Child Development and Education

CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION DAVID ELKIND PREFACE TO JEAN PIAGET To whom many books have been dedicated But to whom no other author owes so much The preface to a book should, I suppose, do several things. One of these is to introduce the reader to the author and to permit the author to give his reasons, or at least his justifications, for adding still another book to the library catalogues. Secondly, a preface should say a little bit about the book itself, what it covers and what it does not cover, who the audience is, and what the reader might expect in the way of return for reading the book. Last, but certainly not least, a preface should give credit where credit is due. For this writer, and I suspect for most others, there is a whole group of people, his family, his friends, his coworkers who--in a variety of ways---enable him to get the work done. This coterie of accomplices never gets mentioned on the title page but at least some recognition can be given in the preface. Accordingly, in this preface I will say something about myself, something about the book, and something about the people who helped make it possible. First, something about the author and his reasons for writing this book. I am a child psychologist fortunate enough to have been introduced early in my career to Piaget's work. I had been trained in traditional learning theory and received my doctorate for a dissertation on the motivation of rats. I was also trained as a clinician and received a heavy dose of psychoanalytically oriented clinical psychology while serving a postdoctoral year as David Rapaport's research assistant at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. But when I was introduced to Piaget's writings, I knew that at last I had found a psychology that was sufficiently broad to satisfy my philosophical preoccupations, my clinical interests, and my scientific conscience. One of the unforeseen consequences of becoming a Piagetian psychologist was that at meetings of various sorts, educators were always asking me to say something about children that might be of interest or use to teachers. When I first started publishing Piaget- oriented research, in the early 1960's, Piaget was already well known in some educational circles. And by some process of intellectual contagion, I surmise, those working in the Piagetian tradition were expected to know something about children that was of value to school people. Looking back on those early years I dread to think of some of the pronouncements I may have made regarding matters educational. My ignorance was brought home to me quickly enough by teachers bold enough to ask difficult questions and gutsy enough not to be satisfied with evasive and pedantic answers. By the mid-sixties I had realized, at last, that if I was going to talk meaningfully about education I ought to know a lot more about it than I did. My education in matters educational is rather long and drawn out, and It involved not only extensive reading, visiting schools, and observing in classrooms but 'also some more direct--hands on experience as well. A few of these more practical experiences might be of interest to the reader. In the spring of 1967 for a full semester I taught several second grade classes reading. It was in an inner city school and it was my first exposure to classroom teaching at the elementary school level. The next year, and every year since, we have brought children to our building from local schools to be tutored by undergraduates under my supervision. Over the years the program has grown and we now have groups of students in several different public schools and have started our own full day school, about which more will be said later. In the seminars we talk about observational skills, about assessment, about curriculum materials, about learning problems, and much more. The students in this program must commit themselves to a full year and must spend at least a day a week in the schools. In 1970, Irene Athey and I were encouraged to apply for an Office of Education Grant to train early childhood specialists. The grant was awarded and we spent the next three years training teachers of teachers in early childhood education. It was a most valuable experience for me because many of the people in the program were very highly trained teachers and administrators and I learned a great deal about education from them. I am not sure how much they learned about children from me! One of the dreams that grew out of our work with inner city children bused to our child development building was that someday we could open a full-day, full-time school for children who were of average ability but who were achieving below the academic norm. These were the children we had been working with over the years and I suspected that they were perhaps the most, or at least the most easily, salvageable. Thanks to a generous grant from a private foundation, we were able to open the doors of the Mt. Hope School in the fall of 1974. It is a small school with no more than twenty children, two teachers, and a group of selected undergraduates who serve as tutors. Our building is a converted stone carriage house on an acre of land about a half-mile from the university. The children come from three middle city schools, and are bused to our building. We follow the public school curriculum and work closely with city school people. Our aim is to keep the children for a year and to return them to the city schools with self-confidence refurbished and tool skills improved. We are following our graduates up to see how they do when back in the public schools. I will not say much more about the Mt. Hope School here, but it will come up repeatedly in later discussions. Many of the examples· are, in fact, drawn from children who are attending or have attended our school. As headmaster of a school, I have learned a lot about the everyday workings of a school that I hadn't fully appreciated before. In addition, the school has allowed me to test at first hand some of the ideas and concepts I had been developing about learning, motivation, assessment, curriculum analysis, and about the running of classrooms. I feel more comfortable writing about these matters now that they have been tried out at the Mt. Hope School. This book, then, is an attempt to put down in one place some of the ideas about education that I have been developing over the years from my standpoint as a*Piagetian. What I have tried to do is present a systematic approach to education from a child development point of view. In the first section of the book, background information about the American social science scene, about Piaget's conceptual forerunners, and about Piaget's life and work is presented. Some readers may want to skip the first two chapters and go directly to the third. Indeed, the first two chapters can be read last by those who are relatively unacquainted with Piaget. For those who have some knowledge of his work, the first two chapters will, it is hoped, deepen their conceptual understanding of the context of Piaget's psychology. The second section of the book is concerned with foundation material. In the chapter on understanding the child, some of Piaget's most important insights about children, including the stages of cognitive development, are presented. In the next chapter I have detailed three modes of learning that are either explicit or Implicit In Piaget's writings. In addition I have tried to iterate several principles of learning that derive from developmental considerations and that might prove useful in the implementation of these three modes of learning in the classroom. The last chapter In this section concerns motivation and is again my attempt to build on Piaget's work and extend it to matters not covered by Piaget himself. So, while the matter of cognitive growth cycles is quite Piagetian, the motivational dynamisms described in the second part of the chapter are my own attempt to answer the question of what sort of motivation takes over when the developmental dynamics are at an end. In the third section I have attempted to speak more directly to classroom applications. The assessment chapter provides teachers with an array of methods for determining children's levels of cognitive development. The next chapter offers many examples of how to analyze curriculum materials from a cognitive developmental point of view. My hope is that this chapter will sensitize teachers, and curriculum builders as well, to the intricate problems involved in creating child-appropriate curricula. The last chapter, The Active Classroom, tries to detail how a teacher who has absorbed what was presented in the previous chapters might actually run a classroom. Now that I have said what I have put into the book, it might be well to say what I have left out. The book is written from a Piagetian perspective and I have not tried to incorporate other approaches, philosophies, or alternative models. In other words this is not a comprehensive text in educational psychology. Nor have I tried to summarize all of the voluminous literature related to topics touched on in the book. Rather, I have tried to present basic concepts and to illustrate them with anecdotal examples more frequently than with experiments.

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