Criticisms

Margaret Donaldson has questioned Piaget’s view that children are highly egocentric, compared to adults. The tasks which Piaget set the children he studied, as she sees it, were presented from an adult standpoint, rather than in terms that were understandable to them. Egosentrism is equally characteristic of adult behaviour - –n some situations. To make the point, she quotes a passage from the autobiography of the British poet Laurie Lee, describing his first day at school as small boy.

“I spent that first day picking holes in paper, then went home in a smouldering temper.

‘What’s the matter, Love? Didn’t he like it at school then?’

‘They never gave me a present.’

‘Present? What present?’

‘They said they’d give me a present’.

‘Well now, I’m sure they didn’t.’

‘They did! They said, “You’re Laurie Lee, aren’t you? Well; just sit there for the present. “I sat there all day but I never got it. I ain’t going back there again’.

As adults we tend to think that the child has misunderstood, in a comic way, the instructions of the teacher. Yet on a deeper level, Donaldson points out, the adult has failed to understand the child, not recognizing the ambiguity in the phrase ‘sit there for the present’. The adult, not the boy, is guilty of egocentrism.

Piaget’s wark has also been much criticized on grounds of his methods. How can we generalize from findings based on observations of small numbers of children all living in one city? Yet for the most part Piaget’s ideas have stood up well in the light of the enormous amount of subsequent research they have helped to generate. The stages of development he identifies are probably less clear-cut than he claimed, but many of his ideas are now generally accepted.

12. Connections between the theories

There are major differences between the perspectives of Freud, Mead and Piaget; yet it is possible to suggest a picture of child development which draws on them all.

All three authors accept that, in the early months of infancy, a baby has no distinct understanding of the nature of objects or persons in its environment or of its own separate identity. Throughout the first tow or so years of life, before the mastery of developed linguistic skills, most of the child’s learning is unconscious because she or he has as yet no awareness of self. Freud was probably right to claim that ways of coping with anxiety established during this early period – related, in particular, to interaction with mother and father – remain important in later personality development.

It is likely that children learn to become self-aware beings through the process suggested by Mead – the differentiating of an ‘I’ and a ‘me’. Children who have acquired a sense of self retain egocentric modes of thinking, however, as Piaget indicated. The development of the child’s autonomy probably involves greater emotional difficulties than either Mead or Piaget seemed to recognize – which is where Freud’s ideas are particularly relevant. Being able to cope with early anxieties may well influence how far a child is later able to move successfully through the stages of cognition distinguished by Piaget.

Taken together, these theories explain a great deal about how we become social beings, having an awareness of self and able to interact with others in regular way. However, they concentrate on socialization in infancy and childhood, and none of the authors provides an account of the social contexts in which socialization takes place – a task to which we now turn.