Preparing children for death
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We think kids are mistreated by parents now, and they are, but it is encouraging to look back and see that we have made some progress. Little did I realize, until I started digging into the history and philosophy of childhood, just how bad it was for kids in the past. Feeding children superstition and dogma must end, imagine telling scary tales to children as a form of discipline. Again we note the ever present influence of clergy. Most people are probably not aware of the role of clergy, beyond the obvious admonitions they made to whip children.
My grandmother was born during the waning days of the Victorian period, and she of course directly influenced my mother who was born in 1917. However, my mother never told me frightening tales as punishment. All children seem to love to listen to stories and I was no different. Perhaps it is because even very young children recognize that this is quality time. Just you and a beloved parent and they are focused perhaps for the first time in the day when they sit down on your bedside, open a book and begin to read. If they are good at this, they also supply appropriate sound effects and voice characterizations as good as any actor on the big screen.
I was treated to many fairy tales, but I don’t recall being especially frightened by Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Jack in the Bean Stalk, or Little Red Riding Hood. Perhaps some of our readers can comment on their childhood memories.
Alexander Bain is an interesting historical figure in the pantheon of humanists. We should celebrate his birthday and revive his memory. Perhaps hold an international day of protest against forcing faith on children and pick his birthday for holding the event.
Pass Grade in Passing On by Jacob Middleton examines how the Victorians’ obsession with death extended to terrifying their children in order to prepare them for the grave.
May 2007, Fortean Times
In 1880, the philosopher Alexander Bain complained about the way in which Victorian society disciplined its children. While he saw many methods as ineffectual, he reserved his greatest hostility to what he dubbed “spiritual, ghostly, or supernatural terrors”. 1 Bain was a rationalist, heavily influenced by the utilitarian philosophers of the early 19th century, and his hostility towards what he regarded as superstition is therefore hardly surprising. What disturbed him most, however, was not the nature of this means of disciplining children, but its ubiquity; in a society that wished to regard itself as rational and modern, most children were frightened into quiescence by the threat of supernatural terrors.
The period in which Bain was writing was one in which corporal punishment of children at school and home was habitual and the treatment to which many children was subjected was considered, even then, to be cruel and demeaning. Moreover, supernatural retribution had long been considered an acceptable means of disciplining children. In The History of the Fairchild Family, probably the most successful children’s book in Victorian Britain, death is painfully visited upon those who disobey parental authority. A child might find itself burnt to death for the sin of vanity, while illicitly consuming preserved fruit would “merely” result in a near-fatal fever. 2 Such punishments were regarded as natural consequences of disobedience, a divine retribution.
Cautionary tales, such as those in The History of the Fairchild Family, were made more believable by the ever-present threat of sudden death in an era of limited medical expertise, which was seeing the first discoveries of microbiology. Children were expected to be aware of their mortality from an early age, and there was even a literary genre devoted to teaching children how to die a ‘good death’. These works were invariably true stories, relating how particular children met their end with appropriate Christian fortitude when struck down by disease. 3
However, while such literature was heavily promoted by the clergy, and by middle-class parents keen to give their offspring a religious upbringing, it formed only one strand in a popular culture preparing children for death. Perhaps it is surprising to the modern reader, used to stereotypes of religious Victorians, to find how small a part Christianity played in their education. Although most Britons would have described themselves as Christian, it was found in 1851 that only a quarter of the population attended church. 4 Education about death, then, was provided for in other ways, often through popular literature and folk custom. From the mid-19th century, this was supplemented by Spiritualism, a movement that concerned itself with raising children with the ‘correct’ attitude to death and the afterlife. It is estimated that, by the end of the Victorian period, as many as 10,000 children were attending lyceums, the spiritualist equivalent of Sunday schools. 5 What we can be certain of is that the messages that the 19th-century child received about death and its spiritual implications were many and varied.
http://www.forteantimes.com/features/commentary/443/pass_grade_in_passing_on.html
