Transcription
As follows, she, Marcel Javier, used the famous Gazelle test for early intelligence, developed at Yale University's Child Development Center. The pictures of the 48-hour child, two, two-day-old child, supported only by the forearms, both upright, perfect head balance and eye focus, and a marvelous intelligence shining in the face, no more astonishing than those of six, of the six-week-old child.
Get what we are saying here again, that the characteristics of these black children are two days at six or seven weeks. These children, crossed skillfully, could sit up by themselves, would sit spellbound before a mirror, looking at their own images for long periods. This particular ability was not expected in the American European child before 24 weeks, that is, six months, according to the Gazelle test.
So here again, we're looking at an intellectual and psychomotor development occurring in African children, some six, seven, eight weeks ahead of those of the of Europeans. Between six and seven months, the Ugandan children performed the toy box retrieval test. Javier showed the infinite torrent, walked across the room, put the touring in a tall box. The child leaped up, ran across the room, and retrieved the toy. Besides the central motor skills of walking and retrieval, the test shows that object constancy has taken place, the first great shift of logical processing in the brain, at which point an object out of sight is no longer out of mind because the characteristic of infancy and early childhood. This test, successfully completed by the Ugandan children between six and seven months of age, was not to be expected until somewhere between the 15th and 18th month in American and European children.
There is no substitute for self-knowledge. We cannot let even be the uh, palliative statements of multiculturalism, which seeks to equate children all across cultures, blind us to our own possibilities as people. We must not let our fear of inferiority make us latch on to the idea that children are only different in their color of their skin. These kind of mythologies prevent us, prevent us from knowing ourselves and from appropriately dealing with our children in terms of their development, in terms of their possibilities.
This kind of study has been duplicated time and time again, not only in Africa but in the United States and in other parts of this world. And as a number of you might know, they appear to be the findings of these kind of studies, in part, appear to be connected to the, the melanin base of our bodies as African people. On some level, they may appear to reflect what we call a biology, a theory of recapitulation, in that during the developmental sequences of uh, of the human embryo, uh, we go through earlier evolutionary sequences. We also, in our development as an ethnic group and as a people, repeat on a certain level in our early development, the developmental histories of our people. And perhaps, as we see our children walking first, and talking first, and negotiating reality first, intellectually processing the information of this world in advance of white children and others, we may on this level be seeing, may see repeated the history of African people, the first man on this earth, the first man to walk this earth, the first man to intellectually master this earth and to deal with it in terms of intellectuality and in terms of definite control and power.
Let's take another look at another study here of uh, some Keyu infants. On both the mental and motor tests, Keyu infants were precocious, scoring significantly higher than would be expected for American infants of the same ages. Has compared with the standard score of 100, American infants average on these tests. The average Keyu year mental score was 108, and their average motor score, 129. The Keyu infants bettered the standard score on 38 mental items and on 20 motor test items. They were lower than the standard on seven of the mental test items and into the motor test item. However, the researchers were under the impression that these items involve implements that are familiar to American infants but not familiar to figures. When when they used scores month by month, were compared month by month with month by month scores for white infants in the United States and in the United Kingdom, uh, because infants performed better on both mental and motor tests throughout the 15-month period of observation than did any of these other groups. However, the superiority of their performance tapered off somewhat toward the end of that period, of the period.
A number of reports have suggested that some equatorial African infants are precocious in their motor development and possibly also in their mental development. And this study appears to confirm these reports. We'll be back to this so-called tapering off momentarily. Jibber concluded as a result of her studies that the precocity of these African children was not only in motor development, it was found in intellectual development also. It is not always realized that intellectual development is displayed very clearly in the use of the Gazelle material. To take an elementary example, the child who nearly looks at the cubes and then picked them up is demonstrating a series of intellectual processes. And for the building of a tower with the two cubes, more complex processes are needed, in addition to the greater manual dexterity. Although most of the African children had never seen anything resembling the test material, they used it in the same way as European children that succeeded in the tests earlier than those children. Their interest was lively, and their personal social relations excellent. They made good contact with the tester, turning and talking, smiling, and trying in every way to communicate.