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Before the industrial revolution, "youth" could hardly be said to exist at all. In primitive societies, children become full-fledged members of the tribe in one painful and often hazardous initiation, which compresses—and purges—the terror of entering adult life. In Europe until well into the 18th century, children were both indulged and ignored. Medieval artists even seemed ignorant of what a child looked like; they habitually painted them as small adults. A 12th century miniature illustrating Jesus' injunction to "suffer the little children to come unto me" shows Christ surrounded by eight undersized men. Before the 17th century, a child passed directly into the adult world between the ages of five and seven. Schoolchildren carried weapons, which they were supposed to check at the schoolroom door. Marriages often took place in childhood. Youngsters drank heavily and even wenched according to their abilities. Montaigne wrote that "A hundred scholars have caught the pox before getting to their Aristotle lesson."
At the same time, society firmly kept the young in their place. In times when life as well as education was far shorter than today, they often made history at an age when the modern young are still working for their degrees; Edward the Black Prince was 16 when he won the battle of Crécy, Joan of Arc was 17 when she took Orléans from the English, and Ivan the Terrible was the same age when he hounded the boyars to death and had himself crowned czar. But for ordinary people, particularly under the long-prevalent guild system of apprentices and journeymen, life was a slow progression toward experience and eventual reward.
In the 17th century came the beginnings of the modern idea of the family with the child at its center. With greater concern for children and more schooling came a new stage of life between childhood and adulthood: adolescence, a new combination of weal and woe that has profoundly altered human institutions and attitudes.
If adolescence had an inventor, it was Rousseau, who was cynical about man in civilization: "At ten he is led by cakes, at twenty by a mistress, at thirty by amusements, at forty by ambition, and at fifty by avarice. When does he make wisdom his sole pursuit?" Rousseau saw wisdom in nature. Against the traditional Christian notion that children, scarred at birth by original sin, must be civilized through education, he felt that they were really innocent and that they are best educated through the emotions. In Emile, in 1762, he advised: "Keep your child's mind idle as long as you can."
Romantic Alienation