Book
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.
Main ideas
- Records of children's spontaneous activity, written up the same day, reveal more of their thinking than set tests and interviews.
- The adult is never a neutral presence: what matters is not what we intend but what the children make of us.
- The child's world is a dramatic world, and make-believe can at any moment slip over into genuine inquiry.
- Egocentrism is an affair of feeling and phantasy, not of thought; development is a progressive penetration of feeling and phantasy by experience.
- Against Piaget, Isaacs holds that he credits to maturation what is partly due to experience, and that her records give positive evidence of reasoning earlier than he allows.
- Development is a continuous process of socialisation in which different levels of functioning coexist, not a sequence of hard and fast stages.
- Piaget's clinical method, by questioning children who lack a firm body of knowledge, pushes them into deeper layers of magic and phantasy: he is digging deeper than he realises.
- Engines, fire, water and animals hold a symbolic meaning for children, rooted in infantile phantasy, which feeds their interest in the real world.
What it shows
- 1930
Susan Isaacs disputed with Jean Piaget
In Intellectual Growth in Young Children (1930) Isaacs set her Malting House records against Piaget's stage theory, arguing that he put down to maturation ways of thinking that depend largely on experience and that appear much earlier under favourable conditions.