Book Description

1.1 OVERVIEW The teacher has an obvious interest in the determinants of personality. Only by knowing where personality comes from can he decide the extent to which the personalities of the children in his class are fixed by what happens outside school, and the extent to which they can be altered by what happens inside it. Personality is the result of interaction between inherited and environmental factors and we need now to look at the evidence for this view, taking heredity first. The first three years of life, during which, as we have seen, the effects of maternal deprivation seem particularly hard to reverse, are an example of what he psychologist calls a critical period in the development of the child. A critical period is, in fact, any stage in human or animal development during which the organism is maximally sensitive to the presence of certain kinds of stimuli. Denied these stimuli, behaviour which is regarded as characteristic of the species concerned does not develop, even though there is often a considerable gap in time between the critical period and the age at which the behaviour normally occurs. Thus, deprived of mothering themselves in infancy, Harlow's monkeys grew up incapable of mothering their own young, and the same may well hold true for humans, as any veteran social worker who has watched the depressing cycle of aggressive and violent mothering styles pas from one general to the next will readily attest.