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800 BCE
DECADE: 800 BC TO 401 D.
During this time, childhood was characterized by an invisible character. The childhood was not recognized as a stage with its own characteristics and qualities, therefore, there was no concept of childhood. The infants used to mix among adults, thus causing them to be unrecognized. Childhood was a period of fragility. -
500 BCE
Classical Greece
In Rome, liberal education loses relevance and there is much less attention to physical education and sport. The aim of education is to form good speakers, "to embellish the soul of young people through rhetoric."
Schooling is divided into three stages: "Ludus" or elementary school (7-12 years), "Grammar" (12-16 years): prose, theater, poetry; "Rhetoric" (since 16 years): study techniques of speech and declamation (very few reach this last stage of education). -
499 BCE
Classical Greece
The concept of liberal education and "integral" development of the person (body-mind) is born, and the need for male citizens to attend school, first receiving informal instruction (Until puberty: reading, writing, physical education), then a formal instruction: literature, arithmetic, philosophy, science. -
384 BCE
ARISTOTELS (384-322 BC):
"until the age of 2 years (first period) children should be hardened, accustomed to difficulties such as cold.In the subsequent period, until the age of 5 years, when it is still not good to guide them to a study or to jobs Coactive so that this does not impede growth,they should, however, allow enough movement to avoid bodily inactivity; And this exercise can be obtained by various systems,especially by gambling.Most childhood games should be imitations of serious occupations of the future age -
301
CENTURY IV
The prerogative of accepting and recognizing the child belonged to the father. If he rejected it, the newborn was abandoned in the street, and he could pick it up (or not) whoever he wanted. This was called "exposure" of the baby (children exposed). Such a practice was more common with girls because of their low social value than with boys -
301
CENTURY IV
In Roman times, poverty led many people to sell their newborns to the slave traders "who still acquired them" bloody ", barely out of their mothers' womb, who thus did not have time to see them and become attached With them it is known from numerous documents that children suffered various abuses (physical, sexual..) and that they were frequently "objects" of adult fun.
Infanticide is not considered murder until the fourth century, although it is still practiced profusely during the Middle Ages -
401
CHRISTIANITY AND MIDDLE AGE (5th century BC until the 15th century)
For Greece and Rome, the most important social institution and the one in charge of education was the STATE. During the Middle Ages, by influence of Christianity, it is the CHURCH (controls both religious and secular education).
There is no concern for childhood as such, and education is not adapted to the child. In fact, all teaching of religious content is in Latin (the mother tongue is considered totally inappropriate to convey knowledge). -
401
CHRISTIANITY AND MIDDLE AGE
The child is conceived as a homunculus (man in miniature), there is no evolution, qualitative changes, but change from a lower state to a higher, adult state (Thomas Aquinas).
Only a few men enter education, not women. Throughout the Middle Ages the child is used as labor. -
401
CHRISTIANITY AND MIDDLE AGE
The secular poverty of large sections of the European population involves the practice of incorporating children to work from the age of five (until the fourteenth century, many girls from poor families are delivered as servants at age 6). The child is in some way "adult slave". Parents have ownership over it. They can deliver it, abandon it, sell it (Babylon, Greece, Europe). In the 12th century the Church decrees that it is not possible to sell a child after the age of seven. -
1401
RENACIMIENTO (centuries XV and XVI) and CENTURY XVII
Luis Vives (1492-1540) also expresses his interest in the evolution of the child, in the individual differences, in the education of "abnormal", and in the need for ADAPTATION Of education to the different cases and levels. It also highlights its concern for the education of women. This idea is central to Comenius (1592-1670), who insists that both boys and girls should be educated, and in the role of the mother as the first educator. -
XVIII CENTURIES
Jean Rousseau, among his most influential and well-known ideas is that the child is good by nature. On the other hand, it vigorously defends that all education must be ADAPTED at the level of the child, the importance of action and experience, and not only the word, to acquire knowledge. Rousseau argues that the child is a being with its own characteristics, following a physical, intellectual and moral development, and considers that education should be compulsory and should include women. -
Industrial Revolution
With the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the bourgeoisie drastically reduces the need for child labor and, therefore, many children stop having to go to work and have "too many hours of leisure" to occupy with some activity. Hence, the need to enroll them becomes a primary objective. On the other hand, changes in social life (the emergence of cities) and family life (home life and changes in distribution) promote closer contact between parents and children. -
XIX CENTURIES
The observations of infants, increasingly systematic, carried out by pedagogues, philosophers and scientists, many of them with their own children proliferate. Biographical monographs are published: Taine, 1876; Darwin, 1877; Preyer, 1882; etc. There is great interest in "exceptional" or "special" subjects: Itard's study of the wild child of Aveyron; Study of gifted (Mozart), blind from birth who recover sight. -
XIX CENTURIES
In the nineteenth century there is still a unified conception of childhood and education. In continental Europe the influence of Rousseau's thought that defends the child's natural goodness and the idea of permissive education persists. On the contrary, in the USA and England the Calvinist tradition is the most influential: the child must be reformed through an authoritarian education that makes use of physical and public punishment. -
TWENTIETH CENTURY
Throughout the twentieth century, the doctrine of children's rights crossed the frontier of intellectual discussion to represent a new vision that has involved transcendental changes, in the way of conceiving the place that they have in our society. Paradoxically, this is happening at a time when the number of children has declined markedly, since, while the overall fertility rate was 3.6 children per woman in 1970, the figure decreased to 2.3 in 2002. -
TWENTIETH CENTURY
UNICEF has defined childhood as Childhood is the time when children have to be in school and in playgrounds, grow strong and confident of themselves and receive the love and encouragement of their families and Of a broad community of adults. -
CONCLUSIONS
Until the twentieth century, childhood is not fully and explicitly recognized as a period with its own characteristics and needs, the child as a person, with the right to personal identity, dignity and freedom.
In the private sphere, forms of upbringing were modified to such a degree that punishment and rigid discipline ceased to be considered as legitimate methods of education, which has not prevented the continued practice of abuse and abuse to this day.
