Childhood is a pleasant invention. I recall reading about Elizabethans dressing their children like miniature adults and on one occasion a four year old boy crying for its mother as it was hanged on the scaffold for stealing bread. It is hard to pinpoint exactly when we gained an idea of childhood, for as late as the Grimm fairytales, the original fairytales were not anodyne as they are today: the prince rapes sleeping beauty and Hansel and Gretal is about child abuse and cannibalism.
But at some stage relatively recently we evolved to understand children’s brains are developing to understand the world around them, and then we gave them different legal status, stopped them working all hours of the day, decided to educate them (though some think that latter is akin to brainwashing) and even gave them different clothes to adults.
This is not universal. When I was last in Aurangabad they had five year old boys working the threads on looms for their silk ware because they had delicate hands. And today we see arguments over the age of ten being the age of criminal liability, and girls of eleven dressing as teenagers. Childhood like everything else is in flux.
But as I age I realise that at twenty human beings are still child like. And I finally see why George Bernard Shaw said no one should leave school until they are thirty.
Because childhood is about everything you aren’t yet and ‘becoming’ takes many more years than we readily realise.