From Birth to Maturity

An Outline of the Psychological Development of the Child

Charlotte Bhler, Bhler, Charlotte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136312793
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

First published in 1999. This title originated from a series of lectures under the auspices of the New Education Fellowship and later in the Froebel Institute and in different universities and colleges in England. The book has been written so that teachers and parents as well as students may make use of it. The author presented this text in precise and succinct form the most important facts concerning the psychic development of children.

Section B
The School Age

Chapter VII
The School Beginner

WE already know that at about the sixth year the child reaches work maturity, which means that from this age on the child handles any material that it happens to lay its hands on constructively. As we have indicated this step has important consequences for the child’s entire development. The following example should make clear the difference between the activities of the small child and the child that has reached work maturity.

The mother of two boys of 31/2 and 7 years had just taken down the washing. She placed the clothes-pegs in a basket on a chair near the table in the kitchen. The boys gathered all the clothes-pegs together and filled their aprons with them. The elder boy, kneeling on the sofa, placed all of his clothes-pegs on the table, and made a horse by putting several of them together. While working he was silent, and when he was finished he clapped his hands with joy and asked me triumphantly if I knew what it was that he had made. I answered, “A horse.” He was pleased that I had recognized what he had built and then took the clothes-pegs apart again. He began to build again and there followed consecutively a house, an aeroplane, and a motor-car. As he finished making each object he asked me to identify it. He always tried to put as many clothes-pegs as possible into each construction.

The younger brother had at the same time arranged his clothes-pegs in two cardboard boxes and fastened the boxes to his wagon. While the older brother was building he rode around several times in the kitchen, then stopped at the sofa near his brother and said: “Good day, I am the baker. Do you need anything?” The older boy answered: “Yes, give me twenty rolls.” The younger boy thereupon gave him some clothes-pegs out of his boxes and said: “That costs 20 pfennigs.” The older brother then pretended that he was counting out money into his brother’s hand and laid the purchased clothes-pegs on the sofa. He did not, however, use them in his building, but considered them rolls. The younger boy rode around several times, even going into the hall. He then sold rolls to his brother again.

While the seven-year-old boy uses the clothes-pegs for building, the small three-year-old plays a game of pretence with them. The older one constructs something, the younger one gives the clothes-pegs a fictitious character and uses them to represent rolls. He can start and finish his game whenever he likes; the construction, on the other hand, is a task which must be brought to a conclusion. The child in constructing something out of materials learns to accept and complete a task. Most of the five-year-old’s play is constructive in character. The child understands this play activity as work. A five-year-old boy was heard sighing while making a building out of blocks. When asked by his mother to interrupt his game for a time, he said: “No, I have to finish my work.” He has set himself a task and wants to finish it.

The wilfulness and laxness of the 2-4-year-old is replaced to a certain extent by the serious attitude of the 5-8-year-old. He is ready to work, i.e. to accept and complete the task which is given to him.

This is the foundation and major prerequisite for successful school adaptation. An analysis of the work in the first grades of the Viennese elementary schools has demonstrated that 80 per cent of the first-grade children who fail, do so because they have not yet developed the work attitude in their games before entering school.

Lotte Danzinger³⁵ conducted this study with the aid of a group of teachers. It was found that only 6 per cent of the failures are in one subject; 50 per cent are in two, and 44 per cent are in three. This means that failure in the first grade is seldom due to the child’s inability to perform successfully in a given subject. There are, of course, individual cases of reading disability, for instance, but they are rare. Failures in the first grade are due, as a rule, not to special disabilities, but to a general disability that is manifested whenever the child attempts to perform anything. The causes may be many and varied. The child may simply be retarded because of a slow rate of maturation, for which he makes up later. In other cases, and they are very frequent, the school difficulties are not the result of retarded maturation but of environmental factors. It is possible that a child who is given no materials to work with, may as a result be mentally retarded. This happens frequently with children who are brought up in institutions. Institutions as a rule maintain a very high standard of hygiene, but are rather backward psychologically and pedagogically. Children from well-to-do homes give the impression in the first grade of being especially bright largely in consequence of their having been provided with constructive play materials.

Danzinger, in her investigation, found that the majority of the children who had difficulty in finishing a task were unusually passive. This passivity was as a rule associated with marked physical weakness, under-nourishment or bad health. Good health and sufficient nutrition are indispensable if the school beginner is to achieve the willingness and ability to overcome those difficulties that every task presents. Sickly and under-nourished children show from the very beginning of their school careers that they cannot meet requirements; they are passive and lack the energy necessary for the carrying out of their class work.

Danzinger’s findings are in accord with other investigators in Vienna, America, Germany, and Russia. They have without exception found a high correlation between mental and physical capacities, especially for the younger children.

The data that follows seems to contradict one psychological theory, namely, Alfred Adler’s³⁶ theory of compensation for physical inferiority by intellectual success. It happens frequently that adults who are weak and delicate physically are capable of high-grade intellectual performance. Alfred Adler built his theory on this fact of compensation; the theory, namely, that individuals who are physically inferior in some respect make every effort to compensate by achieving extraordinary success in some other direction. Adler assumes that this compensatory drive functions from early childhood on. What can our investigations with children contribute to this problem?

We know, first of all, from our tests that in early childhood there is always a correlation between good physical and mental development. It is true that there are children who although clumsy with their bodies or hands show excellent speech development, and vice versa, but we never find decided physical weakness associated with good performances of any kind in early childhood.

The same holds good unquestionably for the early school years. Paul Lazarsfeld³⁷ analysed material gathered in a study of several thousand Viennese school children and came to the following result: In the first, second and third classes good school work correlates positively with good physical development; in the fourth and fifth classes two large groups appear, the type of child whose physical and mental development are in harmony with each other, and those who show a correlation between bad physical development and especially good school work. In other words, the younger the child the greater the dependence of its school performance on physical well-being. The ability to compensate, that is, to achieve intellectual success independent of physical health, appears around the ninth year.

Our finding, in so far as the lower grades are concerned, were confirmed by a study directed by the Russian, Netschajeff.³⁸ He tested 4-8-year-olds and found that their school work improved with an improvement in nutrition, and vice versa. Netschajeff compared three groups of children, one well nourished, the second not so well nourished, and the third on the verge of starvation, in three tests. The degree of retardation was found to be in direct proportion to the degree of under-nourishment.

Several German and American investigations have found a definite positive correlation for the higher grades between good school work and good physical development.

Else Liefmann³⁹ studied primary school girls who averaged ten years of age. Those who had been left back averaged eleven years, and were neither as well developed nor as well nourished as the average. She found further, a high correlation between talent and good physical development as well as size and weight. Liefmanris results are essentially the same as Leta Hollingworth’s.⁴⁰ She studied a group of highly gifted children between nine and eleven years of age, with various tests, in regard to weight, size and strength. In comparing them with children of average and poor intellectual performance a consistent positive correlation between intellectual performance and physical development was found. The thirty-five most intelligent children are in every respect the best developed physically. They excel the norm set up by Bird Baldwin for unusually well-developed children. The weight coefficient for children whose I.Q. is under 65, between 90-110 and over 135 is distributed as follows:

FIG. 12. Weight-height of 9-11-year-old Children. (After Hollingworth.)

The gifted children are also superior as far as general health is concerned. Hollingworth reports a study of high-school students made by Sandwich,⁴¹ who selected the forty best and forty poorest students and tested them for physical defects. The results were as follows:

TABLE VI CORRELATION OF PERFORMANCE AND PHYSICAL DEFECTS IN SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS

	The 40 Best	The 40 Poorest
Number of physical defects	27	125
Average number of physical defect per student	0.71	3.41
Percentage of students without defects.	52.5	0.00

These results would seem definitely to refute the compensation theory as a fundamental psychic mechanism and are surprisingly similar to ours.

It is certain that successful mental as well as physical performance are primarily dependent on those drives that are the product of good physical condition. In other words, strength in the purely physical sense seems to be the first and most basic prerequisite for good mental performance. There exist undoubtedly in addition other tendencies such as ambition, compensation for inferiorities, etc., that are not connected with the physical condition. It would seem, however, that secondary drives of this nature are not fully at work in the young child, especially since he is as yet incapable of self-criticism.

The child finds everything that it has made itself beautiful, more beautiful than that made by anyone else, and it develops a capacity for self-criticism only very gradually. Just as the two-year-old points with pride at something that he has built successfully the child in the kindergarten and lower grades still is lost in admiration of his own work.

Self-praise and criticism of others, as we know from several studies, are primary attitudes that appear as soon as the child begins to evaluate what it does as performance.

When we ask ourselves how these attitudes, which we can illustrate with examples and which th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF PLATES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Introduction
• Section A: THE PRE-SCHOOL CHILD
• Section B: THE SCHOOL AGE
• Appendix: Methods and Techniques of Investigation in Child Phychology
• References
• Index