Column by Wilson Hall Headmaster Brent Kaneft: The disappearance of childhood?

"American culture is hostile to the idea of childhood. But it is a comforting, even exhilarating thought that children are not."

- Neil Postman, "The Disappearance of Childhood"

"Childhood" is disappearing.

"Childhood" is a "social artifact, not a biological category," according to media theorist and cultural critic Neil Postman, noting as an example that "[t]he custom of celebrating a child's birthday did not exist in America throughout most of the eighteenth century, and, in fact, the precise marking of a child's age in any way is a relatively recent cultural habit, no more than two hundred years old" ("The Disappearance of Childhood," 1982). Much of what characterizes "childhood," in other words, is a recent phenomenon.

Two key points from Postman's work: one, without the concept of "shame" - that there is information that is (in)appropriate for children - then childhood cannot exist; and two, that the invention of the printing press invented the modern idea of "childhood." The printing press made information and literacy ubiquitous, which meant that the demarcation line between children and adults rested on the ability to read. This invention is largely responsible for the genesis of modern schools, a place that, through appropriate stages, taught you to read (i.e., to be competent in a literate world, to be an adult). But it's also responsible for a key idea of adulthood - that adults were arbiters of what information kids had access to and when.

But now, with the invention of electronic media (radio, television, internet), we have an information problem - in short, there's too much of it, and the traditional ways that we have controlled and made sense of information are, in many cases, failing: parents/family, school curriculum, religion, political parties, news/media. Which means "childhood," as defined by limited and sequential access to information, is disappearing.

Adults just don't know what to do with the cascade of information we are drenched by every day, and we don't know how to appropriately and systematically control the information in a way that makes sense for our children. We are overwhelmed, a brain state known as "cognitive overload."

Too little information is a problem, but too much information may be an even bigger issue because it often draws out the worst in us. Collectively, we become more polarized ("our information is better than yours"), we shut down and narrow our worldview ("this is the only information I need to navigate the world"), we develop simplistic explanations for massively complex issues ("people just don't want to work nowadays"), or we cling to conspiracy theories that seemingly make sense of disparate pieces of information (Google "current conspiracy theories").

And adults, en masse, have done a disservice to children. We have believed in what historian and writer Yuval Noah Harari calls the "naïve view of information." This is the view that more information is better because more information leads to truth. But as Harari argues, "the truth is very costly; fiction is very cheap. Truth is complicated, and we want simplicity - and truth is sometimes painful. Fiction and lies are the opposite: cheap, simple, and reinforcing [our own narrow beliefs]. In a free market of information, which one wins," truth or lies? I think events in the last decade provide the answer: adding more disinformation and misinformation to our lives does not help us discern truth. How could it?

Postman reflects on how electronic media like television (or Netflix) "cannot dwell upon a subject or explore it deeply […] There may, for example, be fifty books on Argentina, five hundred on childhood, five thousand on the Civil War. If television has anything to do with these subjects, it will do it once, and then move on" (i.e., "a history of the causes of the Civil War in under an hour"). And though I love documentaries - and I've watched ones I thought were brilliant - the danger of course is that truncating events into bite-size episodes leads to intellectual and cultural arrogance, an unearned and puffed-up sense that we really understand highly complex issues because we watched an hour of a TV program. "A proud man," C.S. Lewis says, "is always looking down." In other words, the proud man misses a lot. The trick of electronic media is that it moves information rapidly across the screen, and we are taken by and addicted to the movement, not to deep contemplation about the information presented to us. Take, as another example, Facebook/Meta's recent announcement that it will reduce moderation on certain controversial topics in an effort to support "free expression," which, in their "naïve view of progress" is the "driving force behind progress in American society." Mark Zuckerberg might be right if the purpose behind social media were to progress society, but the purpose is to move information rapidly enough to capture your attention and prevent you from spending your time and energy - which makes him money - on activities with higher value propositions. Like economist Herbert Simon argued, "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." And what we pay attention to is a "moral act," in the words of neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist.

And this is why handing a child a smartphone that has access to the entire adult world of information is a bad idea. They are not prepared to responsibly make sense of the information they will access, information that is moving at speeds where meaning and understanding are secondary to saturation and consumption. Children need a childhood. They need an "adulthood" to earn through stages. They need rites of passage that are meaningful (an interesting question to ask your spouse is what rites of passage they want to practice in your family). They need to bear the responsibility of living in a complex world that, though often chaotic, demands something from you.

So what does that mean for schools?

We have to reconsider our definition of intelligence. Intelligence can no longer be, if it ever was, the amount of information you can remember and apply to a problem. That is not to say certain information is not important to commit to memory (memory reduces "cognitive load" and allows us to solve higher-order problems). But our common enemy in schools is not ignorance - we do not lack information. Our common enemy is emptiness, that children are growing up in a world with an overabundance of information and don't know how to make sense or meaning of it (hence the anxiety, depression, loneliness, suicide epidemic).

Wisdom, therefore - patience, understanding, critical thinking, reasoning, discernment, embodied cognition, imagination - is the goal of education. But instead of cultivating wisdom, we are making our lives smaller.

And yet, it is a sign of intelligence to have a strict information diet, to filter out the noise and follow the signal, to pay attention to what is relevant, but this narrow lens can also lead to self-deception. Extreme polarization and intellectual standoffs are the result of that "strict information diet" becoming fundamentalist and rigid. If using information as a weapon against someone's political or religious enemy is our idea of what "adults" do, then we've failed as adults. If our response to the failure and unsustainability of our systems and institutions is to merely shrug and suggest, "Coastal real estate is probably not a good investment right now," as opposed to deeply reflecting on our lifestyles and hopes for our children, then we have failed as adults. If the topics of conversation with other adults reliably focuses on entertainment, sports and the local gossip instead of how we partner to ensure our children develop into disciplined, trustworthy adults who can delay gratification for higher rewards - or other equally important topics - then we have failed as adults. "Kids these days!" must be followed, then, by "Adults these days!"

It stands to reason that if there is no "childhood" left, then there is no "adulthood" either, and so in our commitment to preserving a childhood that sequentially and appropriately introduces children to topics and information and skills and the ways of being needed to become fully "adult," we would also be committing to the "social artifact" of adulthood: wise, compassionate and courageous men and women, who can balance conflicting information, engage with paradox and judiciously engage with the "new." We are preparing our children for a journey, not a destination. Wisdom travels, certainty stagnates.

Kaneft is the headmaster of Wilson Hall in Sumter.