(C)                                          Early Childhood Development         Emerging from amongst the parochial and savage child-rearing practices promulgated during the Dark Ages, John Locke’s expansionof the metaphor of the child as “tabula rasa” (or, literally, “blank slate”) forms what is popularly regarded as one of the earliest empiricalattempts to understand the psychological processes of intellectual and emotional growth experienced by humans during early childhood.This new branch of scholarship enthralled a public hungry for knowledge as the roots of the Enlightenment flourished in the rich,intellectual medium of the late Renaissance universities. Unbeknownst to Locke, newer and more complex branches of scholarship wouldemerge from his thinking； his ideas would become a cornerstone in the foundation of modern studies in early childhood development.                    According to both secular writings and Catholic Church records dating from around the 8th and 9th century, the idea that childrenare born into a world infected by ‘original sin’ was a world view actively promulgated by church authorities. This worldview wasreinforced by the barbaric, medieval dispensation of justice that was carried out by almost every European monarchy as a duty chargedto them by the church. Monarchs wishing cull favor from the religious authorities were compelled to actively search out heretics. And,indeed, monarchs were required to obey church orders or risk excommunication or execution.         As part of this feudal belief system, parents were encouraged and expected to literally ‘beat the devil’ out of their children, inkeeping with scriptural doctrine inspired by the biblical epic of Noah. The belief was that children were born into and part of an eviluniverse and therefore were themselves evil by nature.        However the early 15th century saw the election of Pope Leo X. His corrupt practices and hedonistic excess led the church intothe chaos of the Protestant Reformation. Significant change was taking place on other fronts as well. Until that time, scripture, laboriouslyinscribed by hand the parchment, and only in Latin, was accessible exclusively to the educated ruling elite. Armed with the newesttechnology of the day – William Caxton’s printing press – Martin Luther published a translation of the bible in German. Soon, a flood oftranslated Bibles spread across Europe. The Bible was no longer inaccessible to a public illiterate in Latin, and splinter denominations ofthe Catholic Church began generating a wide spectrum of biblical interpretations, some of which diverged quite far from traditionaldoctrine.         These historical threads of change converged in the late 16th century and culminated in a new era known as the Enlightenment.Fed by new trends in intellectual freedom and no longer constrained by parochial politics, philosophers and thinkers across Europe beganto freely explore ideas and topics without fear of censure by the church, embracing the fruits of post-renaissance scholarship. It is withinthis intellectual upheaval that John Locke published his watershed work, “Essay Concerning Human Understanding”.         Within this paper, Locke considered that infants are born into the natural world as psychological blank slates – the so called “tabularasa”, a metaphor first coined by the scholar Saint Thomas Aquinas three-hundred years earlier – with no pre-deterministic tendenciestoward ‘good’ or ‘evil’. In this context, the caliber of an individual’s character is implicitly determined by the sum of that person’sexperience； and, particularly, according to Locke, the quality of an individual’s education is a pivotal determiner of the type of personthose experiences produce.         Though widely embraced as a defining moment in the development of empirical developmental psychology, the publication ofthat paper produced prodigious amounts of criticism and rebuttal. For, as many opponents of his ideas so vociferously pointed out, Lockehad neither carried out carefully controlled experiments to verify his theories, nor was he even a father.        Perhaps the most important result of John Locke’s publication of his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” is that itestablished the field of cognitive developmental theory itself as a scholarly blank slate. Others, particularly Emmanuel Kant and JeanJacques Rousseau, would later publish works purporting that nature imbues man with certain predispositions, giving rise to concepts of‘nature versus nurture’ as a framework upon which to build further cognitive development ideas. This seminal concept became thecentral underpinning for modern concepts of early childhood developments； concepts that are, in their complexity and descriptivecapacity, far more advanced and powerful than anything those early thinkers could conceive.
【題組】30. ( ) What is the passage mainly about?[!--empirenews.page--]
(A) Problems with early theories of childhood development.
(B) How the foundation for modern childhood development theory came about.
(C) How John Locke devised his “blank slate” theory.
(D) Why John Locke’s theory was met with such strong opposition.