Joseph Church

Background

Joseph Church was born on July 10, 1918, in Gardner, Massachusetts, United States.

Education

Joseph Church earned his undergraduate degree from the New School for Social Research in 1950 and went on to earn a master's degree at Cornell University in 1951 and a doctorate at Clark University in 1954.

Career

Joseph Church served in the United States Army from 1942 to 1945. He joined Vassar College as an instructor in 1954, becoming a professor there in 1962. He moved to Brooklyn College in 1965 and then to the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he retired in 1985. Church was invariably stimulating and often provocative. He encouraged his students to think independently and challenged colleagues to engage in meaningful debate. He was active professionally as a consultant to the National Institute of Mental Health, the Children's Bureau, the United States Department of Justice, the Educational Testing Service, and other organizations. He served on the editorial board of Child Development from 1964 to 1968 and again from 1971 to 1975.

Joseph Church was widely known in his field for the landmark text on child development that he wrote with L. Joseph Stone in 1957, Childhood and Adolescence: A Psychology of the Growing Person. The field was then dominated by rigid behavioral models of development, and Church's book crossed boundaries by encouraging a view of the child as a more complex social being. It delved into the current research while also exploring a vast range of theories that were not well recognized at the time, including the now-famous stages of cognitive development described by Jean Piaget. The book quickly became popular in colleges and among psychologists because of its unusual breadth and its clear and accessible language, said Margery B. Franklin, director of the Child Development Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. ''A lot of other psychologists studied functions like thinking and feeling separately,'' Dr. Franklin said, ''but Church and Stone's viewpoint was that in the living being these interact and are not compartmentalized.'' Ian McMahan, a professor of psychology at Brooklyn College and a former student of Joseph Church, said the text enticed readers by explaining that child development was still an evolving field. The book was translated into several languages and published in five editions. Church worked on the last one with his wife, Alexandria.

A few years later, he wrote another authoritative text, this one clashing with the prevailing theories of language development. His book Language and the Discovery of Reality asserted that children learned instead through conversation and by listening to adults, not through drill sessions. It challenged the traditional method of teaching language simply as a system of labels.

His next book, Three Babies: Biographies of Cognitive Development, explained some of the peculiarities of early mental development by analyzing daily journals that three new parents kept on their young children. Many of the actions a busy parent may pay little attention to, Church wrote, can often provide a fascinating insight into the workings of a child's mind.

Achievements

• Joseph Church was a prolific writer, whose groundbreaking books in the 1950s and 1960s shattered conventional notions on the ways young children mature and acquire language. He also reviewed a number of social science books and edited several books on child psychology and politics.

Works

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  • Childhood and Adolescence: A Psychology of the Growing Person 1957
  • Language and the Discovery of Reality: A Developmental Psychology of Cognition 1961
  • Three Babies: Biographies of Cognitive Development 1966
  • Understanding Your Child from Birth to Three: A Guide to Your Child's Psychological Development 1973

Personality

Joseph Church had a good sense of humor, sharp intelligence, and generous spirit.

Connections

Joseph Church was married to Alexandria Church. He had two children, Joseph and Amanda.

Wife:

Alexandria Church

Son:

Joseph Church

Daughter:

Amanda Church

Student:

Ian McMahan