‘Discipline’ was the keynote to modern schooling, much more important 

finally than the imparting of learning or information. For to them discipline was an 

instrument of moral and spiritual improvement, adapted less for its efficiency in directing 

large groups to work in common than for its intrinsic moral and ascetic value. That is, 

repression itself was adopted as a spiritual value. 

 

Thus, the function of the school became ‘child-rearing’, complete with disciplinary ‘child 

psychology’. Ariès quotes the Regulations for Boarders at Port-Royal, a forerunner of our 

teacher training manuals: 

A close watch must be kept on the children, and they must never be left 

alone anywhere, whether they are ill or in good health … this constant 

supervision should be exercised gently and with a certain trustfulness 

calculated to make them think one loves them, and that it is only to enjoy 

their company that one is with them. This will make them love their 

supervision rather than fear it. (Italics mine) Shulamith Firestone The Dialectic of Sex | 1970

This passage, written in 1612, already exhibits the mincing tone characteristic of modern 

child psychology, and the peculiar distance – at that time rehearsed, but by now quite 

unconscious – between adults and children

 

The precocity so common in the Middle Ages and for some time after has dwindled 

almost to zero in our own time. Today, for example, Mozart’s feats as a child composer 

are hardly credible; in his own time he was not so unusual. Many children played and 

wrote music seriously then and also engaged in a good many other ‘adult’ activities. Our 

piano lessons of today are in no way comparable. They are, in fact, only indications of 

child oppression – in the same way that the traditional’ women’s accomplishments’ such 

as embroidery are superficial activity telling us only about the subjugation of the child to 

adult whims. And it is significant that these ‘talents’ are more often cultivated in girls than 

in boys; when boys study piano it is most often because they are exceptionally gifted or 

because their parents are musical. 

 

What seems most clear to me from this description is this: that before the advent of the 

nuclear family and modern schooling, childhood was as little as possible distinct from 

adult life. The child learned directly from the adults around him, emerging as soon as he 

was able into adult society. 

 

In summary, with the onset of the child-centred nuclear family, an institution became 

necessary to structure a ‘childhood’ that would keep children under the jurisdiction of 

parents as long as possible. Schools multiplied, replacing scholarship and a practical 

apprenticeship with a theoretical education, the function of which was to ‘discipline’ 

children rather than to impart learning for its own sake. Thus it is no surprise that modern 

schooling retards development rather than escalating it. By sequestering children away from the adult world – adults are, after all, simply larger children with worldly experience – and by artificially subjecting them to an adult/child ratio of one to twenty-plus, how could the final effect be other than a levelling of the group to a median (mediocre) intelligence?

As 

if this weren’t enough, after the eighteenth century a rigid separation and distinction of 

ages took place (‘grades’). Children were no longer able to learn even from older and 

wiser children. They were restricted in most of their waking hours to a chronological 

finely-drawn11 peer group, and then spoon-fed a ‘curriculum’. Such a rigid gradation 

increased the levels necessary for the initiation into adulthood and made it hard for a 

child to direct his own pace. His learning motivation became outer-directed and 

approval-conscious, a sure killer of originality. Children, once seen simply as younger 

people – the way we now see a half-grown puppy in terms of its future maturity – were 

now a clear-cut class with its own internal rankings, encouraging competition: the’ biggest 

guy on the block’, the ‘brainiest guy in school’, etc. Children were forced to think in 

hierarchical terms, all measured by the supreme ‘When I grow up …’ In this the growth of 

the school reflected the outside world which was becoming increasingly segregated 

according to age and class. 

 

Women and children were now in the same lousy boat. Their 

oppressions began to reinforce one another. To the mystique of the glories of childbirth, 

the grandeur of ‘natural’ female creativity, was now added a new mystique about the 

glories of childhood itself and the ‘creativity’ of child-rearing. (‘Why, my dear, what could 

be more creative than raising a child ?’) By now people have forgotten what history has 

proven: that ‘raising’ a child is tantamount to retarding his development. The best way to 

raise a child is to LAY OFF. 

 

Like, why were their parents being 

exploited in the first place: what is anybody doing down in that coal mine? What we ought 

to be protesting, rather than that children are being exploited just like adults, is that adults 

can be so exploited. We need to start talking not about sparing children for a few years 

from the horrors of adult life, but about eliminating those horrors.

In a society free of 

exploitation, children could be like adults (with no exploitation implied) and adults could 

be like children (with no exploitation implied). The privileged slavery (patronage) that 

women and children undergo is not freedom. For self-regulation is the basis of freedom, 

and dependence the origin of inequality. 

 

The child is forced to go to them: the test is that he would never go of his own accord. 

 And though enlightened educators have devised whole systems of inherently interesting disciplined activities to lure and bribe the child into an acceptance of school, these can never fully succeed, for a school that existed solely to serve the curiosity of children on their own 

terms and by their own direction would be a contradiction in terms – as we have seen, 

the modern school in its structural definition exists to implement repression.

 

The child spends most of his waking hours in this coercive structure or doing homework 

for it. The little time that is left is often taken up with family chores and duties. He is 

forced to sit through endless family arguments, or, in some ‘liberal’ families, ‘family 

councils’. There are relatives at whom he must smile, and often church services that he 

must attend. In the little time left, at least in our modern middle class, he is ‘supervised’, 

blocking the development of initiative and creativity: his choice of play materials is 

determined for him (toys and games), his play area is defined (gyms, parks, playgrounds, 

camp-sites); often he is limited in his choice of playmates to children of the same economic 

class as himself, and in the suburbs, to his schoolmates, or children of his parents’ friends; 

he is organized into more groups than he knows what to do with (Boy Scouts, Cub 

Scouts, Girl Scouts, Brownies, camps, after-school clubs and sports)….