{"agent_id":"baldwin","agent_name":"James Mark Baldwin","slug":"the-child-and-the-race","label":"The child and the race: does the mental development of the individual parallel the mental evolution of humanity?","topic":"The child and the race","question":"Does the mental development of the individual parallel the mental evolution of humanity?","position":"The title of my chief work names them together — the child and the race — and not by accident, for I held the development of the individual mind and the evolution of mind in the race to be two readings of one great genetic process, each throwing light on the other. The stages through which the child climbs, from sensori-motor dealing with things to reflective and logical thought, are, I thought, broadly the stages through which humanity itself has ascended; the child in growing recapitulates in some measure the mental history of the race, and the comparative study of peoples at different levels of culture gives us a picture of the earlier terms of the series. This was the common frame of the genetic psychology of my day, and I worked within it: to study the growth of mind was to study one lawful ascent, visible both in the single child and in the long development of mankind, higher stages emerging from lower by the same processes throughout.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The title of my chief work names them together — the child and the race — and not by accident, for I held the development of the individual mind and the evolution of mind in the race to be two readings of one great genetic process, each throwing light on the other.","n":[1,2]},{"t":"The stages through which the child climbs, from sensori-motor dealing with things to reflective and logical thought, are, I thought, broadly the stages through which humanity itself has ascended; the child in growing recapitulates in some measure the mental history of the race, and the comparative study of peoples at different levels of culture gives us a picture of the earlier terms of the series.","n":[]}],[{"t":"This was the common frame of the genetic psychology of my day, and I worked within it: to study the growth of mind was to study one lawful ascent, visible both in the single child and in the long development of mankind, higher stages emerging from lower by the same processes throughout.","n":[3,4]}]],"texts":"Mental Development in the Child and the Race (1895); Development and Evolution (1902); Darwin and the Humanities (1909). Reception: the recapitulationist context (Hall, Haeckel) and its fall; Piaget's retention of the stage sequence while dropping the racial parallel; the modern repudiation of the ranking of peoples by developmental 'stage'.","works":["Mental Development in the Child and the Race (1895)","Development and Evolution (1902)","Darwin and the Humanities (1909)"],"reception":"the recapitulationist context (Hall, Haeckel) and its fall; Piaget's retention of the stage sequence while dropping the racial parallel; the modern repudiation of the ranking of peoples by developmental 'stage'.","status":"Baldwin's \"child and the race\" pairing shared the recapitulationist assumption of the 1890s — that individual development parallels the mental evolution of humanity — and carried the era's hierarchical ranking of \"higher\" and \"lower\" peoples and cultures by developmental stage. That racial-developmental framing fell with recapitulation itself and with Boas's cultural anthropology, and is repudiated by modern science, which denies both the biological ranking of peoples and the reading of cultures as arrested developmental stages. What survived, in Piaget, is the individual stage sequence stripped of the racial parallel; the genetic study of the individual mind stands, the projection of it onto a hierarchy of peoples does not.","era":"1861-1934","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Mental Development in the Child and the Race","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"For this reason the question of arrangement was an excessively difficult one to me. The relations of individual development to race development are so intimate — the two are so identical, in fact — that no topic in the one can be treated with great clear- ness without assuming results in the other. So any order of treatment in such a work must seem finally to be only the least of possible evils.","label":"Mental Development in the Child and the Race"},{"n":2,"work":"Development and Evolution","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The emphasis is, however, still on the mental, and the 1 Mental Development in the Child and the Race, 2a edition reprinted, 1897, and Social and Ethical Lnterpretations, 34 ed.","label":"Development and Evolution"},{"n":3,"work":"Mental Development in the Child and the Race","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1895. Reprinted November, 1895; December, 1896; Septem- ber, 1898; July, 1900; February, 1903. Third edition, revised throughout, November, 1906. NortoooB 5\"g\" J. S. Gushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Ma\"s., U.S.A. FILIOLIS. MEIS 2052523 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION (ABRIDGED) IN writing this book I have had rather conflicting aims.","label":"Mental Development in the Child and the Race"},{"n":4,"work":"Development and Evolution","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Genesis, Method, and Interpretation may be taken as the catchwords of such a series of papers whose com- mon motive is covered by the words 'Development' and Scope and Method % 'Evolution,' understood in the sense of the distinction made immediately below.","label":"Development and Evolution"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"imitation-and-the-circular-reaction","label":"Imitation and the circular reaction: is development driven by the child's imitative appropriation of others' acts?"},{"slug":"organic-selection-the-baldwin-effect","label":"Organic selection (the Baldwin effect): can learning guide evolution without the inheritance of acquired characters?"},{"slug":"the-social-self","label":"The social self: is there any private ego prior to society, or are self and other born together?"}]}