J. McVicker Hunt

Environmental Programming to Foster Competence and Prevent Mental Retardation in Infancy

The idea of arranging environmental encounters in the care of infants to promote competence and good character is as old as the classical thought of the Greeks. In the Laws (Book VII, 788ff), Plato has his Athenian stranger contend that lawgivers should stress the importance of nurture and education in achieving citizens with characters appropriate for the good of the state. On the other hand, this idea is also new. From the time of Plato until the beginning of the twentieth century, exceedingly few of the philosophers who concerned themselves with education and the development of moral character considered nurture and experience during infancy and early childhood to be of significance in the adult outcome of human development. Aries (1960) has described the gradual discovery through the centuries of childhood in the institutional practices of the family and the school. This evolving discovery has continued into the twentieth century, as the age when causal significance attributed to the environments encountered has been extended downward to birth and even to the emotional and nutritional state of the maternal host at conception and during gestation (see Hunt, 1969, Chap. 7).

Comments on “the modification of intelligence through early experience” by Ramey and Haskins

Abstract Ramey and Haskins report two findings of major importance: absence of decline in test scores and absence of mother-child correlation for treated children. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Experiential Roots of Intention, Initiative, and Trust

Intention, initiative, and trust have been considered to be developmental products of the first two years of living in human infants by widely disparate schools of thought. Since evidences of plasticity have weakened the traditional belief that early development is essentially predetermined in course and rate by heredity, an influential role in it may properly be attributed to experience, and especially early experience (Hunt, 1979a). It is common to call this influence “environmental.” Yet it is the functioning of the infant organism rather than the environment per se which modifies the course and rate of its development. Environmental circumstances are only indirectly of influence as they serve in the control of an infant’s functioning. Recent evidence has turned up hitherto unsuspected evidences of specificity between kinds of experience and the kinds of developmental achievements affected (see Hunt, 1977). These evidences of such specificity make it important for both the science of developmental psychology and the technology of early education to know as definitely and accurately as possible what kinds of experience are important for the various developmental achievements. The substance of this paper has been suggested by an unexpected consequence of an intervention in the infant rearing at an orphanage in Tehran (Hunt, Mohandessi, Ghodssi, & Akiyama, 1976). This intervention was planned to foster vocal imitation and, through it, language achievement (Hunt, 1979a). When the intervention turned out to produce also radical improvements in initiative, mood, and trust, it, combined with other new findings in the literature, suggested a need to revise my formulation of the role of intrinsic motivation in early psychological development.

Sequential Order and Plasticity in Early Psychological Development

The philosophers of nature were exceedingly slow to recognize that organisms go through a series of changes in anatomical substance and structure during their embryonic development. The ancient aphorism that “hair cannot come from not-hair,” epitomizing the principle that no substance or structure can come from a substance or structure of a different nature, dominated human thought from the days of ancient Greece to nearly modern times. Over 2,000 years passed from the time of Aristotle’s first observations of some of the epigenetic changes that occur in chick embryos until Casper Friedrich Wolff (1759, 1768) detailed the transformations in the circulatory system and the intestine of chick embryos so clearly that he convinced at least those informed of biological matters, brought an end to the doctrine of preformationism, and established recognition of the epigenetic nature of embryonic development.

Toward Solutions for Problems of Early Childhood Education

The same basic goal has animated the recently instituted efforts of both Israel and the United States of America in early childhood education. For different historical reasons, both nations have faced the incontrovertible fact that a substantial portion of children enter school without the knowledge and skills required to cope effectively with school. In consequence, many children drop out without having acquired the knowledge and skills and values required for productive employment in industrialized economies or for responsible citizenship. A major share of such children come from families where the parents are both uneducated and poor. The goal of early childhood education has been to provide these children with the knowledge and skills required to cope effectively with the tasks of school learning and ultimately to prepare them for a role both productive and responsible in the mainstream of our societies.