Developmentalists Tradition

Beliefs

At the end of the 19th century, the population of students attending U.S. schools and the course of studies offered in U.S. schools became influenced by a new social consciousness. The roles of the teacher and the school as the embodiment of social virtue and value that unified the community began to change. Predicting students' final career paths became the basis for adapting curriculum to U.S. schools' population. As cities grew, schools became responsible for helping students prepare to survive in the new industrialized world. By 1890, four major interest groups struggled for control of the U.S. curriculum. One of those groups was the developmentalists. (The others were humanists, social efficiency educators, and social meliorists.)

Hall, a pioneer in educational psychology, was pivotal as a leader in the developmentalist tradition. His research focused on the study of children's minds. He presumed that if educators were aware of what children knew, they would better be able to systematically teach them what they needed to learn. The child-study movement sought to observe and study children's development in laboratory and natural environments.

Hall and scholars of his time supported the cultural epoch theory, which posited that a child's individual development parallels the developmental stages through which the human race as a whole traversed historically. The theory's widespread acceptance as a valued principle supported a scientific order of curricular studies that integrated rather than isolated subjects. Curriculum could be understood as a scientific and historical epoch that was interrelated and sequenced. For example, while children were in their savage stage of development, they studied ancient fables and mythology that derived from that historical epoch. A curriculum so organized seemed to appeal to children's natural interests. It was believed children had a natural affinity to materials that fit with their epoch stage of development. Cultural epoch theory was endorsed by scholars and widely configured curriculum during this era.

Cultural epoch theory was supplemented by Hall's belief that young children were not capable of intellectual reasoning. He did not think schools should try to civilize children by training them to conform. He saw intellectual training as unhealthy and believed the stages of childhood and adolescence should be prolonged and promoted. Elementary curriculum should be dominated by play until children at least were 8 years old. Children should not be expected to take part in harmful intellectual tasks, but rather should play and follow their primitive interests.

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