2. 职称英语
  3. Does childhood have a history? At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth

Does childhood have a history? At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth

游客2024-10-30  26
问题      Does childhood have a history? At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries William Worthworth wrote of childhood and youth as a uniquely privileged time of innocence and insight--" Heaven lies about us in our infancy," a paradisal state from which growing up was a progressive exile and disenchantment--" Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy." After Freud we cannot quite subscribe to so idealized an understanding of the dreaming innocence of youth. Nevertheless the distinctiveness of childhood as a state utterly different from adulthood is deeply ingrained in our culture, and enclosed in icons of childhood as different as Peter Pan and Huckleberry Finn.
     Childhood did have a history, but it was a short and comparatively recent one, for the very concept of childhood was a product of modern thought. Before the seventeenth century, though children existed, childhood did not. Medieval children lived in the margins of adult life, with little or no distinctive cultural identity of their own. Their clothes were miniaturized versions of adult wear, they had no special culture of play, no children’s literature, there was no Worthworthian idealization of the innocence or carelessness of childhood.
     The reasons for this absence were complex. Many children died young, and so the bonds of affection between parents and children were of necessity looser than those in the modern West, where most children can be relied on to survive into adulthood. The consequent culture of detachment manifested itself from the very beginning of infancy, for every woman who could afford it sent her infant children to wet nurses to be breast-fed, thereby depriving them, and herself, of one of the most intimate bonding experiences between mother and child. For most people the home was also the workplace, not the centre of the loving affective family, but a structure for toil, in which the immature adults we call children were part of the workforce. The children of the poor worked as soon as they were able to pick stones, glean corn, scare crows, or drive a flock of geese; the children of artisans were apprenticed and went to live with their masters long before puberty; the children of the well-to-do were sent away to school, or to other households to be fostered. And because there was little or no privacy within the pre-modern house, relationships were more public and less intimate than we are accustomed to, a situation in which individuality and affection could scarcely flourish. [br] The author believes that ______.
选项 A、childhood is a state with distinctive difference from adulthood
B、children should have their own cultural identity
C、medieval children were more miserable than modem children
D、No distinction should be made between childhood and adulthood
答案 A
解析 本题属于推论题，解题线索是文章第一段末句“然而童年时期作为一种独特的状态是与成年完全不同的，这种观念也在我们的文化中根深蒂固”。这说明作者相信童年是与成年有着独特不同点的一个阶段，故选项A为正确答案。
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