected—like schools and eventually kindergartens, to catch the child even younger. Then there is the refusal to allow child labor and to exploit children economically and physically in a host of ways. And all of these things have been viewed by the participants as unequivocal benefits, great gains, wonderful reforms that are good for the child, that appreciate his real nature and allow him to fulfill his real nature.

What has begun to look worrisome in all of this is that children thus isolated from the world of adults and from the larger society become children with a very shaky understanding of adult life—unable to handle adult responsibilities, and without much eagerness for adult life, quite preferring a world of irresponsibility and spontaneity and playfulness to a world of discipline and hard labor and regularity and responsibility.

Gazette: What did AriËs himself think of all this?

Zuckerman: AriËs thought that this creation of a Youthland was appalling. AriËs hated modern life; he hated the modern family. What he loved was the rough-and-tumble of medieval life, when kids got picked on, when kids got hurt, when kids got bullied, but when they actually were autonomous, when they actually were self-governing or governing in their own groups. He thought that what we’ve really created was a world in which adults kept kids under surveillance, hovered over them and protected them, and wouldn’t let them be grown-ups. And everyone else who’s interpreted AriËs thought that he loved what he described instead of hated what he described. So they enlisted him on their side for their reforms in 20th-century life. Very few people caught on that he was writing in scorn of modern life. For AriËs, it was all downhill from the 15th century.

Gazette: What’s the more recent thinking on these “reforms”?

Zuckerman: There is a new sense afoot that this isolation is bad for children, because it doesn’t enable them to feel any sense of complicity or participation or citizenship—they understand that they are kept apart in a world of no consequence, and they come to believe that their life is irresponsible. Micha de Winter [professor of child care at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and author of Children as Fellow Citizens: Participation and Commitment] reports on some of his own research into allowing children in schools to have genuinely consequential roles in the design of new programs in the schools and in the community. And not only has it activated the kids in ways that are remarkable—once entrusted with responsibility, they come up with extraordinary ideas—but it also has transformed policymaking in the government and in the schools and in the neighborhoods and in the communities. Because the kids tell the adults things that the adults run down and discover are right, but that the adults had never thought of or seen or noticed for themselves. So we end up with a better understanding as adults of what life is like in the community and in the family. It’s just better research.

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