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We inherited one science education project, set up by Frank when
he was traveling to Africa, before the office opened. It was run by three eccentric science teachers from the Bronx
High School of Science who cordially loathed one other. One reason for setting up an office was to get those guys out of
each other’s hair. Beyond that project, we didn’t touch primary or secondary
education because the scale of the problems exceeded by far our
resources. We worked some
with universities, but we were aware that we were tinkering on the
periphery while another generation of young Africans was growing up to
find life little changed from that of their forebears.
I was new to the Foundation, coming to it after a year with the
US Commission on Civil Rights. I
was of course very pro-African and anti-colonial, but the realities of
Africa put one’s beliefs to the test. The majority of people one came in contact with on the street, in
stores, as servants, were very simple, mostly illiterate, and lacking in
maturity. One had to be
cautious not to become paternalistic, to maintain one’s psychic
distance from the colonials, who were decent people with unfortunate
attitudes.
We also got well acquainted with some remarkable Africans, such
as Tom Mboya, Phil Ndegwa, Kyale Mwendwa and many others, which made the
gap between average people and the educated elite all the more
perplexing. I recall Kyale,
then Chief Education Officer for the Government, telling me about his
religious evolution. He was
born a pagan, and believed in the full range of ritual and superstition
that governed the lives of most Wakamba at that time. Then he was sent to a missionary school and taught among other
things to be a Christian. He
was a good student, and eventually wound up at Makerere in Uganda. When he came home on holiday he looked up his missionary teachers
to ask them some questions that arose at college. To his surprise, they denounced him and drove him
away. So then he became agnostic. In one short lifetime he traversed much of the history of
evolution in religious thinking, and he was only around 30 years old!
Bob
Levine and John and Bea Whiting, psychologists from Harvard, were doing
research in East Africa in those days, and interaction with them made us
reflect upon human development issues without, however, coming to any
coherent strategy of action. We
admired the work of Alliance High School, Strathmore College, and other
elite institutions of the colonial era, but it was clear that
state-supported schools could not preserve an elite status when so many
were not being educated at all.
When
I left East Africa in 1967, the Foundation sent me to Harvard for a
year, where I took courses mainly in economic development and public
management I wrote
one paper that bears on human development issues. “Wrong Turn at Arusha” (1967) is mainly a critique of a
series of major policy statements made the previous year by President
Nyerere, a critique that unfortunately stood up well over time. The underlying basis of the critique was that the Tanzanian
people were simply not ready to exercise the sophisticated judgments and
advanced social values that Nyerere, The Mwalimu (the teacher) sought to
grant them. He was an
admirable man with lofty ideals, the darling of the foreign assistance
community. But he essentially misunderstood the human development issue.
In
the early 1970s, the Foundation sent me to Lebanon as representative for
the Middle East. Unlike
East Africa, this was an established program, one of the first offices
set up by the Foundation in the early 1950s. The program had two major themes, set in motion by my
predecessors, Hugh Walker and Don Kingsley:
dry lands agricultural research and public administration,
respectively. I was not
fond of either of these themes. I
didn’t think food production was at the heart of any major Arab
problem, and I didn’t think our style of public administration made
much sense to the Arabs. I
had to continue the investment stream so as not to irresponsibly
terminate programs before they had a chance to succeed, but I wrote
annual screeds suggesting that the development priorities of the region
lay elsewhere (see Archive papers 1972-1976).
My
interest in human development had continued after leaving Africa. I was curious about how to account for the extraordinary range of
capacities and maturity we had encountered there, and had read into
Piaget, Loevinger, Kohlberg and Erikson, seeking answers. I became convinced that early childhood was the critically
important period where vital human traits were established. Benjamin Bloom’s Stability
and Change in Human Characteristics [1] had a powerful impact on me.
He found that many physical, mental and emotional traits of
people were identifiable in them by age three. I also saw a report of a child-rearing experiment in Israel where
researchers sought to close the cultural gap between the children of the
Ashkenazim, or European Jews, and the Sephardim, or Oriental Jews. It was a well-designed study, with controls and different
mixtures of children from each group among the experimental classes. The kibbutz system made it possible to insulate the children from
home experience. It was
found that enrichment activities allowed each group to advance in
cognitive terms well beyond the controls. But the gap in fact widened. The study began with children at age three, which apparently was
too late for the purposes of the study.
The
Dean of Arts and Sciences at the American University of Beirut, Edwin
Terry Prothro, was a child development psychologist who had studied
children in three religious communities in Beirut and rural Lebanon. He found he could identify their community from their appearance
and personalities by age 8. The
geographical environment of these communities was the same, but the
environment in the home must have differed.
Early
childhood development had no place among Ford Foundation programs at
that time. David Bell, the
vice president for international programs, was himself a research
subject in a California project studying gifted children, and I think
that inoculated him against psychology forever. I used to have long and tough arguments with him about the
importance of intervention in the early years. Frank Sutton, a sociologist who has read everything, would be
reference referee for these tussles, but never really took sides. I didn’t win the arguments, but I was still able take a few
initiatives in the Middle East program that were outside traditional
programming lines.
In
Beirut, my wife Pen and I became acquainted with Ali and Saniyah Othman. Ali was a Palestinian with some anthropological training who
worked for UNICEF and Saniyah had a master’s degree in child
development psychology. We met when Ali came to my office with an idea for work in
Oman. The infant mortality
rate in Oman was horrendous, over 150 per 1000. When Ali visited there he found the children who survived until
age two or three typically wore amulets on their clothing to protect
them. He reasoned that any
intervention by UNICEF should be based upon a close understanding of
their mothers’ beliefs and ways of caring for their babies. Together we fashioned a project through which four
Arabic-speaking young women would live for 8 months in the inland
village of Nisweh and the coastal village of Sofar. They would get to know the women of these villages and seek to
ascertain what they thought endangered their babies and how they could
best protect them.
The
study was guided by sociologists from AUB, who prepared interview
schedules and analyzed the results. The results were fascinating, and surprising to the Omani
government as well as to us. The
mothers did everything they could to protect their children from the
evil eye and the djinn, but had no notion of how diseases were
transmitted, and why, for example, they should brush the flies from the
babies’ eyes. The society
we had tapped into existed in an environment riddled with magic and
superstition. Few if any such societies remain in the world.
The late Sultan bin Taimur benefited from oil discoveries, but he
sought to prevent the influences of the outside world from corrupting
his people. The whole
country had but three miles of paved roads and three elementary schools.
Travel was strictly limited outside the country, and no tourists
were permitted to enter.
Even
though the new sultan, who had overthrown his father, was moving as
rapidly as possible to provide medical services for his people, the
facilities were staffed largely by Indian doctors who knew no Arabic,
and the sick were taken to hospital only after all else, by way of
traditional rituals, had failed. Needless
to say, the survival rate of those who went to hospital was not high,
further adding to the problem. Other
development expenditures by the Sultan included a new airport, port
facilities, schools staffed by Jordanian teachers, agricultural research
stations, and expanded government services provided by cadres of Arab,
Pakistani, and Indian expatriates.
The
Sultan was trying to use oil revenues to develop his country as rapidly
as possible. In effect, he
imposed modern society on his bewildered people. They are still trying to learn how to run the modern systems he
instituted. Another, and to
my mind better, approach would have been to take into account the actual
level of consciousness of his people, the place of magic in their lives,
and gradually bring them into the modern world. They needed to be able to understand the improved technologies
available to them and to advance their living standards gradually as
they learned.
I
do not wish to be critical of the Sultan. He was then, and remains today, a leader dedicated to improving
the lives of his people, but one could only wish he had taken a more
gradual approach to development, so his people could feel that they
owned the process, not that they were strangers in their own land.
The
study helped UNICEF design better projects, and would have been of
interest much more widely, but the Government, fearing to portray its
people as ignorant and superstitious, declined to let us publish the
information. A summary of
the results is found in (URL). It
tells a remarkable story of childrearing beliefs and customs at the
magical stage of civilization.
Back
in Beirut, our pub-crawl discussions touched on the place of the child
in Islam. Ali, an amateur
Koran scholar, went back to the text to see what he could discern. He found that the child is considered to be simply a smaller
version of an adult after attaining age six or seven, when it could be
taught to read the Koran. Prior
to that age, the child was considered jehal, or ignorant. (The Jehalliya is the age of ignorance, or human history before
the coming of the Prophet Mohammed.)
As a result, children were traditionally kept healthy and out of
mischief in their younger years, but no particular effort was made to
stimulate cognitive or emotional development. Children experiencing inconsistent parental control are likely to
begin school at a disadvantage. But it is worth remembering that only in the past few
centuries has the sense of childhood’s distinction from adulthood
become commonly accepted in Western society.
Saniyah
said she could write a book in simplified Arabic to serve as a
child-rearing manual for mothers. Again through UNICEF I arranged for the financing, and
Saniyah spent a year writing a book that became a best seller, in
Arabic, and went through at least four printings before I lost track. She interviewed local professionals concerning child-rearing
problems, and was gently persuasive rather than preachy. She sought to reinforce the positive aspects of traditional
Lebanese childrearing, such as the warmth of the home environment, while
suggesting alternatives to some of the less positive aspects. She
provided me with a summary, in translation, of Your
Child, Zero to Five.
I
don’t wish to give the impression that most Lebanese, Jordanians, or
Syrians were deficient or superstitious in child rearing. Indeed, the brilliance of many scholars from the area is widely
recognized in such areas as theoretical physics and medicine, as well as
the arts. My impression was
that the cognitive development of individuals was often more advanced
than the ability to accomplish tasks through cooperation. I was reminded of an observation attributed to Julius Caesar
after conquering Britain, that the Brits were individually a very stupid
people, compared with the brilliant Romans, but that collectively they
somehow were able to get things done. I wonder if he said the opposite about the Lebanese, at the other
end of his empire.
My
final modest effort in the child development field may have had the
greatest impact. A group of
psychologists in Lebanon were interested in the potential of
children’s television programming, so I invited the Children’s
Television Workshop (CTW), producers of Sesame
Street, to send out
a team to explore possibilities. They
made several trips to the Middle East, including the Gulf States, with
the result that a group in Kuwait produced a series called Iftah
ya Simsim, Open Sesame, for audiences in the Gulf States. They commissioned CTW to supply an advisor to the producer, and
paid several million dollars for the use of the Sesame
Street archives of program clips. It turned out that relatively little of the archives were
directly useful because of the differences in script and number systems
(we use Arabic numerals, the Arabs use Indian), but the show was a great
success, and not just among children. Egypt, regrettably, took the view that nothing from the Gulf
could be useful for Egyptians and declined to use the program.
After
I escaped by boat to Cyprus from a Lebanon consumed by civil war in
mid-1978, I took a vacation from human development thinking. I became involved with science and technology policies and public
management issues, which I’ll go into later, but I remained very aware
of the human development dimension in these subjects.
In
1993, after retiring, I enrolled as a post-career graduate student at
The Fielding Institute, studying human and organizational development. This was a terrific opportunity to deepen my understanding of
human development psychology in a semi-structured environment, with wise
counsel available when wanted or needed.
I was able to explore ways in which developmental psychology
could be related to problem solving on a broad scale.
What
captivated me most was a new awareness of the possibility of continued
human development in adulthood, fostered in recent years by Michael
Commons at Harvard, and others. Commons and his associates formed the Society for Research on
Adult Development (SRAD), which meets annually. Appropriately, they titled their pathbreaking work Beyond
Formal Operations [2]. Unfortunately, from my point of view, this
group of pioneers has a very scholarly orientation, devoting itself to
discovering more and more accurate ways to measure and define stages and
transitions between stages in adult development. As developmental psychologists this is entirely
appropriate. But the implications of their theories at the societal level are
profound. I believe they
need to be reaching out to other disciplines rather than simply
deepening their penetration of their narrowly defined field. I gave a paper
(SRAD, 1999) at one of their meetings in which I urged a
broader canvas but, while it aroused a certain amount of interest, I
don’t think it changed anything.
One
scholar who does relate adult development to social issues is Robert
Kegan, a psychologist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and
the University of Massachusetts. In
two excellent books, The Evolving
Self [3] and In Over Our Heads
[4], Kegan demonstrates how much greater are the challenges faced by
citizens of the modern world than those confronting the average man at
any time before in history. The
challenges are not mortal dangers, such as lions, famine, and infectious
diseases, but challenges to our abilities and comprehension. These challenges engender growth in those who meet them
successfully. Clearly, not
all of us do meet them successfully, and modern society contains
distressing numbers of neurotics, psychotics, and criminals, who might
have been better off in an earlier age or a simpler society, where fewer
choices confronted the individual.
Kegan
identifies five stages of human consciousness, each successive stage
incorporating and going beyond the preceding one. Each stage represents a different way of constructing and
interpreting reality. His
first four stages are recognizably Piagetian, and take us through
concrete to formal operations. The
fourth stage, or formal operations, is generally achieved, if at all, in
late adolescence. Only
around half of our population ever reaches stage four, according to
Kegan. As a psychologist he
is especially interested in relationships between people and in the
challenges individuals face. He
notes the demands of modern life with regard to parenting, partnering,
working, learning, and conflict resolution.
The
remarkable thing about our society is that within it, for the first time
in history, three stages or
mentalities exist side by side in the adult population. The three are the traditional, the modern, and the postmodern; or
stages three, four, and five. And the qualitative gap between stages four and five is as
great as that between the traditional (fundamentalist) and the modern. That is why we are, nearly all of us, in over our
heads. Very few of us achieve stage five, and those who do, he claims,
are over forty. I can’t
begin to present stage five in a simple paragraph or two, but I am not
especially concerned with that stage. It is at stage four that people are able to take responsibility
for their fertility and the impact of their actions on the environment. I favor a concerted, worldwide, effort to raise as many people as
possible to stage four.
The
problem I have with Kegan’s approach to human development is that it
focuses on the individual without examining the long-range social
implications. He does
relate development to social issues, but they are issues on the micro
level. We need a sense of
human development in an historical context: a sense of the evolution of
the human race.
References
1.
Bloom, B., Stability and
Change in Human Characteristics. 1964, New York: Wiley. 237.
2.
Commons, M., F. Richards, and C. Armon, Beyond
Formal Operations: Late Adolescent and Adult Cognitive Development.
1984, New York: Praeger. 460.
3.
Kegan, R., The Evolving
Self. 1985, New York: Norton.
4.
Kegan, R., In Over Our
Heads: The mental demands of modern life. 1995, Cambridge: Harvard.
396.
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