During the Middle Ages, a popular image of the stages of life in Roman Catholicism was of a mandala with Christ in the center and the different ages of man represented as spokes around that hub (see my post on The Stages of Life and the Liturgy of the Hours).  With the dawning of the...Read More

Charlotte Bühler (1893-1975), was a German developmental psychologist who was a founder of humanistic psychology, but whose views on the human life cycle are less well known compared to the theories of Piaget, Freud, and Erikson.  She nonetheless made a unique contribution to the study of the life stages with her emphasis on how the...Read More

To watch a great film is to be fed aesthetically, emotionally, and intellectually.  But there are certain great films that do more:  they serve as time machines, bringing us backwards or forwards into stages of life that we have already traveled or will eventually and hopefully travel in the future.  I call these ”stages of...Read More

Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences (MI theory) has revolutionized the field of education.  But it also has important implications for developmental psychology.  Gardner’s theory says that there are at least eight different intelligences:  linguistic (word smart), logical-mathematical (numbers and reasoning smart), spatial (picture smart), musical (music smart), bodily-kinesthetic (body smart)), interpersonal (people smart), intrapersonal...Read More

I’ve written a book for educators called The Best Schools: How Human Development Research Should Inform Educational Practice (publisher:  The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, December, 2006).  In this book I suggest that our educational climate has become totally overwhelmed by what I call an “academic achievement discourse.”  This discourse concentrates on accountability, rubrics,...Read More