Child Development and Education

Dean Miller, Dean Howard, ladies and gentlemen, it is a very great pleasure for me to be here to present the ninth annual Charles H. Thompson Lecture. It is a delight to be invited back home to Howard and to have the opportunity to honor the memory and the work of Dr. Thompson. In his work, Dr. Thompson stressed that IQ was normally distributed and that the ability of children to perform depended a great deal on the quality of the early experiences in their lives. However, the model of teaching and learning that has been widely accepted by policy makers, teacher trainers, practitioners, and researchers alike since 1945 has, unfortunately, been greatly influenced by industrialization. The resulting emphasis has not been on the quality of those experiences but on the production of outcomes. We have not paid enough attention to child development and relationship issues. Instead, schooling in America has taken a mechanistic turn. Schools today are really more like automobile assembly lines: the frames (the students) come down and math, science and social science are put upon them very much like windows and doors are placed onto car bodies. Learning has become very much like the model of the computer, with its input and processing sequences: we assume that a person has learned when he or she is able to make an output. Yet, with humans, learning is really very different, and these models are only partially correct or appropriate.