Child Psychology. Jean-Pascal Assailly

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      Preface

       Each child must be studied as a lock, unique in its mechanism; and then the special key must be devised to fit that lock, so that the door of opportunity may be pened, as wide as the constitution permits, for each child to develop their individual innate capabilities.

      White House Conference, 1932

      This book is the first in a two-part series:

      1) In this book, we study the evolution of our knowledge in the field of child psychology over the last 40 years.

      2) In a future work, we will analyze the impacts of this evolution on practices and policies in the field of childhood (schooling, health, safety, parenthood); for this, we will have to question the practitioners.

      In 1983, my teacher, René Zazzo, published one of his last books, Où en est la psychologie de l'enfant? and dedicated it to us (“To my students at Nanterre, as a token of my gratitude”). After 40 years, we are picking up the baton.

      He particularly pointed out the drifts and aporias in the media conception of psychology (“the psychology of philosophy professors is psychoanalysis, and what psychoanalysis!”); he was disenchanted with the wording and what it covered. The situation has not improved much.

Psychology was for a long time taught in 12th-grade philosophy, tackling various themes such as perception and intelligence, then disappeared from the curriculum in 2003 and was reduced to a few texts by Freud and Lacan. It is amusing to see that National Education adopts the very reductionist view that psychology is the same as psychoanalysis, and vice versa¹.

      However, in various countries (United States, Belgium, Switzerland), psychology is still taught in secondary schools.

      When the Ministry of Education formed 40 working groups of professionals for curriculum reform, there was not a single psychologist.

      In order to provide some balance to adolescents, during what is a risky time in their lives, importance should be placed on reintroducing knowledge of scientific psychology, on how emotions, relationships, self-knowledge, etc. work.

      On bookstore shelves, the most noticeable evolution has been the shift from 90% scientific psychology/10% personal development in the 1970s to 90% personal development/10% scientific psychology today. This says much about the popular conception of psychology. Even in “child psychology” sections, there is still a lot of emphasis on personal development.

      The divisions that Zazzo analyzed are still there:

      Very schematically, the question on which this book is structured (where are we now, 40 years later, and where are we going?) covers two main analyses: