In press for David Salkind (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Human Development. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publishers. © 2004 by Sage.

School and Human Development

by Kelvin Seifert, University of Manitoba

The term school usually refers to formal, institutionalized settings for imparting socially desirable knowledge, skills, and attitudes. In modern societies, children and youth spend many years in such settings, completing tasks assigned primarily by teachers, though interacting primarily with same-age peers. Because schooling is such a major experience, it seems likely both to influence, and to be influenced by children’s personal development. This article considers both possibilities, starting with how (and whether) children’s development affects schooling.

DEVELOPMENTAL EFFECTS ON SCHOOLS

A lot of research and literature takes human development as a "given" independent variable, and argues that school can and should adjust methods to how children grow and change. A specialty that advocates this viewpoint especially strongly is early childhood education (nursery, kindergarten, and the early primary school grades). In early childhood education, "developmentally appropriate practice" includes ample use of "hands-on," sensorimotor experiences, encouragement of elaborated oral language, and leeway for children to choose their own activities. The features are thought to reflect principles of cognitive development as formulated by Piaget and other developmental theorists.

Among older students, pedagogical responses to youthful development are also advocated, though they are not necessarily named as "developmental." The existence of middle schools, for example, and of the former junior high schools, reflects both the research and the popular belief, that participating in peer groups is often stressful for adolescents, especially early in this period of life. Middle schools were invented, so to speak, to ease the transition to peers by protecting young adolescents initially from the dominance of older peers, by reducing the initial size of peer cohorts, and by introducing adult-like responsibilities to youngsters more gradually than otherwise possible.

In spite of responses like these to the development of students, however, the influence of developmental knowledge on schooling has been limited because of both conceptual flaws and practical problems. Conceptually, the assumption that "ages and stages" describe young people is often criticized by developmentalists themselves on the grounds that stages are often imprecise in timing and not easily identified in everyday, non-experimental conditions. It is hardly fair therefore to expect educators to achieve a precision about children’s developmental "levels" than developmentalists themselves have not achieved. As a practical matter, furthermore, the very diversity of students makes educational responses to diversity difficult or at times even unrealistic. The vast literature critiquing education, in fact, can be interpreted as testimony to the difficulties of making a mass, compulsory institution truly responsive to the individuality of children and youth.

That said, it is still true that human development influences schooling, but the effects are often not considered "developmental" in the sense of reflecting particular age-related changes in human nature. Research has found, for example, that students’ classroom behavior can influence teachers to present a program more (or less) abstractly (or concretely); but such influence can happen at any level of schooling, from kindergarten through high school. Research has also documents (rather obviously) that students’ misbehavior can cause teachers to impose stricter controls on behavior and to reduce opportunities for students to self-regulate their behavior. But this effect, too, can happen at any level of schooling, and in this sense is non-developmental. The safest generalization is that overall, human development has contradictory, ambiguous effects on schooling. Whatever tasks are expected on any one occasion can support learning and "growth" in one student, but leave another student more confused or even alienated from the demands of "maturity." This fact makes assessment of schooling puzzling and difficult. But given that schooling is institutional and that human development is individual, it seems inevitable.

SCHOOL EFFECTS ON HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

If schooling is taken as the independent variable and human development as the dependent variable, then consistent effects do become visible. Oddly, though, educational research generally shows that the effects have little to do with specific curriculum goals, even though curriculum is the ostensible, explicit purpose of schooling. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, longitudinal studies of well-designed preschool programs for children from low-income families found few differences in the effects of alternative curricular approaches. Programs that were highly structured and teacher-centered had about the same impact as programs that were moderately structured, or even as programs that were open-ended and child-centered. Similar results have been found for curricular initiatives with older students. For example, programs designed to develop middle- and high-school students’ ethical and moral sense ("character education") generally do not have measurable effects on character: they may have impact, but the impact is too complex and contradictory to reveal trends.

But inconsistent curricular impact does not mean that schooling itself has no broad developmental effect on students. The studies of preschool mentioned above, for example, also found that some sort of carefully planned preschool program does benefit children from low-income families; it just does not matter exactly which sort of program is planned. And analysis of character education programs suggests that students’ experiences with teachers and schools do influence their ethical sensibilities; but the influence is as much in spite of teachers’ efforts as because of them. The conclusion—that effects of schooling are real, but somewhat "accidental"—may not be as ironic as it appears. The breadth, duration, and complexity of most developmental change make school influences both inevitable and reasonable, but also beyond the power of particular teachers or specific curricula to influence broadly.

Effects on Cognition: Literacy

Schooling does seem to affect cognitive development because of its pervasive emphasis on literacy. Virtually all teachers, regardless of grade level or subject area, expect students to acquire and use knowledge of print, and most students do in fact acquire this ability at least to a moderate extent. Because of the nature of text, successful reading eventually fosters to forms of metacognition—reflection on or self-awareness of cognition itself. Metacognition appears because reading requires more than "breaking the code." In addition, effective readers must also realize that print (as opposed to oral language) is a second-order symbolic system: it does not represent the world directly, but instead represents language that in turn represents the world. The printed set of letters caterpillar, for example, represents the spoken sounds in /caterpillar/, but only the latter directly represents the small worm-like creature that later becomes a butterfly. Young children often do not understand this idea, and therefore think that the printed word caterpillar is shorter or smaller than the printed word train, because real caterpillars are shorter and smaller than real trains.

Realizing that printed text stands for language rather than for the world leads to important developmental changes in thinking. It makes possible the insight, for example, that what a person says may differ from what the person means. It also creates the belief that words have fixed meanings (enshrined in dictionaries) that are independent of their oral use on any one occasion. These ideas in turn lead to the realization that words can be misused, either accidentally or on purpose: hence false beliefs (mistaken ideas) become possible, but so does deliberate lying about the truth. In schools, in addition, using words correctly becomes an ongoing issue between teachers and students. Striving for accuracy in language helps to develop achievement motivation for some children. When overdone, though, it can also create pedantic perfectionism or even alienation from schoolwork if children fail chronically to meet teachers’ standards of linguistic accuracy.

Effects on Social Relationships: Peers

Schools provide copious contact with same-age peers, and as time goes on they tend gradually to restrict contact with adults (the teachers) to business-like, formal relationships. These circumstances make it an increasing challenge for older students to identify with the goals of schooling (preparation for career, self-fulfillment) and hence to develop a confident personal identity. They also make peers increasingly important as alternative sources of meaning. Social psychological studies of life in middle schools and high schools document the salience of peer social systems structured around large "crowds" and smaller "cliques," and organized hierarchically in the minds of the participants. With only a few exceptions, most adolescent crowds and cliques influence individuals to limit or even conceal expressions of academic interest and motivation, whether they feel interest and motivation or not. In some cases peers also increase individuals vulnerability to high-risk behaviors (e.g. drugs or early sex). Such influences interact, of course, with teenagers’ relationships with family members. With an appropriate mixture of support, freedom, and protection at home, potential negative effects of schooling can be moderated substantially. Achieving a healthy, developmentally appropriate mix is often easier said than done. But in principle, at least, parents and other family can frame the long-term purposes of schooling more meaningfully than can peers, and interpret the short-term expectations of peers in ways that help a child to respond to peers more as friends than as a monolithic pressure group.