1930 | Education
Education
Intellectual Growth in Young Children by English Freudian education specialist Susan Brierley Isaacs (née Fairhurst), 45, challenges some of the ideas set forth by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, now 34, in his 1926 book The Child's Conception of the World. Isaacs ran an experimental progressive school at Cambridge from 1924 to 1927, letting children learn for themselves rather than instructing them, and allowing them to give vent to emotional expression rather than imposing strict discipline. She will head the department of child development at London's Institute of Education from 1933 to 1943.
Some 4.3 percent of Americans are illiterate, down from 20 percent in 1870. The figure will fall to 2.4 percent in the next 30 years but nearly 5 million Americans will remain illiterate.
Fun With Dick and Jane is published by the Chicago firm Scott, Foresman & Co., whose series of reading primers will be used in U.S. schools for decades to help first-and second-graders learn to read.
Britain raises the age for leaving school. The House of Commons votes November 11 to require that students remain until age 15 and provides maintenance grants for parents who are hard pressed to let their children attend school for an extra year.
President Hoover gives a speech November 19 calling for a mobilization of the best thought in the nation to prepare a program that will prepare American youth for "a complexity of life for which there is no precedent."