View report page

disadvantage when the time comes for them to
go to school. This has acquired particular urgency
with regard to the Negro community, in the light
of political developments. Operation Headstart
was one result of this, but results have not always
been as successful as it was hoped they would be.
It is possible that the time devoted to Headstart
programmes was too short for the immensity of
the task. It may be, as Carl Bereiter and Siegfried
Engelmann have suggested (in a book entitled
'Teaching Disadvantage in the Preschool') that
by modelling Headstart programmes on traditional
nursery school programmes, the originators were
ignoring the very areas of difficulty that essentially
ought to be remedied if the children for whom
these programmes were designed were to start
school without too much of a handicap. In short,
it is perhaps necessary to concentrate on the
teaching of special skills, such as logical thinking
and classification, through language and concrete
example, rather than to go all-out for the
traditional emphasis on the development of the
whole child through typical nursery and
kindergarten activities. Bereiter and Engelmann
state that it is not that they disapprove of these
activities, but that there just is not enough time
for them if the child is to catch up in the verbal
and cognitive areas with the middle class child
and therefore to derive the same benefits from
schooling. They suggest that it is possible that the
'culturally deprived' child is already getting
plenty of freedom in those areas where the middle
class child needs to be freer, and that therefore
the culturally deprived child needs more structure,
not less. (If one takes this argument to its logical
conclusion it would appear that there should be
two types of early education, one for culturally
privileged and one for culturally deprived children,
until everybody has caught up!) I was delighted
to have the opportunity of meeting Mr Engelmann
and of spending a morning watching him and the
teachers with the children of his experimental
classes at the University of Illinois.
'Cross-fertilization of ideas from one area of
education to another is again at work, in that some
of the special approaches being devised for the
culturally deprived child are going to be tried out
with other handicapped groups—for example, with
54
mentally handicapped children. This happens in
most countries: for example, in Britain the success
of the peripatetic teachers of the deaf in helping
the young child and his parents has raised the
question as to whether a similar service should not
be initiated for young severely subnormal children
and their parents ... not merely counselling, but
active teaching. One of the most influential books
of the past few years has been a monograph by
Professor Benjamin Bloom of the University of
Chicago, called 'stability and Change in Human
Characteristics'. This puts forward a great deal of
evidence to show the tremendous importance of
the first few years of life for all that follows. As
the brief description on the book jacket has it
'change in many characteristics becomes more and
more difficult with increasing age and only the
most powerful environmental conditions are likely
to produce signficant changes at the later stages of
life. By the age of six, when the American child
enters school, he has developed as much as twothirds
of the intelligence he will have at maturity'.
Professor Basil Bernstein's work in this country
has suggested that there are psycholinguistic
handicaps also among children from working class
homes, in that they learn and use only a 'restricted
code' as opposed to the ability of the middle-class
child to use both a restricted and an 'elaborate
code'. It is possible, although there is as yet no
large body of research evidence to support the
hypothesis, that specific teaching at earlier ages
would make a difference; it is to be hoped that
more research findings from on-going work will be
available in the near future to confirm or negate
the hypothesis.
'I would like to discuss briefly assessment
centres and related treatment centres. Knowing
something about the research and associated
theories emanating from various of these
institutions, I was grateful to be given an
opportunity to see many of them in action, to
observe assessment techniques, to listen to and
even take part in diagnosis, and to watch treatment
and teaching. I was impressed with the amount of
time given to individual children, and with the
variety of assessment techniques. There were many
differences as well as some underlying similarities
between the centres, and some of the differences