John Curtis Gowan was born May 21, 1912, in
Boston,
Massachusetts. Graduating from
Thayer Academy,
Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1929, John Gowan was only 17 when he entered
Harvard University, earning his undergraduate degree four years later. A master's degree in
mathematics followed; he then moved to
Culver,
Indiana, where he was employed as a
counselor and mathematics teacher at
Culver Military Academy from 1941 to 1952. Earning a doctorate from
UCLA, he became a member of the founding faculty at the
California State University at Northridge, where he taught as a professor of
Educational Psychology from 1953 until 1975, when he retired with
emeritus status. Dr. Gowan became interested in
gifted children after the Russians gained superiority in space with the 1957 launch of
Sputnik. He formed the
National Association for Gifted Children the following year. He was the group's executive director and president from 1975 to 1979 and over the years wrote more than 100 articles and fourteen books on gifted children, teacher evaluation,
child development, and
creativity. While at Northridge, he developed a program to train campus counselors, was nominated in 1973 as an outstanding professor, and had been a counselor, researcher,
Fulbright lecturer, and visiting professor at various schools including the
University of Singapore, the
University of Canterbury in
Christchurch,
New Zealand, the
University of Hawaii, and
Connecticut State College. He was a fellow of the
American Psychological Association and was also a colleague of the
Creative Education Foundation. Besides his work in
Educational Psychology as specifically related to gifted children, he also had an interest in
psychic (or
psychedelic) phenomena as it relates to human creativity. His work in this area was inspired by the writings of
Aldous Huxley and
Carl Jung. Based on his work in creativity and with gifted children, Dr. Gowan developed a model of mental development that derived from the work of
Jean Piaget and
Erik Erikson, but also included adult development beyond the ordinary adult successes of
career and
family building, extending into the emergence and stabilization of extraordinary development and mystical states of consciousness. He described the entire spectrum of available states in his classic
Trance, Art, & Creativity (1975), with its different modalities of spiritual and aesthetic expression. He also devised a test for
self-actualization, (as defined by
Abraham Maslow), called the
Northridge Developmental Scale. Dr. Gowan died on December 2, 1986. His adult twin children survived him from his first marriage, John Gowan Jr. of Albany, NY and Ann Gowan Curry, of Anchorage, Alaska as well as seven grandchildren and his second wife Jane Thompson Gowan. His godson, Cameron Scott Matheson sang at his memorial service which was attended by friends and colleagues. ==Works==