Well-to-do parents typically did not interact with their children, leaving them up to the care of slaves. Children were rudely brought up, and very strong beatings were a normal part of education. In Rome, a child's father had the right to kill him for whatever reason until he came of age.
Friday, April 24, 2015
Who knew?
… How Christianity invented children.
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a. By now, any article on how X invented Y has to show X's patents or lose any claim on my attention.
ReplyDeleteb. "Well-to-do parents typically did not interact with their children, leaving them up to the care of slaves. Children were rudely brought up, and very strong beatings were a normal part of education." Well, under Christianity, the well-to-do parents of Europe tended to hand off their children to the care of servants. Almost any account of education before about 1970 in the English public schools, or in many Catholic schools, will include stories of corporal punishment. A young man I met, born probably 1980 in Barbados, took blows with a cane for his misconduct in secondary school. I should say that the decline of beatings corresponds better with the decline of Christianity than with its rise.
c. Anyone under the patria potestas was subject to any form of punishment that the head of the family chose. Simply being of age did not liberate one.
All true. But I think that a greater appreciation of children as persons and not offspring coincided with the rise and climax of Christianity. Talk of its decline today is short-sighted. It is flourishing in Africa and China, the latter as experienced and powerful a culture as there has ever been on Earth. True, it is a shadow of its former self in its original haunts. But I think, when you split the difference, there is an overall, if not overwhelming, benefit to human society from its influence.
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