(Slate) – When I arrived at the Child Study Center for the first day of preschool in the fall of 1972, I became one of a cohort of over 100 Berkeley children whose parents had enrolled us in a groundbreaking, 30-year longitudinal study of personality that would attempt to answer a simple question: If you study a child, can you predict who that child will grow up to be? Formally, the study is named Block and Block Longitudinal Study, 1969–1999. Colloquially, it’s referred to as the Block Study. Those of us who comprised its cohort knew it as the Block Project. The study was the brainchild of married UC–Berkeley personality researchers Jack and Jeanne Block, who set out to demonstrate that, as the poet William Wordsworth wrote: “The Child is father of the Man.” (Read More)