ABSTRACT
[p. 307] The potential interest of studies of the child’s mental development for sociology resides in more than the fact that this development is at every level a socialization of the individual as much as it is a matter of the individual’s adaptation to the physical world. It derives primarily from the fact that this socialization in no way constitutes the result of a unidirectional cause such as the pressure of the adult community upon the child through such means as education in the family and subsequently in the school. Rather, as the analysis demonstrates, it involves the intervention of a multiplicity of interactions of different types and with sometimes opposed effects. In contrast to the somewhat academic sociology of the Durkheim school which reduces society to a single whole, collective consciousness, and its action to a unidirectional process of physical or spiritual constraint, the more concrete sociology which the personal and social development of the child obliges us to construct must be wary of sweeping generalities if it is to make sense of the systems of relations and interdependencies actually involved.
