Urie Bronfenbrenner
| Date of Birth | : | 29 Apr, 1917 |
| Date of Death | : | 25 Sep, 2005 |
| Place of Birth | : | Moscow, Russia |
| Profession | : | Psychologist, Writer, Educationalist |
| Nationality | : | American, Russian |
Urie Bronfenbrenner was a Russian-born American psychologist best known for using a contextual framework to better understand human development.
Biography
Bronfenbrenner’s family moved from Moscow to the United States when he was six. He later studied music and psychology at Cornell University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1938. Two years later, at Harvard University, he earned a master’s degree in education, and in 1942 he graduated with a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Michigan. He served as a military psychologist during World War II and later was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. In 1948 he moved to Cornell, where he was a professor of human development and a founder of the federal Head Start program, formed in 1965 to provide educational, health, and other support services to impoverished children.
When Bronfenbrenner was a child, his father, who was a neuropathologist, often pointed out the interdependence between living organisms and their surroundings. Those concrete examples were expanded into theories about the ecology of human development, and they were further developed during cross-cultural field research, which Bronfenbrenner conducted in places such as Europe, the U.S.S.R., Israel, and China. His work led him to define human development as a lasting change in the way a person perceives and deals with his or her environment. A child is viewed as a growing dynamic entity that progressively moves into and restructures an environment. The environment in turn exerts an influence on the individual, requiring a process of reciprocity between person and environment. Moreover, Bronfenbrenner realized that the developmental process varies by place and time and that public policy affects the development of humans by influencing the conditions of their lives.
With American developmental psychologist Stephen J. Ceci, Bronfenbrenner extended his theory to behaviour genetics. They recommended that explicit measures of the environment in systems terms be incorporated, and they proposed the existence of empirically assessable mechanisms—proximal processes through which genetic potentials for effective psychological functioning are actualized. They hypothesized that when proximal processes are weak, genetically based potentials for effective psychological functioning remain relatively unrealized and, as proximal processes increase in magnitude, potentials become actualized to a progressively greater extent.
Bronfenbrenner received national and international honours and awards for his work, including multiple honorary degrees and invitations to contribute to two U.S. Presidential Task Forces. He also was honoured by the American Psychological Association with its creation of the Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society.
Death
Awards
- The Ecology of Human Development won the 1980 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction
- The James McKeen Catell Award from the American Psychological Society
- The American Psychological Association renamed its "Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society" as "The Bronfenbrenner Award."
- Chair, 1970 White House Conference on Children
Quotes
Witness the American ideal: the Self-Made Man. But there is no such person. If we can stand on our own two feet, it is because others have raised us up. If, as adults, we can lay claim to competence and compassion, it only means that other human beings have been willing and enabled to commit their competence and compassion to us--through infancy, childhood, and adolescence, right up to this very moment.
In today's world parents find themselves at the mercy of a society which imposes pressures and priorities that allow neither timenor place for meaningful activities and relations between children and adults, which downgrade the role of parents and the functions of parenthood, and which prevent the parent from doing things he wants to do as a guide, friend, and companion to his children.
"In the United States, it is now possible for a person eighteen years of age, female as well as male, to graduate From high school, college, or university without ever having cared for, or even held, a baby; without ever having looked after someone who was old, ill, or lonely; or without ever having comforted or assisted another human being who really needed help... No society can long sustain itself unless its members have learned the sensitivities, motivations, and skills involved in assisting and caring for other human beings.
In the planning and designing of new communities, housing projects, and urban renewal, the planners both private and public, need to give explicit consideration to the kind of world that is being created for the children who will be growing up in these settings. Particular attention should be given to the opportunities which the environment presents or precludes for involvement of children both older and younger than themselves.
Thus if we know a child has had sufficient opportunity to observe and acquire a behavioural sequence, and we know he is physically capable of performng the act but does not do so, tehn it is reasonable to assume that it is motivation which is lacking
Like the sorcerer of old, the television set casts its magic spell, freezing speech and action and turning the living into silent statues so long as the enchantment lasts. The primary danger of the television screen lies not so much in the behavior it produces as the behavior it prevents — the talks, the games, the family festivities and arguments.
One of the most significant effects of age-segregation in our society has been the isolation of children from the world of work. Whereas in the past children not only saw what their parents did for a living but even shared substantially in the task, many children nowadays have only a vague notion of the nature of the parent's job, and have had little or no opportunity to observe the parent, or for that matter any other adult, when he is fully engaged in his work.
Thus if we know a child has had sufficient opportunity to observe and acquire a behavioral sequence, and we know he is physically capable of performing the act but does not do so, then it is reasonable to assume that it is motivation which is lacking. The appropriate countermeasure then involves increasing the subjective value of the desired act relative to any competing response tendencies he might have, rather than having the model senselessly repeat an already redundant sequence of behavior.
If the Russians have gone too far in subjecting the child and his peer group to conformity to a single set of values imposed by the adult society, perhaps we have reached the point of diminishing returns in allowing excessive autonomy and in failing to utilize the constructive potential of the peer group in developing social responsibility and consideration for others.
