Developmental Psychology Is Dead (Again)

Yes, it is time to proclaim the death of our dear friend Developmental Psychology, who was killed off again in the waning months of 2008, this time by No Child Left Behind (otherwise known as No Developmental Psychology Left Alive) and its spiritual progeny and brethren. The final nail in the coffin was provided by a kindergarten teacher whom I shall call (for historical reasons) Miss Watson. But more on her later.

Developmental Psychology was about 100 years old when it died; its date of birth (like most schools of thought in psychology) was never precisely documented. It was a newborn, some say, when Professor G. Stanley Hall set forth the idea, in his book on adolescence published in 1904, that children's and adolescents' characteristic modes of thinking and feeling are different from the thinking and feeling of adults. This idea is, and was, a scientific hypothesis: it is a testable proposition, and data can and has been collected over the last century to test the veracity of this proposition.

But, like most hypotheses concerning human behavior, it is not at all simple. There are some functions of human behavior that develop very early, and so in these domains, children do function like adults (some aspects of the visual system are in this category). In other domains, maturity of the function (whether it is an information-processing function or some aspect of emotional development, or their combination) is very late in coming. For example, all the hoo-hah in the last five years or so about adolescents' late-developing frontal lobes suggests that teenagers do not develop adult-like capacities for impulse control and delay until they are in their early 20s. So it is more correct, more in line with the data, to amend Hall's hypothesis: in some ways, children's characteristic modes of thinking and feeling are different from those of adults. But this still suggests we should treat them differently, that we have different expectations for them than we have for ourselves, or that our expectations for children should take their developmental level into account.

This was the great practical achievement of Developmental Psychology: metaphorically, it was the psychology whose greatest insight was the child-sized chair. Child-sized chairs and tables, and scissors, and all things ergonomically designed for children, are a relatively late development in the West, often credited to Maria Montessori and her Children's School founded in a Rome slum in 1905. Thanks to Montessori, we all recognized that children are more comfortable and therefore learn more efficiently in child-size chairs. They also learn more efficiently in child-sized curricula, which was one of the biggest achievements of Developmental Psychology until its recent demise.

Now, as a result of bracket creep, we have officially lost child-sized curricula, and therefore we have lost the whole idea of Developmental Psychology. Anxiety about "how is our children learning?" and its awful relative, the high-stakes testing movement first established these tests in high schools (like my local version, the MCAS or Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System). But then, we needed to get kids ready for the high-stakes version of the test—the one which, if you don't pass it, you don't get a high school diploma—and so we have to prepare kids at earlier and earlier ages, and assess kids so as to know which of our schools are "underperforming." Meanwhile, the original, bracing and humane insight of our old friend Developmental Psychology has been gradually eroded. Adults' expectations of tests, what they measure, what they are for, etc., creeps down from older kids onto younger kids, whose understanding of tests and whose ability to perform on them is not the same as that of older kids and adults. And as the curriculum is warped to prepare kids to perform on tests, the ways in which young children are different from older children and adults are ignored, while the ways in which they are similar, or must try to be similar, are emphasized.

Developmental Psychology had a long list of rules to live by. Two of my particular favorites, and the two I will miss the most, are: "All children develop at different rates," and "Children's emotional and intellectual development are much more intertwined than those domains are in adults." Which brings me to (in my next post) Developmental Psychology's sad final moments: the curious case of Miss Watson and the teddy bear named Donald.