THE SCIENTIFIC REALIST EDUCATION MOVEMENTOF THE 20TH CENTURY

The scientific-realist education movement began in 1900 when Édouard Claparède, then a doctor at the Psychological Laboratory of the University of Geneva, responded to an appeal from the women in charge of special schools for backward and abnormal children in Geneva. The experience brought him to realize some of the defects of ordinary schools. Not as much thought is given, he argued, to the minds of children as is to their feet. Their shoes are of different sizes and shapes, made to fit their feet. When shall we have schools to measure? The psychological principles needed to adapt education to individual children were expounded in his Psychologie de l'enfant et pédagogie experimentale (1909). Later Claparède took a leading part in the creation of the J.-J. Rousseau Institute in Geneva, a school of educational sciences to which came students from all over the world.

Theorists such as Claparède hoped to provide a scientific basis for education, an aim that was furthered by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piage, who studied in a philosophical and psychological manner the intellectual development of children. Piaget argued, on the basis of his observations, that development of intelligence exhibits four chief stages and that the sequence is everywhere the same, although the ages in the stages of development may vary from culture to culture.

The first stage takes place during infancy, when children, even before they learn to speak, put objects together (addition), then separate them (subtraction), perceiving them as collections, rings, networks, groups. By the age of two or three, a basis has been laid. The children have developed kinetic muscular intelligence to some degree – they can think with their fingers, their hands, their bodies. Aided by language, the capacity for symbolic thinking slowly develops. This constitutes the second stage. Up to the age of seven or eight, some of the fundamental categories of adult thinking are still absent: there is seldom any notion, for instance, of cause and effect relationships.

The third stage is that of concrete operation. The child has begun to know how to deal with mental symbols and acquires abstract notions such as “responsibility.” But the child operates only when in the presence of concrete objects that can be manipulated. Pure abstract thinking is still too difficult. Teaching at this stage must be exceedingly concrete and active; purely verbal teaching is out of place. Only after about 12 years of age, with the onset of adolescence, do children develop the power to deal with formal mental operations not immediately attached to objects. Only then do theories begin to acquire real significance, and only then can purely verbal teaching be used.

The child's total development, particularly emotional and social growth, also concerned educational reformers. They pointed out the error in assuming that incentives to mental effort are the same for adults and children. The English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, in his doctrine of the “Cycle of Interests,” put forward a theory in line with the ideas of the reformers. Romance, precision, and generalization, said Whitehead, are the stages through which, rhythmically, mental growth proceeds.

Education should consist in a continual repetition of such cycles. Each lesson in a minor way should form an eddy cycle issuing in its own subordinate process. Whitehead believed that any scheme of education must be judged by the extent to which it stimulates a child to think. From the beginning of education, children should experience the joy of discovery.

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