History
In 1925 Professor Edward Alexander Bott established the St. George’s School for Child Study at the University of Toronto, which would eventually come to be known as The Institute for Child Study. A number of factors contributed to the schools beginnings: the efforts of the Canadian National Committee for Mental Hygiene of which Bott was a prominent member, the emergence of psychology as a discipline distinct from philosophy at the University of Toronto, the philanthropic activities of the Rockefeller Foundation, and the evolution of the Child Study movement in North America .
In 1924, with project grants awarded by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Foundation and the Canadian National Mental Hygiene Committee, Bott set up an interdisciplinary project administration board. He hired Dr. William Blatz, who was then responsible for directing projects for the board, which included setting up a major longitudinal study of some 1400 elementary school children to study specific areas of their social adjustment, designing and implementing a laboratory nursery school, and developing a parental education program. While the large scale study was carried out at the Regal Road Public School, the nursery school and the parent education program were to become the two major divisions of the St. George’s School.
By 1937, the funding of the Rockefeller Foundation covered only about half of the school’s expenses, and a special committee was appointed by the university governors to consider the future of St. George’s. The decision was to make child study a faculty unto itself, which would keep it under the wing of the University of Toronto, but invite outside financing. In 1937, St. George's School for Child Study, including the research and graduate education activities, was renamed the Institute of Child Study.
In 2010, the institute was named in honour of Dr. Eric Jackman, a clinical psychologist and alumnus of the laboratory school whose financial gift was the largest donation to early childhood education in Canadian history.
Read more about this topic: Institute Of Child Study
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