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Life and ways of the seven-to-eight year old
1 online resource (658 pages) : illustrations
"We set out in this study to describe and, as far as possible, to define a stage in the growth and maturing of children. Our children, ten of them, were somewhere between their seventh and eighth birthdays, and were all members of the larger group known as the Sevens, in the Little Red School House, an experimental school in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan. In this much, at least, they were a community. Their school experience had a basic integrity. There can be little doubt of its reality, significance and potency in their lives. They all were and felt themselves to be "Sevens, " sharing a common and important social experience for six hours a day, five days a week. Though each of them was already clearly and indisputably an individual, a personality, yet as a group they held in common many ways of speaking and doing and thinking, many feelings about themselves and grown-ups, many curiosities, impulses and conflicts about the world of things and people. We did not undertake to discover the sources of these common ways of life, assuming from the start that they were the product of inseparable cultural and biological influences. We would need only to shift the scene of study to an American suburb to find a considerably different picture of seven-year-oldness, not to mention what would be the outcome of studying seven-year-old children under basically different ethnological conditions. We needed only to walk up one flight of stairs to the room where the ten-year-olds carried on their school activities to see and to sense the changes wrought by three additional years of growing, questioning, doing, expressing and interacting with other children and adults. Growth in a specific environment had made our children what they were. Our task was to describe what they were and, from the start, we were convinced we could arrive at the kind of description which interested us only by being as concerned about how, as individuals, they differed from each other as we were about their common ways of living and learning. We undertook therefore to study only ten children, to observe and record what they did in school as individuals, in such a way as to reveal the qualitative, expressive significance of their behavior as well as the quality, tenor and general context of the situation to which they were responding. We did not, however, attempt to restrict ourselves to discussion of behavior, alone. In noting consistency, variability, coherence of behavior we were dealing with traits for individuals and trends for the group, although, to be sure, we could only make conjectures as to the before or after of these traits and trends from the data we had. Although interpretation was necessarily limited by the data of the study and the insight of the investigators, we were inclined to give it a fairly free hand, within what seemed to us to be the legitimate bounds of scientific inquiry. One of the prime purposes of this study is to encourage those who are in active contact with children--teachers, parents, social workers--to find, in children's behavior, significant clues to the deeper, general meanings of childhood experience. At the present stage of child psychology, this cannot be done except when one is ready to make interpretations on the basis of observations"--Introduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved).
by Barbara Biber [and others] With a chapter on the Rorschach test by Anna Hartoch and Ernst Schachtel.
First edition published in 1942 under title: Child life in school.
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
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