DEVELOPMENTAL TASKS & EDUCATION
Definition:
Each cultural group recognizes that certain skills and
behaviour patters can be mastered at certain age. These skills are necessary
for the individual’s adjustment in social life. So, the cultural group expects its
member to master certain skills and acquire certain approved patterns of
behaviour at various ages during the life span. These are known as the developmental task.
Robert Havighurst
(1972) defines, ‘Developmental task is a task which arises at or about a
certain period in the life of the individual, successful achievement of which
leads to happiness and to success with later tasks, while failure leads to
unhappiness, social disapproval, and difficulty with later tasks.’
Three forces work together in mastering developmental task.
They are
1.
Physical maturation,
2.
Cultural pressures of society and
3.
Personal values & aspirations of the
individual.
For E.g. motor skills like walking
develop largely as a result of physical maturation. Learning to read develops
from the cultural pressure of the society. Choosing and preparing for a career
grows out of the personal values and aspirations of the individual.
According to our biopsychosocial model, the first source corresponds to the "bio" part of
the model, the second to the "psycho" and the third to the
"social" aspect. Havighurst
has identified six major age periods:
1.
Infancy and Early Childhood (0-5 years),
2.
Middle Childhood (6-12 years),
3.
Adolescence (13-18 years),
4.
Early Adulthood (19-29 years),
5.
Middle Adulthood (30-60 years), and
6.
Later Maturity (61+).
Purposes:
Developmental
task serve three very useful purposes.
- Developmental task is the guidance that enables a person to know what society expects of them at a given age.
- Individuals are motivated to do what the social group expects them to do at (certain ages) different periods of the life span.
- It indicates what lies ahead and what will be expected to do when they reach the next stage of development.
DEVELOPMENTAL TASK OF INFANCY
AND EARLY CHILDHOOD (0-5)
1. Learning to take solid foods: The way the child is treated during the
weaning period, the schedule on which he is feed, and the age and suddenness of
weaning, all have profound effects upon his personality.
2. Learning to walk: Once the basic skills are mastered, he
learns during later years to run, jump, and skip.
3. Learning to talk: Between these ages of twelve and eighteen
months, the great moment of speech arrives. The two theories agree to this
extent. (1) That the human infant develops a repertory of speech-sounds without
having to learn them. (2) That the people around him teach him to attach
certain meanings to these sounds.
4. Learning to control the elimination of
body wastes: To learn to
urinate and defecate at socially acceptable times and places. Toilet training
is the first moral training that the child receives. The stamp of this first
moral training probably persists in the child's later character.
5. Learning sex differences and sexual
modesty: The kinds of
sexual behavior he learns and the attitudes and feelings he develops about sex
in these early years probably have an abiding effect upon his sexuality
throughout his life.
6. Achieving physiological stability: It takes as many as five years for the
child's body to settle down to something like the physiological stability of
the child.
7. Forming simple concepts of social and
physical reality: And, when
his nervous system is ready, he must have the experience and the teachers to
enable him to form a stock of concepts and learn the names for them. On this
basis his later mental development is built.
8. Learning to relate oneself emotionally
to parents, siblings, and other people: The way he achieves this task of relating himself emotionally to other
people will have a large part in determining whether he will be friendly or
cold, outgoing or introversive, in his social relations in later life.
9. Learning
to distinguish right and wrong and beginning to develop a conscience:
During the later years of early childhood he takes into himself the warning and
punishing voices of his parents, in ways that depend upon their peculiar
displays of affection and punishment toward him. Thus he develops the bases of
his conscience, upon which a later structure of values and moral character will
be built.
DEVELOPMENTAL TASK OF CHILDHOOD (6-12)
1.
Learning physical skills necessary for ordinary games: To learn the physical skills
that are necessary for the games and physical activities that are highly valued
in childhood--such skills as throwing and catching, kicking, tumbling, swimming,
and handling simple tools.
2.
Building a wholesome attitudes toward oneself as a growing
organism:
To develop habits of care of the body, of cleanliness and safety, consistent
with a wholesome, realistic attitude which includes a sense of physical normality
and adequacy, the ability to enjoy using the body, and a wholesome attitude
toward sex. Sex education should be a matter of agreement between school and
parents, with the school doing what the parents feel they cannot do so well.
The facts about animal and human reproduction should be taught before puberty.
3.
Learning to get along with age-mates: To learn the give-and-take of
social life among peers. To learn to make friends and to get along with
enemies. To develop a "social personality."
4.
Beginning to develop appropriate masculine or feminine
social roles:
To learn to be a boy or a girl--to act the role that is expected and rewarded.
The sex role is taught so vigorously by so many agencies that the school
probably has little more than a remedial function, which is to assist boys and
girls who are having difficulty with the task.
5.
Developing fundamental skills in reading, writing and
calculating:
To learn to read, write, and calculate well enough to get along in society.
6.
Developing concepts necessary for everyday living: A concept is an idea which
stands for a large number of particular sense perceptions, or which stands for
a number of ideas of lesser degrees of abstraction. The task is to acquire a
store of concepts sufficient for thinking effectively about ordinary
occupational, civic, and social matters.
7.
Developing a conscience, a sense of morality and a scale of
values: To
develop an inner moral control, respect for moral rules, and the beginning of a
rational scale of values. Morality, or respect for rules of behavior, is
imposed on the child first by the parents. Later, according to Piaget, the
child learns that rules are necessary and useful to the conduct of any social
enterprise, from games to government, and thus learns a "morality of
cooperation or agreement" which is a true moral autonomy and necessary in
a modern democratic society.
8.
Achieving personal independence: To become an autonomous person,
able to make plans and to act in the present and immediate future independently
of one's parents and other adults. The young child has become physically
independent of his parents but remains emotionally dependent on them.
9.
Developing attitudes toward social groups and institutions: To develop social attitudes those
are basically democratic. Attitudes, or emotionalized dispositions to act, are
learned mainly in three ways; (1) by imitation of people with prestige in the
eyes of the learner; (2) by collection and combination of pleasant or
unpleasant experiences associated with a given object or situation; (3) by a
single deeply emotional experience--pleasant or unpleasant--associated with a
given object or situation.
DEVELOPMENTAL TASK OF ADOLESCENCE (13-18)
1.
Achieving new and more mature relations with age-mates of
both sexes:
The goal: to learn to look upon girls as women and boys as men; to become an
adult among adults; to learn to work with others for a common purpose,
disregarding personal feelings; to learn to lead without dominating.
2.
Achieving a masculine or feminine social role: To accept and to learn a
socially approved adult masculine or feminine social role.
3.
Accepting one's physique and using one’s body effectively: To become proud, or at least
tolerant, of one's body; to use and protect one's body effectively and with
personal satisfaction.
4.
Achieving emotional independence from parents and other
adults: To
become free from childish dependence on parents; to develop affection for
parents without dependence upon them.
5.
Achieving assurance of economic independence: To feel able to make a living,
if necessary. This is primarily a task for boys, in our society, but it is of
increasing importance to girls.
6.
Selecting and preparing for an occupation: To choose an occupation for
which one has the necessary ability; to prepare for this occupation.
7.
Preparing for marriage and family life: To develop a positive attitude
toward family life and having children; and (mainly for girls) to get the
knowledge necessary for home management and child rearing.
8.
Developing intellectual skills and concepts necessary for
civic competence: To develop concepts law, government, economics, politics, geography,
human nature, and social institutions which fit the modern world; to develop
language skills and reasoning ability necessary for dealing effectively with
the problems of a modern democracy. Individual differences in mental
development show themselves principally as differences in: (a) acquiring
language and meanings, (2) acquiring concepts, (3) interests and motivation.
9.
Desiring, accepting and achieving socially responsible
behavior:
To participate as a responsible adult in the life of the community, region, and
nation; to take account of the values of society in one's personal behavior.
10.
Acquiring a set of values and an ethical system as a guide
behavior - developing an ideology: To form a set of values that are possible of
realization; to develop a conscious purpose of realizing these values; to
define man's place in the physical world and in relation to other human beings;
to keep one's world picture and one's values in harmony with each other (A
value is an object or state of affairs which is desired).
Hazards:
There
are three very common potential hazards related to developmental tasks.
- The first one is the inappropriate expectations; either individual themselves or the social group may expect the development of behaviour that is impossible at the time because of physical or psychological limitations.
- The second one is the bypassing (avoiding) of a stage of development as results of failure of master the tasks for that stage of development.
- The crises individuals experience when they pass from one stage to another comprise the third one.
Factors influencing mastery of
developmental task:
- A retarded developmental level
- Lack of opportunity to learn developmental tasks or lack of guidance in their mastery
- Lack of motivation
- Poor health
- Physical defects
- A low intellectual level
Implications:
- The concept of developmental task is very helpful in specifying courses content and its objectives.
- The pupil can know in advance, what the society expects from his/her at that age.
- Parents and teachers can guide the children to acquire skills to live in the society.
- The teachers and parents can prepare appropriate climate or atmosphere to achieve a developmental task.
CONCLUSION
The developmental tasks concept has a long and rich tradition. Its
acceptance has been partly due to recognition of sensitive periods in our lives
and partly due to the practical nature of Havighurst's tasks. Knowing that a
youngster of a certain age is encountering one of the tasks of that period helps
adults to understand a child's behavior and establish an environment that helps
the child to master the tasks. Another good example is that of acquiring
personal independence, an important task for the middle childhood period.
Youngsters test authority during this phase and, if teachers and parents
realize that this is a normal, even necessary phase of development, they react
differently than if they see it as a personal challenge.
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