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Plowden (1967) Notes on the text Volume 1 (page numbers in brackets) Preliminary pages (i-xxii)
Part 1 Introduction
Part 2 The growth of the child
Part 3 The home, school and neighbourhood
Part 4 The structure of primary education
Part 5 The children in the schools: curriculum and internal organisation
Part 6 The adults in the schools
Part 7 Independent schools
Part 8 Primary school buildings and equipment; status; and research
Part 9 Conclusions and recommendations
Notes (486-495)
Research and Surveys about Plowden |
The Plowden Report (1967)
A Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1967
[page 5 (unnumbered)]
[page 7] 9. At the heart of the educational process lies the child. No advances in policy, no acquisitions of new equipment have their desired effect unless they are in harmony with the nature of the child, unless they are fundamentally acceptable to him. We know a little about what happens to the child who is deprived of the stimuli of pictures, books and spoken words; we know much less about what happens to a child who is exposed to stimuli which are perceptually, intellectually or emotionally inappropriate to his age, his state of development, or the sort of individual he is. We are still far from knowing how best to identify in an individual child the first flicker of a new intellectual or emotional awareness, the first readiness to embrace new sets of concepts or to enter into new relations. 10. Knowledge of the manner in which children develop, therefore, is of prime importance, both in avoiding educationally harmful practices and in introducing effective ones. In the last 50 years much work has been done on the physical, emotional and intellectual growth of children. There is a vast array of facts, and a number of general principles have been established. This chapter is confined to those facts which have greatest educational significance and those principles which have a direct bearing on educational practice and planning. 11. Among the relevant facts are the early growth of the brain, compared with most of the rest of the body; the earlier development of girls compared with boys; the enormously wide variability in physical and intellectual maturity amongst children of the same age, particularly at adolescence, and the tendency nowadays for children to mature physically earlier than they used to. Among the principles are present-day concepts about critical or sensitive periods, about developmental 'sequence' (that is, events which are fixed in their order but varying in the age at which the sequence begins); about the poorer resilience of boys than girls under adverse conditions; and, above all, about the complex and continuous interaction between the developing organism and its environment. Under this last rather cumbersome phrase lies the coffin of the old nature-versus-nurture controversy. A better understanding of genetics and human biology has ended the general argument, and provided a clearer picture of what is implied when we talk of changes in measured intelligence during a child's development. Physical Growth from Birth to Adolescence 12. The manner in which the skeleton, the muscles and most of the internal organs grow is shown in the curves of height at successive ages of the typical boy and girl. In Diagram 1A the height at each age is plotted; in Diagram 1B, the rate of growth, or velocity. This velocity curve shows that children are growing faster at birth than at any time during post-natal life (they grow fastest before birth) and that the growth rate decreases quite steadily until puberty is reached. From about the age of six to puberty the rate is nearly [page 8] Diagram 1A
Children are measured lying down until the age of two but are measured standing after that age. The break in curves represent the differences between these two measurements.  Diagram 1B Rate of Growth in Height ('Height Velocity') of 'Average' Boy and Girl from Birth to Maturity: From 'Standards from Birth to Maturity, for Height, Weight, Height Velocity and Weight Velocity: British Children, 1965'. By JM Tanner, RH Whitehouse and M Takaishi. 'Archives of Diseases in Childhood'. 1966.  [page 9] constant. At puberty a spurt occurs, and for a year or two the child grows again at about the rate experienced at the age of two to three. 13. The diagrams show considerable differences between typical girls and boys. Boys are slightly larger at birth, and grow slightly faster for the first six to nine months. Then the girls' rate becomes greater, and because of this they gradually catch up in size. By six years of age there is little difference between boys and girls in height or weight or other body dimensions except for the head, which in boys is always larger. Girls begin puberty on average two years earlier than boys; hence from about 11 to 14 they are likely to be taller and heavier than boys, and probably stronger too. This simple fact has implications for coeducation, especially as at this time girls have acquired the beginning of their sexual characteristics while most boys are still entirely pre-pubescent. Eventually, as the girls' adolescent growth spurt is dying away, the boys' begins. The boys' spurt is more marked than the girls' and is accompanied by a great increase in muscular strength, which does not occur in girls. Individual Differences in Rates of Maturing 14. What the diagrams do not show, however, is the wide variations in rate of growth found in any group of normal boys and girls. As a convenient example we may take the age at which menarche, the first menstrual period, occurs. On average this is just over 13.0 years in England at present; but the normal range, comprising 95 per cent of all girls, runs from 10.0 to 15.0 years; for 99 per cent of girls it is from 9.0 to 16.0 years. In practice this means that in a group of 11 or 12 year old girls there will be some whose puberty has not started, others who have full development of the breasts and are menstruating, and a few who are potentially fertile. The same principle applies to boys, though the age at which the pubertal variation between individuals is greatest comes later, at 13 to 14 years. The physical differences between the pre-pubertal and the post-pubertal are even greater in boys than in girls. 15. This individual variation in stage of development can be most dramatically seen at puberty and in relation to physical growth. But it is of cardinal importance to realise that a similar variation exists at earlier ages and in all aspects of growth and development. Thus the notion of developmental age, as opposed to chronological age, has arisen. By developmental age we simply mean the degree to which a child has advanced along the road from birth to full maturity. In the study of physical growth, several methods are used for estimating developmental age. The commonest is by measuring the maturity of the skeleton, especially of the bones of the hand and wrist. From birth onwards the appearances of these bones undergo a sequence of changes, easily seen in an X-ray. The sequence is practically the same in everybody, but the age at which any stage of the sequence is reached varies widely both between the sexes and between individual boys and girls. At birth the average girl is already some weeks ahead of the average boy in 'bone age' and she gradually comes to be more and more ahead until at puberty the difference is two years. Among boys of the same chronological age there is a wide range of bone age which, for eight year olds, stretches from six to ten 'years'. 16. Similar considerations apply to tests of motor development, and it is highly probable they also apply to emotional and intellectual development. Long term studies of the measured intelligence of individual children through- [page 10] out the whole growing period make it seem likely that children differ in their rates of attaining their adult ability just as they do in attaining their adult height. Conventional tests given on a single occasion are unable to distinguish between acceleration and ability; that is, they do not distinguish a child whose ability will eventually be average, but who is accelerated in his intellectual development, from a child of above average ability who is proceeding at the average rate of intellectual development. Only by repeated longitudinal study can the distribution be inferred. 17. Some of the effects of this variability on the child are obvious enough, especially in relation to physical growth at the older ages. Both the excessively late and the excessively early developer, in physical terms, tend to feel estranged from the general group of children. The isolation of the late developer lasts longer and may lead to serious disturbances of behaviour. Some of the effects are already seen in nursery school; the early maturing child tends to be ahead of the others in motor skill and hence to have a degree of social advantage. 18. It is clearly important to know whether there is any overall 'general-factor' of advancement, that is, a significant tendency for all physiological and psychological developments to be advanced together, or whether we have to hold in mind always a whole series of unrelated or only slightly related developmental ages; for example in bone age, in sexual maturity, in motor skill, in measured intelligence and in emotional reactions. The latter seems to be nearer the truth. The age of menarche, and the age of reaching full adult height can both, it is true, be predicted with much greater accuracy from bone age than from chronological age. But the relation between measured intelligence and skeletal age is small. 19. The picture of the growing child emerges as one in which each of a number of facets of physical, intellectual and emotional behaviour is developing slowly or fast, according to the individual and his circumstances. The various facets may only be linked loosely one with another. Thus a 12 year old boy may be beginning puberty, be amongst the strongest of his contemporaries and be skilful at games; but he may still be behind his contemporaries in certain intellectual attainments, not necessarily because he will eventually have little ability in this direction, but because he is developing slowly in these respects. 20. Clearly such a situation makes great demands upon the teacher. The emotional needs and the social interests of a 12 year old entering adolescence will certainly be different from those of a 12 year old whose adolescence is yet to come, whatever intellectual development each may have reached. This individual variability makes itself felt in any group of children and presents the teacher with a complex situation. Much of the variability arises from the biological nature of children; hence it will be with us for the foreseeable future. This demands that teachers should be adaptable in their approach to individuals, and that the educational system itself should be as flexible as possible. A system on the apple sorting model does not square with the nature of the biological material. We need rather to envisage a kind of cats' cradle of opportunity, providing a multitude of differently developing talents with their own appropriate times and degrees of achievement. [page 11] The Growth of the Brain 21. The curve of brain growth differs considerably from that of stature illustrated in diagrams 1A and B. From early foetal life onwards, the brain, in terms of its gross weight, is nearer to its adult size than any other organ, except the eyes. At birth the brain is 25 per cent of its adult weight, at six months 50 per cent and at five years 90 per cent. At this last stage a child has reached only 40 per cent of his adult stature, and the reproductive organs are barely ten per cent of their adult size. In consequence of its early maturing the brain has a very slight pubertal growth spurt, if any at all. 22. We know distressingly little about the development of the cells and the organisation of the brain. It seems, from the work of Conel (1), that the notion of sequence established so clearly in other areas of development applies here also. Within certain areas of the cerebral cortex there is considerable localisation of functions, certain parts being necessary for vision, others for movement and so on. Around these primary motor, sensory, visual and auditory areas are association areas concerned with the integration of the information arriving at the corresponding primary area. Conel has shown that these primary areas mature in regular sequence; first the motor area, then the sensory, then the visual, then the auditory. Gradually the waves of development, as it were, spread out from the primary areas into the surrounding association areas. There is another gradient of maturity also: within the motor and sensory areas there is strict localisation of function to a part of the body. Cells near the top of the areas, for example, serve the leg; those in the middle, the hand; and those at the bottom, the tongue and mouth. These cells develop in the same sequence as the corresponding parts of the body. The arm cells, for instance, are ahead of the leg cells, just as a baby's arms are more advanced in growth than his legs. 23. There is plenty of evidence that, up to two years of age, brain functions appear when particular structures mature and not before. We know practically nothing, however, about the development of the brain beyond that age, but there is no particular reason to suppose that this generalisation suddenly ceases to be true at 2 or 3 or 13. On the contrary, it is more probable that the higher intellectual abilities also appear only as maturation of certain structures occurs. These structures must be units of organisation widespread through the cerebral cortex, rather than localised areas. Piaget and Inhelder (2) have described the emergence of mental structures in a manner strongly reminiscent of developing brain or body structures; the mental stages follow in a sequence, for example, which may be advanced or delayed, but not altered. There seems good reason to suppose that Piaget's successive stages depend on progressive maturation or at least progressive organisation of the cerebral cortex. For the cognitive stage to emerge, brain maturation is probably necessary, though not, of course, sufficient. Without at least some degree of social stimulus the latent abilities may never be exercised, and indeed the requisite cells may go undeveloped. Critical or Sensitive Periods 24. We have no exact knowledge about this in relation to higher brain function, but we may at least speculatively extrapolate from experiments by Hubel and Wiesel (3) on simpler systems. Particular cells in the cortex of the [page 12] brain of the kitten respond to particular, simple light patterns shone into the eye. This response is functional even before the kittens open their eyes. It comes into play as soon as the kittens begin to have visual experience. When, however, kittens' eyes were stitched closed at birth for two or three months and only then opened, these cells failed to function. It seems that experience is necessary to put the finishing touches on these cells, or to prevent them from falling back into an atrophy of disuse. Once they have gained experience, the cells can then go on without it, at least for a considerable time. Stitching the eyes of adult cats for several months did not destroy the cells' function. 25. These experiments with cats also provide an example of another general characteristic in development - the critical period. By a critical period is meant a certain stage of limited duration during which a particular influence either from another area of the developing organism, or from the environment, evokes a particular response. The response may be beneficial, indeed perhaps essential to normal development, or it may be pathological (as in the case of lesions of the foetus caused by the presence of German measles virus, or of thalidomide in the mother at a particular time in pregnancy). 26. A second example of the critical period is seen in the development of the rat. During the first few days after birth the testes of the male rat secrete a substance which passes to the brain and in some way alters the structure of the part called the hypothalamus. Once this has occurred the rat behaves at puberty as a male; the information as to maleness has been implanted into the hypothalamus irreversibly for the remainder of the rat's life. But if the transfer of information be prevented until five days after birth, then the sex of the rat will be indeterminate however much of the substance is administered later. These first few days are therefore a critical period for this development. 27. It is becoming clear that critical periods also exist for stimuli from the environment. Naturally, such an intimate interaction between the animal and its environment can only operate if the environment can be relied on to provide the right stimulus at the right time. Animals, in this sense, are born into 'expected' environments, indeed into 'required' environments. A duckling will follow the first large object seen at a certain time after hatching. This is usually the mother; but if it happens to be Professor Konrad Lorenz the duckling follows him and remains pathologically attached to humans for the remainder of its life (4). 28. We do not yet know to what extent such critical periods occur in the development of children. Psychologists feel fairly sure that in early infancy, and even longer, the baby 'expects' cuddling, and that if he does not receive it, he may become, after a while, pathological in his behaviour, perhaps irreversibly so. Clinical experience with deaf children indicates that the facility for discriminating speech sounds, and therefore for understanding speech and learning to speak, may diminish after early childhood. (5) It would be surprising if at later ages limited periods at least of maximum receptivity did not occur for many skills and emotional developments. A critical period is only the extreme example of a more general class of sensitive periods. It is likely that, in the sphere of learning, periods of maximum sensitivity rather than of critical now-or-never-ness exist. More knowledge of the occurrence and nature of such periods from nursery school age onwards would be invaluable for the teacher and the subject is therefore an important one for educational research. [page 13] The Interaction of Heredity and Environment 29. Biologists are now much clearer than they were 30 years ago about the manner in which hereditary and environmental factors interact to produce a characteristic, be that characteristic stature or the score in an intelligence test. What is inherited are the genes. Except in very special instances, such as the blood groups and a few diseases, the chemical substance that any given gene causes to be produced is not directly related to any characteristic of a child or an adult. All characteristics have a history of continuous developmental interactions, first of gene products with other gene products, then of more complex molecules with other molecules, then of cells with cells, of tissues with the environment of the mother's uterus, and finally of a whole complex organism with an equally complex environment during the whole of growth after birth. It is now believed that all characteristics are developed in this way; none is inherited. And none can develop without the necessary genetic endowment to provide the basis, a basis as essential for characteristics which are learned as for those which are apparently not learned. The effect of this new biological outlook is of particular importance when we come to consider the question of changes in measured intelligence. 30. From an educational point of view the characteristics which have most importance such as intelligence are those which vary in degree in a population rather than being simply present or absent. Stature is a similar example related to physical characteristics. One cannot meaningfully talk of genes for tallness nor of genes for high intelligence. What we can say about such characteristics is that in a given population, growing up under given environmental circumstances, x per cent of the variability in height or intelligence can be attributed to inherited factors (the genotype), y per cent to environmental ones, and z per cent to genotype-environment interaction. The point is that hereditability is not a quantity that belongs to a characteristic but to a population in its environment. Accordingly it varies with the population and the environment. The more uniform the environment, the greater the proportion of variability due to genotype. In England, for example, the differences in height between adults are largely due to hereditary causes, for most children have had enough to eat. But in many underdeveloped countries, where starvation and disease are rife, more of the adult variation will be environmental in origin and a smaller proportion genetic. 31. The interaction of genes and environment may not be additive; for example, bettering the nutrition by a given amount may not produce a ten per cent increase in height in each person in a population irrespective of his genetic constitution. There may be genotype-environment interaction. Some people may have a rise of 12 per cent, others of eight per cent, depending on whether they carry genes making them react favourably to this new environmental circumstance. A particular environment, in other words, may be highly suitable for a child with certain genes, but highly unsuitable for a child with others. We do not know if such interactions occur in the genesis, for example, of the variations in measured intelligence in our population. If they do, and in principle this seems likely, it would follow that giving everybody the maximum educational opportunity may mean creating individual educational environments for different children. In the same way deprivation would not necessarily mean the same thing for one child as for another. [page 14] 32. Genetic factors operate throughout the whole period of growth. Not all genes are active at birth; some only begin to exert their influence after a period of time. Probably this phased effect accounts for the fact that, physically, and perhaps in other respects, children resemble their parents increasingly as they grow older. Some environmental factors, too, may produce little apparent effect when they are most obviously operative, but a larger effect at some time later. This is known as the 'sleeper' effect. Environmental Factors Affecting Physical Growth 33. Adverse environmental conditions may slow down physical growth, and throw the child off his 'programmed' curve, that is, off the curve that would be followed by someone of his genotype under optimal environmental conditions. But children possess a great capacity to return to or towards their curves if the environmental circumstances are made better. After temporary disease or starvation, for example, a child may resume growth at twice or three times the normal rate until he has caught up all that he had previously lost. Whether complete catching up is possible depends on the age at which the child experiences the adverse environment and the length of time for which he does so. The earlier the adversity and the longer its duration the more lasting its effects. The degree to which similar considerations apply to intellectual and emotional development is unknown and a subject requiring more research. 34. Girls' growth is less affected by adverse circumstances than boys' (see, for example, Appendix 10 for recent evidence collected by the National Child Development Study). This seems to be a general phenomenon as it is true of the females and males of several other mammalian species. It may be due entirely to the earlier physiological maturity of girls, or there may be other causes. Boys are more prone to certain disorders such as epilepsy. They predominate in schools for the educationally subnormal and in child guidance clinics. They have more enuresis, more neurological impairments and more reading difficulties. Possibly these are related to worse regulation of growth in the uterus. There is no definite knowledge yet about this. 35. Children in different socio-economic groups differ in average body size at all ages, those from the better-off groups being larger (6, 7). The difference at present between children in upper middle class homes and unskilled workers' homes amounts to about one inch [25 mm] in height at the age of five rising to 1½ to 1¾ inches [38 - 44 mm] at adolescence. It is not clear whether height and socio-economic status are as closely associated as they were thirty years ago, but if there has been any change it has not been great. Part of the height differential persists in adults and it is not therefore simply a reflection of acceleration or retardation of growth. Indeed, menarche now occurs at approximately the same age in different socio-economic classes. Thirty years ago it was earlier in the well off. 36. The number of children in the family is significantly associated with the rate of growth (8, 9). Children with many brothers and sisters are smaller than those with few. London boys aged five with no siblings are on average 1¼ inches [32 mm] taller than those with four or more siblings (10). The difference is not confined to height but occurs also in other bodily measurements and in visual and auditory acuity. A similar relationship has also been shown in tests of mental ability, though whether this persists at older ages is not yet clear (11). [page 15] A relationship has been found between the number of children in a family and the age of onset of puberty (12); few children in the family is associated with early puberty and many children with late puberty. The difference in physical development is at least partly nutritional in origin. The National Food Surveys have shown that families with many children spend appreciably less on food per head than families with few children. Abel-Smith and Townsend (13) have shown that the great majority of the children growing up in families they describe as economically 'poor' belong to families with four or more children. 37. Environmental and hereditary factors interact inextricably to produce these differences between socio-economic classes. One set of factors tends to reinforce, not cancel out, the other. Socio-economic classes are heterogeneous and artificial, and it is not so much the family's occupation or income that is operative here as its attitudes and traditions of child care, its child-centredness, its whole cultural outlook (14, 15). As the more intelligent and forward looking parent moves up the social scale, so his children's conditions improve; the less intelligent, less ambitious and more passive parent creates conditions which give less stimulation and support to the child's physical development. Similar considerations apply to intellectual development. Intelligent parents, who have themselves gained educational and social advantages, tend to make effective use of the educational, social and medical provision for their children. There is a strong association between the circumstances which affect the nutritional conditions underlying progress in physical development and those other conditions which nourish, as it were, intellectual and emotional growth. The significance of these facts for education lies largely in the light they throw on the progress, or lack of it, made towards equalising even the simple circumstances of life between children of different social classes. 38. There is a small positive correlation between a child's size at any age and his score on tests of measured intelligence. Children in grammar schools, for example, are on average larger than children of the same age in secondary modern schools. The available evidence makes it seem likely that part at least of the correlation persists into adult life. The Trend Towards Earlier Physical Maturity 39. During the last fifty years or more there has been a trend towards earlier maturation and greater size in all ages in children. Thus London five years olds in 1959 were on average nearly three inches [76 mm] taller than London five year olds in 1910, and London thirteen years olds were nearly four inches [102 mm] taller. Adults, too, have been getting taller during this century but only to a much smaller degree. Most of the increase in height of children is caused by their earlier maturity. At the turn of the century most English boys probably stopped growing at about 22; nowadays they usually stop at 17 or 18. 40. The trend is most clearly seen in age at menarche, illustrated in Diagram 2. The statistics for Great Britain before the late 1940s are less satisfactory than those for other European countries, but the general tendency in this country is evidently is in line with others. At present the average age of menarche in southern England is 13.0 years and probably a month or two later in northern England. The tendency has been for menarche to commence earlier by an average of about four months per decade. Probably this tendency is [page 16] now becoming less as an ultimate threshold is approached. It seems likely, however, that the average menarcheal age will decrease at least to about twelve years six months during the next twenty to thirty years. 41. The reasons for this trend are not fully understood, but it seems probable that better standards of nutrition and home conditions, particularly in infancy, are chiefly responsible. The reduction of illness in childhood may also have played a part. The trend has been greater in the worse off sections of the community though not confined to them.  Secular trend in age at menarche 1830-1960. Values are plotted at year in which the average menarche took place, ie in 'recollected-age' data if average menarche of 40-year-olds interrogated in 1900 was 15 years, this is plotted at 1875. This places old data on same age scale as modern probit data. Where age of interrogation is not recorded an estimated amount has been subtracted according to the nature of population studied (primiparae etc). Grouping errors have been corrected where necessary (i.e. 13-year-olds centred at 13.5 years, not 13, as in some older literature). Sources of data as quoted in original. (From Tanner Growth at Adolescence Blackwell Sci. Publ.: Oxford). The Development of Behaviour 42. Each event in a child's behaviour results from the interaction of his inheritance, his history and his immediate situation. Very few of the child's responses are wholly innate (as are many responses in young birds, for example); most require learning, though the basis on which learning can take place is inborn. The baby depends on environmental stimuli for his development, and these need to be varied and complex if the full range of normal behaviour is to be developed. It is the function of the educational process to provide these stimuli from the moment of birth onwards. [page 17] 43. The smiling response is one example of the manner in which basic behavioural patterns are elaborated and remoulded by the environment and society during the course of development. During the first two to eight months after birth any object with some resemblance to the pattern of eyes in a human face may elicit a smile from the baby. This behaviour appears to be virtually unlearned and serves to evoke maternal behaviour in the mother or other adult. Gradually learning takes place so that the child distinguishes his own mother from other adults, and for a time smiles only at her. Much later the child or adult uses the same response elaborated and codified to show sympathy with others. 44. The persistence of early responses and particularly of unconscious emotional attitudes towards other people has been stressed especially by the psychoanalysts. Children 'identify' with parents and others, imitate them and assume their attitudes. They also project on to them many of their own infantile thoughts and wishes. As they grow up they may transfer these attitudes to others in their environment. Thus the child may re-enact this parental relationship with his teacher; a teacher may partly re-enact with colleagues his own earlier relationships with parents or siblings. Such identification, and the formation of strong emotional bonds between child and teacher, can be valuable educationally if the bonds are positive ones. 45. The child appears to have a strong drive, which shows itself at a very early age, towards activity and the exploration of the environment. He also displays curiosity especially about novel and unexpected features of his experience. As far as can be judged, this behaviour is autonomous since it occurs when there is no obvious external motivation such as hunger. 46. There seems to be a pressure in the young child towards the emergence of sensori-motor skills. He needs opportunity for movement. Even in totally limbless children, this drive towards physical experience finds expression, at first through total body movement, and later, when crawling would normally occur, through locomotion of the trunk alone. But the drive needs support from the environment and such children need to be fitted with artificial limbs at or before the time when they would normally use their arms and legs. In short, the child displays a drive towards mastery of his environment, and tends to adopt a style of behaviour and response which provides a technique for achieving mastery. This technique comes by repetition of experience, and the physical and conceptual skills required to handle experience are then practised without any obvious incentive. 47. Individual differences between children in level of ability, sensitivity, vigour and tempo of response appear very early in life (18). Different children, even within the same family, often have different temperaments from birth. Parental personality, attitudes and modes of child rearing interact with the child's temperament, reinforcing or conflicting with the ways in which he prefers to respond. It is important that early learning should take into account the child's style of response. Little is known, however, of the way in which the different personalities of parent or teacher and child interact, or of how different attitudes to or modes of rearing affect children of varying endowments. Much more research in this area is needed. 48. In the early stages of the learning process, neuro-motor, perceptual and emotional operations are inextricably bound together. When a child enters [page 18] school his success in learning is bound up with the development of emotional control and satisfactory relations with the adults about him. If he does not succeed in this, there is a danger that he may refuse to learn. Intellectual processes in a child will not function fully unless some emotional incentive or interest is present. Freedom from severe emotional disturbance is also a necessary condition of learning. 49. Like the growth of the body, the development of behaviour is a continuous process. The concept of clear cut stages is too crude to describe adequately the subtleties of development though it may at times be useful as a working model. According to Piaget, mental structures appear in a sequence as coherent and regular as many aspects of physical growth, and all people, whatever their variation in pace and final level, pass through the same sequence. 50. Piaget distinguishes four stages in intellectual development, which follow in sequence: 'sensori-motor', 'intuitive thought', 'concrete operations', and 'formal operations'.* But a child does not switch suddenly from one stage to another, just as he does not suddenly walk. At first he supports himself for brief periods and mostly crawls; then he walks half the time and, later still, he walks as his principal mode of progression. So also with learning to think and to feel. The stages, too, are not irreversible; though a child (or an adult) may operate most of the time in the stage of concrete operations or formal operations, he may relapse into an earlier mode of behaviour in play, or regress into it in confusion or under stress. 51. Just as a child cannot learn to walk before he has learned to stand, in cognitive development the reaching of successive phases depends upon an adequate level of development in the earlier phase. A child cannot learn to read, for example, without having learned to discriminate shapes. Not all individuals reach the same level of development. Mentally sub-normal individuals never fully attain the later stages or may do so only long after the average child. The creative and powerful thinkers in our society go far beyond the stage reached by the average adult. 52. There is the same wide variation in the speed and efficiency with which neuro-muscular skills are acquired as there is in the growth in height or the development of the skeleton. Some children by the age of five have fine hand control and can cut with scissors and draw straight lines and circles; others are clumsy at these activities for several further years. Advancement or retardation of these skills is the result of the interaction of a hereditary tendency and environmental factors such as encouragement or discouragement, training and practice or the lack of it, but in what proportion is not clear. The 'self fulfilling prophecy' may operate here as throughout so much *Sensori-motor phase - the child moves from apparently uncoordinated reflex responses to successively more complex patterns of activity and establishes a rudimentary sense of the persistence of permanent objects, inanimate and human.
[page 19] of the educational process. The advanced and well controlled children may be given the most interesting and demanding tasks, and may claim more of the teacher's time. They thus advance even further. Meanwhile a clumsy child may sit neglected, falling farther and farther behind. It is as though we made a point of giving tall children better food and starving the short children. If we did this, we would certainly see a greater variation in height in the adult population than was necessary on purely genetic grounds. Language 53. Communication of feeling and attitude between parent and child, child and child, and teacher and child can often take place by non-verbal means such as facial expression, gesture or bodily movement. These are fundamental forms of expression and attention to them is particularly valuable for understanding young children. Experience and feeling may also be communicated through play, through expressive and creative response to media such as paint and clay, and through the re-enactment of emotion in movement, mime and spontaneous dramatisation. 54. Spoken language plays a central role in learning. Parents in talking to their children help them to find words to express, as much to themselves as to others, their needs, feelings and experiences. Through language children can transform their active, questing response to the environment into a more precise form and learn to manipulate it more economically and effectively. The complex perceptual-motor skills of reading and writing are based in their first stages upon speech, and the wealth and variety of experience from which effective language develops. Language originates as a means of expressing feeling, establishing contact with others and bringing about desired responses from them (19); these remain as fundamental functions of language, even at a more mature level. Language develops through the stages of speech, of repeating the commands and prohibitions of others, to become finally part of the child's internal equipment for thinking. Language increasingly serves as a means of organising and controlling experience and the child's own responses to it (20). 55. The development of language is, therefore, central to the educational process. Children who are brought up in a home background where the forms of speech are restricted are at a considerable disadvantage when they first go to school (21) and may need to have considerable compensatory opportunities for talking if they are to develop verbal skills and form concepts. The child's active vocabulary grows at a dramatic rate between two and five years, reaching an average of over 2,000 words. It has been estimated that a child needs to understand about 3,000 words to begin reading (22). By four or five years years children should be articulating sounds about 90 per cent correctly. Most children can make sentences by the time they go to school and are able to understand simple instructions given by unfamiliar people. Nevertheless, there will be a proportion who, because of difficulties in development or unfavourable backgrounds, are likely to lack fluency or have difficulty in making themselves understood. The psychological trauma of placing a child without adequate powers of communication in a new social situation can be serious. [page 20] The Measurement of Intelligence and its Bearing on Educational Decisions 56. The results of tests of intelligence or general ability are usually expressed as an 'intelligence quotient' (or IQ) and define a child's standing relative to other children. Everything that has been said above about the interaction of hereditary and environmental factors in controlling the development of adult characteristics applies to the scores achieved in those tests. Thus any IQ score represents an interaction between hereditary endowment and environmental circumstances, both past and present, including, of course, the influence of parents or teachers. Furthermore it shows how the particular environmental circumstances, past and present, suit the particular genetic endowment of the individual in question. 57. The importance of genetic factors and of very early environment, or both, is shown by the fact that IQ remains fairly stable throughout development in most children while varying greatly from one child to another. This also indicates that circumstances rarely change so much for the worse as seriously to lower the IQ. But the benefits that can occasionally accrue from an improvement in environment, effected perhaps by a transfer from one school to another or by a change of home, are indicated by the large gains, of up to 25 points, made in a short space of time by some children. 58. Large short term changes must be distinguished from longer-term trends. Long term gradual trends may signify a gradual betterment or worsening of a child's environment; but they may alternatively proceed from largely genetic factors if the child is a late or an early developer. Just as some children at the age of five are shorter than most other children of the same age but reach average height by the time they are 15, so some children have a higher rate of gain in intellectual ability than others and so register an increasing IQ in successive tests. Brain maturation is not complete until the end of adolescence at the earliest but it is not known whether a spurt in mental growth occurs during adolescence or not. If a spurt does occur the evidence indicates that it can only be a slight one. 59. Investigations by Husen (23) in Sweden and Burt (24) in England record correlations of 0.7 and 0.8 respectively between IQs of boys and girls as ascertained in tests separated by an interval of about ten years. This implies that about ten per cent of the children moved from the lower half to the upper half of the distribution and that a corresponding number moved the other way. Thus if the IQ had been made the single criterion at nine or ten for sorting the children into sheep and goats, and if the same criterion had been used again at 19, it would have been found that a mistake had been made in 20 per cent of the cases. 60. Thus the notion of the constancy of the IQ is biologically self-exploding as well as educationally explosive. The description of the causes of IQ variation given above shows that strict constancy of the IQ could not be achieved under any circumstances. The nearer the approach to the ideal state in which each person's environment became perfect for him throughout his whole growth, the nearer, it is true, would be the approach to constancy. But even then the long term gains and losses due to the different rates of intellectual development would remain. The IQ has indeed its educational uses, but these can only be properly evaluated if we have a clear, not over [page 21] simplified idea of what IQ test scores represent, on what they are based, by how much they vary, and for what reason. 61. There are also shorter term variations in IQ test results attributable to transient effects in the environment. The child on the day of the test may be unhappy, preoccupied, or about to go down with 'flu. He may simply dislike the tester, or he may have his attention wholly concentrated on a football game that afternoon. According to temperament, a child may do better when tested individually by a psychologist than in the impersonal situation of a group test. He may, or may not, have been coached in the type of test used. It has not proved possible to construct tests in which practice does not lead to improvement. Recent figures suggest that a single practice results in an average gain of about five points, while serious coaching might be worth up to 15 points (25, 26). Even the smaller gain would be sufficient to give a considerable advantage to a child on the borderline, who had an even chance of a grammar school place, since with the usual 11 plus borderline, this would be equivalent to a rise of ten percentile ranks. Many group tests have a practice test incorporated in them. Yet variation between primary schools in the amount of coaching given is known from enquiries made by HM Inspectors to be one of the reasons why children from some primary schools do better at the secondary stage, and others worse, than their tested intelligence at 11 would suggest. 62. The genetic background against which intellectual ability develops is similar to the genetic background to stature. There are a large number of genes each contributing to this background; in consequence the correlations between twins, between siblings and between children and parents resemble the equivalent correlations for stature, though they are not quite so high, because the direct environmental effect on IQ is greater than that on stature. There is also, as with height, a well marked correlation between children's IQ and parental occupation. The children of professional parents have an average IQ of about 115, and at the other extreme the children of unskilled workers average about 93, although there is considerable overlap between individuals in different socio-economic classes (27). 63. This correlation of test with parents' occupation has sometimes been said to make the use of the tests socially unjust. But in fact the IQ scores are not so highly correlated with parental occupation as are the scores in attainment tests or probably as are teachers' ratings. Consequently, in the right circumstances, and in these only, the IQ test may serve to pick out a child of ability who would be passed over by an attainment test or a teacher's rating because his home background is poor and his success at school less good than that of more favourably placed pupils. 64. The fact that there are no very precise criteria for determining what constitutes the exercise of intelligence is not an obstacle to the use of intelligence tests, though it creates some difficulty over their interpretation. The tests have been designed to sample a child's powers over a wide field. For example, one of the most used tests, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), comprises 12 sub-sets called information, comprehension, arithmetic, similarities, vocabulary, digit span, picture completion, picture arrangement, block design, object assembly, coding and mazes. But there are certainly areas of the child's thinking which remain unsampled. Efforts have [page 22] been made in the past to devise 'culture free' tests, that is, presumably, tests which reflect only genetical endowment and are independent of environment. Such efforts are worth making, but can have only limited success, in view of the analysis of the causes of test scores given above. What we would like to know is just how much more ability could be uncovered in the population if everyone was given the most suitable home and educational environment. We can never know this completely but we can discover more about it. As it is, the tests now being devised try to be 'culture fair' rather than 'culture free', so that they are not considered suitable if they do not match reasonably well the group for whom they are standardised. Rightly used, the intelligence test can assist us in these efforts: wrongly used, it can frustrate them. Hebb has made a distinction between Intelligence A, genetic potential, and Intelligence B, the ability which can be observed in daily life and sampled by intelligence tests. Most psychologists agree that there is no sharp distinction between measured intelligence and educational attainments. Both are the product of genetic and environmental factors; both are learned. Intelligence refers to generalised thinking powers which have developed from experience in and out of school: attainments are more directly influenced by the school curriculum. The Emotional Development of the Child 65. The emotional aspects of the child's development, like the intellectual, follow a regular sequence based on the interaction between maturation and biological factors on the one hand and experience and learning within the cultural setting on the other. Emotional, social and intellectual aspects are closely intertwined in mental growth: the child is a total personality. Emotional life provides the spur and in many ways gives meaning to experience. There are widely differing points of view on the importance of innate factors in emotional development. In the Freudian scheme, emotional development is thought of as taking place in a fixed sequence of stages based on instinctual drives which interact with such demands as those imposed by weaning or toilet training. This interaction creates individual personality and affects individual ways of growth. But anthropological and social studies suggest that there may be differences in 'basic personality' caused by different ways of upbringing and cultural expectations. Individual personality development, however, depends very much on learning from the expectations and practices derived from the family relationship. 66. In any society the child moves through successive levels of development and encounters crises stemming from the demands made on him by society. The effectiveness with which he has been helped to come to terms with these crises is of lasting importance to him. Failure to master one stage will affect the next, leading to later difficulty or failure to adjust fully as a person and member of society. Emotional life becomes increasingly structured and complex as the child grows and learns. The expression and control of emotional response or feeling develop from a diffuse, total response of comfort or discomfort, sleep or wakefulness in the very young child, involving the whole body and nervous system. At a very early stage there appear more specific responses differentiated by the end of the second year into the emotions of anger, love, fear, jealousy and the like. The child is vulnerable to his emotions, not so much experiencing them as being swept by them. Even the five year old, [page 23] despite his apparent balance and control, remains subject to overpowering impulses and fears and is still dependent on those close to him for guidance and control. Common observation as well as the study of the development of brain rhythms in young children suggest that attention and learning are readily affected by discomfort or bodily needs, such as a full bladder, or by emotional upset or tension, and that any emotional disturbance reverberates for a long time. The emotional life of the child of two to five is intimately bound up with his relationships with those who care for and are close to him. Emotional development is related to intellectual development as well as to increasing maturity and experience. In the first year, fears centre around the unknown or sudden changes. Then children begin to show fear of more specific objects and situations, noises, or animals, and readily acquire 'conditioned' fears. With capacity for thought and imagination, children come to fear unseen and unknown things emerging from their fantasy life. At a later stage, in the primary school, more fears appear which are related to experience or are connected with the sense of personal adequacy and need to succeed and be accepted. 67. The child is at first dominated by his needs and impulses. Much early learning is concerned with helping him to live with others, accept delays, deal with frustrations and build up inner controls. Learning theory provides many examples of how this training, within a context of parental and social expectations, occurs. The child is not just 'trained' but learns to handle his feelings and drives in constructive ways which have been succinctly described as 'the mechanisms of defence'. Reasonably phased experiences of delay, frustration and control help to establish the sense of separation between himself and the environment. In play the child masters reality by imitating and acting out situations he has experienced. 68. Aggression is one example of the emotions that the child must learn to handle and express. Some aggressiveness is not only part of the individual's response to difficulties and frustration, but is necessary in social life, to allow the individual to assert his identity and ensure that he gets within reason what he should. Normal progress in transforming aggressive impulses into more mature forms can be seen in the development from the tantrums or the tussling for possession of the two year old to the brief and desultory quarrel of the nursery school child and so to the verbal insults, arguments and discussion of the older junior school child. A major role of the school is to help the child to come to terms with these feelings and not to suppress them, but to understand them and thus to discover how to deal acceptably with them. His experiences with other children give him essential experience in handling relationships. 69. One of the most important aspects of the child's early learning is his dependence on the adults around him. His anxiety over the deprivation or punishment which he experiences in the course of social training leads to an avoidance of the disapproval of the adults who care for him and a seeking for their approval. This is one of the most powerful motives for emotional and other learning, at home, in school, and in social relationships in general. Consistency of handling, too, is an important factor in helping the child to pick his way through the confusion of acceptable and forbidden types of behaviour which, at the time of learning, he cannot fully understand. The [page 24] quality of the care and security provided by a child's home during the early years of his life are of extreme importance for his later emotional development. The emotional climate of the home, parental attitudes, values and expectations, whether personal or derived from their social and cultural background, appear more important than specific techniques of child rearing. Maladjustment may result from tensions in the family rather than from an illness in the child himself. 70. The emotional effects of being deprived at an early age of a consistent and warm maternal relationship have become well known through the work of Bowlby and others (28, 29). Cultural deprivation can also have disastrous results. A child brought up in a family which, because of poverty, missing parents, or the low intelligence of parents, cannot provide security or sufficient emotional and intellectual stimulation, may miss a significant stage in his early social development. Children who have been reared in this way often find difficulty in handling their impulses and needs. They may find it hard, too, to make the transition to later learning, since they cannot cope constructively with materials or concentrate. We do not know at what age, and to what extent, this process is reversible by suitable experience or treatment. Left untreated, it may persist in continued ineffectiveness, and in the lack of motive for learning in school. It can result in the creation of adults who are feckless, tough and without real feelings, and without any personal identity outside their immediate family group. 71. A child develops from complete dependence on his mother to independence. One major crisis for the child is the separation required of him when he goes to nursery or school. He becomes less dependent on his family and other relations close to him, and experiences increasing inter-dependence with others as he learns social skills, finds new roles and establishes more firmly his own identity. There are strong urges towards growth, maturity and independence, but there are also factors which tend to make the child wish to remain protected and dependent. Family situations or maternal attitudes which foster this can cause emotional difficulties in the child, and it has been suggested that over dependency may be one reason for difficulty in independent learning, particularly in reading. 72. The child moves through distinguishable stages in social behaviour. At 15 to 18 months, he recognises and responds to other children. Between two and three and a half he plays for the most part as an individual and not with others. Even at four and five social interaction is loosely structured, and the dependence of the children on adult support is shown by the fact that a nursery group playing together quite effectively will disintegrate when the teacher moves away. In the primary school years, especially from 8 to 12, the child moves increasingly into social groups composed of children of the same age and maturity. In this 'peer' group, he learns how to play and live in cooperation and competition, how to control his feelings, establish roles and social techniques, and become accepted for what he is and can do, outside the close relationships of his family on the one hand, and the more formalised relationships and values of the school on the other. Group membership in work and play within the school fosters this social and emotional development, the process of defining oneself as an individual through the reflected appraisal of the group. [page 25] 73. Moral development is closely associated with emotional and social development. The child forms his sense of personal worth and his moral sense from early experiences of acceptance, approval and disapproval. Out of an externally imposed rule of what is permitted arises a sense of what ought to be done and an internal system of control: in everyday terms, a conscience. The very young child, limited in understanding, acts according to strict rules, even though he often breaks them. What is right and wrong relates closely to what his parents say and to the situation arising in the home. Later, as the child develops intellectually and lives with others, his sense of right and wrong derives from a wider circle and becomes more qualified; the rules of a game are seen to be arrived at by a consensus, and therefore modifiable by common agreement. Even so, the 11 year old still has a fairly crude and concrete sense of justice. It appears doubtful whether an autonomous conscience is established before adolescence. 74. Although much work has been done on physical growth during puberty, little study has been made of the progress towards emotional maturity and stability. The subject is important not only because it might be relevant to the age of transfer from primary to secondary education, but also because of the increasing number of children who begin to enter puberty before they leave the primary school. Psychological changes at adolescence centre on the search for personal identity, for independence arising out of increasing competence and self-esteem, and on the development of maturer sexual attitudes and behaviour. The emotional changeability of some adolescent children is well recognised, and may sometimes lead to quite bewildering and contradictory behaviour. But opinion differs as to whether it is the majority or a minority of adolescents who behave in this way (30). Both biological and cultural factors affect adolescent behaviour, and physical and psychological changes do not necessarily coincide. There is also conflicting evidence as to whether the transition from primary to secondary school, selective or unselective, is a cause of distress (31). What seems most likely is that it brings to the surface psychological difficulties in vulnerable children. Implications 75. This chapter has been concerned with some aspects of the growth and development of children on which sound educational theory and practice must be built. We have taken them into account in making our recommendations on the issues discussed in the Report. It is not possible to summarise further this material but the more obvious implications of it can be stated baldly as follows: (a) Individual differences between children of the same age are so great that any class, however homogeneous it seems, must always be treated as a body of children needing individual and different attention. (b) Until a child is ready to take a particular step forward, it is a waste of time to try to teach him to take it. (c) Even at the ages with which we are concerned, boys and girls develop at different rates and react in different ways - a fact which needs particular attention because we have coeducational schools. Boys are more vulnerable to adverse environmental circumstances than girls. Both reach maturity earlier than they did. [page 26] (d) Though IQ scores are a useful rough indication of potential ability, they should not be treated as infallible predictors. Judgements which determine careers should be deferred as long as possible. (e) Since a child grows up intellectually, emotionally and physically at different rates, his teachers need to know and take account of his 'developmental age' in all three respects. The child's physique, personality, and capacity to learn develop as a result of continuous interaction between his environmental and genetical inheritance. Unlike the genetic factors, the environmental factors are, or ought to be, largely within our control. 1. Conel JL The Postnatal development of the human cerebral cortex, Vols. I-VI. 1939-1959, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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