child study at clark university: 1894–1904

Journal o/ /he Hislory o/ rhe Behavioral Sciences Volume 26. April 1990

CHILD STUDY AT CLARK UNIVERSITY: 1894-1904

SHELDON H . WHITE

A first cooperative research program in developmental psychology was established in the Clark questionnaire studies. The program was not meant to be free-standing but to elaborate an evolutionary conception of child development synthesized from findings of several scientific fields. The short-lived program had some serious faults, but an examination of its research papers suggests that it produced some worthwhile work. The child-study researchers gathered information about children’s social and emotional reactions in everyday settings; one or two of their studies were replicated; they found pattern and order; they elaborated a meaningful social-biological view of child development.

In the very beginning, American psychologists established not one but three patterns of cooperative research activity, three normal sciences. Kurt Danziger has studied the early psychological journals and reports three patterns of scientific observation, which he calls “the Leipzig method,” “the Clark method,” and “the Paris method.’’ In his 1890 Principles of Psychofogy William James identified three methods of scientific psychology and James’s three methods clearly align with Danziger’s.

James described “the comparative method” in these terms: So it has come to pass that instincts of animals are ransacked to throw light on our own; and that the reasoning faculties of bees and ants, the minds of savages, infants, madmen, idiots, the deaf and blind, criminals, and eccentrics, are all invoked in support of this or that special theory about some part of our own mental life. The history of sciences, moral and political institutions, and languages, as types of mental products are pressed into the same service. Messrs. Darwin and Galton have set the example of circulars of questions sent out by the hundred of those supposed able to reply. The custom has spread, and it will be well for us in the next generation if such circulars be not ranked among the common pests of life.2 James’s comparative method included a synthetic enterprise and an empirical enter-

prise. The synthetic enterprise cross-aligned diverse bodies of data to put together an evolutionary analysis of mind. This was to be part of Clark’s approach to child study in G. Stanley Hall’s time and the synthetic enterprise remained recognizable in later years at Clark University in Heinz Werner’s comparative-developmental psy~hology.~ James’s empirical enterprise was a set of questionnaire studies identified with Charles Darwin and Francis Galton.

As early as 1839, Darwin had circulated a printed questionnaire on UQuestions About the Breeding of Animals.” In the same year, he was a member of a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science that prepared an anthropological questionnaire, “Queries Respecting the Human Race, to be Addressed to Travellers and Others.” Later, Darwin began his Expression of the Emotions in Animals and Man by

1 would like to thank Emily Cahan and Eugene Taylor for many and useful conversations about G. Stanley Hall; Stuart Campbell of the University of Archives at Clark University for help with the G. Stanley Hall papers; and William F. Reynolds, Jr., for help in preparing the figures.

~~

H. W m is Profmor of Psychology in the Department of Psychologv, Harvard Univer- sity, Cambridge, MA 02138. He is interested in the social origins and meaning of American psychology and has recently published with Stephen L. Buka, “&rIy education: Programs, traditions, and policies” Review of Research in Education 14 (1987): 43-91.

132 SHELDON H. WHITE

reporting on a questionnaire on the human expression of emotions he had sent out in early 1867.4

Darwin used questionnaires to draw together observations from small numbers of expert informants. Later, Galton used questionnaires in his studies of ideational types with aims similar to those of psychological researchers today.5 Following Gustav Fechner’s early inquiries into ideational types, Galton’s questionnaires drew from or- dinary observers reports of the quality of imagery to be found in their conscious experience.6 Galton’s conception of how one moves from particulars to the general differed from those on which contemporary statistical inference is based and his research approach was consequently different.

E. B. Titchener’s Manual of Experimental Psychology attributed the origins of the questionnaire as a psychological instrument to Galton and paraphrased Galton’s specifica- tions for optimal use of the method:

The requirements are given by Galton as follows. (a) The questions must be such as will be quickly and correctly understood. (b) They must admit of easy reply. (c) They must cover the ground of inquiry. (d) They must “tempt the correspondents to write freely in fuller explanation of their replies, and on cognate topics as well.”’ There was an older, broader tradition involving the use of questionnaires to study

social and political conditions and to arrive at “moral statistics.” Robert Gault’s 1907 history of questionnaire work placed the origin of this tradition in Adolph Quetelet’s program for a social physics in 1835. As part of this tradition, educators explored children’s range of ideas and their knowledge of things in their environment. Berthold Sigismund did such a study in Germany in 1856, Edwin Chadwick in England in 1864, C. V. Stoy in Jena in 1864, the Berlinerpadagogische Verein in 1869, K. Lange in Plauen in 1879, and B. Hartmann in Annaberg in 1880-1884.* G. Stanley Hall’s first questionnaire study of the contents of children’s minds on entering school, in 1880, was an adap- tation of the Berlin Study to American sch~olchildren.~

William Torrey Harris, as head of the Education Department of the American Social Science Association, began another questionnaire inquiry in 1881. In that year Mrs. Emily Talbot, Secretary of the Education Department, sent a questionnaire to parents asking them to report on their infant’s physical and mental development. It was hoped that the records of “many thousand observers” over the next few years would yield facts of great value to the educator. An effort was made to interest Darwin in the project and he replied graciously, suggesting some research questions. (Does education of the parents influence the mental powers of their children at any age? Is the often-repeated statement true, that colored children at first learn as rapidly as white children and then fall behind? Children are prone to strong inexplicable special interests- How often do these die away and how often do they have a lasting influence in later life? Are the sounds prelinguistic children make, their pitch and tonality, predictors of their mental state?)” There is not, as far as I know, any published report of the data of the Harris study.

THE RISE AND FALL OF CHILD STUDY AT CLARK The first systematic program of questionnaire studies of child development was

initiated at Clark University in 1894-1895 when G. Stanley Hall mailed out to about eight hundred correspondents a series of fifteen printed questionnaires titled “Anger,” “Dolls,” “Crying and Laughing,” “Toys and Playthings,” “Folk Lore Among Children,” “Early Forms of Vocal Expression,” “The Early Sense of Self,” “Fears in Childhood and Youth,” “Some Common Traits and Habits,” “Some Common Automatisms, Nerve

CHILD STUDY AT CLARK UNIVERSITY 133

Signs, etc.” “Feeling for Objects of Inanimate Nature,” “Feeling for Objects of Animate Nature,” “Children’s Appetites and Foods,” “Affection and its Opposite States in Children,” and “Moral and Religious Experiences.””

Though research questionnaires were to be printed at Clark from 1894 to 1918, there were to be ebbs and flows. The active use of questionnaire research for something like a normal science of child development lasted ten years. Even within that decade, there was variation. The mailing out of topical syllabi from Clark started with a rush, dwindled, flared up just before Hall published his Adolescence, and then slowly and gradually extinguished.

Table 1 The Clark University Questionnaires: Numbered Series of Topical Syllabi

Period Syllabi Research Papers

1894- 1895 I5 20 1895-1896 I5 13 18%-1897 14 10 1897-1 898 18 14 1898-1899 8 3

1899-1903 23 (5.8 per year) 14

1903-1904 22 I 1

1904-1918 69 (4.9 per year) 6

At first, from 1894-1898, there were fourteen to eighteen questionnaires mailed out each year. The questionnaires asked about the fundamental nature of the child. In the fifth year, the rate slowed. Instead of a numbered series each year, one series stretched across four years. Probably the rate slowed because child study was now being criticized by some leading psychologists and educators who, in addition, were negative towards what they characterized as the sentimentality, tub-thumping, and amateurishness of the child study exponents. Hall was in an awkward position. He retained prestige and power, but he had had setbacks as a college president and he had enemies and rivals among his fellow psychologists. Some of the criticisms of child study, it must be said, came from rivals who were reacting against a groundswell of support for child study and who had something to gain by moving Hall, his child study program or both, to the side.I2

For one year, 1903-1904, there was a surge. Hall got support-$1,000 from Mr. Arthur S. Estabrook of Boston and $2,000 from the Carnegie Institute. He wrote a defense of child study.13 Twenty-two questionnaires were mailed out that year, making it the single most active year of the program. At the end of this academic year, Hall published his two-volume magnum opus on adolescence and, as he has himself said, lost interest in child study.

The Clark questionnaires from late 1904 formed one long numbered series of sixty- nine titles. They emerged slowly, at the rate of 4.9 per year. Hall was author or coauthor on a few, but most do not reflect his interests or his thinking. The questionnaires had become mostly a vehicle for professionally oriented theses. The last fifteen question-


naires, printed between 1914 and 1918, were on “How to Teach the War,” “Dreams,” “Composition of Boards of Colleges,” “Election and Service of State and County Superintendents,” “Superintendents and Boards of Education,” “The Junior High School,” “The Relation of the School and Home,” “The Pedagogy of Mathematics,” “A Study in the Psychology of Industrial Efficiency,” “The Relation of Physical to Mental Characteristics,” “College Versus Church Teachings,” “Vocational Guidance in American Colleges,” “The Good and Bad Teacher,” “The Teachers’ Institute,” and “Study of Punishment .”

METHODS AND METHODOLOGY OF THE QUESTIONNAIRES What led me to look at the research generated by the Clark questionnaires was,

at first, a belief that psychology advances by perfecting methods as well as by discover- ing phenomena. I had been interested in the child study movement-exploring, with Alexander Siegel, the movement’s social and political history, and subsequently looking at the transition from Mark Hopkin’s theistic moral philosophy to Hall‘s evolutionary moral philosophy at the core of child s t ~ d y . ’ ~ I was drawn to look at the questionnaire studies because, like everyone else, I “knew” that those studies were poorly done, amateurish, and of negligible scientific value. Certainly, the first few papers I looked at did little to dispel that conclusion. It seemed worthwhile to look at the questionnaire research precisely because it was so bad.

It seemed to me that possibly we underestimate the sophistication of contemporary research methods in developmental psychology - taking routines and practices for granted as “obvious” when they have, in fact, taken time and effort to achieve. The Clark questionnaire program was a small, whole normal science constituted at the very beginning of psychology’s establishment as a scientific discipline. Perhaps, by looking at the awkward, clumsy questionnaire studies, one could arrive at a better sense of the cumulative wisdom buried in the design of our contemporary research methods.

It was reasonably obvious from the beginning that the questionnaire program as a serious child psychology lasted about a decade. It was possible to find eighty-four publications reporting the results of the questionnaires printed between 1894 and 1904.l5 More such publications can be found, I am sure, but the journals searched so far- principally Hall’s two journals, the Pedagogical Seminary and the American Journal of Psychology-seem to be most likely outlets for significant findings of the Clark work.

A surface problem was the fact that the prose of the child study papers is unlike the lean, clean writing of research papers today. Contemporary authors are pressed to give only the essentials of their research; Hall’s authors had room to be garrulous, to opine, to write exegeses on etymology, literature, natural history, world history, manners and morals, or the contemporary state of society. However, disregarding the wandering quality of the prose and looking structurally at the research reported in the questionnaire papers, it is obvious that many of the current canons of data collection and research reporting were not being followed.

Very large numbers of cases were collected in many of the studies, but subject sam- pling was neither systematic nor clearly described. Bursts of questions were asked rather than the simple, direct unambiguous question commonly favored in questionnaire work today. The clustered questions might tempt the respondent to write freely, as Galton would put it, but the modern reader is left distinctly uncomfortable when he or she cannot tell what question the respondent is answering. There was no routine form for the report of research, no APA Publication Manual. At the beginning of the child study


effort, the statistics of tests and measurements were ten years down the road, and the statistics of inference would not come into use for another thirty years. l6 Quantitatively, the child study research reports offered, at most, categorizations of the responses, counts, and tables of frequencies and percentages.

In short, the Clark questionnaire work was poor methodologically by contemporary standards. Nevertheless, 1 am not as sure as I was that the research work should be viewed as an imperfect ancestor of our contemporary work in developmental psychology, an enterprise in which people were trying to do the same thing we do today, but doing it less well. Child study had its faults, but one of its assets was that it struggled to achieve a different order of observation, and to perfect a distinctly different vision of child development than we currently have. Whatever its problems, child study had some efficacy. The Clark researchers looked at aspects of child development that we have trouble reaching with current research methods; they found some interesting and nontrivial developmental patterns; they elaborated a plausible and reasonable social-biological pic- ture of the child’s development.

In the remainder of this article, I shall discuss some questionnaire findings that seem illustrative of what the questionnaire research of the Clark method had to offer.

DIALOGUES WITH QUESTIONNAIRES The questionnaires focused on common observations of children in everyday sur-

roundings; they were naturalistic rather than experimental. Ecological validity was not yet an issue; the theoretical orientation of Hall and his students required that children be understood in their transactions with their everyday social world. The Clark people did not look at children directly themselves, of course. They asked others for their observations and so we have a naturalism of events selected and reported by others -memories of things adults have seen children do and say and found interesting enough to remember. Gathering together quantities of such recollected observations, the Clark researchers looked for patterns: developmental changes, individual differences, manifestations of pathology, and information about how children may be controlled and guided, by themselves and others. Early Automatisms, Instincts, and Feelings

The Clark inquiries began with the widely held assumption that at the bottom of human activity patterns is a substrate of basic instincts. Everyone believed that, and there was an industry of turn-of-the-century scholars drawing up instinct lists.” William James repeatedly claimed that humans have a very large instinctive repertoire, larger even than that of animals; in his Principles of Psychology he listed eighty-one basic human instincts. Edward L. Thorndike subsequently used James’s list as the foundation of his three-volume educational psychology. We need to know the original nature of man, Thorndike said:

It is a first principle of education to utilize any individual’s original nature as a means to changing him for the better - to produce in him the information, habits, powers, interests and ideals which are desirable. . . . A study of the original nature of man as a species and of the origiyil natures of individual men is therefore the primary task of human psychology. Skeptical about the quality of the Clark questionnaire work, Thorndike nonetheless

drew upon it for his first volume. He had few other sources, and the Clark researchers made a special effort to inquire about innate automatisms, instincts, and feelings and their place in the young child’s behavior.


Children have many preorganized small programs of behavior. Hall called them “paleopsychic” behaviors, “motor odds and ends” in his Adolescence, and listed some:

. . . licking things, clicking with the tongue, grinding the teeth, scratching, tap- ping, twirling a lock of hair or chewing it, biting the nails (Berillon’s onychophagia), shrugging corrugations, pulling buttons or twisting garments, strings, etc., twirling pencils, thumbs, rotating, nodding and shaking the head, squinting and wink- ing, swaying, pouting and grimacing, scraping the floor, rubbing hands, stroking, patting, flicking the fingers, picking the face, interlacing the fingers, cracking the joints, finger plays, biting and nibbling, trotting the leg, sucking things, etc. l9

These are the marginal activities people sometimes put forth inadvertently when they are concentrating. Ernest L. Lindley reported on responses to two questionnaires, one asking about automatisms put forth during effortful activity and the other about automatisms put forth during early reading and writing. There were 662 cases, 421 females and 241 males. The questionnaire reports suggested that children show more automatisms than adolescents, and that the automatisms tend to emerge when the children are concentrating, producing mental effort, and when they are fatigued.”

Instincts organize children’s early social behavior, it was thought, and so a number of studies explored that organization. Representative is Frederic L. Burk’s analysis of questions on teasing and bullying included on a questionnaire Hall had sent out in 1885. A total of 135 people had responded to the questions about bullying, 156 to the questions about teasing, yielding a total of 1,120 reported instances of bullying and teasing. Consider bullying. The raw material Burk began with were stories such as these:

-John (9) lived next door to a very small and weak boy. John would waylay this boy in a quiet place and make him fight. When the child cried, John would stand back and laugh at him. - Willie (14) played with boys much younger than himself and when tired of play he would throw away their hats, throw the little fellows into the mud, cf l their ears, and always send them home crying before they had played an hour. - A boy (9) goes up to a group of smaller boys playing marbles, puts their marbles in his pocket and walks 08. -M. (9) blew over the card houses of F. (7) every time she built them. She grew angry, stamped her foot, and told him to stop. M. was in great glee. Finally F. cried. Thereupon M. showed sorrow, buj{t fo r her some very tall card houses and promised not to blow them over again. Burk’s analysis of the stories subjects them to a motivational analysis. There is a

pattern of human interaction that, somehow, we can “read” or detect as a pattern in each story, and that unites them. The image to be found in every story, the rubric by which all were elicited and the pattern to be read in every one, is the theme of a strong child intentionally harassing one who is weaker.

This intentionality is innate, Burk says, rooted in what Herbert Spencer called “sentiments generated in the race.” Burk quotes Ribot on these innate sentiments. “For there exists in the bottom of a soul, buried in the depths of our being, savage instincts, nomadic tastes, unconquered and sanguinary appetites which slumber and die not.”” Humans have a vast unconscious and in it are adaptive behavior programs formed during older modes of existence. Children take pleasure in the exercise of those programs:

This explanation of these singular traits of childhood finds an apt fitting into the doctrine of the unconsciousness towards which modern psychology and recent in- vestigations of neurology are so significantly tending- the view that our conscious existence is only a fragment, probably a very small one, of the whole sphere of


mentality; that consciousness only crops out here from the great subliminal region of unconsciousness, as fragments of a fence from out a snowdrift.23 Some episodes of bullying, for example the first episode given above, Burk classifies

as expressions of “The Fighting Instinct” because they seem to reflect purely and simply the exercise of preorganized fighting movements and the child’s pleasure in such exercise. Some episodes of bullying have a more complex motivational structure. The child enjoys the fighting but at the same time gives it a functional turn, directs it towards private or social benefits. Burk’s classification scheme recognizes several higher-order motives: “Egoistic Assertion of Authority” (an example of which is the second episode given above); “Obtaining Property, Service and Obedience by Bullying” (the third episode); “Tormenting” (the fourth episode); and “Hazing.”

Burk’s analysis has some delicacy. The fourth-quoted episode above suggests to him that “two fragmentary and opposed motions can exist in the same child mind” and he asks with regard to it:

Why is it that at one moment M. is an egoist in a world of individualism, gleefully exuberant in the distress he inflicts upon another, and at the next moment a sympathetic member of altruistic society? Are these the acts of a continuous and homogeneous consciousness, or are they to be regarded as separate reactions from fragments of consciousness - fragments each with a separate phylogenetic origin and development?24 Teasing, Burk argues, occurs because we have an instinctive satisfaction in seeing

our enemy fall victim to emotions that weaken him and make him less dangerous. Again, reported episodes are classified according to what amounts to a motivational analysis and again, the child’s behavior is pictured as oscillating between the instinctual and the rational.

The Burk study is representative of a good number of Clark questionnaire studies directed towards the small feelings and social configurations of everyday life. The Clark researchers asked about scenes and events that elicit pity or fear or curiosity in people; they explored odd configurations of everyday behavior - crossing the heart, taking oaths, swearing, ceremonials, taking a dare, showing off, bashfulness, mimicry, trying to fool others; they asked how children thought and felt about dolls, plants, animals, and other phenomena of nature. Generally, the material was interpreted in evolutionary terms not dissimilar to Burk‘s analyses. The interpretations were generally quite speculative and argumentative. What remains intriguing about the questionnaire work is the extent to which it brought up for consideration a variety and richness of “small” social and emotional phenomena far larger than that which is explored in contemporary developmental psychology.

THE MENTALIZATION OF ACTION As children get older, activity patterns once organized instinctively now begin to

pick up a secondary governance reflecting the child’s growing awareness and use of the rational possibilities of action. In addition, instinctive action gets “mentalized“ as children grow older. Sanford Bell reported on the data of three questionnaire studies exploring children’s reactions to food-a 1895 syllabus answered by 86 women and 14 men in the New Jersey State Normal School, a 1903 supplementary syllabus answered by 91 men and 102 women at YMCA training schools, and a second supplementary syllabus answered by 1,475 schoolchildren, second graders through high schoolers, in Holyoke, Massach~se t t s .~~


Several sequences of progressive sensorimotor organization were abstracted from the questionnaire responses: the development of mouth grasping from birth to six months; the development of hand grasping from zero to six months; and the development of the hunger cry. At first, Bell argues, the hunger cry seems to be delivered reflexively; then it becomes intentional, artful, directed towards its effect on mother; then its expression seems more and more to be merged into the child’s use of language. As with the other Clark studies, there is the theme of the child’s movement from the preorganized and instinctual towards the more rational and directed behavior. In addition, Bell’s study traces the developing child’s movement from the plane of organized action towards the plane of organized symbols.

“Beginning at about seven years in the child’s life, taste becomes mentalized,” Bell says. “A new cycle, both in physical and mental development, starts to run its course. The child passes a station that once in the prehistoric past may have been the terminus of his development.”26 (One of Hall’s favorite theses was the notion that vestiges of an older, earlier human adolescence are expressed in modern children at age seven.)” The mentalization of food initiates a new willingness to experiment with food, and a new consciousness of it.

Children approach food differently. Their tastes broaden. They begin mixing foods and things to drink in crazy combinations. They smoke odd things. Bell gives long lists of examples of each of these behavior patterns. On the conceptual side, children begin to analyze food for qualities and flavors. They talk about liking and disliking foods, giving reasons, analyzing foods and their eating experiences. They express ideas about what they like and don’t like. They become aware of sources of food and food preparation.

An appreciation for the asthetic appearance of food and settings rises at eleven to fifteen for girls and fifteen to eighteen for boys, Bell says. Before this new appreciation, children are enamored of individual items; afterwards, they are sensitive to ensembles. Women more than men say setting and ceremony helps taste and enjoyment of food.

GROWING MEMORY FOR SYMBOLIC MATERIAL Along with the growing mentalization of experience of children as they get older,

the Clark researchers found evidence of a growing capacity to hear and retain symboli- cally given material. Shaw studied the growth of such memory capacity by asking 700 children in third- to twelfth-grade classrooms to write down as much as could be recollected of a 324-word story read once. Figure 1 gives the mean number of words recalled, by boys and girls, for the first, second, and third part of the story. As children get older, they retain more; his sample remembered 17 to 18 percent of his story in third grade and in high school 40 to 47 percent. Girls recalled slightly more than boys at every age. Children remembered the story from front to back-the first third most, the second third next, the last third the least.”

Instinctive Basis of Character and Interpersonal Behavior The Clark research program explored cognitive development, but such develop-

ment was seen as subordinate to developmental changes in emotion, will, and the child’s growing ability to participate in different forms of social life. The questionnaire studies returned again and again to explorations of character and interpersonal style. Linus Kline and Clemens France’s questionnaire study asked about early signs of a sense of

CHILD STUDY AT CLARK UNIVERSITY

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Figure 1 . Data of John C. Shaw’s study of schoolchildren’s memory.

ownership in children; early passions for ownership or trade; quarrels about ownership; reactions to desired gifts; renunciations of ownership; first reactions to coming into or losing fortunes; miserliness and spendthrift behavior; cravings for wealth.29 Returns to the sections varied between 180 and 320 reports per section. By quoting a few responses, I can offer a short “movie” illustrative of what they found.

- F., 4 months. Cries whenever bottle is taken from her. Even i f bottle was empty would not let it leave her sight unless given another. -F., 4 months. Never showed sense of special ownership until another baby was brought to visit her. The second child was given F. ’s rattle, whereupon F. began to cry and reach for it. - M., 20 months. Had been given a great many playthings but the things he seemed really to care f o r and to own were a wool& lamb and some building blocks. -F., 2 and 3 years. K. and R. were given blocks to play with. One of them kept taking the other’s blocks. Then they began to quarrel; neither one would give up her blocks. Finally they became so angry K. up and danced around the floor in her temper, while R. sat on the floor and cried. The mother heard the noise and came to the rescue, She took the blocks away from them. -M., 4 years. Collected a large number of uncoloredpictures. After gathering a box full he painted them, pasted them in a box and showed them to every one who came in. - M., 5 years. Saves every cent he can get which he keeps in a bank and i f he wants any money to buy candy or anything with, he will ask some one else for money. -M., 5. Steals hammers and nails from the shop. Took empty dinner pails that men had left in the barn. Will ask for food when he is not hungry and will store it away. Tried to steal a wheelbarrow but it proved too heavy for him to move. - I have noticed that very young children desire things that they an see, feel, hear or taste, things that please the senses, when older, 6-12, they desire things that they


can do things with, as express wagons, goats, tools, guns, dolls, fancy ribbons and the like. - F., 8, bought a dress which she charged to her grandmother. Then took it to the dressmaker’s and ordered it made up, but she never went after it. Entered another store and ordered two handsome pictures sent home. She went to a milliner’s and selected two hats and order them trimmed, but never went for them. All these things she charged to her grandmother. Family suspected brain trouble, so sent her to a home for feeble minded. They, however, claimed there was nothing the matter with the child’s brain, but that in fact she was a particularly bright child. -M., 12 years. Trades his things with his friends and always gets the best of bargain. He says he has a great knife at home and praises it so that the boys are very anx- ious to obtain it. He lets on he doesn’t want to part with it, and gets the boys so craw they are willing to give anything for it. When he thinks he has found something better than the knife, he hestitates a little and then makes the bargain. -M., 45. Came suddenly into possession of a great deal of money. He became very disagreeable socially, and was considered mean in business, his family was about as bad oflas before, for his new wealth made him stingy. -M., 60 inherited a small (to him large) fortune. The first thing he did was to tell all his friends and invite them to a supper. Before this he had been rather a quiet man and not given to pushing himself into anything. Now, however, he was heard from in most enterprises. -M., 80. Lives by himself in a little old red house. Works very hard, eats but little. Goes to bed early in order to save oil and coal, although he has plenty of both. Hides his money in many odd places; stovepipe, under the carpet, buries it in the cellar. He was not always this way; became so since the death of his wife about four years ago. At first toddlers show rudimentary acts indicative of possessiveness and a sense of

ownership. Then they begin to collect and own. They move to trading. Eventually, the complex tactical and strategic reasoning characteristic of adults acquiring and manag- ing property emerge. Dealing with anecdotes is inherently a clumsy business methodologically, but the ground the Clark questionnaire people had staked out was large and ambitious. We are dealing with preliminary mappings of child development. From Mentalization to Altruism and Ethical Thinking

If children can represent people in their minds, they can feel towards them. With growth, there ought to be an increase in altruism and ethical thinking and, indeed, a cornerstone of Hall’s theorizing was that the entrance of children into adult forms of civil society should depend upon the emergence of altruistic thinking at adolescence. Kline’s study of juvenile ethics presented 2,067 children with a story and asked them to finish it. Pearl Nelson, a poor girl, goes to school for the first day and she discovers to her dismay that she feels shut out of things and that a girl she knows, Stella, doesn’t speak to her. She runs home at recess, taking Stella’s hat by mistake. Stella notices, takes Pearl’s hat and runs after her with several girls coming along. What happens? Completions to the story could be indifferent (“Hey, you took my hat!”), sympathetic (“Oh, please come back and I’ll introduce you to my friends.”), or unsympathetic (“You horrid guttersnipe! You’re nothing but a thiej”.)

Rather striking sex differences were found in children’s tendency to be sympathetic or unsympathetic. Indifferent completions went down with age, for both sexes. Boys showed a steadily increasing tendency to supply sympathetic completions as they got older; with age, they were also increasingly unsympathetic. Girls, who begin with a


tendency to be far more sympathetic than boys, show a decline and then an upswing. Kline’s 1903 findings are consistent with recent work of Carol Gilligan’s group indicating that at ages eleven and twelve girls arrive at a kind of critical self-consciousness and doubt about their own moral ~rientation.~’

Choosing Ideals We have, then, an enlarging life of the mind as children grow up. Children reach

beyond the here and now. They remember the past in more detail. They deal with images of people in their minds, some real ones and some invented ones. Given the actions of thought-of people, children can estimate their motives and can form judgments about those actions. Margaret Schallenberger reported, on the basis of her questionnaire study, that as children grow older they move from a morality based upon consequences to one based upon intention^.^'

Children have feelings about the people they think about and, apparently, children can align their thoughts and hopes about themselves with either real or imaginary people. A 191 1 study of children’s ideals by David Spence Hill is interesting because it shows a movement towards the increased use of thought-of people as personal standards in children’s thinking; it found some interesting sex differences, and it is representative of what appears to be a small fad in the child study literat~re.’~

Hill asked a total of 1,431 children, white children from two schools in Nashville, Tennessee, to write down who each child “would like to resemble.” As children got older, they showed a diminishing tendency to write down mother or father. They also showed a declining tendency to write down “acquaintance-ideals,” people they have met and know in the flesh. Boys show this more than girls. There is a rising tendency to choose as ideals public and historical figures. Children move away from local heroes and towards ideal-figures they have read or been told about in the broader culture. If this was less true for girls, perhaps this was because most of the movers and the shakers of American society at that time were men.

A somewhat poignant finding was that as boys got older they more and more chose same-sex figures as ideals while girls more and more chose opposite-sex figures.

When children are young, they feel themselves to be affiliated with their family and local community. But by growing up and going to school and by reading, they learn about a wider world of human affairs and some, at least, more to identify themselves and their ambitions with that wider world. The dawning awareness of that wide world is not an altogether happy experience for the girls in Hill’s study. They put forth opposite- sex figures as ideals. They show, more than boys, a tendency to put forth fictional characters as personal ideals. While Hill’s questionnaire findings do not conform to the bigger-and-better-in-every-way genre of research on child development, they show a degree of bittersweet realism that must command some respect.

The findings of Hill’s study resembled findings being reported by others in other parts of the United States and abroad. In his 1911 paper, Hill compares his findings with those obtained with previous samples of children. The findings of the diverse studies are reasonably comparable and where they differ it it possible to set forth interesting hypotheses about the differing development of children’s ideals in different environments. In one instance, at least, the questionnaire research showed replicability and the possibility of cross-alignment of comparable studies gathered under slightly different conditions to move towards a more complex analysi~.’~


Forming Small Societies When children are younger, their social instincts permit them to participate in

families and familial kinds of groups, and in peer group activities. As children grow older, they move from peer associations based on gregariousness towards organized associations and clubs; adults create such clubs for children, and children form them themselves.

Henry D. Sheldon’s study explored this sequence of club formation. Children in five cities - Manchester, New Hampshire; Chicopee and Springfield, Massachusetts; and Stockton and Santa Rosa, California- were asked to write a composition or language exercise on some society or club that they had organized themselves without adult assistance. A total of 1,126 papers gave clear descriptions of such a club and an age at which it had been organized.34

Sheldon coded the clubs into seven types, categorizing them according to the mutual purpose that the social association seemed to serve. Figure 2 shows the distribution of such clubs over age; what is remarkable is the tendency of adolescents to form autonomous or relative autonomous peer societies, and the different kinds of societies favored by males and females.

Social societies are groups indicated primarily to having a good time - promoting parties, picnics, and so forth. This is a favorite kind of girls’ association, Sheldon remarks, the girls outnumbering the boys five to one. For both sexes, the peak age for such formation was twelve. Predatory societies, Sheldon says, are “the typical association of small boys.” These are clubs dedicated to hunting and fishing, play armies, organized fighting bands, and so on. Here the boys greatly outnumber the girls. Sheldon classed as secret societies all clubs having secret features. The majority of these were clubs dedicated to social activities, but not all. Some were clubs to prevent swearing, societies for trout fishing, and literary organizations. Note the greater involvement of girls than boys in such secret societies. Gilligan has argued that it is very characteristic of adolescent girls to become very interested in issues of social inclusion and exclusion, and to play with it.

Sheldon’s category of industrial societies has a misleading name; it refers to sewing circles, groups that give shows, play store, and collectors’ groups. Girls form these kinds of clubs more than boys, and Sheldon remarks that the clubs often have subordinate philanthropic features, as when sewing clubs sew for the poor. He has a category called philanthropic societies. These are societies dedicated towards helping other people, or for members to provide mutual help against slang, swearing, smoking, and the like. There are not many such societies, but girls form most of what there are. Note that the peak of such societies is now in the age range from thirteen to fifteen, where the earlier-discussed societies peaked at an earlier age. Artistic societies, dedicated to mutual interests in literature, art, and music emerge at a somewhat older age and, again, are favored by girls more than boys.

What Sheldon calls “the strongest of all the forms of organization here presented’’ is the athletic club. It is the boys’ association, par excellence, with males outnumbering females five to one in the formation of such clubs. This is an association favored by older boys, and Sheldon says that it is common for the predatory societies of younger adolescents to give way to athletic organizations in the older years.

Considering all of the 1,126 clubs reported by the children together, Sheldon found that the peak age for such spontaneous societies is ages twelve and thirteen. Hall would argue a few years later in his Adolescence that these are characteristically the years when


Sociol Societies

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Figure 2. Data of Henry D. Sheldon’s study of societies formed by children. Age and sex distributions of different kinds of societies.

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children are ready for tribal kinds of peer societies and that adults should bear this in mind in designing organizations for children. Sheldon provided a little data bearing on this. In scoring the children’s compositions, he had made every effort to screen out adult- organized, as opposed to spontaneous, organizations formed by children. Having at hand 611 reports of societies with adult influence he graphed them. The distribution is quite similar to that for children’s spontaneous associations. Apparently, adults respect the spontaneous propensities of children in designing social institutions for them.

Again, there was some replicability; Louis Hartson reported a substantial replica- tion of Sheldon’s findings for women in 1897-1898.35

The tendency to form spontaneous organizations reported by Sheldon and Hartson dies off in later adolescence, presumably, because it is at this time that children begin to make their entrance into adult-level participation in the mainstream institutions of civil society. Hall in his Adolescence argued that a first level of social development com- pletes itself in the age range from twelve to fifteen. A next level of social development begins at age fifteen with the form of that higher-order development determined by the institutional forms of the society in which the child is being reared. In Western societies, children become ready for scientific reasoning, altruism, religious thinking, and the various intellectual and social forms necessary for participation in civil society. A rather dramatic manifestation of this is to be found in the phenomenon of religious conversion.

Religious Conversion Edwin Diller Starbuck undertook a series of studies of religious experience, exploring

it partly through autobiographies of religious figures and partly through questionnaires. Starbuck was particularly interested in conversion experiences, which he defined as “characterized by more or less sudden changes of character from evil to goodness, from sinfulness to righteousness, and from indifference to spiritual insight and a~tivity,”~‘

Figure 3 shows the reported age-incidence of religious conversion experiences for samples of males and females in Starbuck’s study. Conversion is an adolescent phenomenon, and Starbuck in his discussion of his work takes pains to show the parallels between his age-curves for religious conversion and growth curves reflecting the physical changes that take place in adolescence. The peak years for women are from eleven to fifteen, for men from fifteen to nineteen. A number of other questionnaire studies, but not all, show an earlier incidence of adolescent phenomena for women.

Starbuck gives detailed and interesting analyses of his subjects’ reports of their feelings and thoughts before, during, and after the conversion experience. William James wrote a gracious preface to Starbuck’s 1899 book on The Psychology of Religion, say- ing that he had been skeptical about the questionnaire method (vide his description of the comparative method quoted above) and conceding that perhaps there was something to this questionnaire work after all. James subsequently made substantial use of Star- buck’s data for the preparation of his classic Varieties of Religious Experien~e.~’

THE DECLINE OF CHILD STUDY AT CLARK After he wrote Adolescence, Hall’s involvement with child study changed. He re-

mained a spokesman for children in American society and he took steps to consolidate his leadership. In 1910, Hall persuaded the Clark trustees to put up $5,000 to establish a Children’s Institute. The first White House Conference had been held in 1909. There was now an initiative to establish a federal Children’s Bureau, and Hall hoped to make Clark a research arm of the children’s cause.38


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Figure 3. Data of Edwin Diller Starbuck’s study of religious conversion. Age-distribution for conversion experiences reported by males and females.

Hall’s political vision had broadened. When he began his child study work in 1880, he saw his work as potentially relevant to education and the moral and religious training of children. Thirty years later, in his Educational Problems, Hall knew and discussed at some length the complex infrastructure of American agencies and institutions dealing with children’s welfare.39 Hall had made efforts to connect Clark to the child welfare movement by convening national conferences on social work in Worcester in 1909 and 1910 but those efforts were not fruitful. There was to be no lasting Children’s Institute at Clark. In 1917, Cora Bussey Hillis persuaded the Iowa state legislature to establish the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, and this was to be the first of a new wave of child development institutes and centers that were to mount a substantial program of research on child development in the 1930s and 1 9 4 0 ~ ~ ’

Hall’s personal interests turned elsewhere after Adolescence. He felt that genetic psychology might be the basis for training people who would work with “adolescent races” and so he turned toward missionary pedag~gy .~’ It is, in retrospect, unfortunate that Hall relinguished efforts to develop his child study questionnaire program after only a few years of serious effort. He was sixty when he published his Adolescence. The child study questionnaire work was problematic, little question about that, but it had produced some interesting and suggestive findings. Hall reviewed those findings at some length in the second volume of his Adolescence and Thorndike, after discussing at some length his methodological reservations about the questionnaire work, made substantial


use of its findings in the first volume of his three-volume educational psychology, discussing “The Original Nature of Man.”

Much of the questionnaire work was crude. What needed to be done was to tighten methods and build knowledge about where the strengths, weaknesses, possibilities, and artifacts were to be found in questionnaire work. Hall was not the man to engage in this kind of technical development nor was he, as an older and somewhat embattled college president, in a good position to do so. Child study had failed to prove a moneymaker for Clark university. The questionnaire research had gathered friends and enemies who were both hard to handle. The friends of child study approached the work in an extravagant, evangelical, uncritical spirit that was hard to defend and that fed the fires of criti~ism.~’

If one looks past the clouds of positive and negative rhetoric that seem to surround all discussions of the child study questionnaire research, one finds some reasonably positive attributes of the research that are worth a degree of recollection and recon- sideration: (1) a social-biological vision of child development; (2) the use of a “composite photograph”; pattern-recognition strategy of epitomizing data; and (3) the synergy of the synthetic and empirical enterprises.

Social-Biological Vision and Child Development Hall’s vision of the nature of child development was different from the cognitive-

developmental vision that has dominated recent work in developmental psychology. Just as the cognitive-developmental view is not Jean Piaget’s unique theory, the social- biological view was not Hall’s unique theory. What Hall carried into his research program was a late-nineteenth-century vision of child development as a movement through a series of social environments. The developing child moves from one set of social arrangements to another, and the design of child development - what constitutes development - is organized to bring forward capacities to participate in more complex, sophisticated, and demanding kinds of social arrangements. Such a design is consistent with recapitulationism, but one can believe such a design exists without having to believe that: (a) all human societies fall along a single lineage of progress or perfection; or (b) children repeat the history of human societies as they grow up.

This social-biological view of child development entails cognitive development. The Clark researchers searched for and found indications that children acquire more symbolic capacity as they grow up; children develop more power to think in imaginaries; they become more able to reason using combinations of the perceived and conceived. But the Clark researchers did not observe this Piaget-like elaboration of intelligence in the context of tabletop games of reason. The Clark researchers extracted them from stories about children’s changing behaviors towards food, their changing emotional behavior, and changes in the way in which children tease, bully, or assert feelings of ownership as they grow up.

Like his contemporary, William McDougall, Hall saw the social life of the small child as governed by instincts, and the instinctive life of the child as linked closely to the emotional. Biological development organizes the early years of development, Hall thought, and the social life of that small child takes around built-in social instincts. In adolescence, the determinants of a youth’s social development change; what deter- mines the subsequent development of an adolescent depends upon the kind of society he is to join. Hall’s vision of social development, with biological determination earlier and social determination later, was an interesting mixture of the sociobiological and the Vygotskian.


“A veraging Data” One of the curious features of the early child study questionnaire work was a kind

of “mindless empiricism.” Child study researchers had a somewhat disconcerting tendency to collect great quantities of information about children with little concern for hypotheses, theories, or focused thinking about what line the inquiry should take. Much of this passivity was, most likely, due to amateurism. To a degree, it may have reflected a belief that data can be expected to reveal its own inner pattern.

What we look for in research are generalizations, truths about many children to be somehow extracted from observations of a few. Psychologists now take for granted essentially quantitative methods of synthesizing observations. Some quality of an observation is represented by a number. Operations on sets of numbers are taken to move the observer from particulars to the general. And so there arises one of the great fictions of contemporary scientific work on children, the “average child,” taken as a proxy for t he-child-in-general.

The questionnaire research was based on a different vision of the possibility of sum- marizing observations, a fundamentally esthetic vision. It was hoped that by the examination of quantities of questionnaire responses, patterns common to them would be apparent to the observer as “generic images”-that is, as representations of underly- ing similarities of form. A series of questionnaire responses might serve, in effect, as a composite photograph of some configuration of human response to the world.

Galton described his composite photographs in the following terms: Specimens of blended portraits will now be exhibited; these might, with more pro- priety, be named, according to the happy phrase of Profesor Huxley, “generic” portraits. The word generic presupposes a genus, that is to say, a collection of individuals who have much in common, and among them medium characteristics are very much more frequent than extreme ones. The same idea is sometimes expressed by the work “typical,” which was much used by Quetelet, who was the first to give it a rigorous interpretation, and whose idea of a type lies at the basis of his statistical views. . . . It might be expected that when many different portraits are fused into a single one, the result would be a mere smudge. Such, however, is by no means the case, under the conditions just laid down, of a great prevalence of the mediocre characteristics over the extreme ones. There are then so many traits in common, to combine and to reinforce one another, that they prevail to the exclusion oLthe rest. All that is common remains, all that is individual tends to disappear.

Synergy of the Synthetic and Empirical Enterprises The Clark questionnaire program was not meant to be free-standing; it was meant

to elaborate an evolutionary conception of child development synthesized from findings of several scientific fields. In a day and age in which we prefer to interpret data in par- simonious and conservative terms and we believe that theories should be as close to data and as quickly falsifiable as possible, it is not easy to come to terms with the tactics and meaning of a research enterprise that sees itself as an outpost of a body of theory resting upon a number of other research enterprises in laboratories and disciplines outside the investigator’s scope.

In describing the comparative method in his 1890 Principles, James sketched out a synthetic enterprise and an empirical enterprise. The Clark researchers saw both as one enterprise. The developmental theory they were testing did not rest upon their data and it would not be fully proved or disproved by their research methods. It preceded their data. The task of their research program was to elaborate an evolutionary theory of the child’s development, explore it in detail, seek out its practical implications.


NOTES

1. For Kurt Danziger’s estimates of the pluralism of early American psychology, see his “The Origins of the Psychological Experiment as a Social Institution,” American Psychologist 40 (1985): 133-130; ”social Context and Investigative Practice in Early Twentieth-Century Psychology,” in Psychology in Twentieth-Century Thought and Society, ed. M. G. Ash and W. R. Woodward (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); “A Ques- tion of Identity: Who Participated in Psychological Experiments?” in The Riw of Experimentation in American Psychology, ed. J. G. Morawski (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 35-52. Other sources agree with James and Danziger on the pluralism. John Dewey mentions the three psychologies-plus a fourth, objective psychology-in his Psychology (New York: Harper, 1887). Rand Evans has surveyed the contents of Hall’s first psychology seminar taught at Johns Hopkins. Hall took three years to give his seminar and in it he covered the work of the several methods. See “The Origins of American Academic Psycholgy,” in Explorations in the History of Psychology in the United States, ed. J. Brozek (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1984), pp. 17-60.

2. William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), vol. 1, p. 193. 3. Heinz Werner’s The Comparative Psychology of Mental Development (New York: Science Editions,

1%1) is in the tradition of the comparative approach discussed by James, and translates an older evolutionary analysis of the growth of intelligent (hierarchically organized) systems into a more contemporary systems- analytic analysis. See Sheldon H. White, “Studies of Developing Mentality: Retrospective Review of Heinz Werner’s Comparative Psychology of Mental Development, ” Contemporary Psychology 29 (1984): 199-202.

4. Darwin’s first questionnaire on animal breeding is described in R. B. Freeman and P. J . Gautrey, “Dar- win’s Questions about the Breeding of Animals, with a note on Queries about Expression,” Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History 5 (1969): 220-225. Darwin’s questionnaire on expression was reproduced in the introduction to his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872), and its development is described in R. B. Freeman and P. J. Gautrey, “Charles Darwin’s Queries about Expression,” Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) 4 (1972): 204-219.

5 . Howard Gruber, in his Darwin on Man (London: Wildwood House, 1974), gives a brief account of the range of Darwin’s psychological interests as expressed in his M and N notebooks in the years 1837-1839 and Darwin’s use of questionnaires and Galton’s subsequent use of them (pp. 221-223). GNber describes Darwin’s use of questionnaires as “aimed not at collecting self-reports from his respondents but at assembling wide- ranging surveys of observations on the behavior of individuals other than the person answering the questionnaire” (p. 22). In contrast, Galton’s questionnaire on visual imagery “is probably the first use of a questionnaire to amass numbers of genuinely introspective reports of inner experiences” (p. 223). 6. Robert H. Gault, “A History of the Questionnaire Method of Research in Psychology,” Pedagogical

Seminary 16 (1907): 366-383. 7. E. B. Titchener, Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice: Vol. I . Qualitative Ex-

periments: Part 11. Instructor’s Manual(New York: Macmillan, 1901), pp. 387-388. Titchener notes that Gustav Fechner in his Elemente der Psychophysik had published introspective accounts of the visual imagery of several well-known persons, and had given an elaborate comparison of his own memory-images and after-images. Titchener says, “The programme which he drew up for further work was carried out, with curious exactness, by Francis Galton” (p. 387). Galton described his questionnaire work in his Inquiries Into Human Faculty and its Development (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1928) in the following terms:

After the inquiry had been fairly started it took the form of submitting a certain number of printed questions to a large number of persons. There is hardly any more difficult task than that of framing questions which are not likely to be misunderstood, which admit of easy reply, and which cover the ground of inquiry. I did my best in these respects without forgetting the most important part of all- namely, to tempt my correspondents to write freely in fuller explanation of their replies, and on cognate topics as well. These separate letters have proved more instructive and interesting by far than the replies of the set questions (pp. 57-58).

8. Gault, “History of the Questionnaire Method.” 9. Hall’s study, “The Contents of Children’s Minds on Entering School”, was published in the Princeton

Review 2 (1883): 249-272, and republished in Pegagogical Seminary 1 (1891): 139-173. 10. See “Notes and Discussions,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 15 (1881): 99-100. For Darwin’s letter to Mrs. Talbot, see pp. 206-207 of the same volume. 11. Sara Wiltse, one of four kindergarten teachers who examined the children for Hall’s first study, has written an account of the coming of child study to the United States in her “A Preliminary Sketch of the History of Child Study in America,”PedagogicalSeminary 3 (1894): 189-212. Wiltse reports that over 20,000 returns were received to the first-year questionnaires.


12. James Dale Hendrick’s excellent dissertation, “The Child-Study Movement in American Education, 1880-1910: A Quest for Educational Reform Through a Scientific Study of the Child,” Ph.D. diss., Indiana University School of Education, 1%8, discusses the groundswell of enthusiams for child study and the negative commentary that damped it. Charles McMurray, a Herbartian, felt that American education needed studies of the history and philosophy of education much more than studies of the child. William Torrey Harris criticized the movement because it was not based on the Hegelian analysis of developmental stages he had himself used as a basis for his Psychologic Foundations of Education (New York: Appleton, 1898). John Dewey felt that scientific study of the child could help education, but that child study wasn’t science. Hugo Miinsterberg, felt that child study wasn’t psychology and, even if it were, American schools wouldn’t be reformed just by informing teachers about the child’s nature. William James criticized the movement for burdening the teacher with additional tasks of data collection. Edward L. Thorndike had a number of serious methodological criticisms. 13. Hall’s “Child Study at Clark University: An Impending New Step,” American Journal of Psychology, 14 (1903): 96-106, summarized what he saw as the achievements of the Clark program:

In insanity it has given us the new studies of dementia praecox; has almost re-created the department of juvenile criminology; furnished a new method of studying the most important problems of philology . . .; has revolutionized and almost re-created school hygiene; made adolescence, a strange word ten years ago, one of the most pregnant and suggestive for both science and education; given us the basis of a new religious psychology; and laid the foundation of a new and larger philosophy and psychology of the future, based not on the provincial study of a cross-section of the adult mind, but on a broad, genetic basis (p. 97).

14. Alexander Siege1 and Sheldon White, “The Child Study Movement: Early Growth and Development of the Symbolized Child,” Advances in Child Behavior and Development 17 (1982): 233-285; White, “Developmental Psychology at the Beginning,” Developmenfal Psychology Newsletter (Fall 1985): 27-39. 15. Canan Karatekin put in much work and gave intelligent help in locating the questionnaire studies and classifying them according to their methodological quality. 16. American psychologists’ use of tests and measurements probably began close to the date of E. L. Thorn- dike’s Introduction fo the Theory of Mentaland SocialMeasurements (New York: Science Press, 1904). The statistics of inference came into use after 1930. See Gerd Gigerenzer, “Probabalistic Thinking and the Figut Against Subjectivity,” in The Probabilistic Revolution: Vol. 2. Ideas in the Sciences, ed. L. Kruger, G. Gigerenzer, and M. S. Morgan (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 11-33. 17. Charles Cofer, “Human Nature and Social Policy,” in Human Nature and PublicPolicy: Scient$c Views of Women, Children, and Families, ed. L. Friedrich-Cofer (New York: Praeger, 1986), pp. 39-96. 18. E. L. Thorndike, Educational Psychology, vol. I , The Original Nature of Man (New York: Teachers College, 1913-1914), p. 4. 19. G. S . Hall, Adolescence, vol. 1, pp. 158-159. 20. Ernest H. Lindley, “A Preliminary Study of Some of the Major Phenomena of Mental Effort,” American Journal of Psychology 7 (1896): 491-517. 21. The questionnaire responses, most or all of them almost certainly paraphrased from the original, are found in Frederic L. Burk ‘Teasing and Bullying,” Pedagogical Seminary 4 (1897): 344, 345, 346, 352. 22. Ibid., p. 344. 23. Ibid., p. 344. 24. Ibid., p. 352. 25. Sanford Bell, “An Introductory Study of the Psychology of Foods,” Pedagogical Seminary 11 (1904): 51-90. 26. Ibid., p. 70. 27. Hall repeatedly refers to a change in human growth at age seven in his Adolescence. In Volume 2, p. 451, he offers something like a summary and recommendations in a passage that begins as follows:

After the critical transition age of six or seven, when the brain has achieved its adult size and weight and teething has reduced the chewing surface to its least extent, begins an unique stage of life marked by reduced growth and increased activity and power to resist both disease and fatigue which . . . suggests what was, in some just post-simian age of our race, its period of maturity. Here belong discipline in writing, reading, spelling, verbal memory, manual training, practice of instrumental technique, pro- per names, drawing, drill in arithmetic, foreign languages by oral methods, the correct pronounciation of which is far harder if acquired later, etc.

28. John C. Shaw, ”A Test of Memory in School Children,” Pedagogical Seminary 4 (1895-18%): 61-78. 29. L. W. Kline and C. J. France, “The Psychology of Ownership,” Predagogical Seminary 6 (1897-1898): 421470.


30. L. W. Kline, “A Study in Juvenile Ethics,”Pedagogical Seminary 10 (1903): 239-266. For the work of Carol Gilligan’s group, see Lyn Mike1 Brown’s Ph.D. dissertation, “Narratives of Relationship: The Develop- ment of a Care Voice in Girls 7 to 16,” Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1989. 31. “The young child thinks of the results of an action. If the result is bad, punishment should follow. . . . The older children, on the contrary, think of the motive that led to the action. If this be good, punishment should be light or not at all,” pp. 91-92. Margaret E. Schallenberger, “A Study of Children’s Rights, as Seen by Themselves,” Pedagogical Seminary 3 (1894): 87-96. 32. David S. Hill, “Comparative Study of Children’s Ideals,” Pedagogical Seminary 18 (191 1): 219-231. 33. Hill’s study repeated previous studies by Barnes (not cited) and Goddard (Pedagogical Seminary 13: 209). See also W. G. Chambers, “The Evolution of Ideals,” Pedagogical Seminary 10 (1903): 101-143. 34. Henry D. Sheldon, “The Institutional Activities of American Children,” American Journal of Psychologv

35. Louis D. Hartson, “The Psychology of the Club: A Study in Social Psychology,” Pedagogical Seminary

36. Edwin Starbuck, “A Study of Conversion,” American Journal of Psychology 8 (1895-18%): 268-308. See also his “Contributions to the Psychology of Religion: 11. Some Aspects of Religious Growths,” American Journalof Psychology 9 (1895-1896): 70-124; and The Psychology oJReligion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899). 37. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experiences: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longman, Green, 1902). 38. Hall described his overall plan for the Children’s Institute in “General Outline of the New Child Study Work at Clark University,” Pedagogical Seminary 17 (1910): 160-165. Subsequent articles in the journal by Hall’s associates describe plans for some of the anticipated departments of the institute. 39. Theodate Smith, working with Hall, had compiled a taxonomy of ninety species of organizations dedicated to children, reproduced in EducationalProblems (New York: Appleton, 191 l), vol. 2, pp. 74-75. In two long chapters, Hall provides a review of the work of these organizations. The first, “Special Child-Welfare Agen- cies Outside the School,” discussed agencies that try to deal with problems already existing- for example, those dealing with retarded, deaf, or blind children. The second, “Preventive and Constructive Movements,” deals with organizations dedicated to preventive work. 40. Robert R. Sears, Your Ancients Revisited: A History of Child Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). 41. This turn in Hall’s interests is reflected in the last chapter of his Adolescence, “Ethnic Psychology and Pedagogy, or Adolescent Races and their treatment.” See also Volume 2, Chapter 10 of his EducationalProb- lems, “Missionary Pedagogy.” Hall started the Journal of Religious Psychology and Education in 1904 and then later in the decade, with Blakeslee, the Journal of Race Development. 42. Hendricks’ review of the criticisms of Hall‘s contemporaries has already been mentioned above. Presentday accounts of child study generally center their discussion on what the earlier commentators and critics had to say about it and ultimately have little choice but to reassert those older judgments. Leila Zenderland‘s recent article, “Education, Evangelism, and the Origins of Clinical Psychology: The Child-Study Legacy, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 24 (1988): 152-165, does this, and her third footnote mentions a number of “historical assessments” of child study whose method is, generally, the same. It seems likely a movement like child study cannot be judged completely and fairly by repeated re-examinations of its reputa- tion; sooner or later, the historical assessment of the movement should include an examination of its work. 43. From Galton’s memo “Generic Images,” extract from Proceedings Royal Institution, 25th April 1879, p. 230, reprinted as part of Appendix A in his Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development.

9 (1988): 425-448.

18 (1897-1898): 353-414.

child study at clark university: 1894–1904

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