Object Lessons: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sturm und Drang of Race Childhood

While originally referring to the use of material objects to convey abstract ideas, “object lesson” took on a second meaning at the turn of the twentieth century. This particular connotation—denoting a person and leader as moral exemplar—reveals fault lines between the thinking of W. E. B. Du Bois and G. Stanley Hall on young people. Through his own adoption of the German ideals of sturm und drang and bildungsroman, as well as “aftershadowing”—a recalibration of ideas and reflections on his own family genealogy, childhood, and intellectual lineages—Du Bois made ideological claims that were a counter-narrative to Hall’s recapitulation theory.

Dynamical Systems Approach to Evolution-Development Congruence: Revisiting Haeckel’s Recapitulation Theory

It is acknowledged that embryonic development has tendency to proceed from common toward specific. Ernst Haeckel raised the question of why that tendency prevailed through evolution, and the question remains unsolved. Here, we revisit Haeckel’s recapitulation theory, i.e., the parallelism between evolution and development through numerical evolution and dynamical systems theory. By using intracellular gene-expression dynamics with cell-to-cell interaction over spatially aligned cells to represent the developmental process, gene regulation networks (GRN) that govern these dynamics evolve under the selection pressure to achieve a prescribed spatial gene expression pattern. For most numerical evolutionary experiments, the evolutionary pattern changes over generations, as well as the developmental pattern changes governed by the evolved GRN exhibit remarkable similarity. Both pattern changes consisted of several epochs where stripes are formed in a short time, whereas for other temporal regimes, pattern hardly changes. In evolution, these quasi-stationary generations are needed to achieve relevant mutations, whereas in development, they are due to some gene expressions that vary slowly and control the pattern change. These successive epochal changes in development and evolution are represented as common bifurcations in dynamical systems theory, regulating working network structure from feedforward subnetwork to those containing feedback loops. The congruence is the correspondence between successive acquisition of subnetworks through evolution and changes in working subnetworks in development. Consistency of the theory with the segmentation gene-expression dynamics is discussed. Novel outlook on recapitulation and heterochrony are provided, testable experimentally by the transcriptome and network analysis.

The Legacy of Recapitulation Theory in the History of Developmental Psychology

From the late 1800s, under the auspices of G. Stanley Hall and then independently by others, investigations of children’s development were undertaken from the perspective of recapitulation theory. This application of the theory was guided by the overarching premises that (a) human evolution was a linear chronology of biological and sociocultural progress; (b) an individual’s abilities, behaviors, and biological development followed the same evolutionary stages as had the human species (i.e., Ernst Haeckel’s dictum that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny); and (c) the path of human evolution could be traced backward through identification of contemporary manifestations of development and behavior. An assumption of the theory was that the human species is hierarchically differentiated by race, a concept defined by physical attributes and sociocultural practices. Persons of north-western European descent were believed to be of a race that had achieved the greatest evolutionary advancement; those of African descent, as belonging to that with the least evolutionary distance from ape ancestry. Evolutionary achievement was also differentiated by gender and economic status, with Caucasian bourgeois males ranked as superior over all others. Additionally, evolutionary progress was applied to individuals in relation to their proximity to ideals of appearance, heteronormativity, behavior and well-being. Incorporation of these beliefs into the study of human development was productive of treatises and practices that had widespread influence in scientific and popular culture. Child-centred parenting advice, progressive educational reform, and youth organizations emphasized gendered behaviors that, it was believed, would ensure children’s surpassing their parent’s evolutionary attainment, resulting in continued progress toward an ideal Euro-Anglo race. The playground movement’s segregation of non-whites, the disabled, poor and unattractive from archetype white children was similarly based on the theory’s dictum that the former being seen by the latter would contaminate white evolutionary well-being. The theoretical beliefs became further rationalization for the incarceration of Indigenous children in residential facilities that through coercion and isolation from their communities were intended to abolish the ‘race’s’ genetic lineage. Even though child study regard for the theory declined by the 1920s, its regulatory prescripts endured within developmental psychology, continuing to significantly impact beliefs about women, non-whites, the economically disadvantaged, those with disabilities and those who are gender nonconforming. As example, through policies that limit access to educational funding with explanations that such opportunities fail to alter the economic trajectory of non-whites, and through educational content that presents bourgeois Euro-Anglo persons as representing developmental normality, Academic defence of the theory’s and its founding adherents includes its use to rationalize bigotry, violence and discrimination. It is a legacy that requires concerted effort to defeat.

Jung, Neumann and Gebser

In recent decades, indeterminate states of cultural identity in both individuals and nations have resulted from cross-cultural migrations and the resistance of host nations to critically re-evaluate traditional cultural complexes and welcome new influences. Jung’s theory of individuation, Neumann’s centroversion and Gebser’s integrality provide a new foundation in consciousness for re-evaluating both individual and national cultural identities. In terms of the development and education of children, the two common threads in these three theories are individuation and recapitulation theory. Individuation, re-imagined by Neumann as centroversion, parallels Gebser’s concept of integrality and provides a mediating foundation for comparing individuation and integrality. Both concepts are compared in terms of the first phase of the individuation process, characterized by the development and education of the child. The objective is to achieve an individuated-integral, spiritualized personality in the first half of life so that the spiritually mature adult can contribute to an evolved human consciousness and global cultural identity in the second half of life.