Intellectual Growth in Young Children

Susan Isaacs's account of how young children discover, reason and think, drawn from the records she kept as principal of the Malting House School in Cambridge from October 1924 to Christmas 1927. The children came from professional families and were well above average in mental ratio; in the last term there were twenty of them, aged two to eight. Notes were taken during the children's spontaneous activity and written up the same day, and Isaacs argues for such qualitative records over set tests. The school aimed to provoke the children's own inquiry and bring the real world within their direct experience, within limits of safety and routine and with no bullying or cruelty to animals. The book traces how the child's dramatic play and phantasy pass into genuine inquiry, and holds that egocentrism belongs to feeling and phantasy rather than to thought. Its third chapter sets the records against Jean Piaget: Isaacs finds reasoning appearing earlier than he allows, a continuous process of socialisation rather than fixed stages, and a clinical method that reaches into phantasy. A chapter on the children's interest in animals discusses their care, dissection and the adults' own inconsistency about killing. An appendix by Nathan Isaacs analyses children's 'why' questions.