Maturation & Learning

Maturation is the process of becoming mature while learning is the act, process, or experience of gaining knowledge or skill. In education, maturation and learning have deep relations with each other. For example, maturation comes with passage of time while learning is took by the child from his/her environment, parents. 

In 1930’s, Arnold Gesell (Psychologist) born in America who developed the clinic of child development there and received his M.D. He studied about infant child behavior during first nine month. He focused on maturation this era, might be accounted by the fact that the investigators were studying infancy, a stage of development when physical and neurological growth is most rapid and dramatic. 

For this purpose, he experimented on two children grown up in different tribes of India. The first child was brought up in cradle board for the first nine month, while other was free to move outside. He computed the maturation and learning in this duration. He simply noted ages of those babies in each tribe started to walk. When, they computed averages, they found that, the cradle board babies walked day earlier than the non cradle board baby.

Dannis carried out study in which two girls whose mother was unable to care for them were, reared under control conditions where stimulation was minimized. Up to the age of nine month, the behavior of girls was similar to that of infants growing up under normal condition. Smile, laughter, motor activities of both the girls was same to the normal growing babies under the custody of mothers.

The first sign of retardation in development, learning and maturation appeared when the gifts were placed in the sitting, standing positions. They were unable to sit and stand properly as compared to the children brought up under the custody of parents. All these signs of retardation established by Dannis were only the self generating.

But by all these observations, Dannis concluded that, teaming also played vital role in the loco motor development. In my view point, maturation and learning comes under affection of teaming, where the child brought up. Parent’s role is most important in this respect especially for the special children who are unable to do things by themselves. It’s easy for the parents to distinguish about retarded and the normal children behavior during first nine month.