Uric Bronfenbrenner's pedantry in laying out formal definitions,
hypotheses, propositions, is off-putting until you realize that he
is establishing the ground rules for an evolutionary/revolutionary
turn in developmental psychology. Notwithstanding the debased
currency of the word, his is a truly "ecological" viewpoint. He
sees the growth of a child as a series of nested boxes of micro- to
macrosystems involving first dyads and triads of individuals, then
larger chunks of society. With acknowledgment to Kurt Lewin's
"topologies" and Harry Stack Sullivan's interpersonal psychology -
and perhaps unconscious homage to Jules Henry, that master of
family psychopathology - Bronfenbrenner convinces us that parents,
teachers, social scientists have all been blind to the fact that
development is not something that happens to a child, but a process
that involves the child in a series of potentially transforming
interactions with others in particular settings. While
psychologists have often paid lip service to these ideas,
developmental studies continue to focus on a child in a laboratory,
or a white academician in an ethnic ghetto, and perpetuate a
"deficit"-in-the-victim ethos. If something is developmentally
wrong, the child is at fault; or if not the child, the family; and
so on. Even the classic experiments to determine if there are
critical periods of attachment or dependency have focused on the
mother or the child, but not on both together. Thus, Bronfenbrenner
astonishes and delights us as he painstakingly re-analyzes the work
of Rene Spitz, for example, or of Skeels, who had the beneficent
idea of putting orphans in wards of mentally-retarded females, to
their mutual gain. On an adult level, he reviews the Milgram
pain-inflicting experiment and the Zimbardo prisoners-and-guards
role-playing scenario. All these experiments - involving
interpersonal and larger ecological variables - have been
criticized in terms of design, interpretation, and ethics.
Bronfenbrenner, moreover, goes so far as to suggest that
psychological studies should not necessarily shape social policy,
but the other way around. We could, for example, mandate the
addition of "caring" programs to school curricula, where children
would learn what it is like to help the aged or the ill. We could
emphasize play that simulates the workplace or stimulates fantasy -
neither presently encouraged in American schools. Of course, there
is a danger of social manipulation which Bronfenbrenner recognizes,
for these practices are typical of the Russian and Chinese
nurseries that he has studied. But Bronfenbrenner argues that
changes can take place in the macrosystem as well: society need not
be static. It all sounds eminently sensible, and exciting. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Here is a book that challenges the very basis of the way
psychologists have studied child development. According to Urie
Bronfenbrenner, one of the world's foremost developmental
psychologists, laboratory studies of the child's behavior sacrifice
too much in order to gain experimental control and analytic rigor.
Laboratory observations, he argues, too often lead to "the science
of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with
strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time." To
understand the way children actually develop, Bronfenbrenner
believes that it will be necessary to observe their behavior in
natural settings, while they are interacting with familiar adults
over prolonged periods of time. This book offers an important
blueprint for constructing such a new and ecologically valid
psychology of development. The blueprint includes a complete
conceptual framework for analysing the layers of the environment
that have a formative influence on the child. This framework is
applied to a variety of settings in which children commonly
develop, ranging from the pediatric ward to daycare, school, and
various family configurations. The result is a rich set of
hypotheses about the developmental consequences of various types of
environments. Where current research bears on these hypotheses,
Bronfenbrenner marshals the data to show how an ecological theory
can be tested. Where no relevant data exist, he suggests new and
interesting ecological experiments that might be undertaken to
resolve current unknowns. Bronfenbrenner's groundbreaking program
for reform in developmental psychology is certain to be
controversial. His argument flies in the face of standard
psychological procedures and challenges psychology to become more
relevant to the ways in which children actually develop. It is a
challenge psychology can ill-afford to ignore.
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