"Fascinating, lively, well-documented, and challenging....Both timely and necessary....An ideal resource for professionals who work with delayed children. It is so readable, it will also be valued by parents of these children." --Lee Combrinck-Graham, M.D.
In matters of education, are all children created equal? Despite reforms that champion the rights of handicapped youngsters, are we really punishing such children with the very systems that are supposed to help them?
Joan Goodman's bold and controversial book asks what we are accomplishing in early intervention programs that attempt to accelerate development in delayed young children. She questions the value of such programs on educational, psychological, and moral grounds, suggesting that in pressuring these children to perform more, and sooner, we undermine their capacity for independent development and deprive them of the freedom we insist upon for the nondelayed. Goodman argues that we need a more tolerant, less directive model of instruction in which the aim is to support the child's natural and spontaneous, albeit slow, development and to stimulate individual processes of discovery and self-expression. The elements of this more supportive model are then described in detail.
Raising fundamental questions about our ambitions for children and how we fulfill them, this lively and provocative book is bound to stir controversy. It is especially timely as early intervention programs rapidly gear up to serve all handicapped children from ages 0 to 5.
Joan Goodman received her bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College and her doctorate from The Harvard Graduate School of Education. For the last thirty years, while her career has combined the practice of child psychology with writing and teaching, her abiding interest has been the challenges that preschool children with developmental disabilities present to parents, teachers, and the science of psychology. She has written over 30 chapters and articles on the diagnosis of, and intervention with, this population. She is the author of a novel nonverbal assessment instrument, THE GOODMAN LOCK BOX, and has recently completed a series of videotapes on families raising handicapped youngsters. While in charge of a psychological diagnostic unit for preschoolers at The Children's Hospital of Philadephia, Dr. Goodman started an early intervention program which she directed for seven years. Currently she is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania.
