Bird Thomas Baldwin

Background

Bird was born into a Quaker family on May 31, 1875, in Marshalltown, Pennsylvania, United States.

Education

In 1900 Bird earned his Bachelor of Science degree at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, United States. Bird took advanced work in psychology and education at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. In 1903 Bird earned a Master of Arts degree.

Later Bird studied at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. In 1905 he became a Doctor of Philosophy in psychology. He studied psychology at Leipzig University in Leipzig, Germany, in 1906. After teaching at Westchester State Normal School for a year he studied at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas, United States, from 1910 to 1912.

Career

Bird worked for two years as principal of Friends’ School in Moorestown, New Jersey, United States. He taught at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, United States, until coming to the State University of Iowa, in 1917 to direct the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, the first research institute in its field in the world.

Baldwin moved quickly to ensure its worldclass status. His own research centered on the vexed problem of the relationship between mental and physical growth. He and his colleagues worked on a variety of problems relating to these issues, including proper nutrition, what went into the development of the “normal” child, the differences between up-to-date and regressive rural environments for children, and the intelligence of preschool children. The provisions of the Rockefeller grants, which totaled almost $1 million in the 1920s, stipulated that the ICWRS would do the basic research in the field, whereas a department at Iowa State College would train future preschool teachers, and Iowa State Teachers College would train teach- ers of classes in parent education. Together with the various child welfare reform organizations, which had led the political campaign for the ICWRS’s founding by the Iowa legislature, Baldwin led the ICWRS to national eminence, in the late 1920s.

The ICWRS fulfilled the intent of the Rockefeller Memorial grants by integrating the science of child study and the applied social technology of parent education. Baldwin and his colleagues not only helped to build up a science of child study, or, as they preferred to call it, a science of child development. They fostered the training of nursery school teachers and promoted parent education through classes and conferences.

Baldwin’s work centered on the phenomenon of development. In the early and middle stages of his career, he distinguished himself by becoming one of the most careful measurers of the physical growth of children, winning national and international recognition for his work. At the ICWRS, he also became interested in the problem of mental growth because his daughter was having learning difficulties. She was placed in the ICWRS observational nursery school, and, possibly because she received extra attention from her teachers, her test scores improved dramatically within about a year, showing that she was not mentally subnormal, but slightly above normal.

Through his daughter’s unexpected experience, Baldwin came to realize that IQ tests were flawed and could be misleading. As a result, his career veered off from the problem of physical growth to that of mental growth. By the later 1920s, when he was at the height of his career, he was becoming an increasingly severe critic of IQ testing if it was interpreted as a final judgment of the inheritance of intelligence on the part of any individual. At that point, in May 1928, he was at a conference, stopped in a barbershop for a haircut and a shave, received a terrible freak infection from the shave, and died within a few hours.

Achievements

• Baldwin won a series of grants from the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (a Rockefeller philanthropy) in the 1920s to enhance its mushrooming programs in research, training, and service.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Physical Growth of Children From Birth to Maturity

    (This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)

    2015
  • Standards and Tests for the Measurement of the Efficiency of Schools and School Systems 2016
  • Notes on School Observation; the Physical Nature of the Child 2015
  • Studies in Experimental Education 2015
  • Physical Growth and School Progress 2015

References

• The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa Iowa has been blessed with citizens of strong character who have made invaluable contributions to the state and to the nation. In the 1930s alone, such towering figures as John L. Lewis, Henry A. Wallace, and Herbert Hoover hugely influenced the nation’s affairs.
  2008