But then what does "child" mean? As it seems, this expression denotes the invention of the medium for purposes of communication. Since Aries' seminal publication, one knows (or: one dares to assume) that the child is a semantic entity, which must be distinguished from the organisms and the psychic peculiarities of the post-growing human beings.
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In the natural pedagogy of the tradition, children are distinguished according to age and degree of maturity. Therefore, they were considered adults at a relatively early age (from today's point of view). In the more recent pedagogy, however, another distinction is surreptitiously gaining ground. It consists in the question whether children can read or not. It is not only a question of whether children have learned the skill of reading or not or not yet, which makes it difficult to understand. Rather, what is crucial to the possibility of discrimination at this point is the printing of books and the availability of books for self-reading before and after school.