ABSTRACT
The beginnings and the growth of one’s interest in any form of inquiry are not easily reconstructed. How did I, initially an academic psychologist in a rather conservative academic setting at Harvard, develop such a long-lasting interest in education? And not until my early forties, at that, with a background principally in such hard-nosed psychological topics as perception! Education, in those days, was a “second-class” subject among “real” psychologists, a subject mostly confined to schools of education. To be sure, I had always had side-interests in what was then called “the psychological study of social issues” (as the politically oriented division of the American Psychological Association, of which I eventually became President, has long been called). But education in those days was not considered a “social issue.”
