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Transitory Connections: The Reception and Rejection of Jean Piaget’s Psychology in the Nursery School Movement in the 1920s and 1930s Barbara Beatty In 1927, nursery school educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell heralded Jean Piaget’s psychology as of ‘‘outstanding interest’’ and wrote in Progressive Education that it should be of ‘‘immense service’’ to psychologists, teachers, and parents. In 1929, psychologist Lois Meek praised Piaget’s research in the National Society for the Study of Education’s yearbook on preschool and parental education. In 1931, the National Association for Nursery Education bibliography on nursery school- based research, for which Meek was on the editorial board, included no mention of Piaget at all. 1 The appearance and disappearance of Piaget in the nursery school movement in the 1920s and 1930s was as if a window briefly opened then closed. Quick introductions and rapid fading of psychological theories are almost a truism in American education. A few theories become dominant and remain so for years; fleeting interest followed by evanescence seems more common. Patterns of reception and rejection vary enormously, of course, with much depending on timing, context, competition, and myriad conditions in schools. What might be learned from examination of transitory connections between psychology and education such as that between Jean Piaget’s psychology and the nursery school movement in the 1920s and 1930s? 2 History of Education Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 4 November 2009 Copyright r 2009 by the History of Education Society A Professor in the Education Department at Wellesley College, Barbara Beatty is writing a book on the rise and fall of Piaget’s ideas in American education. She would like to thank Emily Cahan, Julia Grant, and anonymous reviewers at the Quarterly for their helpful comments and suggestions. 1 Lucy Sprague Mitchell, ‘‘The Language and Thought of the Child,’’ Progressive Education IV (April-May-June 1927): 136, 139; Lois Meek in National Society for the Study of Education, Twenty-Eighth Yearbook, Preschool and Parental Education (Bloomington, IL: Public School Publishing Company, 1929), 459; Dorothy Bradbury, Esther Skeels, and Wand Sweida, eds., Nursery School Education: A Classified and Annotated Bibliography (Washington, DC: National Association for Nursery Education, 1935). 2 For some classics on transience in education, see, among many others, Larry Cuban, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890–1990
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Piaget Psychology in the Nursery School Movement in the 1920s

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Page 1: Piaget Psychology in the Nursery School Movement in the 1920s

Transitory Connections: The Reception andRejection of Jean Piaget’s Psychology inthe Nursery School Movement in the 1920sand 1930s

Barbara Beatty

In 1927, nursery school educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell heralded JeanPiaget’s psychology as of ‘‘outstanding interest’’ and wrote in ProgressiveEducation that it should be of ‘‘immense service’’ to psychologists,teachers, and parents. In 1929, psychologist Lois Meek praisedPiaget’s research in the National Society for the Study of Education’syearbook on preschool and parental education. In 1931, the NationalAssociation for Nursery Education bibliography on nursery school-based research, for which Meek was on the editorial board, included nomention of Piaget at all.1

The appearance and disappearance of Piaget in the nursery schoolmovement in the 1920s and 1930s was as if a window briefly opened thenclosed. Quick introductions and rapid fading of psychological theoriesare almost a truism in American education. A few theories becomedominant and remain so for years; fleeting interest followed byevanescence seems more common. Patterns of reception and rejectionvary enormously, of course, with much depending on timing, context,competition, and myriad conditions in schools. What might be learnedfrom examination of transitory connections between psychology andeducation such as that between Jean Piaget’s psychology and the nurseryschool movement in the 1920s and 1930s?2

History of Education Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 4 November 2009 Copyright r 2009 by the History of Education Society

A Professor in the Education Department at Wellesley College, Barbara Beatty is writinga book on the rise and fall of Piaget’s ideas in American education. She would like to thankEmily Cahan, Julia Grant, and anonymous reviewers at the Quarterly for their helpfulcomments and suggestions.

1Lucy Sprague Mitchell, ‘‘The Language and Thought of the Child,’’ ProgressiveEducation IV (April-May-June 1927): 136, 139; Lois Meek in National Society forthe Study of Education, Twenty-Eighth Yearbook, Preschool and Parental Education(Bloomington, IL: Public School Publishing Company, 1929), 459; Dorothy Bradbury,Esther Skeels, and Wand Sweida, eds., Nursery School Education: A Classified and AnnotatedBibliography (Washington, DC: National Association for Nursery Education, 1935).

2For some classics on transience in education, see, among many others, LarryCuban, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890–1990

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Piaget’s psychology was very new when it made its first appearancein the nursery school movement. What were the origins of hispsychology? What did it imply about the education of youngchildren? How did it come to the United States and how and bywhom was it received? How and why did it disappear and who werethe key actors in its rejection? What might the reaction to Piaget suggestabout the ideology and interaction of psychology and pedagogy in thenursery school movement in the 1920s and 1930s? What might this firsttransitFPiaget’s ideas reappeared in a second transit in the 1960s and1970sFtell us about the transmission, diffusion, and interaction ofpsychological theories in education generally?

I am calling Piaget’s two appearances in American educationtransitory connections in two senses, as transatlantic transits and astransient phenomena. Piaget’s theory of child development was one ofmany transatlantic transits known to preschool educators and Americanpsychologists in the twentieth century. We know a great deal about someof the main competitors whose psychological theories connected withAmerican elementary and secondary education for long periods of time,especially Thorndike and Dewey. What might be learned from moretransient interactions in preschool education?3

Examining the transit of a lesser-known psychology in a less-researched field illuminates the processes of introduction, advocacy,criticism, and rejection common in many interactions between psychol-ogy and education. Unlike experimental psychology, behaviorism,and psychoanalytic psychology, Piaget’s developmental psychologyhas been largely ignored by historians of education, perhaps becausePiagetianism was largely confined to preschool education. Piagetianpreschool education has been largely ignored as well. Larry Cubanargues that the success of the kindergarten, for instance, may have beendue in part to its ‘‘flying under the radar’’ of grade-school education.Because of what I call ‘‘preschool exceptionalism,’’ the insulation andisolation of preschools from the norms of elementary and secondaryeducation, much of preschool education other than the Froebelian

(New York: Longman, 1984) and ‘‘Reforming Again, Again, and Again,’’ EducationalResearcher 19, no. 1 (1990): 3–13; Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the AmericanCurriculum, 1893–1958 (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986); and David Tyack andLarry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1995). Political scientist John Kingdom talks about policy‘‘windows’’ in Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (Boston: Little Brown, 1984).

3On the transmission of ideas in the Atlantic world during this period see Daniel T.Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press ofHarvard University, 1998). For an example of international diffusion see RobertaWollons, ed., Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea (New Haven,CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

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kindergarten and Montessori has flown under the radar of historians ofeducation.4

Preschool education may be one of the best, albeit atypical, fields inwhich to study relationships between psychology and education reform.Like reforms in private progressive schools, reforms in preschooleducation are easy to see because they are less obscured by encrusteddidactic practices. Because preschool reforms do not threaten thestatus quo of elementary and secondary education, they are lesssubject to the dulling effects of traditional graded schooling. Becausepreschool educators are not expected to produce measurable academicachievement, they are freer to experiment, to use play-based pedagogiesin which children are thought to create knowledge actively themselvesrather than learn it passively from teachers.

Given this relative freedom from traditional restraints, one mightexpect new ideas in preschool education to flourish and remain in uselonger than in the upper grades. Some did. Froebelianism enjoyed morethan half a century of relatively faithful implementation. Even furtheroutside the mainstream, with a short interruption in the United States,forms of Montessorianism have been around for almost a century. Thelack of constraint on preschool educators, however, also gave them moreleeway to try out a wide variety of ideas, some of which, such asPiagetianism when it was first introduced, did not stick.5

The transience of some connections between preschool educationand psychology may be related to gender and the low status of workingwith young children. An almost entirely female occupation, preschooleducation was seen as women’s work, child care, not education. Whenolder, nineteenth-century ideologies of Republican, Romantic, civiliz-ing motherhood which elevated kindergartning gave way, preschooleducators were left with little to uplift their field. One answer to this

4Larry Cuban, ‘‘Why Some Reforms Last: The Case of the Kindergarten,’’American Journal of Education 100 (February 1992): 166–94. Piaget has been studied bya few historians of psychology. On Piaget, see especially Fernando Vidal, Piaget BeforePiaget (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) and Yeh Hseuh, ‘‘Jean Piaget,Spontaneous Development and Constructivist Teaching’’ (PhD dissertation, HarvardGraduate School of Education, 1997); ‘‘ ‘He Sees the Development of Children’sConcepts Upon a Background of Sociology’: Jean Piaget’s Honorary Degree atHarvard University in 1936,’’ History of Psychology 7, no. 1 (2004): 20–44; and ‘‘TheHawthorne Experiments and the Introduction of Jean Piaget in American IndustrialPsychology, 1929–1932,’’ History of Psychology 5, no. 2 (2002): 163–69. Interest inpreschool education may be increasing. See for example the May 2009 special issue ofHistory of Education Quarterly on international preschool education.

5On varieties of preschool education, see among others, Barbara Beatty, PreschoolEducation in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); V. Celia Lascaridesand Blythe F. Hinitz, History of Early Childhood Education (New York: Falmer, 2000); andKeith Whitescarver and Jacqueline Cossentino, ‘‘Montessori and the Mainstream: ACentury of Reform on the Margins,’’ Teachers College Record 110, no. 12 (2008): 2571–600.

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dilemma of professionalization was to overtly embrace psychology, toattempt to provide preschool education the respect it lacked. Still new tothe academy, psychology was also in need of status. Until they becamebetter established, many psychologists welcomed nursery schooleducators and collaborated with them in building a body of nurseryschool-based research. Developmental or ‘‘genetic psychology’’ as itwas initially called was especially dependent on the nursery schoolmovement.6

Developmental psychology was not the only option for nurseryschool educators, however. With various types of psychology clamoringfor academic approval in the 1920s and 1930s and vying for control offiefdoms within education, the allegiance of nursery school educatorswas up for grabs. With which brand of psychology would they place theirbets, experimental psychology, Watson’s behaviorism, Thorndike’s edu-cational psychology, Freud’s psychoanalytic psychology, or develop-mental psychology, to name the main contenders?

The initial reception and rejection of Jean Piaget’s developmentalpsychology in the nursery school movement exemplifies how transientconnections can be when both psychology and education are filled withdifferent models jockeying for prominence. In the 1920s and 1930s, theheyday of the nursery school movement, many variants of new ideas ineducation and psychology were in competition. The larger historicalcontext within which these competitions occurred, to which I cannot dojustice in this short piece, was also very important. The economic boomand bust cycle of the 1920s and 1930s and the rise of fascism and wardecreased funding for some new ideas and changed the flow of transat-lantic transits of psychological and educational ideas as some psy-chologists and educators emigrated to the United States, while others,such as Piaget, stayed in Europe.7

6Barbara Finkelstein, ‘‘The Revolt Against Selfishness: Women and the Dilemmasof Professionalism in Early Childhood Education,’’ in Professionalism and the EarlyChildhood Practitioner, eds. Bernard Spodek, Olivia N. Saracho, and D. L. Peters (NewYork: Teachers College Press, 1988), 10–28; Marian Bloch, ‘‘Becoming Scientific andProfessional: An Historical Perspective on the Aims and Effects of Early Education,’’ inThe Formation of School Subjects, ed. Thomas Popkewitz (New York: Falmer Press, 1987),41–49; Barbara Beatty, ‘‘The Rise of the American Nursery School: Laboratory for aScience of Child Development,’’ in Developmental Psychology and Social Change, eds. DavidPillemer and Sheldon H. White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 264–87; Emily D. Cahan, ‘‘Toward a Socially Relevant Science: Notes on the History of ChildDevelopment Research,’’ in When Science Encounters the Child: Education, Parenting, andChild Welfare in 20th-Century America, eds. Barbara Beatty, Emily D. Cahan, and JuliaGrant (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006), 16–34.

7On the crowded terrain of psychology and education, see among others, EllenCondliffe Lagemann, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

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Origins of Piaget’s Developmental Psychology

Grounded in the philosophies of continental European rationalism,evolutionary biology, and the New Education, as progressive educationwas called in Europe, Jean Piaget’s psychology exemplifies the nest-edness of child psychology and nursery education in the early 1920s.Piaget did his early research with young children at the Maison desPetits, the laboratory school at the Institute Jean-Jacques Rousseau inGeneva. His early books were filled with verbatim transcripts ofconversations with young children. He observed children playing,listened to them talking, asked them about how the physical worldworks, studied their games, probed them about right and wrong, andfrom these samples of child life, developed a theory of the evolution ofchildren’s thought.8

Heavily dependent on language and largely descriptive, Piaget’sfirst five books in the 1920s and early 1930s were based mainly onchildren’s answers to psychologists’ questions during what Piaget called‘‘clinical interviews.’’ Later, in the 1930s and 1940s, when he beganworking with his colleague Barbel Inhelder, Piaget developed a ‘‘revisedclinical method,’’ in which he gave children problems to solve withphysical objects, such as different sized beakers, which when youngchildren pour the same amount of water back and forth they say thatthere is more water in the tall, thin beaker and older children say theamounts are identical, and can explain why. Nor had Piaget yetdeveloped his full theory of ‘‘disequilibrium’’ and ‘‘equilibration,’’ themechanisms through which he argued children passed through fourstages of developmentFsensorimotor, primary operations, concreteoperations, and formal operationsFin which they successivelyconstructed their own knowledge of the world through interactionswith the environment. These differences in Piaget’s early and moremature work matter because the theory that appeared in the United

8Jean Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child, trans. Marjorie Gabain (NewYork: World Publishing, 16th edition, 1971, 1st French edition, Paris: Delachaux etNiestle, 1923, 1st English editions, London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1926, NewYork: Harcourt Brace, 1926); Jean Piaget, Judgment and Reasoning in the Child, trans.Marjorie Warden (Paterson, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1959, 1st French edition, Paris:Delachaux et Niestle, Neuchatel, 1924, 1st English editions, London, Kegan Paul,Trench, & Trubner, 1928, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1928); Jean Piaget, The Child’sConception of the World, trans. Joan and Andrew Tomlinson (Lanham, MD: Rowman &Littlefield, 1951, 1st French edition, Paris: Alcan, 1926, 1st English editions, Routledge& Kegan Paul, London, 1929, Harcourt & Brace, New York, 1929); Jean Piaget, TheChild’s Conception of Physical Causality (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2001, 1st Frenchedition, Paris: Alcan, 1927, 1st English edition: London, Kegan Paul, Trench, &Trubner,1930); Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child, trans. Marjorie Gabain (New York:Free Press, 1997, 1st French edition, Paris: Alcan, 1932, 1st English edition, London:K. Paul, Trench & Trubner, 1932).

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States in the 1920s and early 1930s, unlike his work from the late l930sonward, contained fewer examples of children demonstrating theirintellectual abilities and was less developed and convincing.

The interaction and mixing of different philosophies andpsychologies is evident in Piaget’s life and education. Born in 1896 inNeuchatel, Switzerland, to a professor of medieval literature and asocialist, religious mother, Piaget was a precocious child and buddingnaturalist. At the age of ten, he wrote a paper on an albino sparrow, whichwas published in the magazine of a local natural history club, whichPiaget soon joined. In 1907 he began working with the president ofthe club, classifying land and freshwater mollusks. As an adolescent,Piaget read voraciously in philosophy, sociology, and psychology,especially Kant, Henri Bergson, Herbert Spencer, and William James.After finishing his doctorate in 1918 at the age of twenty-one in theDivision of Science at the University of Neuchatel, with a dissertation onmollusks, Piaget went to Zurich, where he attended psychologylaboratories, worked in a psychiatric clinic, listened to Carl Jung’slectures, and read Freud. Between 1919 and 1921, Piaget studied inParis at the Sorbonne and in Alfred Binet’s laboratory school, where,under the supervision of Theodore Simon, he worked on standardizingCyril Burt’s English intelligence tests on Parisian children. Fascinatedby the children’s wrong answers, which Piaget sensed revealed moreabout the growth of thought than their correct answers, he drew uponpsychiatry and his own work with children, to develop his trademark‘‘clinical interview method,’’ and became interested in the ‘‘embryologyof intelligence,’’ which he called ‘‘genetic epistemology.’’9

Piaget spent the rest of his long professional career in Geneva, ahub of experimentation and reform in psychology and education.Associated with the Institute Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the University of

9My understanding of Piaget’s early life is based largely on Vidal, Piaget beforePiaget, Piaget’s autobiography, ‘‘Jean Piaget,’’ in A History of Psychology in Autobiography,Vol. 4, eds. Edwin G. Boring et al. (Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1952), 237–56, and Yeh, ‘‘Jean Piaget, Spontaneous Development and Constructivist Teaching.’’Other biographical sources include Margaret A. Boden, Jean Piaget (New York: VikingPress, 1979); Michael Chapman, Constructive Evolution: Origins and Development of Piaget’sThought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Richard I. Evans, Jean Piaget:The Man and His Ideas (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1973); John H. Flavell, ‘‘Historiographicaland Bibliographical Note,’’ Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 27,no. 2; ‘‘Thought in the Young Child: Report of a Conference on Intellective Developmentwith Particular Attention to the Work of Jean Piaget’’ (1962): 5–18. For discussion of thedevelopment of Piaget’s thought see especially John H. Flavell, The DevelopmentalPsychology of Jean Piaget (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1963); Herbert Ginsburgand Sylvia Opper, Piaget’s Theory of Intellectual Development (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:Prentice Hall, 1969); Howard E. Gruber and J. Jacques Voneche, eds., The Essential Piaget(Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1977); and Brian Rotman, Jean Piaget: Psychologist ofthe Real (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).

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Geneva, and what became his Center for Genetic Epistemology, Piagetwas connected to the growing international network of research centerswhere psychologists and educators worked together on psycho-educational problems. In 1921, at the age of twenty-five and without adegree in psychology, which he never obtained, Piaget was appointedDirector of Studies at the Institute Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by EdouardClaparede, a psychologist with broad interests in pedagogy, physiology,psychotherapy, neurology, and experimental psychology. Begun in 1912and imbued with the scientific spirit of Protestant Geneva, the Institutewas a center for teacher training and research in the New Education.Claparede and the international group of psychologists and educators atthe Institute were well acquainted with the work of William James, JohnDewey, and other American progressives and pragmatists, and withEuropean educators such as Ovide Decroly, who designed methods forBelgian children with special needs, and Georg Kerschensteiner, aleader of the work-school movement in Germany. By 1928, there wereseventy graduate students at the Institute. No matter the topic of theirresearch, they were required to observe children in the Institute’sMaison des Petits and in other schools in Geneva.10

In many ways, Piaget’s educational psychology mirrored that of theeducational philosophy of teachers at the Maison des Petits, whosepractice combined different forms of psychology and preschooleducation. Founded in 1913, the Maison des Petits opened its doors in1914 with an enrollment of twenty children between the ages of threeand seven. By 1915, there were thirty children; by 1926, fifty. In 1919, itbecame a public school, with funding from the commune of Geneva, asthe city government was called, but still associated with the InstituteJean-Jacques Rousseau. The teachers, Mina Audemars and LouiseLafendel, had kindergarten training and were influenced by Froebel’sideas of natural development, play, and manual activities, as well as bythe philosophy and methods of Maria Montessori, whose graduatedcylinders and other sensorial materials were used at the school. Theschool’s name was a French rendition of Montessori’s Casa dei Bambinior Children’s House, and two Montessori teachers had given classes atthe Institute. Claparede’s Deweyan theory of ‘‘functional education,’’ inwhich children’s ‘‘wants’’ or ‘‘needs’’ were satisfied by their play was

10Hseuh, ‘‘Jean Piaget,’’ 67–72, 78–82. On Claparede see ‘‘Edouard Claparede,’’ inA History of Psychology in Autobiography, ed. Carl Murchison (Worcester, MA: ClarkUniversity Press, 1930). On the New Education, see among many others, CarletonWashburne, New Schools in the Old World (New York: The John Day Co., 1926) and MarcDepaepe, Frank Simon, and Angelo Van Gorp, ‘‘The Canonization of Ovide Decroly asthe ‘Saint’ of the New Education,’’ History of Education Quarterly 43 ( June 2003): 224–48.

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probably the most direct influence on Audemars and Lafendel, and onPiaget, as well.11

Piaget’s first five books, translated into English soon after theirpublication, were a continuous piece of research on the development ofchildren’s thought. For his 1923 The Language and Thought of the Child,Piaget followed two boys at the Maison des Petits, Lev and Pie, both sixand a half, recording their ‘‘ego-centric speech,’’ when they spoke tothemselves without taking hearers into account, and their ‘‘socializedspeech,’’ when they talked to other children, which Piaget calculatedincreased with age. In his 1924 book, Judgment and Reasoning in the Child,he examined children’s concepts of causality, arguing that a childconstructed his own sense of reality through play and saw ‘‘theexternal world as though he had previously constructed it with hisown mind.’’ In his 1926 The Child’s Conception of the World, Piaget studiedchildren’s ideas of how the external world works and hit upon his famousline of questioning about children’s ‘‘magical causality’’ when they saidthat the sun and moon and other inanimate objects acted as if they werealive and followed them around, another form of egocentrism. In his1927 book, The Child’s Conception of Physical Causality, he describedseventeen types of causal relations, from ‘‘animism’’ through ‘‘logicaldeduction,’’ and explored children’s explanations of the movement of air,wind, water, and other natural phenomena.12

In his 1932 The Moral Judgment of the Child, Piaget extended histheory to social development, and analyzed the social implications ofchildren’s play. Using a now classic example of boys playing withmarbles, he described the stages of rules through which he arguedmoral and legal thought emerged. When Piaget looked at girls’ gamessuch as hopscotch, however, he said that he did not find as many rules,and asserted that ‘‘the legal sense’’ was ‘‘far less developed in little girls,’’for reasons about which he did not speculate, but which may reveal agender bias in his research that led to criticism later in his career.13

Eclectic influences on Piaget’s thought were especially apparent inthis last of his first five books that appeared in America in the 1920s and1930s. In The Moral Judgment of the Child, Piaget cited Adolphe

11Daniel Hameline, ‘‘Aux Origines de la Maison des Petits,’’ in ‘‘Une Ecole Ou LesEnfants Veulent Ce Qu’ils Font: La Maison des Petits hier et aujourd’hui,’’ Collection InstitutJ.-J. Rousseau, eds. Christiane Perregaux, Laurence Rieben, and Charles Magnin(Lausanne: Loisirs et Pedagogie), 19–20, 24–26. Mina Audemars and Louise Lafendel,Compte-rendu d’experiences faites a la Maison des Petits Durant notre conge de 1914 a 1920, inPerregaux et al., ‘‘Une Ecole,’’ 191–92.

12Jean Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child; Judgment and Reasoning in theChild, 255; The Child’s Conception of the World; The Child’s Conception of Physical Causality;The Moral Judgment of the Child.

13Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child, 77–83, 122–23, 137–48.

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Ferriere’s ‘‘Activity School,’’ in which education was based on‘‘individual interests and free initiative,’’ as a model. The first profes-sor of education at the Institute Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ferriere basedhis philosophy on Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Bergson, G. StanleyHall, and Dewey, and developed pedagogy in which children learnedthrough manual activities such as gardening, cooking, weaving, candle-making, and carpentry, meant as experiential, not vocational education.Piaget also mentioned Dewey and wrote that teachers in progressiveschools in Europe such as Ferriere’s and in America saw how wellchildren behaved when they were genuinely interested in what they weredoing.14

As the number of international researchers associated with theInstitute Jean- Jacques Rousseau grew, Piaget’s ideas drew internationalattention, much to his purported surprise. His first five books weretranslated into English and published in both London and New York,by Kegan Paul, Trench & Trubner and Harcourt & Brace, within twoor three years of their French editions. French and English editions ofThe Moral Judgment of the Child came out simultaneously. In 1929, Piagettook on the post of Director of the Bureau of International Education,later associated with UNESCO, which brought his research into evenlarger circulation internationally.15

Reception of Piaget’s Psychology in the Nursery School Movement

Piaget’s psychology was attractive to British and American nurseryschool educators in the 1920s and 1930s in part because it evolved in asimilar environment. The early nursery school movement, progressiveeducation for young children, was a large psychological and educationalexperiment. Associated with colleges, universities, and traininginstitutes, many American nursery schools were begun for the expresspurpose of producing psychological research and were laboratories forthe new science of child development. Crusading socialist MargaretMcMillan, who with her sister Rachel founded the first nursery school ina London slum in 1913, was especially influenced by the sensorypsychology of Edouard Seguin. Future American nursery schoolleaders such as Abigail Eliot visited and studied with McMillan andBritish nursery school educator Grace Owen, sister-in-law of Teachers

14Piaget, Moral Judgment, 364, 365, 405, 406. Adolphe Ferriere, The Activity School,trans. F. D. Moore and F. C. Wooten (New York: John Day Co., 1928), 133–46. OnPiaget’s early views on pedagogy see among others, Silvia Parrat-Dayan, ‘‘Piaget, LaPsychologie et ses Applications,’’ Archives de Psychologie 65 (1997): 247–63.

15Piaget, ‘‘Jean Piaget,’’ 251.

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College psychologist James McKeen Cattell, and imbibed thispsychological spirit.16

Private philanthropy played an important role in supportingnursery schools and disseminating Piaget’s research. In 1923,University of Chicago-trained psychologist Beardsley Ruml andUniversity of Chicago-trained economist Lawrence K. Frank begandistributing large sums of Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial fundsto projects designed to advance child development and parent educationthrough scientific methods. By 1925, Ruml and Frank had awardedmore than a million dollars to nursery school-related research, and gaveout another $10 or $11 million before they left the fund in 1930. Much ofthis money went to child development institutes at Teachers College,Yale, and at the Universities of Minnesota, Iowa, California, andToronto, and elsewhere, all of which operated laboratory nurseryschools. The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial also provided aninitial $15,000 grant with more to follow to fund Piaget’s position andresearch at the Institute Jean-Jacques Rousseau.17

Piaget’s initial reception by nursery school educators was mixed.Nursery educators who read Piaget’s first five books hoped that hisnaturalistic methods would influence academic psychology, and sawparallels with their own research. Lucy Sprague Mitchell, whocollaborated with Caroline Pratt and Harriet Johnson in founding theBureau of Educational Experiments, in New York City in 1916, was one

16Beatty, ‘‘The Rise of the American Nursery School.’’ On McMillan and Britishnursery schools see, among others, Lascarides and Hinitz, History of Early ChildhoodEducation; Beatty, Preschool Education in America; Carolyn Steedman, Childhood, Culture,and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan, 1860–1931 (New Brunswick, NJ: RutgersUniversity Press, 1990); Ilse Forest, Preschool Education: A Historical and Critical Study(New York: Macmillan, 1927); and Nanette Whitbread, The Evolution of the Nursery-Infant School: A History of Infant and Nursery Education in Britain (London: Routledge andKegan Paul, 1972).

17On Rockefeller funding and support for Piaget and child development research,see Steven L. Schlossman, ‘‘Philanthropy and the Gospel of Child Development,’’ Historyof Education Quarterly 21 (1981): 297; Julia Grant, ‘‘Constructing the Normal Child: theRockefeller Charities and the Science of Child Development,’’ in Studying PhilanthropicFoundations: New Scholarship, New Possibilities, ed. Ellen Lagemann (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1998), 131–51; Yeh Hseuh, ‘‘ ‘He Sees the Development of Children’sConcepts upon a Background of Sociology’ ’’; and Barbel Inhelder, ‘‘Barbel Inhelder,’’ inA History of Psychology in Autobiography, Vol. VII, ed. Gardner Lindzey (Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press, 1989), 209–44. On the child development institutes, see,among others, Alice Boardman Smuts, Science in the Service of Children, 1893–1935 (NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Emily D. Cahan, ‘‘Toward a Socially RelevantScience’’; Beatty, ‘‘The Rise of the American Nursery School’’; Julia Grant, Raising Baby bythe Book: The Education of American Mothers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,1998); Milton Senn, ‘‘Insights on the Child Development Movement in the UnitedStates,’’ Monographs for the Society of Research in Child Development 40 (Serial no. 161); andRobert R. Sears, Your Ancients Revisited: A History of Child Development (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1975).

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of the first to spread word of Piaget in the United States. Begun in 1919in Greenwich Village, the Bureau’s nursery school was a center forresearch much like that conducted at the Maison des Petits. Filled withlengthy, verbatim transcripts of children’s conversations and samplecopies of children’s daily records, Harriet Johnson’s books A NurserySchool Experiment and Children in the Nursery School, document howpsychologists and nursery educators worked together at the Bureau ofEducational Experiments as they did in Geneva.18

Both appreciative and critical, Mitchell’s review of Piaget’s firstbook, The Language and Thought of the Child, published in ProgressiveEducation in 1927, shows much about what nursery school educatorsinitially liked about Piaget, and some of what they did not. The journal,begun in 1924 in by the Association for the Advancement of ProgressiveEducation that became the Progressive Education Association, pub-lished articles by many well-known nursery school educators, includingCaroline Pratt and Margaret Naumberg. Mitchell praised Piaget forstudying children in the relatively naturalistic environment of a school,rather than a laboratory. Piaget’s work, which ‘‘seems to have startledprofessional psychologists,’’ was ‘‘a relief to the layman,’’ Mitchell said.By studying children ‘‘in their spontaneous activities instead of theartificially controlled set-up of a laboratory,’’ Piaget could be veryuseful to schools, because he saw ‘‘the application of his findings toschool procedure’’ and addressed those interested in ‘‘the art of teaching’’as much as he did ‘‘specialists in child psychology.’’ If only he could‘‘interest his professional brethren in this kind of observation’’ he wouldperform ‘‘an immense service both to them and to those teachers andparents who look to psychologists with incurable hopefulness,’’ Mitchellwrote, revealing much about the relationship between preschooleducation and psychology. Piaget’s methods provided ‘‘valid materialto work on,’’showed the ‘‘child in action,’’ the ‘‘child we know and wish tounderstand,’’ and was of ‘‘outstanding interest.’’ Piaget was on ‘‘anexciting pioneer path in psychology,’’ which Mitchell hoped he wouldbe able to induce others to follow. ‘‘I don’t see how they can resist.’’19

Confident of her own knowledge of children’s language develop-ment, Mitchell critiqued Piaget for using adult standards to judgechildren. Piaget’s classifications of children’s egocentric and socializedspeech were based on adult language, she said, and did not take intoaccount the context in which the children were talking. Nor did he

18Joyce Antler, Lucy Sprague Mitchell: The Making of a Modern Woman (New Haven,CT: Yale University Press, 1987); Harriet Johnson, A Nursery School Experiment (NewYork: Bureau of Educational Experiments, 1922); Harriet Johnson, Children in the NurserySchool (New York: John Day Company, 1928).

19Lucy Sprague Mitchell, ‘‘The Language and Thought of the Child,’’ 136, 139.

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understand infant speech Mitchell argued, a topic which Piaget wouldtake up in more depth later. Piaget said that repetition, for instance, was‘‘a remnant of baby prattle.’’ ‘‘As if that explained it!’’ Mitchell exclaimed.She objected that Piaget viewed words solely as a progression fromegocentric to socialized speech and missed their inherent value as playand art. Play with words was a ‘‘permanent and precious part of thehuman language,’’she said. Repetition led to literature, and was ‘‘in partenjoyment of the sound quality and the muscle quality of words andphrases.’’ By viewing language teleologically as ‘‘a tool for the expressionof logical thought,’’ Piaget missed the artistic side of expression,Mitchell said, which she and many others in the nursery schoolmovement valued highly. Mitchell’s critique was prescient; in the1940s Piaget came to believe that actions, not language, best revealedthe development of logical thought.20

Author of the Here and Now storybooks, Mitchell focused especiallyon the relevance of Piaget’s ideas for children’s literature. She noted thatPiaget’s concept of egocentric speech supported her view that youngchildren needed literature based on things that they had experiencedthemselves. If young children were pre-logical, as Piaget argued, then itwas ‘‘inappropriate to present them with facts’’ unrelated to things theyknew. Writers of books for young children should present materials asshe did in her storybooks, which were filled with pictures of everydayobjects, things presented in ‘‘sense and motor terms and not ingeneralized or abstract observations’’ or artificial ‘‘plots’’ which youngchildren could not understand. Mitchell worried, however, that Piagetdid not understand the potential pedagogical value of ‘‘Rhythm orpattern’’ to make understanding a story ‘‘clearer’’ and more ‘‘accurate.’’21

Mitchell especially objected to the implication that Piaget knewmore about the development of preschool children than Americannursery educators did. Piaget’s findings were not new to nurseryschool teachers, Mitchell said. He confirmed what good teachersalready knew: that the ‘‘old-type pedagogy’’ was absurd. His theoriesabout the egocentric nature of young children’s thinking and the pre-logical stage of their development were already recognized by ‘‘schoolsthat work to give children first-hand experiences rather than infor-mation; that emphasize relationships and avoid isolated facts.’’ HarrietJohnson, Mitchell said, had already noted the ‘‘pre-social stage’’ Piagetdescribed, in the drawings and block buildings of children under three atthe Bureau of Educational Experiments nursery school, understood theconnection between speech and action, and had taken this into account

20Ibid., 136–37; Emily Cahan, personal communication with author, August 2007.21Ibid., 136–39.

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in the ‘‘language pedagogy’’ she had worked out in the Bureau’s nurseryschool.22

Critical reviews of Piaget’s first books also appeared in the journal ThePedagogical Seminary and Journal of Genetic Psychology, a bellwether of chang-ing psychological trends. First published in 1891 at Clark Universitywhere G. Stanley Hall was president, the journal was originally founded topromote Hall’s child study movement, a precursor of developmentalpsychology. In the 1880s, Hall, who had studied in Germany underWilhelm Wundt and Carl Ludwig and at Harvard under William James,had collected data on young children in Boston kindergartens. Like Piaget,who knew Hall’s work, Hall had asked children questions, relied uponinformation gathered from teachers, and used naturalistic rather thanlaboratory methods to develop a ‘‘genetic psychology,’’ based on themetaphor of organic development, which Piaget later concretized in hisresearch. By 1929, however, when reviews of Piaget’s work began comingout, Hall had died, and the journal had changed hands. Although thejournal published everything from studies of relearning T-mazes by albinorats to analyses of the daily behavior of infants and memory span inpreschool children, the editorial board was increasingly dominated bybehaviorists, learning theorists, and psychometricians, such as Ivan Pavlov,Edward L. Thorndike, John Watson, John Anderson, and LewisTerman.23

Susan Isaacs’s 1929 review in The Pedagogical Seminary and Journal ofGenetic Psychology of Piaget’s first three books was particularly cogent andrevealing. An English progressive educator with degrees in infanteducation and philosophy who had studied psychology at CambridgeUniversity, Isaacs was doing her own research on children’s mentaldevelopment. She based her critique of Piaget on extensive observationsof children aged two to ten at her radically progressive Malting HouseSchool in Cambridge, which she directed from 1924 to 1927. Isaacs hadseen Piaget’s methods first-hand when she visited the Maison des Petits.Piaget in turn had visited Isaacs’school when he came to give a lecture atCambridge in 1927. Like Mitchell, Isaacs praised Piaget for studyingchildren in a naturalistic context and for trying to get at the ‘‘livingthought of the child himself, embedded in the matrix of feeling anddoing.’’ There was ‘‘probably no single contributor to genetic psychology

22Ibid., 138.23On Hall and the child study movement, see among others, Dorothy Ross, G.

Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985);Beatty, Preschool Education in America; Leila Zenderland, ‘‘Education, Evangelism, and theOrigins of Clinical Psychology,’’ Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 24 (April1988): 152–65; and Sheldon H. White, ‘‘The Child Study Movement: Early Growth andDevelopment of the Symbolized Child,’’ Advances in Child Behavior and Development 17(1982): 233–85.

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within recent years whose work is of greater importance and interest thanthat of Jean Piaget,’’ she wrote. But Isaacs’s extensive recording ofchildren’s speech, transcribed in her 1929 book Intellectual Growth inYoung Children, had convinced her that many children’s questions weresimply an ‘‘automatic verbal habit.’’ When the children at her schooldissecting the gall bladder of a rabbit asked ‘‘What is that?’’ it was oftenout of habit, she said. Piaget had no ‘‘notion of chance.’’ He assumed thatthere were ‘‘explanations for everything.’’ Sometimes children’s reasoningwas ‘‘pre-causal,’’ Isaacs thought, but sometimes they were just asking orresponding to implications in the psychologist’s questions.24

Isaacs found three main ‘‘sources of error’’ in Piaget’s ideas. LikeMitchell, she worried that Piaget saw children through the lens of aphilosopher and focused too much on how they came to ‘‘feel logicalnecessity and to syllogize correctly.’’ Even adults were not always aslogical as Piaget assumed, she opined. Based on Piaget’s ‘‘philosopher’smeasuring stick,’’ Isaacs said, the daily thoughts and behavior of mostadults would display the ‘‘syncretism and tolerance of contradiction’’ ofchildren, especially when discussing unfamiliar subjects or fields whichlacked clear and rigid objectivity, such as ‘‘politics, sociology, andreligion,’’ and when ‘‘passion and prejudice’’ prevailed. Piaget ‘‘enor-mously’’ exaggerated the differences between the ‘‘mental ways’’ ofchildren and adults, Isaacs wrote, and attributed too much uniformity tothe stages of children’s thought. Everyone’s thoughts varied, in context,daily, she said.25

Isaacs’s second criticism was of Piaget’s ‘‘pseudo-biological’’ way oflooking at mental development. He treated the mind as a biologicalorganism going through a ‘‘series of metamorphoses occurring at defi-nite ages’’ rather than ‘‘as a continuous curve, with peaks and troughs, ofdevelopment of ways of functioning,’’ she wrote. There were stages ofdevelopmental maturation, Isaacs said, but Piaget viewed them toorigidly, not seeing that we kept much from each stage with us as wematured, a critique that would haunt Piaget’s work.26

Isaacs’s third criticism was that Piaget exaggerated children’segocentrism and lack of knowledge. Piaget did not give enough

24Susan Isaacs, Review, ‘‘The Language and Thought of the Child, Judgment andReasoning in the Child, and The Child’s Conception of the World,’’ The PedagogicalSeminary and Journal of Genetic Psychology XXXVI (1929): 597. Susan Isaacs, IntellectualDevelopment in Young Children (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1930), 326, 192, 327,333. On Isaacs see Jody Hall, ‘‘From Susan Isaacs to Lillian Weber and Deborah Meier: AProgressive Legacy in England and the United States,’’ in Founding Mothers and Others:Women Progressive Leaders During the Progressive Era, eds. Alan Sadovnik and Susan Semel(New York: Palgrave, 2002), 237–52.

25Isaacs, Review of Piaget, 604–5.26Ibid., 605–6.

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credence to the accuracy of children’s sensory experiences, she said. Thesun does appear to follow us when we move. Egocentrism does not causebelief in this illusion, ignorance does. Many adults, Isaacs thought,would not be able to explain ‘‘how the sun came’’ or ‘‘how the moonbegan,’’ either. One clinical interview could not provide enoughevidence to assess the full range of a child’s practical knowledge.Parents who spent hours with their children, in the kitchen, at dinner,in the bathroom, on the street, could see that their children knew a greatdeal that would not necessarily come out in one interview session. This,Isaacs said, was the ‘‘most serious methodological error in Piaget’swork,’’ his tendency to disadvantage children in verbal intercourse withadults. Piaget over-emphasized and stereotyped differences betweenadults and children ‘‘by calling them various ‘isms.’ ’’ In her own study ofchildren’s intellectual development, Isaacs said, she found childrenfunctioning at much higher levels than Piaget had, and suggested thatthis might be due to the lower ‘‘mental ratio’’ of the children at theMaison des Petits than the very bright children at her school. She saidthat she had asked about this when she visited Geneva, and that a morerepresentative control group would be needed to test these differences,another concern that would dog Piaget’s research.27

Piaget’s work spread within the nursery school movement moregenerally and seemed poised for fuller acceptance when it appeared in alandmark volume documenting the growth of nursery-school relatedresearch. Once again, Rockefeller money played a major role. Under-written by funding from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, theNational Society for the Study of Education’s 1929 Twenty-EighthYearbook, Preschool and Parental Education listed hundreds of psycho-logical studies done in nursery schools. The imprimatur of the Society,which included leading progressive educators such as Dewey andFrancis Parker, validated Piaget’s inclusion in the volume. Chairedby psychologist Lois Hayden Meek (later Stolz), head of the AmericanAssociation of University Women’s child study campaign, theYearbook’s advisory committee included Teachers College Institute ofChild Welfare director Helen Thompson Woolley, Merrill-PalmerInstitute director Edna Noble White, Yale Child Guidance Institutedirector Arnold Gesell, and mental hygiene and child guidancemovement leader Douglas Thom. The volume was dedicated torecently deceased committee member Bird Baldwin, the first directorof the Iowa Child Welfare Station, who had noted Piaget’s work as earlyas 1923. Although its coverage of Piaget’s work was brief, the Yearbookhighlighted The Language and Thought of the Child, which was

27Ibid., 607; Isaacs, Intellectual Development, 96.

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summarized favorably in the sections on intellectual and languagedevelopment. The Yearbook also mentioned the Maison des Petits.Yearbook chair Lois Meek praised Piaget’s ‘‘clinical method,’’ andrecommended his ‘‘two volumes on The Development of Child Logic,’’for ‘‘the fresh light which they cast on the mental processes, andincidentally on the personality of the young child.’’28

Rejection

Some of these same psychologists and nursery educators played key rolesin the rejection of Piaget’s psychology in the 1930s. In a stark example ofPiaget’s rapidly waning fortunes, the National Association for NurseryEducation’s bibliography Nursery School Education, published by in 1935contained no references to Piaget. Convened in 1925 by TeachersCollege kindergarten and nursery school leader Patty Smith Hill, theNational Association for Nursery Education included nursery schooleducators, parent educators, and psychologists committed to makingnursery schools a permanent institution. The Association’s bibliographywas an outgrowth of the epochal 1930 White House Conference onChild Health and Protection and its Committee on the Infant andPreschool Child, headed by psychologist John Anderson of theUniversity of Minnesota Institute for Child Welfare. Following theconference, Dorothy Bradbury, who had worked on the earlier NationalSociety for the Study of Education Yearbook, Esther Leech Skeels, andWanda Swieda, all from the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station,volunteered to produce a survey of nursery school-based research. In1931, a bibliography committee was appointed, headed by Anderson,Lois Meek, George Stoddard, who took over at the Iowa Station afterBaldwin died, and Mary Dabney Davis of the U.S. Bureau of Education.An influential group, Anderson, Meek, and Stoddard also worked withDavis on the National Advisory Committee on Emergency NurserySchools, the federally-funded nursery schools sponsored by the WorksProgress Administration during the Depression. Funded with LauraSpelman Rockefeller support, the National Advisory Committeeunderwrote the bibliography’s publication, giving it the stamp ofpublic sponsorship.29

28National Society for the Study of Education, Twenty-Eighth Yearbook, Preschooland Parental Education, iv; Bird Baldwin, ‘‘Mental Development of Children,’’ PsychologicalBulletin 20 (December 1923): 674; Bird Baldwin, ‘‘Educational Psychology,’’ PsychologicalBulletin 21 (April 1924): 206; Lois Hayden Meek, in Twenty-Eighth Yearbook, 459. OnMeek see Julia Grant, ‘‘Lois Meek Stolz,’’ in Women Educators in the United States, 1820–1993, ed. Maxine Schwartz Seller (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994).

29Bradbury, Skeels, & Swieda, Nursery School Education. On the 1930 White HouseConference see Diana Selig, ‘‘The Whole Child: Social Science and Race at the White

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In her introduction to the National Association for NurseryEducation bibliography, Mary Dabney Davis emphasized the scien-tific tone of the nursery school movement, saying that the more than 400studies listed were evidence of ‘‘the scientific sponsorship which hasbeen given the development of nursery school education’’ and showed‘‘the care with which the activities of the program’’ were ‘‘continuallybeing analyzed and developed.’’ Given this scientific perspective and thefact that Piaget’s work was by now quite well known among nurseryeducators and child psychologists in the United States, it seemssurprising that his work was not included in the sections on mental orlanguage development, especially given that Lois Meek, who hadpraised Piaget’s work in the National Society for the Study of Edu-cation Yearbook, was also on the committee for the National Associationfor Nursery Education bibliography, as was Dorothy Bradbury, who hadhelped compile the earlier volume.30

The omission of Piaget from the later bibliography was likelydue in part to rapidly changing trends in American psychology, andto the influence of John Anderson. Experimental psychology wason the rise. Straddling the worlds of the nursery school and experi-mental psychology, Anderson, who was on the Committee on ChildDevelopment, which in 1933 evolved into the Society for Research inChild Development, had become deeply critical of anecdotal biographyand survey methods. Like most members of the Committee on ChildDevelopment, which had been organized under the auspices of theNational Research Council in 1925, he was eager to erase all traces of theinformal baby biographies produced in the nineteenth century and ofG. Stanley Hall’s survey-based child study approach. As Anderson andhis co-author Florence Goodenough wrote in the foreword to their 1931book Experimental Child Study, ‘‘the modern attitude’’ is ‘‘franklyexperimental and observational in tone rather than philosophical.’’Theories ‘‘unsupported by evidence command slight respect,’’ theysaid. Goodenough and Anderson praised John Watson’s behaviorismas the ‘‘beginning of another great epoch in child psychology,’’ andstated that ‘‘child psychology could not advance rapidly’’ without‘‘a suitable technique.’’31

House Conference of 1930,’’ in When Science Encounters the Child, 136–56. On the IowaStation see Hamilton Cravens, Before Head Start: The Iowa Station and America’s Children(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). On the National AdvisoryCommittee, see Sonya Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights: The Shaping ofAmerica’s Child Care Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).

30Mary Dabney Davis, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Bradbury, Skeels, and Swieda, NurserySchool Education, v.

31Florence Goodenough and John E. Anderson, Experimental Child Study (NewYork: The Century Company, 1931), vi, 16; Emily D. Cahan and Yeh Hseuh, ‘‘American

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To experimentalists, Piaget’s clinical interview method wasunsuitable. Its reliance on a small number of subjects and narrativeapproach were anathema to psychologists who stressed sample size,objectivity, and quantitative analysis. Piaget’s sample size was limited torelatively few children in Geneva; Anderson had surveyed the conditionsof children in 3,000 families throughout the United States. As ColumbiaUniversity psychologist C. J. Warden summed it up, Piaget’s method of‘‘pertinent illustration’’ was ‘‘outworn,’’ his ‘‘arm-chair verbal analysis’’was unclear, and his examples were ‘‘so highly selected as to be whollyinadequate to support general conclusions concerning the evolution ofthe child’s reaction to the external world.’’32

The juggernaut of the standardized testing and IQ movements wasanother main force blocking acceptance of Piaget. By the 1930s,Thorndike’s school achievement tests were firmly entrenched, as wasTerman’s IQ testing. Psychologists were busy finding new ways ofmeasuring children’s academic performance and intelligence. Piagetused children’s own interpretations of their drawings to analyze thedevelopment their thought; Florence Goodenough, Anderson’s co-author, became famous for her 1925 book Measurement of Intelligenceby Drawings, which used children’s drawings as a means of measuringIQ.33

A few psychologists were more positive. By 1935, there had beenalmost forty reviews and replications of Piaget’s research reported inpsychology journals such as the American Journal of Psychology, thePsychoanalytic Review, and Psychological Bulletin. Psychoanalysts werethe most receptive, probably because of Piaget’s clinical interviewmethod. Harvard’s Jungian psychologist Henry A. Murray had been

Educators and Psychologists Encounter Piaget’s Early Works’’ (paper, Annual Meetingfor the Society for Research in Child Development, 2003); Emily D. Cahan, ‘‘Toward aSocially Relevant Science.’’

32Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child; White House Conference onChild Health and Protection, Committee on the Infant and Preschool Child, JohnAnderson, chair, The Young Child in the Home; A Survey of Three Thousand AmericanFamilies (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936); C. J. Warden, ‘‘Review of Piaget, J., TheChild’s Conception of Physical Causality,’’ The Pedagogical Seminary and Journal of GeneticPsychology XXXIX, no. 2 (1931): 298.

33Florence L. Goodenough, Measurement of Intelligence by Drawings (Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book Company, 1926). On Thorndike and testing, see amongothers, Barbara Beatty, ‘‘From Laws of Learning to a Science of Values: Efficiency andMorality in Edward L. Thorndike’s Educational Psychology,’’ The American Psychologist53 (October 1998): 1145–152; Jo Anne Brown, The Definition of a Profession: The Authorityof Metaphor in the History of Intelligence Testing, 1890–1930 (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1992); Geraldine Joncich Clifford, Edward L. Thorndike: The SanePositivist (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1968); and Paul Davis Chapman,Schools as Sorters: Lewis M. Terman, Applied Psychology, and the Intelligence Testing Movement(New York: New York University Press, 1988).

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impressed when he met Piaget in Geneva. Piaget’s clinical interviewmethod was also applied in industrial psychology, where his ideas hadmore staying power. Harvard business school researcher Elton Mayo,who helped design the famous Hawthorne Experiments in whichworkers at the Western Electric plant in Chicago were questionedabout their work, used techniques taken directly from Piaget. TheseHarvard connections came together in 1936, when Piaget was awardedan honorary degree at Harvard’s Tercentenary Celebration, evidencethat Piaget was well known in some psychology and social sciencecircles in the United States in the 1930s. In an example of the sometimescapricious politics of knowledge, however, Piaget appears to have wonas a compromise candidate when Freud and Pavlov could not come andagreement could not be reached about Stanford’s controversial IQ testerTerman, so the degree may not have been as much of an endorsement asit appears. Despite this conspicuous honor, few, if any references toPiaget appeared in American education again until the 1950s.34

Transits

Some of the factors that affected the transit of Piaget’s psychology in thenursery school movement in the 1920s and 1930s are common to theintroduction of other new education ideas. Five stand out. Philanthropicsupport matters. The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial supportedPiaget in Geneva and underwrote the publication of the 1929 NationalSociety for the Study of Education volume in which his work appeared,but Rockefeller support declined during the Depression and with achange in personnel. Goodness of ‘‘fit’’ with existing ideas is important.American and British nursery educators saw how Piaget confirmedtheir own research and ideas, but at the same time saw flaws and viewedhim as competition for their own work. Methodological novelty andusefulness in classroom settings is critical. Piaget’s clinical interviewmethod showed promise as a way of studying children and aidingteachers, but was critiqued by experimental psychologists and someteachers espousing newer, more ‘‘scientific’’ approaches. Publicitythrough existing dissemination networks is helpful. The ProgressiveEducation Association and National Society for the Scientific Study ofEducation promoted Piaget in their publications, but the NationalAssociation for Nursery Education omitted his research from theirbibliography. Invocation of and blessing by experts is very important.

34Cahan and Hseuh, ‘‘American Educators and Psychologists Encounter Piaget’sEarly Work’’; Yeh Hseuh, ‘‘ ‘He Sees the Development of Children’s Concepts Upon aBackground of Sociology’ ’’; Yeh Hseuh, ‘‘The Hawthorne Experiments and theIntroduction of Jean Piaget in American Industrial Psychology, 1929–1932.’’

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Piaget cited Dewey’s work and American experts such as Lois Meekinitially gave Piaget a stamp of approval. At the same, Patty Smith Hillbrought out a behaviorist Conduct Curriculum antithetical to Piaget andsome nursery school educators switched their allegiances away fromdevelopmentalism.35

Of these factors, the influence of key psychologists and nurseryeducators was probably the most salient in the rejection of Piaget’sideas in the 1920s and 1930s. From the 1890s onward, psychologistsplayed an increasingly large role in education reform, by lending orwithdrawing supposedly scientific approval and status to pedagogicalmethods. Psychologists functioned as brokers and arbiters, and individualpsychologists, such as John Anderson, could wield much power. Aspsychology became more splintered and wracked by internecine conflict Fa ‘‘crisis’’ of which psychologists in the 1920s and 1930s were awareFthe potential for condemnation by one or another of the competing,rapidly changing psychological sects grew exponentially. The power andvolatility of psychology was especially felt in preschool education, in partbecause of the lack of consensus about what and if young children shouldbe explicitly taught, and because of preschool education’s low status dueto its identification with women and the lowly activity of caring foryoung children.

Like the rest of psychology, though arguably more so, because itdealt with young children, child psychology was also subject to statusanxiety. To raise the status of child psychology to a ‘‘real’’ science andrespected profession meant purging it of subjectivity and anecdotalism.Any nursery school teacher could record children talking about thecolors they were using in their drawings; many did. To elevate this kindof work to a professional science required having an ‘‘n’’ of a largenumber of ‘‘subjects,’’ not the names of a few individual children. Itrequired documenting correlation coefficients between which childrenat what age under what conditions chose which colors, not quoting thatLev at the Maison des Petits said that a color was ‘‘brownish yellow.’’ An‘‘ish’’ would not do. A ‘‘real’’science could not be based on ‘‘ishes.’’ By the1930s, study of groups and aggregates had triumphed in psychology.36

Nursery school leaders could also wield much power and functionas mediators and arbiters in their symbiotic relationships with

35Patty Smith Hill, A Conduct Curriculum for the Kindergarten and First Grade (NewYork: Charles S. Scribner & Sons, 1923); Beatty, Preschool Education in America. On habittraining in nursery schools see Julia Grant, Raising Baby by the Book (New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press, 1998).

36Piaget, Language and Thought of the Child, 29; on the triumph of the aggregate, seeKurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

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psychologists. Torn between child-centered pedagogy and naturalisticmethods and the quantitative methodology and apparent objectivity ofexperimental psychology, behaviorism, and testing, some influentialpreschool educators, such as Patty Smith Hill, began espousing whatthey saw as more scientific methods, creating more divisions within thealready fractured preschool movement, and deflecting attention fromPiaget.37

Introduced during a period of friction and transition, Piaget’snaturalistic methods and philosophical observations were deemed outof step with professionalization projects in both child psychology andpreschool education. Academic psychologists rejected Piaget’s anec-dotal methods; nursery school educators rejected some of Piaget’sconclusions about children’s language and egocentrism and felt thatPiaget did not capture enough of the variability and fluidity of individualchildren’s thought.38

Piaget was competing on shaky, shifting ground. Factionalism andthe whirlwind of activities within preschool education, the ‘‘childsciences,’’ and ‘‘child saving’’ created much instability. In the 1910s,orthodox Froebelianism had officially splintered, and Montessori’sideas had been introduced and rejected. The National Kindergar-ten Association was promoting public kindergartens, helped by theNational Congress of Mothers and other groups. By the 1920s, differenttypes of nursery schools had developed and parent education was beingpushed. The voice of one Swiss psychologist could hardly be heard overthe din of the huge, varied number of participants at the 1930 WhiteHouse Conference on Child Health and Protection, which sponsoredthe bibliography in which Piaget was not mentioned, where socialworkers, pediatricians, nurses, home economists, parent educators,school psychologists, child guidance workers, child welfare workers,

37Bloch, ‘‘Becoming Scientific and Professional’’; Finkelstein, ‘‘The Revolt againstSelfishness’’; Judith Sealander, The Failed Century of the Child: Governing America’sChildren in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); andBeatty, Cahan, and Grant, When Science Encounters the Child. On the crisis in psychologyand role of psychology, see among others, Cahan, ‘‘Toward a Socially Relevant Science’’;James H. Capshew, Psychologists on the March (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);Danziger, Constructing the Subject; Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology:Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);Lagemann, An Elusive Science; and Donald S. Napoli, Architects of Adjustment: The Historyof the Psychological Profession in the United States (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press,1981).

38Cahan, ‘‘Toward a Socially Relevant Science’’; Sheldon H. White,‘‘Developmental Psychology in a World of Designed Institutions,’’ in Beyond theCentury of the Child: Cultural History and Developmental Psychology, eds. Willem Koopsand Michael Zuckerman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 204–24.

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psychiatrists, sociologists, and many more experts all claimed authorityto ‘‘speak for the child.’’39

Piaget was never fully accepted by nursery school educators oracademic psychologists in the 1920s and 1930s. Drowned out by myriadchild savers and child scientists, he was caught between experimentalpsychologists and nursery school educators who thought his researchwas too child-centered and methodologically loose and other nurseryschool educators who thought his research was insufficiently child-centered and too rigid. Unlike Dewey’s ideas, which found a safe harborin schools of education, if not in public schools, Piaget’s ideas did notfind a home, either in academia or in nursery education.40

Back in his Genevan stronghold, Piaget continued to produceprodigious amounts of research, on infants, on the growth of logico-mathematical thought, and gradually articulated a fully-developed stagetheory of child development. None of his books were translated intoEnglish between 1933 and 1949 however, during the war years whenAtlantic crossings declined unless psychologists themselves relocated toAmerica, as many, unlike Piaget, did. Like the sun and the moon aboutwhich he asked children, Piaget went into eclipse.

Piaget’s psychology had a much longer second transit in the secondhalf of the twentieth century. When it was reintroduced to the UnitedStates in the late 1950s, much had changed, in the country, in education,in psychology, and in Piaget’s psychology. With Sputnik and the ColdWar, new federal money was available for education projects. Again, anindividual psychologist served as a powerful arbiter, when JeromeBruner introduced Piaget’s ideas to the group of high-status scientistswho convened at Woods Hole in 1959 to develop new science curricula.With behaviorism losing ground to cognitive developmental psychol-ogy, American psychologists and educators, some of whom studied withPiaget in Geneva, disseminated his ideas through a network of new, well-funded research centers. Eleanor Duckworth experimented withPiagetian concepts in the Elementary Science Study at the EducationDevelopment Center in Newton, Massachusetts. Seymour Papert usedPiagetian ideas in developing computer applications for children at theCenter for Artificial Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of

39William H. Kilpatrick, The Montessori System Examined (Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1914). On the growth of child experts, see, among others, Hamilton Cravens,‘‘Child Saving in an Age of Professionalism, 1915–1930,’’ in American Childhood: AResearch Guide and Historical Handbook, eds. Joseph Hawes and N. Ray Hiner (Westport,CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 415–88; and Barbara Beatty, Emily D. Cahan, and JuliaGrant, ‘‘Introduction’’ and Diana Selig, ‘‘The Whole Child,’’ in Beatty, Cahan, andGrant, When Science Encounters the Child.

40David F. Labaree, The Trouble with Ed Schools (New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 2004.

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Technology. Preschool educators David Weikart, Constance Kamii, andothers, who used Piagetian methods with ‘‘educationally disadvantaged’’children, also served as important arbiters, adapters, and disseminators.Preschool education had a somewhat higher professional status andfirmer base in schools of education, where Piaget’s ideas joined Dewey’sto form the cult of constructivism.41

By the 1970s, Piaget was a god. Then the cycle began to repeatitself, for some of the same reasons. The growth of informationprocessing models and cognitive neuropsychology, new prioritiesin private and federal funding, and the rise of multiculturalism in psy-chology, schools of education, and education changed the terrain.Bruner once again played a key role, by introducing the ideas ofRussian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, which eventually overshadowedPiaget in education. Seen as rigid, biologically deterministic, and lackingin the social dimensions of learning, Piaget’s genetic epistemology fellout of style. The transitory connections between Piagetian psychologyand education, the first brief, with the nursery school movement in the1920s and 1930s, the second longer, in the second half of the twentiethcentury, were gone, replaced by new psychological and educationaltrends, some which may in turn suffer the same fate that Piaget’s ideasdid.42

The window had closed again. The alignment of factors in psycho-logy and education conducive to the establishment of a new trendFphilanthropic support, fit with existing ideas, methodological noveltyand classroom usefulness, dissemination through professional networks,and approval of influential expertsFhad shifted. Piaget’s directconnection with American education was at an end, though some ofhis ideas about development and learning had seeped into educationalideology where they remain today in important but watered-downforms.

41On Piaget’s return in education, see among others, Jerome Bruner, The Process ofEducation (New York: Vintage, 1960); Eleanor Duckworth, ‘‘The Having of WonderfulIdeas’’ in Piaget in the Classroom, eds. Milton Schwebel and Jane Raph (New York: BasicBooks, 1973); Seymour Papert, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (NewYork: Basic Books, 1980); Constance Kamii and Rheta DeVries, Piaget, Children, andNumber (Washington, DC: Association for the Education of Young Children, 1976);Constance Kamii and Rheta DeVries, Group Games in Early Education: Implications ofPiaget’s Theory (Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of YoungChildren, 1980); and David P. Weikart et al., The Cognitively Oriented Curriculum: AFramework for Preschool Teachers (Washington, DC: National Association for theEducation of Young Children, 1971).

42Jerome S. Bruner, ‘‘Preface,’’ in Thought and Language, ed. Lev S. Vygotsky(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962).

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