ABSTRACT
In Chapter 3 we gave consideration to functionalism, founded by the American William James (1890). James was severely critical of ‘structuralism’ (behaviourism), the approach to development that forms the core of the present chapter, because he considered its outlook on human behaviour to be narrow and artificial. It is possible that no other theory of child development has been subject to such scrutiny. As Horowitz (1987: 62) noted,
It has been declared obsolete, overthrown, and outmoded. Yet, paradoxically, this object of derision, behaviorism, has given us our most unassailable behavioral laws and provided the underlying principles from which our most powerful behavioral technologies have been derived to help the retarded, the handicapped, the dependent and the ill.
