Psychology of Early Childhood

Up to the Sixth Year of Age

William Stern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351614443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Entwicklungspsychologie

Originally published in 1924, this sixth edition published in 1930 is thoroughly revised and updated to take account of the important advances in the field of child psychology at the time. In this new edition the personal standpoint is emphasized, while at the same time other psychological theories such as mental psychology, form psychology, psychoanalysis and individual psychology have been exhaustively treated, criticized and discussed in contradistinction to the theory of personality. Much fuller treatment has been given to the experimental examination of young children for purposes of research and tests, since it is in this form of investigation that major advances had been made. Today it can be read and enjoyed in its historical context.

PART I

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

CHAPTER I

THE AIM AND DEVELOPMENT OF CHILD-PSYCHOLOGY

1. Aim

THERE are two paths of progress in science and culture; the one starts from what is normal, ordinary, matter-of-course, and leads into the far distance, looking for what is strange and mysterious, diseased and exceptionally gifted; for unknown regions, marvellous forms of life, and curious spiritual phenomena.

The other has no such distant goal, and yet it brings us to discoveries of no less value. It traverses only what is quite near and apparently known to all, and suddenly shows it to us in a totally new light. This is the more toilsome path; for, if we are to believe Plato’s dictum that wonder is the beginning of all search, of all enquiry, how difficult is it to arouse wonder once more in our daily surroundings, to perceive that the “self-evident” is anything but evident at all.

So it is not difficult to understand why the science of childhood or child-study is one of the latest shoots on the tree of human knowledge. It is true that, at every period of human civilization, we find care, education and instruction of the child, but it has been reserved for our own times to look upon the child himself as a problem; now we suddenly discover beside what deep mysteries and riddles we have wandered blind and deaf for thousands of years, and, at the same time, we recognize that an examination of those untouched problems will not only increase our knowledge but also add to our skill in education.

Child-knowledge in the widest sense of the word has to concern itself with all sides of the immature human being, with his physical and spiritual nature, with his relation to society, morality, law; and so there is an anthropology, physiology, a pathology and psychology, a sociology and criminology of the child. But in the very centre of all these scientific efforts stands the study of the child’s psychic life, and the aim of the present book is to present a certain part of this by dealing with the normal psychic development in early childhood, i.e. in the period before school-age.

Such a limit is fixed, not only by considerations of space, but by reasons arising from the matter under treatment. For the entire youth of a human being falls quite naturally into three periods, each of six to seven years, and every one of these periods may be looked upon as a whole, complete in itself.

It is no accident that educational authorities of all times have fixed the seventh year as the beginning of school-life, and the fourteenth year as the end of general education, whilst the third period of youth is given up to study in continuation and high schools or to vocational training, but rather is it an instinctive feeling that, at these ages, development reaches a natural turning-point. The time-periods are marked physically by the change of teeth and by puberty. But it is in psychic directions that the differences are most marked. The distinguishing feature of the first period is its character of play. The human being develops his natural powers by play; by it the child, through his senses, comes to a realization of the world outside himself, gains control over his own movements, and learns to express and communicate his ideas in speech. In the middle of the second period (seventh to fourteenth year) comes the differentiation of work and play, the systematic development of the powers of memory (conscious learning), and the reaching, thereby, of the last stage of the elementary education of man. In the third period (fourteenth to twentieth year) the hitherto predominate receptivity and interest in outside things of the human soul is replaced by a turning-in upon itself; there comes an independence of the personality; what is learnt is now the object of inner consideration and further development; a free choice of interests and individual judgment exercise great influence on the attitude to life. And thus a separate treatment of each of these three periods is not only possible but requisite.

The student of the first period has to do with the child whose world is the nursery and the kindergarten, and the difference between the psychology of early childhood and the psychology of school-age is no less marked than that between first education and school pedagogics. The problems of the first period are, primarily, of a genetic order concerned with the gradual unfolding of the mental powers from their very earliest beginning, whilst in school-psychology, the all-important point of interest is the existent psychic condition at fixed stages of childhood. And this difference makes itself felt even in the methods of scientific research; in early childhood by far the most important point is the continuous observation of as many sides as possible of the individual child, whilst at school-age we have to combine a wide observation of the child with experimental testing of separate powers and with statistic results of examination of great numbers.

This demarcation between early childhood and school-age must, however, not be so much emphasized that the teacher who only has to deal with school-children should think he need not take any interest in early psychology, for nothing could be wider of the mark than this conclusion. The orchard-grower who desires good fruits must not confine his observation to the growth of the fruit alone, but he must be familiar with and follow the whole development of the trees even before the fruit is formed. So too the teacher. The understanding of the psychic phenomena which he sees in his school-children is, in great measure, dependent upon his knowledge of how they have come to pass, and what conditions have determined the rate of their development and their special individuality.

But these first stages of development are found in early childhood. Sometimes indeed certain individual points of development in infancy may prove to be of the utmost importance through successive stages of growth right up to adult life; moreover, separate powers exist in far greater simplicity and can be observed with much more ease and control than in the older child, so that the study of these first stages has an incalculable educational value for every one who makes it his task to penetrate into the intricacies of the psychic life of school-age.

. . . . .

We will now attempt to give a short résumé of the work done in child-psychology up to the present time, and, in so doing, follow first the main-trend development and then two remarkable off-shoots, viz. psychoanalysis and the Montessori movement.

2. Development of Child-Psychology to 1914

The real founders of a psychology of early childhood were neither pedagogues nor psychologists by profession. It is true great educationists of earlier times—Comenius, Rousseau, Pestalozzi and others—had plainly asserted that educational principles should be deduced from child-nature, but all they could say about this child-nature was the sum of occasional experiences, keen intuitions and a wide range of preconceived ideas; they did not dream of scientific research. And when, in the nineteenth century, Herbart and his followers laid stress on the fact that pedagogy ought to be founded on the science of psychology, they meant, as a rule, general psychology, which was rooted in systematic logic and in the observation of adults—generally the investigator’s own observation of himself; the conclusion which lay so close at hand of beginning a psychological study of the child was, as yet, not apparent.

Froebel has undoubtedly been one of those older pedagogues with the widest knowledge of child-nature. With deep intuition he has not only found a number of “occupations” for children which are at once psychologically suitable and of educational value for this early age, but he has taken up a standpoint in his theoretical arguments and reasons whose value—thanks to the “personalistic” turn in psychology—we are only now beginning to value at its true worth.¹ If Froebel has not exercised a direct influence on purely scientific research work amongst children, this is due to the fundamental attitude which he and his followers adopted of concentrating entirely on the practical education of young children.

It was medical men, rather, who were the first to make an earnest effort to tackle our problems. They were, indeed, the only investigators whose profession required them to study the child on his first stages of life’s journey; as students of natural science, they were familiar with those vast, new questions arising from the problem of development. So, at an early date, we find physicians writing on this subject, but in too isolated a fashion to be productive of much result: Tiedemann’s Consideration of the Development of Psychic Qualities in Children (as early as 1787!); B. Sigismund’s The Child and The World (1856); Kussmaul’s Enquiry into the Psychic Life of the New-born Child (1859). But, then, in 1882, Wilhelm Preyer brought out his Soul of the Child, a book which may be considered as the real foundation of modern child-psychology. For the first time a child—an only child, too, the author’s son—was made the object of systematic observation—observation that began with the moment of birth and continued, day by day, until the end of the third year. As a physiologist, Preyer gave an important place in his study to the child’s physical powers, especially to the development of muscular movements. Still, he was no less the first to record the early stages of the really psychic powers of speech, the sense of space, of memory, of voluntary action, etc. It was no matter for surprise that the deductions he drew from his observations were often wrong and, above all, too intellectual—we needed a full ten years’ apprenticeship before we reached a certain degree of surety in the interpretation of these vague and ambiguous psychic expressions of a primitive kind.

Preyer found numerous imitators, strangely enough not so much in his native land as in others. America, above all, was flooded with descriptive records of little children; of these, by far the most comprehensive are the studies of Miss Shinn, but the records of Moore, Major, Chamberlain are deserving of mention. In France we find the works of Pérey, Egger and, lately, Cramaussel, in Bulgaria of Gheorgov. In various non-German countries, too, relatively early attempts were made at more summarized and generalized characterizations of early childhood, attempts that took up a not very clearly defined position between a scientific and popular presentation of the subject. They have all been translated into German, although, with the exception of the first two named, such translation seems scarcely justified. These books are written by Sully (English), Compayré (French), Tracy (American), Paola Lombroso (Italian), and Sikorski (Russian).

It is only since the beginning of the present century that the work has been taken up again in Germany with a pronounced scientific leaning, and has much benefited by the fact that psychologists (Ament, Meumann, Stumpf, and the author of this book), who, before, had only studied special sides of the question, have now taken up the work as a whole; philosophers, educationists and others have also joined them (Dyroff, Dix, etc.)

Nearly all the investigations named above have the one point in common, that they are limited to the first three years of childhood. This is partly due to the very nature of the observation itself. All investigations into the history of development—even in quite other fields—always show a great preference for the earliest stages; investigators always like to put their hands, if possible, on the first link of the chain to be followed. Besides, with the child’s increasing years, it becomes increasingly difficult to exercise a more or less complete control over all the influences to which he is subjected, a control which allows the observer to distinguish how far the facts noted are due to inborn capabilities or are the result of outside causes. Also—as even Preyer emphasized—man, in the first three years of his life, accomplishes a mental development which, in range and extent, is scarcely less than the development of the whole of his after-life.

Partly, too, doubtless, Preyer set an example which has been only too slavishly followed; perhaps also the patience required for continuous note-taking would not last beyond three years. This is the more regrettable, as the next three years—also bringing with them a mighty quota of development—are likewise very little known as regards their psychological history.

For this reason the personal investigations of the author and his wife have been carried on to the sixth year and even beyond, as were those recently published by Herr Scupin and his wife.

These older investigators of child-psychology differ widely in arrangement and treatment of the subject in hand. Some follow Preyer also in observing the child’s early development in every direction, but the majority confine themselves to individual treatment of some single psychic function, usually giving strong preference to the development of the sense of observation and of speech. There is, too, quite as much variety in the number of children under observation; many writers are content to give an individual presentation—psychography—of the one child observed by them, whilst others try, by comparison with observations gathered from other quarters, to arrive at more universal conclusions regarding the psychic nature of the child. In our own monographs on speech and memory in childhood the subjects are treated both from a psychographical and psychological point of view, but in separate sections. The most advisable course seems to deal with the subject both from a psychographical and a psychological point of view, keeping each, however, in its separate division.

In addition to the literature named above, which is exclusively confined to the earliest years of life, mention must be made of some German writings on the psychology of youth which treat of early childhood as well as of other ages. Such are the works of K. Groos and Dyroff, and the popular little books of Ament and Gaupp. Ament has also earned our gratitude by a very complete bibliography—with a short descriptive index—brought up to the year 1903.

3. The Development of Child-Psychology since 1914

The present book, whose aim and method are explained in the preface to the first edition, first appeared in the year 1914.

The attempt thus made to bring about a closer union between child-study and theoretical psychology brought forth good fruit in succeeding years, in the work of various psychologists. On the one hand, certain new theories were applied to explain psychic phenomena in the child, and, on the other, observations of such phenomena were accepted at their full value as indubitable proofs of new psychological ideas. These theories—however diverse in detail—have one point in common, viz. that they are all opposed to any explanation of psychological phenomena based on sensualistic or “association” theories.

Theories of the older school had referred the beginning of the child’s psychic life to the reception of sense-impressions and to the union of sensations and their effects into perceptual forms (due to association-mechanism).

The present book had already opposed to this view the theory of “personality,” i.e. the conviction that the independent unity of personal life is the starting-point and continuous cause of all psychic development. Meantime the critical view of personality, in its general applicatio...