Hierarchical Developmental Models

Hierarchical developmental models figure prominently in many current theories of education. However, the idea of hierarchical development models is far from new, as seen in Plato's three-tiered view of personal development and social organization in The Republic. In fact, Plato's model has all the major elements of many conventional hierarchical developmental models. First, it deals with maturation; second, it assumes that not all people will ultimately mature to the same level; third, it is invariant, which is to say that one cannot “skip” stages; fourth, it is unitary—which is to say that a person moves as a whole from one stage (after having satisfied the requirements of that stage) to another, and does not partially remain in the earlier stage and partially go on to the other; and fifth, it has educational implications and applications. Not all hierarchical developmental models have all of these elements, but all of them have at least several of them. Developmentally appropriate curricula—from those suggested by Jean Jacques Rousseau, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and Friedrich Froebel, to those championed by the Progressives in the first half of the twentieth century, to those still advocated today—typically rest on some notion of hierarchical development. There continues to be a particularly strong emphasis on developmentally appropriate education in holistically oriented schools, such as Waldorf and Montessori, and in the earlier grades in U.S. public education.

In the twentieth century, a variety of hierarchical developmental models were posited that continue to be highly influential in educational theory and practice. The Freudian model of psychosexual development, for instance, which was central to decisions about what to teach to students and when and how to do it, influenced schools throughout the twentieth century, as well as private institutions such as Margaret Naumburg's Country and Day School, later called Walden Schools, where Naumburg asked all of her teachers to undergo psychoanalysis so that they would be adroit at handling psychosexually based developmental issues with students. The great Freudian psychiatrist of adolescence, August Aichhorn, also wrote in 1935 that such knowledge was essential for teachers.

Jean Piaget's hierarchical developmental model has had widespread influence on curriculum theory and instructional practices. This model posits four stages: sensorimotor, in which the child is learning to organize its perceptual world and physically negotiate it (birth to 2 years); preoperational, in which the child becomes able to pretend and imagine (2 to 7 years); concrete operational, in which the child is learning the basic rules that govern his or her physical world (7 to 11 years); and formal operational, in which the person learns to think analytically about psychological, social, and ethical questions (12 years and on). Closely related to Piaget's model of cognitive development is Lawrence Kohlberg's model of the development of moral reasoning, which goes from preconventional moral reasoning (thinking something is good or bad because one's parents said so) to conventional moral reasoning (making moral judgments based on social norms) and concludes with postconventional moral reasoning (determining what is right or wrong on the basis of putatively universal philosophical principles).

...