gat

e controlled by the proper use of carrots and sticks.
Another respectable rival for the crown behaviorism found itself holding after WWII was stage
theory, which could vary from the poetic grammar of Erik Eriksson to the impenetrable
mathematical tapestry of Jean Piaget, an exercise in chutzpah weaving the psychological destiny
of mankind out of the testimony of less than two dozen bourgeois Swiss kids. Modest academic
empires could be erected on allegiance to one stage theory or another, but there were so many
they tended to get in each other’s way. Like seven-step programs to lose weight and keep it off,
stage theory provided friendly alternatives to training children like rats—but the more it came into
direct competition with the misleading precision of Skinnerian psychology, the sillier its clay feet
looked.
All stage theory is embarrassingly culture-bound. Talk about the attention span of kids and
suddenly you are forced to confront the fact that while eighteen-month-old Americans become
restless after thirty seconds, Chinese of that age can closely watch a demonstration for five
minutes. And while eight-year-old New Yorkers can barely tie their shoes, eight-year-old Amish
put in a full work day on the family homestead. Even in a population apparently homogenous,
stage theory can neither predict nor prescribe for individual cases. Stage theories sound right for
the same reason astrological predictions do, but the disconnect between ideal narratives and
reality becomes all too clear when you try to act on them.
When stage theory was entering its own golden age in the late 1960s, behaviorism was already
entrenched as the psychology of choice. The federal government’s BSTEP document and many
similar initiatives to control teacher preparation had won the field for the stimulus-response
business. So much money was pouring into psychological schooling from government/corporate
sources, however, that rat psychologists couldn’t absorb it all. A foot-in-the-door opportunity
presented itself, which stage theorists scrambled to seize.
The controlling metaphor of all scientific stage theories is not, like behaviorism’s, that people are
built like machinery, but that they grow like vegetables. Kinder requires garten, an easy sell to
people sick of being treated like machinery. For all its seeming humanitarianism, stage theory is
just another way to look beyond individuals to social class abstractions. If nobody possesses a
singular spirit, then nobody has a sovereign personal destiny. Mother Teresa, Tolstoy,
Hitler—they don’t signify for stage theory, though from time to time they are asked to stand as
representatives of types.
Behaviorists
To understand empty child theory, you have to visit with behaviorists. Their meal ticket was
hastily jerry-built by the advertising agency guru John Watson and by Edward Lee Thorndike,
founder of educational psychology. Watson’s "Behaviorist Manifesto" (1913) promoted a then
novel utilitarian psychology whose "theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior."
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