The Feeling Child
By requiring the end of segregation on the basis of segregation's emotional impact on the segregated pupil, the Supreme Court mandated a new pedagogy based on a new child psychology for all schools and all children. This apparently unintended consequence sprang out of the theoretical source of the Social Science Statement's conclusions. This theoretical source was an extreme extension of progressive, child-centered pedagogy called "the mental-hygiene approach" to education.*
Two streams of understanding about child psychology came together in the mental-hygiene approach to education. One stream was the child psychologists' theory of "periods of emotional development" of children. The other stream was mental-hygienists' theory of "stages of socialized emotional maturation."#
According to the Midcentury White House Conference's summary of then current understanding of child psychology, every child grows from birth to adulthood through a sequence of stages (or periods). In each stage, one particular emotional development is central and is required for the eventual emergence of a healthy adult personality. These stages with their emotional development are**:
Birth to 12-15 months = trust
1 year to 3 years = autonomy
4 years to 5 years = initiative
6 years to 12 years = duty and accomplishment
adolescence = (personal) identity
late adolescence = intimacy
early adulthood = parenting sense
adulthood = integrity
Each developmental level involves the relationship of a child with other persons, that is, is social; or (to put it in my own words) is social enframing of emotional development. Mental-hygienists looked at the periods of emotional development in terms of the child who had difficulty fulfilling - or failed to fulfill - the particular emotional growth that was the central problem of a developmental level. Incomplete growth changed the kinds of purposive behavior the child was capable of expressing as she grew older. It also changed the dynamics between the child and the teacher. For the emotionally immature child at any stage of development, the teacher would become the focus of the central issue of that stage.
Consider the example of the child who is not permitted to say "no!" in the 1 to 3 year period.
"If he is not given opportunity to do this, he may fail to develop an adequate sense of himself as an operating force in his world and so continue throughout life to assert himself with a persistent and relatively incorrect negativism, or in some other ways equally inappropriate and unfortunate. Or he may remain always ineffective and unassertive, full of doubt."(Pp. 245-246.)
The child's teacher in the lower grades would have to deal with the child's emotional immaturity before the teacher could teach a subject matter. The child would not be capable of being an active agent of her own learning. Readiness to learn is not intellectual; readiness to learn is emotional.
The Midcentury Conference report clearly laid out the conclusion of this line of reasoning.
"[The mental-hygienist approach] emphasizes the predominance of feelings toward persons in the child's experience, and the extent to which these feelings pervade his response to all new situations, whether primarily social in nature of not. And it holds, furthermore, that the feeling life is prior and basic, playing such a fundamental role in experience that all other learnings are acquired in its terms."(P. 252.)
The child's (hence, the pupil's) emotional development precedes and conditions cognitive development. Academic curriculum must be made secondary to the school's fosterage of the child's emotional development.
"... Purposes, feelings, attitudes, ways of life, and personal dedications are seen to be learned as well as subject matter, and ... subject matter is not and cannot be learned without at the same time learning attitudes and ways of life."(P. 258.)
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* Helen L. Witmer and Ruth Kotinksy, editors, Personality in the Making: The Fact-Finding Report of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, reprint edition ([1952, Harper & Brothers] Science and Behavior Books, Inc, Palo Alto, California, n.d.), p. 238 ff.
# The phrase, socialized emotional maturation, is mine. It is intended to point to the major elements of the mental hygienists' theory.
** Witmer and Kotinsky, Personality in the Making, pp. 5-26. The chronological boundaries are general or overlapping, because each child's development is individual.
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