The material in this book has led me to a position so at odds with current opinion about the child mind and human intelligence that I have been at some loss to bridge the gap. At issue is a biological plan for the growth of intelligence, a genetic encoding within us that we ignore, damage, and even destroy. The mind-brain is designed for astonishing capacities, but its development is based on the infant and child constructing a knowledge of the world as it actually is. Children are unable to construct this foundation because we unknowingly inflict on them an anxiety-conditioned view of the world (as it was unknowingly inflicted on us). Childhood is a battleground between the biological plan's intent, which drives the child from within, and our anxious intentions, pressing the child from without.
Nature has provided that the human child be more dependent on a caretaker, for a long period of time, than any other species. If parents and society honored nature's purpose behind this long dependency and slow maturation, the child would discover and respond to the world without concern for the utility or value of his discovery. If the child were allowed to develop this natural world view, logical maturation would develop a utility, value, and ability almost beyond our imagination.
I thought at first to write a simple outline of the biological plan as my understanding of it has unfolded over these years. But the material would not let me rest with that. Critical issues tumbled in: What is going so wrong in all technological countries today that infantile autism and brain damage are increasing at an epidemic rate, that childhood suicides are increasing yearly, that growing numbers of parents are beating infants and tiny children to death, that schooling is becoming increasingly unproductive, traumatic, even hazardous and improbable to maintain, and so on? I found that none of these problems, isolated to itself, is solvable. And I found that we make a serious error if we think children are only reflecting the tensions of the adult world. Rather, it may be the reverse. The issue is the nature of the child mind, human intelligence, and our biological connections with the earth system on which the development of the mindbrain depends. Until this issue is clarified and corrected, our problems can only multiply.
After working on this manuscript for a year or so, I felt it would be productive to lecture on the subject, to get feedback from parents, teachers, professionals, or whoever might be interested. The lectures grew to three-day seminars and proved of great value as a source of constant correctives, balancing theory and everyday reality and providing dozens of research sources that I might otherwise never have found. Above all, these lectures and seminars have given me a near shock wave of profound affirmative response, from many different parts of the country, to the ideas set forth in this book.
As the father of five children; as an adult who has a clear recollection of the impressions, states of mind, and expectancies of my own early years; and as a teacher in both college and public school, I had some tangible background to relate to the often abstract studies of the child, the mind-brain, and reality. I was not prepared, though, for what formed as the material broke through to me with connections and meanings I had only dimly suspected. At one point, I felt that the book was impossible for me to do, that the implications were too vast and too sad to articulate---I underwent some depression when I began to see the potential of the child and the monumental tragedy that befalls us anew with each generation. I knew guilt over my own experience as a father and nostalgia over the loss of potential I had once felt so keenly. Only by delving as completely into the material as was possible for me did I finally see why I was not guilty, why none of us is or was, and why blame is largely fruitless. Once I had achieved this insight, the material showed me the extraordinary and profound potential and hope that an understanding of the child's (and our own) mind-brain holds.
Because I am writing this book as a parent to parents, a teacher to teachers, and a human concerned about the reintegration of self and child, I will avoid, as far as possible, technical terms or explanations. My sole concern is to outline the biological plan and how it is damaged, and I use any material that is helpful. The work of Jean Piaget, for instance, is one of my foundation blocks, yet I have used his theory and materials selectively as it aided my purpose. It will take us generations to appreciate the enormous scope of the work of this Swiss biologist turned psychologist. He spent some forty-five years observing the growth of intelligence in hundreds of children, and I find his work an invaluable source, guide, and model. It was, in fact, Piaget's concern over so-called magical thinking in children that proved a valuable clue and eventually gave me the title of this work. Yet, I often use his material in ways almost opposite to his own viewpoints. For the sake of brevity, I do so without explanation, argument, or apology (other than right here).
As a biologist, Piaget felt that psychology had erred by starting with the grown human and working backward to the child, carrying into research the biases and viewpoints of a mature logic. The end product of a biological organism, he said, is not the best place to start if you want to understand that organism. You must start your research at the beginning of that life and let the creature show you as it grows. Piaget found that the child had to build his or her own intellectual knowledge for interpreting and physically responding to the world. He found the infant driven from within, with a nonvolitional intent, to make the necessary physical interactions with the world. Piaget called the results the child's structure of knowledge. We sometimes refer to this as our world view, that is, the way the brain organizes its incoming information and makes an intelligent response.
Piaget found that the child goes through clear developmental stages in this growth of intelligence, stages that parallel physical growth. He found that the child's brain system and structure of knowledge undergo specific transitions on a kind of timed maturational basis. At each of these shifts, the brain then processes its information in new ways and develops new ways for interacting with a larger experience. These shifts of logic, according to Piaget, are genetically determined and occur in all children in the same sequence at about the same age---much as physical growth does, I might add.
Many people have argued against this position, particularly in this country. Jerome Bruner feels that any subject can be taught at almost any time if it is cast in a proper framework and that the stage-specific nature of learning Piaget outlines is artificially binding. Most educators have followed Bruner and his call for earlier academic experience and training. In the following pages, I will concern myself with these theories counter to Piaget only as I see them acting against the unfolding of the biological plan, not as they relate to Piaget, whose work will stand on its own merit.
Recently, Herman Epstein, the Brandeis University biophysicist, has found evidence of periodic brain-growth spurts in all children at about the same stages in their development. At these periods, the brain actually grows new biological materials for learning. These spurts occur roughly every four years, all but one coinciding with Piaget's periods of logical transition. Brain-growth spurts seem genetically predetermined in the same way that Piaget's developmental stages do, and I take it as obvious that these are all part of an integral genetic coding for the growth of intelligence.
The theory of development presented by Piaget and Epstein offers a model in which nearly all the problems of childhood and eventual adulthood can take on new meaning. But this is the case only if we take into consideration, and go around, Piaget's own bias, a point of view that was almost inevitable for a twentieth-century scientist. The prejudice distinctly qualifying his observations was his attitude toward the characteristic he calls magical thinking. In this he shared the conventional view of other researchers who refer to the child's wish thinking, fantasizing, or autistic thinking (in the original meaning of that term) as a self-enclosed thought that doesn't bother to check against reality. In brief, magical thinking implies that some connection exists between thought and reality, that thinking enters into and can influence the actual world. Child thought is based on this attitude for the first seven or eight years. The central question of psychologies and educational research has been: How can the child be made to attend to reality? Or how can we make the child abandon magical thinking?
Each generation uses its children to its own ends, Otto Rank once claimed, and magical thinking has been one of the stumbling blocks to using our children as we would like to in service to our technology. Has nature, then, made a monumental error in creating a child who compulsively spends most of his or her time in the apparently nonproductive and even antisurvival activities of fantasy, magical thinking, and play? The implicit, almost axiomatic answer of our whole modern treatment of children has been: Yes, nature has apparently so erred, in spite of the fact that this seems to go against the entire thrust and fabric of evolutionary adaptation and selection. But the child's world has recently been collapsing almost as fast as our adult one. Is it not possible that our ideas of the child and nature are in error instead?
Piaget's primary interest and unconscious bias were in the development of rational scientific thought, the kind of thinking that makes great university material. His brilliant observational analysis of the development of such thinking is of immense worth, but something profoundly significant is missing. Recently, split-brain research has led to a theory of a dual functioning of the brain according to left and right hemispheres. Some researchers have decided that Piaget's type of thinking (and therefore his results) stems from left-brain thinking, the ordinary, linear, rational, digital thinking so typical of this century. So a counterswing is now under way to promote the education of the other half of the brain. Our ills, say the leaders of this trend, are due to overeducating the left brain. Thus, schools should incorporate right-brain curricula. I cringe at the thought.
The clue lies with the child's universal compulsion to play and fantasize. Researchers state that the infant makes no random or useless movements; from the beginning every action has meaning, purpose, and design. In the same way, if all children compulsively spend the bulk of their time in some activity, then that activity must play a major role in genetic organization. Fantasy play and magical thinking cannot be errors of nature or examples of a faulty child logic needing adult correction because no species could survive with such a built-in contradiction.
What I have done is to take the liberty of using Piaget's research and terms as a basis for examining the child's experience. But I have included those magical areas found unacceptable to academic thought. Once all aspects of the child's experience are examined as natural and meaningful, Piaget's own developmental theory takes on dimensions far beyond, yet still encompassing, his own interests. Concern for the viewpoints of the various specialists whose domain I encroach upon is theirs, not mine. If I have glossed over some points, ignored minor discrepancies, used or misused materials selectively, so be it. My task has been to sketch the picture of the child's mind and nature's plan for intelligence. This is a large terrain, and discrepancies are probably inevitable. But I stand by my sketch of human intelligence and intend this book to be an aid in the correction of a monstrous misunderstanding.
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