G. Stanley Hall‘s (1844–1924) innovative work arose out of his combined interest in psychology, pedagogy and evolutionary theory. In the early 1880s he began a large series of questionnaire studies of kindergarten-aged children, designed to find out what they knew and thought
about a great variety of things, including their bodies, games and stories, animals, the sun and stars, and religion. With this and subsequent work, Hall became one of the central figures in the child study movement. In 1904 he summarized his work and his students into his famous book called Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education. The book reflected Hall’s interest in developmental issues, along with his conviction that children must be regarded as constantly growing and changing individuals, who have different kinds of knowledge, emotions, and intellectual characteristics at varying stages throughout their lives.
Hall proposed a theory of child development, based on Darwin and recapitulationism, according to which the stages of each person’s intellectual, emotional, and psychological development pass through the same ones as our pre-human ancestors. Hall argued that a child’s progress from crawling on all fours to walking upright, and through successive stages of social, playful, and artistic activity, essentially repeats the evolutionary sequence leading to modern humanity. Hall’s version of recapitulationism also incorporated some of his beliefs about race and gender. He talked about influx of ancestral traits, which were more numerous in children of “mongrel” stock (e.g., Americans, as opposed to their purer European counterparts). Hall recommended that educators encourage and support boys, especially Caucasian boys, to systematically relive all the racial strains of their diverse ethnic heritage in order to reach the highest stage of evolution. Hall’s recapitulationist views are obviously not accepted today, and some of his ideas were debated in his own time. However, like many of his contemporaries, Hall based his “scientific” views circulated in his cultural environment. And despite holding these general views, Hall nonetheless worked individually with female students and supervised the first African American man to be awarded a Ph.D. in psychology.
Source: Fancher, R. E., & Rutherford, A. (2017). Pioneers of Psychology: A History (5th ed.). W.W. Norton And Company
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