Volume 30, Number 16 · October 27, 1983

State of the Child

By Jerome S. Bruner
Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences
by Howard Gardner

Basic Books, 440 pp., $23.50

The Mental and Social Life of Babies: How Parents Create Persons
by Kenneth Kaye

University of Chicago Press, 289 pp., $22.50

Siblings: Love, Envy and Understanding
by Judy Dunn, by Carol Kendrick

Harvard University Press, 289 pp., $18.50

The Erosion of Childhood
by Valerie Polakow Suransky

University of Chicago Press, 221 pp., $7.95 (paper)

A half-century ago psychologists and philosophers could still innocently make generalizations not only about the universal character of mind but about the 'natural' way in which mind grows from infancy to such perfections as it may attain in adulthood. The proclivity to do so, it seems, proved extraordinarily robust even in the face of criticism from such anthropologists and advanced social philosophers as Franz Boas and G.H. Mead. The chief inheritor of that universalist tradition in our times was, of course, Jean Piaget—though his version of it could hardly be called innocent.



Review, 6182 words

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