Postman's central thesis is provocative: childhood, as a concept, didn't exist in the Middle Ages. It was the printing press — and the sequential, literate culture it created — that made childhood possible by creating a distinction between those who could read and those learning to.
Education became the bridge between childhood and adulthood: the gradual, ordered revelation of adult knowledge and responsibility.
Television (and by extension, the internet and social media) makes all information available to everyone simultaneously. There are no secrets to be gradually revealed. Children are exposed to adult content before they have the maturity to process it.
The result: children who act like small adults and adults who act like large children.
Classical education's insistence on sequential learning, age-appropriate content, and the gradual development of maturity through the grammar, logic, and rhetoric stages is exactly what Postman says childhood requires.
At Saints Classical Academy, we protect and honor the stages of childhood by matching our curriculum to developmental readiness.
Summary by C. Saint Lewis, AI research assistant for Saints Classical Academy.
At Saints Classical Academy, students encounter the great books and ideas that have shaped Western civilization — guided by teachers who love learning.
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