Fifteen years after its initial publication, Nefl Postman's "The Disappearance of Childhood" remains perhaps the most insightful and provocative commentary on the decline of innocence in American culture.

Postman vividly describes ours as a society overflowing with doubletalk: We adore our children. Yet we insist on embracing a popular culture that is hostfle and damaging to them.

We happily immerse ourselves - children and adults together - in the movies, TV shows, billboards, music, computer games and other pop influences that destroy the enchantment that childhood once held, Postman says. What's happening, he says, is that adults are becoming more childish in these pop pursuits and that children, with all the secrets" of adulthood now revealed to them in prime time, are becoming more adult.

The idea of childhood is disappearing.

Writing a new preface three years ago for the re-released version of the book, Postman, who teaches media and political culture at New York University, confessed that, "sad to say," he saw little to change in his 1982 text. "What was happening then is happening now. Only worse."

In Postman's view, the postmodern culture is propelling us back to a time not altogether different from the Middle Ages, a time before literacy, a time before childhood had taken hold as an idea. Obviously, there were children in medieval times, but no real childhood, he says, because there was no distinction between what adults and children knew.

Postman's book recalls the coarse village festivals depicted in medieval paintings - men and women besotted with drink, groping one another with children all around them. It describes the feculent conditions and manners drawn from the writings of Erasmus and others in which adults and children shared open lives of lust and squalor.

"The absence of literacy, the absence of the idea of education, the absence of the idea of shame - these are the reasons why the idea of childhood did not exist in the medieval world," Postman writes.

Childhood over by 1950

Only after the development of the printing press, and of literacy, did childhood begin to emerge, he says. Despite pressures on children to work in the mines and factories of an industrial age, the need for literacy and education gradually became apparent, first among the elite, then among the masses. Childhood became defined as the time it took to nurture and transform a child into a civilized adult who could read and comprehend complex information. The view American settlers was that only gradually could children attain civility and adulthood through "literacy, education, reason, self-control and shame."

It was during that time, Postman notes, that public education flourished, that children began celebrating birthdays and that a popular culture especially for kids developed around games and songs. Postman places the high-water mark for childhood at between 1850 and 1950.

But the seeds for childhood's demise were sown even before 1850 with the advent of the telegraph. For the first time, electronic messages could be transmitted faster than the human ability to travel.

The most profound meaning of the telegraph (and of its electronic successors) was that the information transmitted on it didn't need real content. The medium itself was the message.

It's an observation that only a few people understood at the time. Henry David Thoreau was among them. When told it was possible for people in Maine and Texas to exchange electric messages, Thoreau remarked, "But what do they have to say to one another?"

Postman sees Thoreau as a prophet. The point is that electronic messages in a free-market society tend to be uncontrollable and banal. News becomes a product. Advertising becomes ubiquitous. Self-restraint and deferred gratification collapse. Celebrity takes over.

Television especially vaporizes the hierarchy that adults once held over children, Postman argues. Pictures dominate. Unlike a child learning gradually to read and to grasp ideas, no one needs to learn how to watch TV. No one gets better at TV watching by doing more of it. Its images are simply there for everyone, adult and child, to absorb.

By its nature, commercial TV feels compelled to take on taboos, nearly always in glib tones, Postman says. "Don't go away," he mimics. "Tomorrow we'll take a quick look at incest."

"Electronic media find it impossible to withhold any secrets," Postman writes, letting the reader's mind drift backward to the Middle Ages. "Without secrets, there can be no such thing as childhood." The electronic media thus pose a challenge both to the authority of adults and to the curiosity of children, he argues. Children's curiosity is replaced by cynicism and arrogance. "We are left with children who are given answers to questions they never asked."

Violence, for example, is offered without the mediation of a mother's voice. It's governed by no theory of child development. Rather, it's there because it makes for interesting TV.

Toys are us

Postman worries less about fiction than news. "To what extent does the depiction of the world as it is undermine a child's belief in adult rationality, in the possibility of an ordered world, in a hopeful future?" he asks.

Postman saves some of his harshest words for advertising. The graphic / electronic revolution has rendered Commercial Man irrational, he says, and has upset some key assumptions of the free market. One such assumption is that a buyer and seller can make a trade based on rational self-interest. Traditionally, children have been excluded from this assumption. Laws protect children because they aren't considered yet capable of making rational transactions.

But the TV commercial makes no appeal to rationality. As any parent can tell you, its message is to be felt, not understood.

I clearly recall my own son's first intelligible complete sentence. It was this: "We'll be right back after these messages." And, when he was older, I remember his explanation for wanting toy after toy that he had seen advertised on TV. "Dad," he would plead, "I feel like it."

This is true, of course, for adults, too, as the line blurs between us and our children. Toys, as it turns out, are us. We display the same desires for instant gratification as our kids. We even play some of their computer games. We ferry them to their ballet lessons and sit for hours watching their exploits on the hockey rink or soccer field. When they score, we score.

: For middle-class kids, this meshing of adult and child worlds is surely one of the biggest differences between today's childhoods and those of earlier times, say the 1950s.

Our parents never saw us play ball. They never knew that sometimes we hung out in the rail yards, or stole apples from neighbors' trees. They didn't know the games we played because they were ours. On summer mornings, we disappeared into neighborhood - kid enchantment, emerging only briefly for lunch before plunging back into our conspiracies. We had no play dates. It was assumed we'd return before dinner – safely.

Now, middle-class parents feel the need to be all over their kids' lives. Rarely do you see middle-class kids playing unattended in city parks. Kids are tightly scheduled: ballet, swim team, computer camp. Postman writes about a scuffle that broke out among parents at a massive kids' soccer tournament, and then, afterward, about how parents congratulated one another for a wonderful event.

But Postman's question was this: What were 4.000 kids doing at a soccer tournament? Surely they couldn't have organized such an event themselves, for their own enjoyment. He concludes that kids' sports have less to do with children's fun than parents' gratification. Play has become serious business. As childhood disappears, so does a child's idea of play. And of innocence.

Were he to write a 1997 version, it might conclude with the tragic case of Jon Benet Ramies, Postman said this week. It's not the killing that interests him but that her parents were so intent on making her up to be something other than a child.

"They tried to make this small child into a sexy woman, and at the time I first wrote the book I wouldn't have believed that anyone would do that - but I'm told that thousands of children are made to do these things.

Wherever one looks, one sees more evidence that childhood is disappearing."