📚 Why we bother with history
They said that about books, too.
For more than two hundred years, adults have panicked about new things that children love. Let’s look at some of them.
Every generation is sure…
…that some new thing is rotting the kids.
The game
Watch grown-ups panic again and again
History at school can feel like a list of kings and dates to learn for a test, but it can also help you notice when people are panicking about the same thing people panicked about a hundred years ago, and getting it just as wrong.
Your turn. Drag the slider through the years below to see what adults were certain would ruin children. Read each one before you move on to the next.
Novels
–
–
Panic 1 of 7.
One of them got much louder than the rest.
It led to hearings in the US Senate
and bonfires in the street.
The trap
We skipped one on purpose
You’ve just gone straight past the 1950s. That was on purpose, because the 1950s had the loudest panic on the whole list, with government hearings and bonfires in the street. Before you find out what it was, have a guess. Grown-ups in the 1950s were certain that one thing was turning children into criminals. What do you think it was?
The thing they burned in the streets in the 1950s was…
In 1954 a respected psychiatrist, Fredric Wertham, published a bestseller called Seduction of the Innocent, which argued that comic books were turning children into criminals. The United States Senate held televised hearings about it. Across the country, schools and towns held public bonfires where children threw their comics onto the fire. The comic companies were so worried that they brought in strict rules about what their comics could show. All of this was over comics like Superman and Batman.
Each of these panics went the same way.
They went through the same four stages,
in the same order.
The why
Every panic goes through the same four stages
Once you’ve seen a few, you’ll notice they follow a pattern: the same four stages in the same order, every time. Pick one from the list and step through it. Then pick another and you’ll see it goes through the same four stages.
Stage 1
–
…and right now it’s happening to you.
Where you fit
Where phones are in the pattern
Every panic on the left of this row has reached stage 4, become ordinary and turned out fine. Now look at where your phone is.
Tap the button to see where phones are in the pattern.
This does not mean phones are harmless. There may be something real to worry about, and some of the old panics had a bit of truth in them too. What history shows is that the panic itself keeps coming back, and it nearly always turns out much bigger than the problem. Knowing that won’t tell you the answer about phones, but it helps you think about your own life calmly instead of just believing the alarm.
Play with it
Same sentence, every century
Here’s the same worry written as one sentence. Flip through to see who worried about it and when. If you cover up the year, you can’t tell which century it’s from, because only the new thing in the gap changes.
This new novel is destroying young people’s minds and morals, and it’s far worse than anything that came before.
–
Only the word in the gap ever changes.
History is more than a list
of kings and dates.
It shows you patterns
that keep happening again.
Every panic before this one reached stage 4, became ordinary and turned out to be wrong. Once you know the pattern, you can often guess what will happen next, because you’ve seen it happen before.
One more thing
So the next time a grown-up tells you that something you like is ruining your generation’s brains, you don’t have to argue and you don’t have to believe it. You can think to yourself, …they said that about novels, and then decide for yourself.
You could also tell someone that in the 1950s, respectable people held Senate hearings and burned comic books in the street because they were sure Batman was turning children into criminals. Then ask them what they think about phones.