ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the developmental psychological theories behind Head Start and their implications on working with children and parents from the lower social classes. Unhampered by any historical sense of previous social movements for raising the quality of life for poor children, many Americans were carried away by the Head Start project in the mid-sixties. Project Head Start was based on a combination of political, economic, sociological and psychological theories. Besides experiments with children such as those carried out by H. M. Skeels, there were also animal experiments on behavioural learning. The results of all these experiments only acquired prominence after they had been placed within a theoretical framework by B. S. Bloom and J. Hunt. Bloom used statistical techniques on psychometric material gathered from longitudinal research started during the twenties and thirties. Hunt was strongly influenced by Hebb's animal experiments and J. Piaget's theory on human thought.
