Volume 47, Number 4 · March 9, 2000
Tot Thought
By Jerome S. Bruner
The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn
by Alison Gopnik, by Andrew N. Meltzoff, by Patricia K. Kuhl
Morrow, 279 pp., $24.00
The Myth of the First Three Years: A New Understanding of Early Brain Development and Lifelong Learning
by John T. Bruer
Free Press, 244 pp., $25.00
Why are adults half-blind to the ways of the child's mind? Equally puzzling, why are they so gullible about fashionable dogmas on that oddly vexed subject? Years ago I was stunned to hear Anna Freud declare in a lecture at Harvard that if a three-year-old wandered unrestrained from Central Square to Harvard Square, he would likely commit every crime in the statute books on the way. How had psychoanalysis managed to displace Rousseau's Emile or William Blake's 'Songs of Innocence' from mythological center stage so quickly?
Review, 5596 words
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