New Page 1

<body> <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="VBScript"> </script> <script language="VBScript" src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Scripts/mycolors.js">  </script> <font SIZE="6"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Alycita</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The View of a Young Child's World</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">By Hugh M. Lewis</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Copyright © 1992 by Hugh M. Lewis, all rights reserved.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Permission is granted to make copies of this document only for fair use in education and research.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">This is another E-publication by:</p> <font SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Lewis Micro-Publishing</p> </font><font SIZE="1"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">A division of Lewis-works</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER">All queries should be directed to:</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="mailto:e-publishing@lewismicropublishing.com">e-publishing@lewismicropublishing.com</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="line7.gif" WIDTH="542" HEIGHT="18"></p> <dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="onea"></a><a HREF="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/ChildsWorld.htm#one">INTRODUCTION </dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER">NATURE versus NURTURE: and the EGG of the WORLD</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="twoa"></a><a HREF="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/ChildsWorld.htm#two">PART I </dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER">THE PRIMARY ACQUISITION PROBLEM</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="threea"></a><a HREF="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/ChildsWorld.htm#three">PART II </dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER">ORGANIC HUMAN DEVELOPMENT</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="foura"></a><a HREF="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/ChildsWorld.htm#four">PART III </dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER">THE BLACK BOX, LIFE WORLDS, and TOTAL CONTEXTS</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="fivea"></a><a HREF="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/ChildsWorld.htm#five">PART IV </dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER">ANTHROPOGENESIS, CREOLIZATION and IMAGINARY DINOSAURS</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="sixa"></a><a HREF="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/ChildsWorld.htm#six">PART V </dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER">FERAL CHILDREN, CHILD PRODIGIES and the</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">LAW OF AVERAGES</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="sevena"></a><a HREF="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/ChildsWorld.htm#seven">PART VI </dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER">A CHILD’S WORLD</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="eighta"></a><a HREF="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/ChildsWorld.htm#eight">PART VII </dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER">A CHILD’S WORLDVIEW</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="ninea"></a><a HREF="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/ChildsWorld.htm#nine">PART XIII </dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER">ALYCITA: A CHILD as an AMATEUR SYSTEM</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="tena"></a><a HREF="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/ChildsWorld.htm#ten">PART IX <p ALIGN="CENTER">ALYCE in ANTHROPOLOGIA'S ASTONISHING WORLD of WORDS</p> </dir> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <dir> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="bibliography"></a><a HREF="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/ChildsWorld.htm#biblioone"><font SIZE="4">Bibliography</font></a></p> </dir> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="one"></a><a HREF="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/ChildsWorld.htm#onea">INTRODUCTION <p ALIGN="CENTER">NATURE versus NURTURE</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">and the EGG of the WORLD</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> <font SIZE="2"> Obviously, the present great differences in vigor and welfare between nations cannot be the result of differences in the performance of their elites but must be ascribed to differences in character of their masses. (Eric Hoffer 1973:59)</p> </font> <p>The first years of an infant’s life have been well mapped out by child behavior experts and child-care authorities. Yet the exact how and why of the miraculous development from a blind helplessly screaming neonate into a little walking, talking, misbehaving child remains an unsolved mystery baffling the experts but delighting parents around the world.</p> <p>Central to this mystery has been the question of how and why a child acquires its first language abilities at an astonishing, almost phenomenal rate, and transforms within a few too brief years into a competently speaking and acting human being. And central to this question, and to the whole problem of human development, has been the long-standing debate of whether such acquisition is more a matter of nature or of nurture. Is it by virtue of genetic inheritance and biological programming that a child’s clock is set to invariably go off and necessitate the acquisition of her/his world competencies? Or is it by the exclusive virtue of social limitation, environmental enrichment and parental instruction that a child acquires and achieves development or not?</p> <p>The question has been an important one, and has had a long history of philosophical, and later, scientific/humanistic debate. The ‘tabula rasa’ or ‘blank slate’ or ‘erased tablet,’ ‘applied figuratively to the mind on which no impression has been made by experience, as the mind of an infant.’ (<u>Webster's Unabridged Dictionary</u>, 1983) It was the Romantic Social philosopher Rousseau, who in reaction to the encyclopedia salon rational enlightenment philosopher’s of his day that we owe the conception of the ‘natural’ and ‘unfettered’ development of the child, in which social influence was deemed as interference. The debate has not been an exclusively Western one, but has had other Eastern style formulations upon whether human character was by nature good or evil-requiring either the intervention or interference of social authority. But the debate has also always had basic socio-political overtones and real world resonances in reform policies and the promulgation of social and educational ideologies, and it continues today, albeit, in a more modified and scientifically sophisticated way.</p> <p>A great deal of how we construct, and reconstruct, our world hinges upon how we answer this question. If nature is seen to be the governor of human character, then this belief can and has been used to legitimate ‘self-fulfilling’ social policies. Thus the rich are innately more achievement oriented and inherently successful because they have by natural right inherited their human superiority, while the poor are ‘Nature’s failures’ who lack the inherent potential for development. This line of reasoning, when carried to its logical extreme, promulgates a faith in varying versions of Social Darwinism-‘selection of the fittest’ was applied to social process in the same manner that it was afterward applied to natural process. The lot of the poor and miserable must not be alleviated as social evolution inevitably works to eventually weed out the unfit. Social evolution is a purifying process in which ‘those not sufficiently complete to live should be allowed to die.’ It is not too difficult to see how this line of reasoning can be used to systematically discriminate and exclude certain categories of ‘inferior’ human beings. Blacks, women, homosexuals, criminals, alcoholics and drug addicts, all represent inferior or weaker classes of human beings left out of competition in the social market place. It is not difficult to see how it can be used to justifying and legitimate certain educational ‘tracking’ policies that tend to channel from a very young age people into two different trajectories in their development. There are those geared toward reproducing the lumpen proletariate and then those promised to fulfill the ranks of the professional and elite priesthood. It is not hard to see how, given such a social policy, those who are born poor become socially pre-conditioned to remain thus, whatever their incredibly average character.</p> <p>On the other hand, extreme commitment to the other line of reasoning, of the absolute blank slate and infant silly putty, has led those more rationally enlightened to crusade for radical socio-political reforms that possibly ignored crucial individual differences in human variation and the important role that nature really does seem to play in child acquisition. It led somewhat unwittingly to spurious utopian presumptions that proved no less harmful than those of the opposite camp. Certain restricted cultural, linguistic and cognitive codes were somehow incomplete or inadequate for the purpose of comprehending and successfully transmitting rational science and technology, and the ‘gap’ could be bridged by heavy doses of technical instruction in superior codes. The imperialistic presumptions of empowerment, and of bureaucratic, political economic encapsulations and enforced structural dependency within the capitalist world system, are not very deep beneath the surface of such extreme enlightenment ideology.</p> <p> </p> <p><font SIZE="2">When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it. (Eric Hoffer 1973: 6-7)</p> </font> <p> </p> <p>The nature/nurture debate, carried to either extreme, seems quite unsatisfactory, and even, from a strictly intellectual point of view, unnecessary. Though today few worth their weight would take an exclusive either/or position, the basic contrast between Nature and Nurture remains today as important as ever. This is not just because social action requires the kind of simplifying illusion that can only be sustained upon the logical extremes of strong determinism. It is also because sophisticated scientific theory and jargon often obscures a predominant commitment to one or the other orientation in the guiding questions of research and publication, even though a ‘mixed,’ ‘balanced’ and bi-directional ‘systems’ causality is ostensibly professed. A holistic perspective which views the problem as essentially an counterproductive hen and egg dilemma runs across the positivistic grain of modern scientific praxis which depends naturalistic observation, empirical experimentation and verification, and upon a correspondence theory of language descriptivism. With such a science oriented worldview. Synthetic and dialectical models implicit in complex ‘formal/functional’ systems theory and in historical and biographical narrative fundamentally contradict an extremely analytical orientation aimed at reduction of the complex to the essential and universal. It remains more subtly important what is taken to be more primary and pre-determinative in the overall process, whether nature or nurture is the strongest influence. Answers of this kind can still lead us in certain directions of research while possibly ignoring other, especially vital avenues of understanding.</p> <p>Nevertheless, the nature/nurture debate, cast in its tacit political frame, obscures more scientifically interesting issues of the exact role which both play in the shaping process that goes on during early human development and the crucial questions of critical concern are exactly how much and in precisely what ways. Scientific researchers can and have adopted fruitful and productive ‘synthetic’ research orientations to the problem of child acquisition. Consider the conclusive statements made by John and Beatrice Whiting in the classical ‘Six Cultures’ study. They mention the two prevailing views: 1. Whether children in all cultures have the same developmental processes and sequences, without significantly important differences in the rate of development: or 2. That culture affects child development in profound ways such that developmental sequences are incomparable across cultural contexts.</p> <p> </p> <font SIZE="2"> <p>Our results indicate that both these positions, taken in the extreme, are false, but there is some truth in each…(Beatrice and John Whiting 1975: 174)</p> <p> </p> </font> <p>Like so many dilemmas involved in the understanding of human reality, there is not simple or straightforward way off the horns of Nature or Nurture. We are left, something like Humpty Dumpty, to sit somewhat precariously upon a fence, to make what sense of nonsense we will.</p> <p>The issue of Nature and Nurture has been important for deeper and less obvious reasons. All societies which have some form of traditional, institutional order and corporate cultural history which transcends the individual biographies of its members, are centrally engaged in the ‘critical moment’ of its own reproduction and cross-generational transmission. Not only does the adaptive success and survival of any society depend upon the success of its reproduction and transmission, but its progressive development, if it holds and puts into practice such ideals, also depends critically upon the same mechanisms of social reproduction and transmission. 'Only with the transmission of the social world to a new generation (that is, internalization as effectuated in socialization) does the fundamental social dialectic appear in its totality. To repeat, only with the appearance of a new generation can one properly speak of a social world.’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966:61)</p> <p>The relative success or failure of a society therefore depends centrally upon its ability to reproduce itself in its newer generation. This a lesson long taught by teachers, parents, child-care experts and children, but one which our Modern World Society, technologically based as it is upon the hyper-development of the political economic World System, has come to ignore. Technological development is being promoted, almost world wide, at the expanse of the promotion of human development. There is a sad and tragic trajectory in this for the future of our world society, as our children, and our children’s children, will be inheriting a world that may be ill suited to meet most of their human needs. Because non-relative measures of the quality of life have been next to impossible, it has been difficult to justify purely in economic terms the investment of social resources into improving the human condition which can be seen as a bottomless sink hole without tangible, touchable, material results. But there remains a very real formula that investing resources into human development is an indirect way of ‘making more from less’ and that continued exclusive techno-environmental-economic development is leading down the road of diminishing returns--of getting less from more.</p> <p>It is with this larger political issue looming in the background, that this work is written treating the problem of early human development. It is not a new problem, but it is the mark of the basic wealth of human reality that it has not, and will not soon, become an exhausted and infertile ground for discovery.</p> <p>Language remains at the center of this problem, because it is primarily via language that the world comes together and things fall apart. Language is both our naturalistic handle upon human nature, and our window upon the ‘seat’ of human culture and cognition. Language, and its critical absence, expresses and reveals human thoughts, feelings, moods, values, attitudes, beliefs, of the individual’s subjective world, as well as communicates information in the social coordination of practices and production. Language has the virtue, in spite of the inherent ephemeralness of its broadcast transmission of being quite amenable to scientific methods of analysis and study. It is something that happens as a discrete event of our senses, to which and from general laws may be applied. Of course, in this work, unless otherwise specified, language will be used in the more general and comprehensive sense encompassing not only spoken and written forms of linguistic discourse, but para-linguistic, pragmatic, contextual, meta-linguistic and even ‘non-linguistic’ phenomena as well.</p> <p> </p> <p>The purpose of this work is to promulgate and explore several of the dimensionalities of a basic, synthetic theory that I have called organic human development that addressed the central issue of nature and nurture in the form of what I refer to as ‘the primary acquisition problem’. Though the theory is synthetic, it nonetheless is not unamenable to analytical treatment of its various elements in relation to one another or as separate complex components, or in interrelation to the whole problem. This theory has not only important theoretical and philosophical implications, touching upon diverse fields of science, especially the intersection of developmental psychology, linguistics and cultural anthropology, but also has certain important teleological and ideological ramifications. The study will come to focus upon the life world of my own daughter, whom I shall call by her middle name Alyce, who I know best of all children of the world, as but one example among many.</p> <font SIZE="2"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Man was nature’s mistake--she neglected to finish him--and she has never ceased paying for her mistake. (Eric Hoffer 1973: 4-5)</p> <p> <img SRC="line7.gif" WIDTH="542" HEIGHT="18"></p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="two"></a><a HREF="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/ChildsWorld.htm#twoa">PART I <p ALIGN="CENTER">THE PRIMARY ACQUISITION PROBLEM</p> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> <font SIZE="2">Language was invented to ask questions.... Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions. (Eric Hoffer 1973: 55-6)</p> </font> <p>The problem of the primary acquisition of language by children is an inextricable part of a broader problem of the primary acquisition of worldview and of cultural character by children within the native contexts of their earliest developmental phases. The primary acquisition problem refers to the development process of the child’s whole world and worldview, unless specific reference to specific aspects of this problem are made, for instance linguistic, cultural, cognitive or behavioral. This larger, more general problem of primary acquisition has features of its patterning which are both relative products of ‘nurture’ (psychologically, culture historically, linguistically, cognitively and normatively) as well as aspects which can be considered to be ‘structurally’ universal constraints of pan-human ‘nature’.</p> <p>From a child’s point of view, it makes little difference whether the development of cognition, language, socio-emotional well being or motor coordination can be technically considered to be parallel but separate processes, or which work in tandem with one another by taking turns. From the everyday world of a child, all of these aspects of development are inextricably bound up each with the other into an inseparable bundle of things and their relations: a virtual Gordion knot. It is from this holistic perspective of the child’s whole ‘life world’ that human development can be referred to as organic. To deprive or stem one or other crucial element of the child’s organic growth and development is tantamount to the amputation of a limb or removal of one of its organs of sense. The child will rapidly grow around the acquired disability as if this disability were a natural aspect of its being and life world remain in a fundamental sense forever sundered, incomplete and lacking in its developmental potential.</p> <p>It is only for the sake of scientific study that we treat the child’s development as if it were separated into distinct domains of physical growth, sensori-motor development, cognitive development, linguistic development, socialization, socio-emotional development of the sense of the self. From the biographical viewpoint the individual child’s development is always a veritable ‘kaleidoscope’ of skills, actions, mistakes, utterances, emotions, interactions, intentions.</p> <p>The larger "primary acquisition problem" represents, therefore, a complex nexus of synergistically interacting and cybernetically simulative sets of complicated variables. These can be divided for analytical purposes of scientific study into linguistic, cognitive, behavioral, psychological and socio-cultural components; these sets of variables interfunction in naturally and culturally coordinated sense within a kind of organic feedback system of the child’s ‘principle’ or ‘effective’ environment. The development of each of the component sets are linked in many ways to the development of the child’s whole organismic being and ‘life world.' The development of each of the traits is actually conditioned by the development of all other sets of variables and of the ‘system’ as a whole.</p> <p>It is perhaps an important lesson to be learned from the study of our children. Our everyday worlds always present themselves as is, as somehow integrated and however willy-nilly whole. Its analytical sub-divisions into different domains of understanding such as psychological, linguistic, cultural are but the residuum of our own mostly arbitrary conventions and an important demonstration of the inherent limitations of our language in adequately representing our experience of the world. It is in respect for our children’s worlds that we must learn to see them, hear them, and represent them in our scientific theories as they are and not as we decide to make them.</p> <p>The great divide between nature and nurture, especially as this is focused upon the problem of early child development, underlies what has come to be known as the ‘world view problem’ that concerns the pathways of causality and determinacy of interconnections between language, culture, cognition and behavior. This has been at the center of both relativist and universalist arguments regarding the ‘deep structural’ and ‘surface functional’ uniformity or variability of the phenomenal patterning and organization of language, culture, cognition and behavior. As aptly argued by Del Hymes (1966) this problem in itself is from a purely analytical framework extremely complex, involving many different kinds of possible combinations and possibly much trans-personal and cross cultural variation. The problematic of the relativity/structure of worldview should nevertheless most apparently evident in the differentials of patterning of the primary development of children involving many variables of primary acquisition. It is in terms of the child’s primary acquisition of language, culture, cognition and behavior that the ‘World View Problem’ becomes focused in terms of discovering how these different domains of human experience become interconnected and interfunctional.</p> <p>It is from this standpoint of the primary acquisition problem that the worldview problem can best be answered. In this regard the major theories of child development, of Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Noam Chomsky, L. Kohlberg, L. Vygotsky, and M.A.K. Halliday need to be reconsidered to understand the modern history of thought and research into early childhood development.</p> <p>Sigmund Freud looms large in the background of thinking about child development. Freudian psychoanalytic theory, whether it remains correct or was but the predominant dogma of the day, must be regarded as a seminal theoretical contribution to the human sciences. It gave the world not only a new theory, but a new paradigm, a whole new way of looking at the world, which set the tone and the later direction for much subsequent psychiatric and anthropological research into the human condition. For a period, its cross-cultural validation and elaboration provided the impetus to many anthropological ‘culture and personality’ and social ethnological studies. Though the central tenets have been severely tested and criticized, largely because its central theoretical concepts are problematic and difficult to operationalize for scientific investigation, it has made significant contributions to the early study of child development. It has served to focused attention upon the principle that the early stages of child development, especially interrelationships between the child and parents or significant others in the formation of the child’s self-identity and social conscience, may have major consequences upon the whole life of the resulting adult personality.</p> <p>The classical Freudian tripartite structure of the human psyche into the superego (conscious values), the ego (self concept and conscious thought0 and id (unconscious impulses) and the resulting dynamics of personality between the levels of conscious, pre-conscious and unconscious, remains an exemplary model and central tenet of scientific psychology. This schema is fit into the psychoanalytic theory of the psychosexual development of the personality and the central struggle of the id with the internalized ‘superego’ and the resulting formation of the mediating ego. It involves a series of developmental stages, the oral, anal, phallic, latency, adolescent and mature. It is in terms of the interactions and influence of significant others that a child achieves cathexis, an ‘cognitive emotional’ loading of symbolically and linguistically expressed relations, and ‘fixation’ or fluidity of personality at each of the stages of development.</p> <p>Freud related different kinds of adult experience anxiety as being the by-product of the lack of important experiences during the early psychosexual stages of development ‘which failed to fulfill basic and psychological needs during the early stages of infancy’. Thus he distinguished between: 1. Reality anxiety that might be related to certain stressors or noxious agents in the environment. 2. Neurotic anxieties, or ‘the fear that certain antisocial, sexual or aggressive urges will become uncontrollable and cause individuals to do something that will eventually cause them to be punished.’(Zaichowsky 1980: 182) and 3. ‘Moral anxiety’ that is guilt or fear of one’s own conscience and of being punished or persecuted for one’s actions. Inordinate restriction of early development during any of the critical psycho-sexual stages can result in the fixation of personality upon that stage and arrested socio-emotional development which shows up later in life as ‘the return of the repressed’.</p> <p>Later stages of this psychosexual development occurring during adolescence become critical in the formation of the individual’s sexual identity, internalization of conscience, and ability to form healthy sexual relationships later in adult life. Young boys undergo an ‘Oedipal conflict' that effectively sunders their strong bond with the Mother and results in the internalization of the sexual identity of the Father. Failure to resolve this oedipal conflict can result in an ‘Oedipus Complex’ in which the individuals gender identity and sense of conscience are incomplete or impaired. The result for males is a kind of ‘castration anxiety’ for females there is a corresponding ‘Electra Glide’ complex in which the female becomes incapable of forming close bonds with males.</p> <p>Like most psychological theories, its cross-cultural validation and research has yielded mixed and ambivalent results. As a general ‘hypothetico-deductive’ model it is still widely applied in revised and ‘weak’ forms in explaining observed phenomena, (Ward Kracke 1978, Melford Spiro 1967, Ganath Obeyeskeere 1981) even though most of its components have failed to stand up to more rigorous cross cultural testing (Richard Sweder 1979) and its near exclusive reliance in psychiatry has been severely criticized from several directions. (Thomas Szasz 1970, John Townsend 1979) In this regard, the association of orality and later development of personality has received some cross-cultural validation in the exhaustive ‘Six Cultures’ study by John and Beatrice Whiting, and its more sociologically oriented criticism has yielded important insights into labeling, stereotypes of mental illness, and the social construction of reality and the negotiation of power in psychiatric wards. (Irving Goffman 1961, Susan Estroff 1981) Non-Freudian theory has been fruitfully applied in psycho-historical studies (Erik Erikson ?) in studies of Authoritarianism (Adorno 1950, Bettleheim 1950, Fromm 1947, Hoffer 1958) as