Giants in the Nursery: A Biographical History of Developmentally Appropriate Practice

By David Elkind

Examine the evolution of developmentally appropriate practice with this biographical history of early childhood education. This book explores the theory's progression—from its beginnings in writings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophers, its experimental implementation by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practitioners, and its scientific grounding in contemporary theory and research—and includes biographical sketches and perspectives of eleven philosophical, pedagogical, and theoretical figures—the giants—in this evolution.

David Elkind, PhD, is the best-selling author of more than twenty books and a well-known early childhood expert who has appeared on shows including Today Show, CBS Morning News, 20/20, Dateline, Donahue, and Oprah.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Redleaf Press
• Release date: Mar 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781605543710

David Elkind

Dave Elkind had a successful law practice for many years before retiring. Any worries that he had about how he would occupy his time during retirement have been laid to rest. He spends four days each week volunteering at Insight, which serves people with memory issues. Dave has never had so much fun and has made friends with the most amazing people he has known. While he is at home, Dave enjoys exercising, reading, and writing, theater, concerts, travel, music and trying to play guitar, friends, and family, and following the New York Giants football team and Washington Capitals hockey team. His life is never dull.

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Introduction

Over the last few centuries, early childhood education—the instruction of young children outside the home—has become an internationally accepted level of schooling. Yet the first years of life are unique in that they include the most accelerated pace of physical, intellectual, emotional, and social growth and development of all stages of the human life cycle. Consider the progress from a squalling bundle of wants at birth to a walking, talking, socially adept child by age five or six. These rapid changes make it necessary to take growth and development into greater account in the education of this age group than any other level of pedagogy.

It was John Amos Comenius in the seventeenth century who not only first recognized the educational importance of the early years but also articulated the teaching practices, skills, and subject matter most appropriate for this age group. First and foremost, he argued that both child rearing and education should be adapted to the growing abilities, needs, and interests of the child. In accord with this principle, he contended that subjects should be presented from the simple to the complex and in a way that is made interesting and enjoyable to the student. He was also adamant that education should be for everyone, male and female from whatever station in life, and for those of limited as well as exceptional ability.

These ideas were progressively elaborated, articulated, and given philosophical, practical, research, and theoretical support by those individuals whom I am calling the Giants of early childhood education. The work of these Giants further clarified, extended, and enriched Comenius’s original vision of child-centered education. To be sure, early childhood was not the major concern of many of the Giants. Nonetheless, they all recognized, in their own ways and from their own perspectives, the crucial importance of age-appropriate child-rearing and early childhood instruction for later healthy development. Yet despite four centuries of arguments for constructing pedagogy in accordance with the psychology of the developing child at all age levels, this idea has yet to be fully implemented.

In the United States, the negative legacy of humanism and the reliance on books, recitation, and role learning have been difficult to overcome. This has been particularly true of elementary and secondary education. The difficulty has been aided and abetted by the introduction of standardized tests of academic achievement—suggesting that education is a measurable quantity. As a consequence, major efforts at educational reform have not been fully successful. As Diane Ravitch (2011) explains, the problem is that each reform movement is followed by a counterrevolutionary one aimed at correcting the errors of its predecessor. With this in mind, perhaps the best we can hope for is that we take what is of value in each of these efforts to progressively craft a more humane and effective educational system.

Early childhood education has had its own problems. Because of its focus on very young children, long thought to be the province of the family, the education of young children outside the home has challenged traditional gender roles and religious values. It also has not been spared the intrusion of politics, economics, and social and historical forces (Pound 2011). As a result, the history of early childhood education has been diverse and discontinuous. For example, in many countries, including the United States, support for educating young children outside the home has waxed and waned depending on the particular political party in office at the local, state, and federal levels.

The fortunes of early childhood education have also suffered because of the many competing child-centered programs claiming to best meet the needs of young children. The success of these competing programs (for example, Froebel, Montessori, Waldorf, and Reggio) has made it difficult to argue that one is undeniably better than any other. That being the case, it has been hard to present a united front against the pressures to make early childhood education a size smaller elementary education.

The Introduction of DAP

In 1987 the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) reintroduced some of Comenius’s ideas under the rubric of developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) (Bredekamp 1987). In 2010 this concept was expanded (Bredekamp and Copple 2010) to encompass the philosophical, practical, theoretical, and research contributions of the later Giants. What this integration has made clear is that all of the child-centered early childhood programs, regardless of the particular Giant to whom they owe allegiance, share the same core principles: namely, child rearing and education have to be adapted to the growing needs, abilities, and interests of the child, and children are best served when they are actively involved in their own learning. This commonality makes it clear that beneath the appearance of diversity and discontinuity in the history of early childhood education, there is an underlying unity and continuity.

The Giants of Developmentally Appropriate Practice

The progressive elaboration and integration of the philosophical insights, experimental innovations, theoretical ideas, and research evidence of the twelve principles brought together by NAEYC is the untold history of early childhood education. To be sure, these philosophical, practical, theoretical, and research ideas were not formulated exclusively for the education of young children. Indeed, the Giants thought of their ideas as applicable to all levels of child rearing and education. Comenius himself proposed that his ideas were applicable from infancy through the university level (Keatinge 1910). That DAP can be employed at least up to the high school level is supported by the fact that many of the descendants of the schools first introduced by two of the Giants, Montessori and Steiner (Waldorf schools), today serve the K–12 age groups.

I am very well aware that, over the years, a great many distinguished educators both in the United Sates and abroad have made important contributions to early childhood education. But in every discipline there are only a few individuals whose work marks major turning points in their field. I believe this is true for early childhood education. From this perspective, there are eleven individuals whose work has shaped the discipline. These are the philosophers, practitioners, researchers, and theorists whom I am calling Giants. By focusing on the work of the Giants, I by no means intend to belittle the significance of other contributors. It just seems necessary to call on the authority of the Giants in support of DAP at a time when DAP principles are being overlooked, ignored, or rejected—witness national achievement standards.

In choosing the Giants, I used three criteria. First, they were persuaded, far ahead of their times, that education had to be based on an understanding of the child. In the absence of a science of child psychology, they employed analogies, such as the growth of plants and the change of seasons, to illustrate developmental changes and to suggest age-appropriate child-rearing and educational practices.

Second, each has made a unique contribution to our conception of the child and to our understanding of experiential learning. To be sure, all learning is experiential in a broad sense. Yet, since the time of Francis Bacon (1561–1626), it has been tradition to distinguish book learning and deductive reasoning from experiential learning based on sensory observation, experiment, and inductive reasoning.

Finally, they are all Giants inasmuch as they have all found a prominent and lasting place in the theory and practice of early childhood education. Coming from different backgrounds and living in different times and places, each Giant conceptualized the child and experiential learning from his or her unique orientation. Each successive conception has added to our knowledge of the complexity and variety of child nature and of the ways in which young children learn. Thanks to these ideas, we have a more comprehensive picture of the young learner than students at any other age level.

Ten individuals meet the criteria outlined previously. John Amos Comenius, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau contributed the philosophical foundations of experiential learning and modern education in general. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, Maria Montessori, and Rudolf Steiner carried out the experimental groundwork of early childhood education. Most recently, early childhood education was scientifically rooted in the research and theory of Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, and Erik Erikson. I have also added a chapter on the Russian Lev Vygotsky, even though he was not a Giant in the sense described here. This seemed appropriate both because of his influence and because he might well have been a Giant had he lived long enough to fully articulate his theories and complete his research program.

The Aims of This Book

My aims in this book are threefold. First, as described previously, one core problem in early childhood education is that most, if not all, historians of early education give accounts of the diversity and controversy in the field at the expense of a comprehensive picture of the discipline as a whole. From the perspective of DAP, however, early childhood education does have a historical and a conceptual continuity and unity. All the Giants contributed significant ideas about the nature of the child and about learning and instruction that have been progressively assimilated into the principles of DAP. In detailing the lives and works of these Giants, I aim to provide a much-needed coherent and compelling narrative of the progressive formulation, application, and theoretical or research support for the foundational principles of DAP.

Second, another longstanding problem in early childhood education is that there are a number of competing child-centered camps linked to the work of Froebel, Steiner, Montessori, Freud, Piaget, Vygotsky, and Erikson. The proponents of these methods seldom communicate or interact with one another. Many educators working under these rubrics are unfamiliar with the other methods’ histories and shapers. This book addresses this problem by bringing together a brief biography and work summary of the Giants of each of these programs. This integrative approach will afford both students and workers in any early childhood specialty an opportunity to learn about the Giants of other approaches. This is particularly true for the contributions of little-known and exceedingly original Comenius. Likewise, there is little recognition of Pestalozzi’s introduction of manipulatives and field trips as methods of experiential learning. Finally, outside of Waldorf-trained educators, few early childhood professionals know much about Rudolf Steiner and his holistic educational contributions.

A third aim of this book is to provide early childhood educators three powerful arguments in defense of DAP:

1.DAP is more solidly grounded in philosophy, theory, research, and practice than any other approach to education or any other early education program.

2.DAP provides the most integrated curricula of socialization, individualization, work, and play than does any other approach to education.

3.DAP offers students the greatest possible combination of learning experiences (social, natural, personal, and unconscious) than any other approach to education.

I believe these three considerations taken together enable early childhood educators to make a powerful case for the superiority of DAP over any other educational programs for young children.

I fully appreciate that there are many approaches to the education of young children other than DAP. But in my fifty years of engaging in child-development research, teaching child development, and supervising students, I have become convinced that the science of child psychology is the science of education.

This conviction was further reinforced when I began lecturing to parents and teachers in the United States and other countries. I was particularly impressed by my visits to Scandinavian countries where DAP is the norm for their educational systems. Throughout these countries, formal education does not begin until age six or seven, and early childhood programs are play based. One of the most powerful observations I have made is that effective early childhood educators, regardless of their theoretical persuasion, practice what we now call DAP. Finally, I have yet to see any research evidence to show that any non-DAP approaches are more effective in the long or short term than DAP approaches that adapt to the growing needs, abilities, and interests of children.

Despite all these considerations, the pressure to push academics into early childhood has increased rather than abated. In my talks at early childhood centers and in numerous letters and e-mails from experienced early childhood professionals, I hear the same sad story. The pressures for testing, homework, and the elimination of play are unrelenting. Too many of our best early childhood educators are leaving the field because they cannot, in good conscience, engage in the age-inappropriate practices they are being forced to impose on young children.

It is because DAP has the weight of history, philosophy, practice, theory, and research to recommend it that I believe it is superior to any other educational approach for young children—indeed, for students at all age levels. And it is because I see this approach in jeopardy that I wrote this book.

Organization of the Book

The organization of the book is as follows. An introductory chapter provides a brief history of Western education from the Greeks and Romans until the modern era introduced by the Reformation, the printing press, and the exploration of the New World. The next few chapters of the book offer brief accounts of the lives and work of Moravian philosopher and educator John Amos Comenius, English philosopher John Locke, and Swiss French social philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The following chapters give similar accounts of the lives and work of the shapers of early childhood pedagogy: Swiss Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, German Friedrich Froebel, Austrian German Rudolf Steiner, and Italian Maria Montessori. The last chapters are devoted to the lives and work of the researchers and theorists: Austrian Sigmund Freud, Swiss Jean Piaget, Danish American Erik Erikson, and Russian Lev Vygotsky.

At the end of each chapter, I summarize how each Giant viewed the nature of the child, the aims of education, and the role of play. I chose the nature of the child because each Giant held his or her own view of what was essential to childhood. Like the blind man and the elephant, each Giant saw the child in a somewhat different way. Together, their perspectives give us a fuller and richer appreciation of the child than we might otherwise have.

I chose the aims of education because the modern recognition of individual rights has raised the issue of whether education should focus on individualization, socialization, or some combination of the two. Over the years, individual rights versus social obligations has become a major issue addressed in different ways by modern major educational figures. Herbart (McMurry 1893) suggested that the issue was a character (education) versus academic (teaching) issue; Dewey ([1899] 1900) put it as an issue of the child and society. More recently, Freire (1970) has argued that it is a political issue of liberation versus domestication. What is important from the perspective of this book is that regardless of how each Giant viewed the aims of education, they all believed these aims could be achieved in developmentally appropriate ways.

I have included the Giants’ ideas on the role of play because their views of play complement their views on the aims of education. Each Giant’s perspective also gives weight to the idea that our stances on perennial issues in education derive, in part at least, from our personal predispositions.

Each chapter concludes with how the writings of the Giants link to one or more of the twelve principles of early childhood education given in Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth through Age 8 (Bredekamp and Copple 2010). For the later Giants in particular, the origination is often readily apparent. For example, the principle Development and learning result from a dynamic and continuous interaction of biological maturation and experience is a basic proposition of Piaget’s theory. The principle Early experiences have profound effects, both cumulative and delayed, on a child’s development and learning; and optimal periods exist for certain types of development and learning to occur is surely a reference to Montessori’s sensitive periods. Likewise, the principle Development and learning advance when children are challenged to achieve at a level just beyond their current mastery and also when they have many opportunities to practice newly acquired skills is clearly taken from Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (ZPD) concept. For the earlier Giants, the links to the DAP principles are not as direct but are clearly anticipated in their writings.

The book’s concluding chapter describes some of the personality traits that the Giants had in common and details each Giant’s individual contribution to the concept of experiential learning. The chapter also compares and contrasts the Giants’ contributions to our conception of child nature as well as their views on the aims of education and the role of play. A final section in the last chapter concludes that history supports the employment of DAP and reiterates the warning of the great philosopher George Santayana: those who ignore the mistakes of the past are bound to repeat them. The chapters that follow teach again how much we have to learn from history.

References

Bredekamp, Sue. 1987. Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth through Age 8. Washington, DC: NAEYC.

Bredekamp, Sue, and Carol Copple. 2010. Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth through Age 8. Washington, DC: NAEYC.

Dewey, John. (1899) 1900. The School and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.

Keatinge, Maurice Walter. 1910. The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius. London: Adam and Charles Black.

McMurry, Charles Alexander. 1893. The Elements of General Method Based on Principles of Herbart. Bloomington, IL: Public School.

Pound, Linda. 2011. Influencing Early Childhood Education. Glasgow: Bell & Bain.

Ravitch, Diane. 2011. The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. New York: Basic Books.

1

A Prehistory of Early Childhood Education

The teaching of young children is embedded in the history of education as a whole. A brief summary of that history will help provide the context for fully appreciating the uniqueness of the kind of schooling needed for children during their first five or six years of life.

At any time and place in history, educational theory and practice necessarily reflect the prevailing worldviews of the society and the culture in which they take place. Although we will only be concerned with the post-Renaissance phase of this history, a brief review of the pre-Renaissance stage will help put the present work in context. For Western Europe and the United States, three pre-Renaissance phases of education are usually distinguished. These phases were the classical phase of the early Greeks and Romans, the scholastic and dialectic teaching of the medieval Christian period, and the humanism of the early Renaissance.

An Uneven Historical Progression

I have to emphasize, however, that as far as education goes, this time line is primarily a historical progression rather than a true developmental one. While there has been regular forward movement for some facets of educational history, it is far from being true for all. To illustrate, there has been a steady growth in the availability of education to all members of a society. During the Greek and Roman, medieval, and early Renaissance periods, education was primarily for the sons of the wealthy. Over the next few centuries, thanks to a combination of technological, economic, and social changes, education became more widely available, though still primarily for boys, of the lower-economic classes.

On the other hand, comparable advances in educational theory and practice did not parallel this progress. The third phase in this historical sequence, the Renaissance humanistic phase, was a revolt against the Christian educational system that dominated the medieval period. Humanism was built on the resurrection and, one might argue, the deification of Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, and science. Yet the early humanists, in their zeal to teach students Latin and Greek, used harsh methods that would never have been used by teachers like Plato and Aristotle from the classical period.

The history of education is, therefore, not a regular progression of improvement and effectiveness. In some respects, it even appears to be more cyclical than evolutionary. This seems particularly true of the last few centuries, when the same educational ideas have seemed to go in and out of favor depending on the social, political, and economic climate. Consider the movement from progressive education to curriculum reform to open education to back to basics to No Child Left Behind that characterized education in the United States during the twentieth century. Indeed, there often seems to be no clear connection between explicit educational aims and theories and their translations into educational practice. For example, most effective teachers employ comparable methods of discovery learning, open discussion, and intellectual challenge, even though educators profess quite different educational philosophies.

What is perhaps most striking in reviewing these phases of educational evolution is how educators have advocated across the centuries the abiding educational insights applicable to children at all age levels. These insights include placement of the child before the curriculum, adaptation of the curriculum to the child, the primacy of observation and experience, the necessity of making learning interesting and enjoyable, and the priority of acquiring mental process over content. Yet these abiding bedrock principles of educational practice have never been universally put into practice in any one of these historical periods. It is a sad fact that what we do in education at any point in history often seems to have little or nothing to do with what we know to be good pedagogy for children.

In this book, I am primarily concerned with the three most recent phases of educational evolution—the experiential, the universalism, and the scientism—because it was only during these last phases that the teaching of young children came to be recognized as a legitimate pedagogical enterprise. Nonetheless, I do believe a brief summary of the educational practices of the first three pre-Renaissance periods of educational history is important to fully appreciate what came after them.

The Classical Period of Education, 600 BCE–476 CE

The Grecian Period, 600 BCE–146 BCE

The ancient Greeks did not believe that education was to be derived only from books. Blessed with a warm climate, many Greeks spent much of their time outdoors, often in open discussion in the marketplace. Above all they knew, as not other peoples of their time, the value of moderation. The virtues of self restraint, self-knowledge, self-reverence expressed their motives (Lawrence 1970, 26). In addition, the Greek gods were human in their emotions, thoughts, and deeds. Thus, for the early Greeks, religion was not a mystery that had to be conveyed by clergy; it was a set of stories or myths that could be understood by everyone and that had relevance to their daily lives.

Education varied among the different Greek city-states. Spartan education, for example, was much more militaristic than an education in Athens. With the exception of education in Sparta, most Greek education was private, for the wealthy families, and limited to boys. Formal education began at age seven, and classes were generally held in the teacher’s home. A family slave, called a pedagogue, accompanied the boy to school and monitored his progress. The boys were taught reading, writing, mathematics, singing, and playing the flute and lyre. For boys twelve years and older, the curriculum was expanded to include sports suited for the adolescent body. These included wrestling, running, and throwing the discus and javelin (Marrou 1956). Most Athenian youths were expected to perform some form of military service, which was regarded as a form of education. They also had additional training in the fine arts, culture, science, and music. Education, including military service, ended for most of these students when they reached the age of twenty.

The richest and ablest students, however, continued their