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In the fifty years since the Laboratory for Human Development at Harvard was founded in 1949, the social sciences have transformed the way we humans now understand ourselves. Feminism and multiculturalism destroyed the idea that the workings of white males' minds could define what it is to be human. Technology radically altered, among other things, the way we transmit and consume information. And modern cognitive scientists proved what was previously considered an impossibility: that we can rigorously and scientifically study what goes on inside people's heads. And in all these areas, HGSE's Human Development and Psychology (HDP) area—an outgrowth of the 1949 laboratory—has distinguished itself as a leader.
Today we're on the verge of changes at least as revolutionary as those
of the past 50 years. Invoking HDP's track record for seeing what's ahead,
we've challenged several distinguished
faculty and alumni of HDP to look into the future. We asked them: "What
are the key issues and questions just around the corner in your fields?
What are the big dangers, the big promises?" This response was written by Hobbs Professor Howard Gardner. Jean Piaget, the father of cognitive developmental psychology, once declared, "Every psychological explanation comes sooner or later to lean on biology or logic." As usual, Piaget was right, but even he could not have anticipated the enormous progress in these two realms. Students of human development in the future will have to take into account our understanding of the intricacies of the brain, the nervous system, and the genetic code which underlies all facets of development. Students of human development will also have to incorporate advances in computing, robotics and artificial intelligence, all outgrowths of the logical demonstrations in the 1930s by mathematician Alan Turing. I assume that genetics and artificial intelligence will not merely affect our knowledge as scholars; they will also affect what human beings become. There will be genetic experiments and attempts to create designer babies; and these will require new psychological accounts. There will be smart robots, attempts to merge gray matter and silicon, efforts to download machine software into human wetware or vice versa. Again, new psychological accounts will be needed. Already, children's and adolescents' views of the world and of themselves are affected fundamentally by their immersion in the world of computing. And what about education? The biological and information revolutions will doubtless bring about the most dramatic changes in education since the invention of the printing press, if not writing. I am most interested in three questions:
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HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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