Anyone familiar with Jodorowsky’s ‘El Topo‘, will vividly recall the opening scene, in which El Topo leads his son, naked on horseback, into the desert. There, he instructs him to bury his first toy and a photo of his mother. “You are seven years old”, he tells him, “You are a man”.

This is inconceivable to the deeply-conditioned modern sensibility, yet it is symbolic of the reality of medieval life. Just a few hundred years ago, the constructions of “childhood” and “the family” that have become such an impenetrable cult in contemporary society, simply did not exist. For as long as he was an infant – typically until the age of about 7 – the child was under the care of womenfolk.

From 7, he became part of the adult world. He dressed the same as adults, took part in the same activities and went to the same places. Nothing was off limits to him; he went everywhere and saw everything. He was not ‘innocent’, because there was no ‘innocence’. There was no period of ‘quarantine’ in which he had to be kept apart from the ‘adult world’. There were no ‘teenagers’, there was no ‘adolescence’. The ‘child’ could be found gambling in ‘taverns of ill-repute’ alongside soldiers and whores. He left the parental home; he traveled; he worked. Transmission from one generation to the next was ensured by the everyday participation of the child in adult life; they learned the art of living from everyday contact.

Compare this 7 year old to the 16, 18, or even 21 year old of today’s society. Infantilized. Subjected to the often brutal disciplining of his parents’ regime, and incarcerated in the prison of the family home. He has no freedom, and is accorded no respect. His mind and body are enslaved.

How has this enforced bondage come to pass – and, moreover, how has it happened so seamlessly that the ‘children’ of today’s society are not even aware that they have been enslaved?

The most influential factor in the creation of the modern understanding of ‘childhood’ is education. It is commonly supposed that this was primarily the result of the socio-economic changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution of the late-18th and 19th Centuries, and the consequent extension and elongation of education. This is too simplistic an explanation – for the problem is not education, but rather the nature of education; and the nature of education had already changed long before the Industrial Revolution.

Schooling was well-established – at least for boys of middle- and upper-class families – by the 17th Century. Its character is unrecognizable to us. Teachers were the equivalent of shopkeepers: they rented a room, worked to acquire a reputation, and waited for boys to come to them. No distinction of age was made, since ‘education’ was the imparting of technical skill – reading, writing, grammar, and maybe some arithmetic – to anyone who needed it. Preteen boys and adult men of 25 were mixed together, taught in the same class. They traveled around together and sought out the best teachers – moving from town to town, or even to another country, as they saw fit. They found private lodgings, where they slept in the same beds. Free of all authority, whether paternal or academic, hardly anything in their way of life distinguished them from unmarried adults.

Compare this education to the modern educational system, in which young people are under permanent supervision and scarcely a minute of their day is not rigidly controlled. They are strictly divided up by age, regardless of ability – and different age groups may not mix. Their teachers control their days at school, humiliating and inflicting punishment (just as their parents do outside of school hours). They are forced to learn the same things, they have their reading materials censored, and have no choice of teacher. Their lives are not their own, but are subjugated to a carefully-constructed regime of indoctrination.

The key factor in this diachronic evolution into slavery is the change in the nature of education from being a mechanism for the provision of skills, to being a vehicle for social conditioning.

The change can be traced back to a few influential churchmen, moralists and pedagogues of the 15th Century. Their attitude represented an outlook foreign to their times: a love of order, regulation, classification, hierarchy and organization. One such influential figure was Jean Gerson, who adopted a vast propaganda campaign to spread a new concept of childhood and its education: the duties of pedagogues should not consist solely in communicating knowledge, they must also – and above all – mold their pupils’ minds, inculcate virtues, educate as well as instruct, be responsible for their charges’ souls. Gerson acknowledged that masturbation, for example, was near universal from the earliest age, but was concerned that the child did not feel any inherent sense of shame about this (“sentiunt ibi quemdam pruritum incognitum tum stat erectio”) – and consequently insisted that children had to be brought up differently: adults must imbue them with a sense of guilt.

In the course of the 17th Century, these ideas of a (barely perceptible) minority of 15th Century moralists and pedagogues became the overwhelming majority position. The same men can be found at the origins of both the modern concept of ‘childhood’ and the modern concept of ‘education’. It was in this period that the previously unknown concept of ‘childhood innocence’ became firmly established. Gerson’s urgings from 200 years before attracted increasing popularity – particularly in the wake of the moral reforms and the existential crises provoked by the Reformation, Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. Religious iconography began to associate children with the Holy Infant: “[Childhood] is the age of innocence…let tender and gentle respect be shown to these young plants of the Church. Heaven is full of anger for whosoever scandalizes them,” (Guérard).

In accordance with this new religious dogma, the idea of immodesty and sensuality in the child had to be done away with – since that would equate childhood with silliness and corruption, when in fact the child had to be seen as pure: innocence as perfection. Children could have neither passion nor vices. The result was the formation of that moral concept which insisted on the weakness of childhood, but which associated its weakness with its innocence, the true reflection of divine purity, and which placed education in the front rank of man’s obligations. Children were ‘witnesses to baptismal innocence, comparable to angels’. Their ‘souls were the dwelling-place of Jesus Christ’, and consequently the education of children must become ‘one of the most important things in the world’. Previously a fleeting period of no importance, and soon finished with, ‘childhood’ had become equated with a new and special sensibility.

“As far as possible, all the apertures of the cage must be closed…A few bars will be left open to allow the child to live and to enjoy good health; this is what is done with nightingales to make them sing and with parrots to teach them to talk.” (Cadet, ‘L’Éducation à Port-Royale’, 1887).

Three and a half centuries ago, in a tragedy incomparable in human history, young people were pushed into cages. There they became trained slaves, and were given a new identity: weak, innocent and in need of ‘training’. The modern State knows that its control depends upon control of education. They know that there must be imposed a long period of segregation. ‘Children’ must be quarantined, humiliated and incarcerated within the confines of the parental prison and the impenetrable walls of the school, in order to ensure that the young are sufficiently indoctrinated to propagate the cycle. Contemporary society is at once an all-encompassing factory and an unseen prison.

Young people need to be enlightened as to their dark history. They are neither parrots nor nightingales, and must be freed from their cages.