William Emet Blatz: The development of a developmental psychologist.

摘要

William Emet Blatz (1895-1964), a developmental psychologist at the University of Toronto, directed the St. George's School for Child Study (later the Institute of Child Study) from 1925-1961. During his tenure developmental psychology itself was growing and changing. The purpose of the present work is to place William Blatz in the context of this emerging discipline.;Blatz had been trained in the school of functionalism associated with the University of Chicago. Further, he was tutored in the mental hygiene perspective that pervaded Canadian psychology at the beginning of his career. These influences combined to determine, and in some ways delimit, his theory and practice.;Blatz's theory of child training and parent education followed along the early lines of the emerging discipline of developmental psychology which were characterized by non-theoretically informed observations made by non-trained observers (Child study), through to methods employing trained observers with respect to specific empirical questions (Child science or Child development). However, when professional studies of mechanistic learning principles (Child psychology) and of broad theoretical models of development (Developmental psychology) began to dominate the field, Blatz's ties with the community were severed. He was not prepared to adopt many of the new statistical strategies and the models of investigation they implied.;The picture that emerges is of a man who was both a product of developmental psychology and alienated from it. Blatz had an enormous impact on society early in his career. He was a public figure who dominated the press with his radical theories of child training and a provocative speaker who changed the child rearing practices of at least a number of Torontonians. He demonstrated his principles to the world through the interest in the Dionne quintuplets who he educated for three years and determined the course of nursery education in Canada after World War II. Nonetheless, Blatz's reputation and ideas did not withstand the vagaries of time as the nature and interests of developmental psychology changed and historians of the discipline no longer appreciated Blatz's ever-present functionalist and mental hygiene perspective.