When Science Encounters the Child

by Beatty, Barbara; Cahan, Emily D.; Grant, Julia

• ISBN13: 9780807746912
• ISBN10: 0807746916
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-09-30
• Publisher: Teachers College Pr

Summary

This provocative volume takes a critical look at how psychology and the social sciences have been applied to the lives of children, particularly in education, parenting, and child welfare. Contributions by senior scholars and promising new voices offer fresh, balanced perspectives on key questions: What role has science played in perpetuating discrimination and inequality among different groups of children? How has science been employed in the politics of program formulation, advocacy, and funding? How has science been used to justify the practices of child professionals? How have parents and children responded to scientific ventures designed to help” them? Co-edited by a historian of education, a historian of childhood, and a developmental psychologist, this book contains an overview of the last century’s efforts to understand children by means of scientific methods and a cogent examination of how scientific research was translated into programs and policies (such as Universal Pre–K and the No Child Left Behind Act) in response to social needs.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(194)
Barbara Beatty, Emily D. Cahan, and Julia Grant
1. Toward a Socially Relevant Science: Notes on the History of Child Development Research	16	(19)
Emily D. Cahan
2. Psychologizing the Third R: Hall, Dewey, Thorndike, and Progressive Era Ideas on the Learning and Teaching of Arithmetic	35	(21)
Barbara Beatty
3. The Rise of English-Only Pedagogy: Immigrant Children, Progressive Education, and Language Policy in the United States, 1900-1930	56	(21)
Carlos Kevin Blanton
4. Raising "Precocious" Children: From Nineteenth-Century Pathology to Twentieth-Century Potential	77	(19)
Roblyn Rawlins
5. When Physicians and Psychologists Parted Ways: Professional Turf Wars in Child Study and Special Education, 1910-1920	96	(20)
Stephen Woolworth
6. In the Voices of Delinquents: Social Science, the Chicago Area Project, and a Boys' Culture of Casual Crime and Violence in the 1930's	116	(20)
David Wolcott and Steven Schlossman
7. The Whole Child: Social Science and Race at the White House Conference of 1930	136	(21)
Diana Selig
8. White Teachers and the "Black Psyche": Interculturalism and the Psychology of Race in the New York City High Schools, 1940-1950	157	(18)
Jonna Perrillo
9. The Children of Brown: Psychology and School Desegregation in Midcentury America	175	(20)
Christopher W. Schmidt
10. "Training" the Baby: Mothers' Responses to Advice Literature in the First Half of the Twentieth Century	195	(20)
Rima D. Apple
11. Bringing Up Boys: Science, Popular Culture, and Gender, 1890-1960	215	(20)
Julia Grant
Coda: The Sciences of Childhood	235	(1)
Barbara Finkelstein
About the Editors and the Contributors	235	(6)
Index	241