Father to the Man

No man living knows more about children and how they grow than Arnold Lucius Gesell. Unlike Freud, who reconstructed the child's development from the moldering memories of neurotic adults, Dr. Gesell (pronounced gazelle) went to the child. For 40 years, most of them spent at Yale University's Clinic of Child Development, Dr. Gesell has poked the fists of newborn babies to see how they contracted, taken 300,000 feet of movies showing how more than 12,000 youngsters grew in skills and aptitudes from the cradle to the age of ten.* This week, in a slim volume called Infant Development (Harper; $3.50), Dr. Gesell sums up what he has learned of life and growth.

To Dr. Gesell's understanding and sympathetic eye, the baby picking up building blocks one after another and banging them on the table is not making useless noise but doing something essential to his learning and growth: "He is much too young to count by spoken words. But this one-by-one behavior is unquestionably the embryological root and prerequisite of later mathematical numeration and comprehension. The rudiments of geometry are contained in his ... arrangements of his building blocks."

Dr. Gesell sees growth as an uninterrupted, continuous process from the moment of conception to old age; even the sudden change from life in the womb to the world outside is, to Gesell, only an uncommonly striking and abrupt phase of this continuous development. And he includes mental growth along with physical growth. "It is probable," he writes, "that all mental life has a motor basis and a motor origin. The non-mystical mind [i.e., the mind when not engaged in pure reverie] must always take hold. Even in the rarefied realms of conceptual reasoning we speak of intellectual grasp . . . Thinking might be defined as a comprehension and manipulation of meanings. Accordingly, thought has its beginnings in infancy."

His researches have gone far enough to convince Dr. Gesell that "there is a basic ground plan of growth peculiar to the species, and always a variation of that ground plan distinctive for the individual." But much remains to be learned:

"We shall not have the requisite self-knowledge to manage our culture until we make a more sedulous effort to understand the ways of all growth and the potentials of child growth, which are the . . . products of organic evolution. This evolution has not ceased, and to that degree man still remains educable . . . Among other things, he surely needs a science of behavior . . . which will not only probe the lingering wickedness of Old Adam, but will explore with unrelenting penetration the rich repository of potentials for good, which are revealed with awesome mystery in the sequences of child development."

*He has spelled out the stages of growth in two bestsellers (written with Dr. Frances L. Ilg): Infant and Child in the Culture of Today and The Child from Five to Ten.

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