[xmca] The passing of Seymour Sarason.

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

This is a very sad day for me in many ways, one of which is the loss of a
man who
was inspiration to me over many decades: From NY Times.

Seymour B. Sarason, a psychologist whose groundbreaking work on social
settings and their influence on individual problems helped establish the
field of community psychology, died on Jan. 28 in New Haven. He was 91 and
lived in Hamden, Conn.
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Thomas McDonald for The New York Times

Seymour B. Sarason

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Julie.

The author of more than 40 books, Dr. Sarason applied his insights on social
psychology to a wide variety of issues that included the treatment of the
mentally ill and retarded, educational reform, teacher training and care for
the aged.

He started out as a clinical psychologist but quickly became disenchanted
with the idea, then dominant in the field, that individual problems could be
analyzed and treated individually. While working at a state institution for
the retarded in Massachusetts, he became convinced that many psychological
problems stemmed from social settings and institutional cultures.

At Yale, where he taught for more than 40 years, he founded the
Psycho-Educational Institute, a clinic for developing new approaches to
treating the problems of children and adolescents. The clinic’s
psychologists and students, instead of doing laboratory work, went into
schools, day care centers and correctional institutions to work with
administrators on improving their surrounding environments.

Dr. Sarason’s work at the clinic, which he directed from 1961 to 1970, led
to several seminal works, including “Psychology in Community Settings”
(1966), written with several co-authors; “The Culture of the School and the
Problem of Change” (1971); “The Creation of Settings and the Future
Societies”(1972); and “The Psychological Sense of Community: Prospects for a
Community Psychology” (1974).

“He founded the field of community psychology,” said Andy Hargreaves, holder
of the Thomas More Brennan chair in education at the Lynch School of
Education at Boston
College<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/b/boston_college/index.html?inline=nyt-org>.
“It did not really exist before him. And he was one of the very first people
to write in an explicit way about educational reform and the culture of the
school from the perspective of the people who experience the change —
teachers and students.”

Seymour Bernard Sarason was born on Jan. 12, 1919, in the Brownsville
section of Brooklyn and grew up in Newark. The family was poor, and when he
contracted polio in high school, his mother encouraged her son to write to
President Franklin D.
Roosevelt<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/franklin_delano_roosevelt/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
who himself had polio, asking for help.

To the family’s astonishment, a letter arrived from Missy LeHand,
Roosevelt’s secretary, announcing that arrangements were being made for the
boy to get treatment. He eventually made an almost complete recovery from
the illness.

He attended the University of Newark (now part of Rutgers), where he
received a bachelor’s degree in 1939. At Clark University in Worcester,
Mass, he earned a master’s degree in 1940 and a doctorate in clinical
psychology in 1942.

While working as a clinical psychologist at a new institution for the
mentally retarded in Southbury, Conn., Dr. Sarason began to entertain the
idea that institutions might do more harm than good. He was particularly
disturbed by the way psychological tests measured deficits rather than the
potential he saw in students taking art classes from Henry Schaefer-Simmern,
an important influence on his thinking.

Dr. Sarason explored these issues in his first book, “Psychological Problems
in Mental Deficiency” (1949), which examined social and cultural factors
that affected subnormal behavior.

In 1945 he began teaching at Yale, where he remained until retiring in 1989.
His community approach to psychological problems lent itself to a variety of
fields, and he wrote extensively on many of them, particularly education. He
regarded traditional schools and what he called the “encapsulated classroom”
as enemies of learning and human potential, sealed off from the larger
society around them and crippled by a lack of collaboration among teachers.

Although deeply pessimistic about the possibilities of school reform, he
nevertheless published many books on the subject, including “The Preparation
of Teachers: An Unstudied Problem in Education” (1962), with Kenneth S.
Davidson and Burton Blatt; “How Schools Might be Governed and Why” (1997);
and “Educational Reform: A Self-Scrutinizing Memoir” (2002).

In addition to his daughter, Julie, of Lowell, Mass., he is survived by a
brother, Irwin, of Seattle; a grandchild; and his companion, Irma Miller of
Stratford, Conn.

In 1988 Dr. Sarason published an autobiography, “The Making of an American
Psychologist.” At his death, he had completed “Centers for Endings: The
Coming Crisis in the Care of Aged People,” to be published later this year
by Springer.
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