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School psychology: An autobiographical fragment
Journal of .S
SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGY:
0022.4405/83i$O3.OU/O ( 1983 The Journal ol School Pryhology. Inc.
1983
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
SEYMOUR
FRAGMENT
B. SARASON
Yale University
Summary: This paper describes some of the dramatic changes that have transformed the field of school psychology over the last 40 years, a period during which the author was part of that field. The most important change was from the restricted and stultifying role of “Binet Tester” to one encompassing the culture of the school setting and its relationship to the community. These changes have been slow but steady. Many obstacles-professional preciousness, protection of turf, conceptual narrowness, an American psychology riveted on the individual-had to be overcome. The battle is far from won. These obstacles and changes are illustrated by events and programs of which the author was a part. A basic remaining problem is how to define and redefine the human resources that will meet more productively the needs of our educational system.
I never intended to enter the field of school psychology. In fact, in 1941-42, my last year in graduate school, I did not know (nor did I feel I had control over) where in psychology I would find a place. That was the year the United States became part of World War II, and there was a serious question about how many and in what ways colleges and universities could survive the loss of students and faculty to the armed services. Aside from the unclear consequences of the war, there were other factors that made me feel like a dangling man with no control over where I was going. I was Jewish, and in those days that made a teaching job a very dim possibility. I was getting my doctorate from Clark University, from which several leading members of the psychology department had left a few years earlier, mammothly diluting the department’s quality, strength, and reputation. The department did have some young stimulating faculty (e.g., Donald Super, Saul Rosenweig, R. B. Cattell) but they were of no help in terms of placing their students. I knew early on in my graduate experience that I was most likely to get a job that would involve testing, and in my last year I was able to arrange for an externship at Worcester State Hospital, which at that time was probably the best place to receive experience with a clinical population. And experience meant psychological testing. That psychologists could or should have a role outside of testing was hardly an issue. Psychologists were “slotted.” That restriction in role never made any sense to me, and my experience at Worcester State Hospital made me forever sensitive and sympathetic to groups who were the objects of professional preciousness and imperialism. So, for example, I have always fought against the use of advanced degrees as 28.5
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criteria for membership in professional organizations and for restricting opportunities that would enlarge what people can learn to do. I am, of course, not against standards of quality and experience, but I am against confusing degrees with competence and denying opportunities for new learning other than on the basis of demonstrated potential. I learned the hard way how the understandable and laudable goals of professionalism too frequently are transformed into the self-serving rhetoric of guildism. These beliefs, obviously deeply personal in their origins, did enter into my decision to take a position at the Southbury State Training School in Connecticut. In the fall of 1941 I took a civil service exam in Connecticut, and in late spring of 1942 I had a choice of positions in three institutions. One was in a state hospital where there was a good and growing department of psychology, but if I went there I would be a “guest” in someone else’s house: the psychiatrist’s. Only as a last resort would I take a position there. The second position was in the first and oldest state training school for epileptic and mentally retarded individuals. The superintendent, a psychiatrist, was as stultifyingly traditional and foreboding as the institution’s architecture. He started the interview by asking for the ethnic origins of my name, and I knew that I would rather starve than work for and under him, He also told me that I would have to use the 1917 Binet and not the 1937 revision! It’s one thing to be a secondclass citizen, it’s another thing to be a slave or drone. The third position was at Southbury, which had just opened its doors. And what a refreshing vista those opened doors presented! Suffice it to say that Southbury was architecturally a most innovative institution located in a bucolic valley in the middle of nowhere in beautiful rural Connecticut. No less significant than the architecture was the superintendent; Mr. Ernest Roselle, who had a masters degree in education, had been superintendent of a residential institution for troubled youngsters of members of the Loyal Order of the Moose and had been hired as a full-time consultant to the board of trustees responsible for planning and building Southbury. Southbury was Mr. Roselle’s creation, and if it was for at least two decades an international showcase, it was because of him. He was appointed superintendent over the objections of the medical fraternity, no mean feat in those days. Mr. Roselle was an entrepeneur in the best sense of that word. Had he not been the moral person he was, he could have sold the Brooklyn Bridge to anyone. He knew little about mental retardation, but he knew everything about man’s obligation to man and that included the obligations of staff to residents. He and the board of trustees were crystal clear that Southbury was to be an educational and not a custodial institution. I was to start a psychology department independent of any of the other departments: medical, cottage life, social service, school, etc. Neither in my interview with Mr. Roselle nor in subsequent years did he tell me how I should conduct myself professionally. Of course my major function was to develop a testing program, but there were no restrictions against my doing anything else that would be helpful to residents. Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity to work at Southbury. The limitations of space preclude a detailed discussion of how the several years at Southbury forged my identity as a school and educational psychologist. Indeed, everything I have ever done or written has its origins in my Southbury experience. Let me list some of the things I learned and experienced there: 1. The use of psychological test scores for the purpose either of labeling or administrative action is unconscionable. We (Dr. Esther Sarason and I) spent a good deal of time trying to return to the community individuals who had “low” test scores. Enamorment with test scores and using them as a basis for affecting the lives of peo-
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ple were not peculiar to the general public but also characterized the practice of what in those days were called “Binet Testers.” Psychological tests-their contents, the occasions on which they were used, the purposes for which they were used-are never neutral affairs. 2. In any institutional setting there is almost always (I would say always) a built-in conflict between the needs and traditions of the organization, on the one hand, and the needs of the individuals it serves, on the other hand. That those the organization serves experience that conflict goes without saying, but it is no less the case for the school psychologist. To deny this conflict or to gloss over it is to deny the realities of social living and to push ethics and morality into the background. To recognize and live with that ever present conflict is no easy matter, but to practice as if that conflict does not exist is ultimately maladaptive for everyone. 3. The major justification for psychological testing is to gain knowledge that is the basis for helping an individual. But the knowledge gained from the testing situation has to be integrated with knowledge about the individual’s behavior and performance with other people in his or her major sites of behavior and performance. To the extent that the school psychologist has little or no knowledge of these other sites-or, worse yet, has no access to them- the ability to help is drastically limited and the chances that the test report will be wrong or misleading are much increased. Put in another way, by assuming the obligation to help, the school psychologist is obligated to try to illuminate the significances of the relationships between the testing and other situations. A psychological report that deals only with the testing situation undercuts the goal of being helpful. 4. Few things are as destructive of the sense of personal and professional worth as the perception that one’s knowledge and capabilities are underutilized or the feeling that one is being prevented from expanding one’s accustomed role. I was indeed fortunate that at Southbury I was not told “This is the way you can or should be helpful” but instead was encouraged to be helpful in any way I could justify as promising. When I became aware how different my role was (and became) from those of colleagues in other institutions and public school systems, I realized that what was then the field of school psychology had been put into a rigid, impoverishing mold from which it might not be freed in my lifetime. If I was and remain pessimistic on this score, it is because of several factors, not the least of which is the fact that the field of education has never been an important part of mainstream American psychology, a manifestation of snobbishness no less true today than in the past. It was at Southbury that I began to have trouble answering such questions as: “What do you do? What kind of psychologist are you ?” If I said I was a clinical psychologist, I felt that was an incomplete or misleading answer. I felt the same when I said I was a school psychologist. And when people asked me what I did, they really wanted a 15-second reply and not one that I could not answer well even if they would be willing to listen for a half an hour. Professional labels are as meaningful as test scores and no less mischievous in what they convey. Candor requires that I admit that when “forced” to say what kind of a psychologist I would say I was a clinical psychologist, and for one guilt-producing reason: I could not be proud being identified with what was then school psychology, I was as sure as I was sure of anything that the school setting was where psychology could make its most socially-productive contributions. However much I liked and respected the clinical role, it was obvious to me that prevention rather than repair had to become a central focus and no setting rivaled the school for the opportunities it afforded to such a focus.
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There has not been a time in my professional life when I have not been associated in some way with public schools. While I was at Southbury I was, of course, immersed in matters of schooling, and it also brought me into contact with many school systems, especially those that wanted to close their special classes and literally dump the children into Southbury. In 1944 (while I was still at Southbury) I was given a clinical appointment in the Department of Pediatrics at Yale to supervise the practicum experience of a couple of psychology graduate students. I also was part of that department’s mini-child guidance unit headed by Dr. Edith Jackson, a unit that helped open my eyes to the enormous discrepancy between what school psychologists did and what needed to be done. It should be apparent that my view of school psychology developed in an atypical fashion, i.e., I have never functioned full time inside a public school system; I was always a kind of “outsider.” That could have been a major disadvantage in terms of understanding the culture of the school and the roles of people in it, making it all too easy to arrive at oversimple conclusions reflecting the ignorance and biases of the outsider. To an extent, I am sure that disadvantage operated in me, but I would like to believe that I also benefited from the potential advantage of the outsider: to see how total immersion in a particular type of setting restricts the universe of alternatives that people in that setting are able to be aware of. That is true of professionals in schools, academics in the university, executives in industry, etc. The education and socialization of the professional inevitably narrows his or her outlook and, as an outsider, I was coming to the conclusion that nowhere was this narrowing of outlook and role more clear than in the case of the school psychologist. Fortunately, early on I realized that this unwholesome situation was not a matter of the personality, intelligence, and motivation of school psychologists but a manifestation of some of the dominant features of our society, e.g., mass education, immigration and ethnic and racial diversity, the prepotent tendency to segregate “deviants or failures,” the worship of numbers and technology, increasing specialization in role, and an American psychology that was quintessentially a psychology of the individual unrelated to a social-historical context. For reasons still not clear to me, I knew that to understand why a particular professional group performed as they did, one needed to go beyond an individual psychology. John Dewey knew that, but American psychology was not set to comprehend what he was saying. This is an issue I was only able to formulate to my satisfaction decades later in Psychology Misdirected (1981), a book dedicated to John Dewey and containing a long chapter on the misuse of Alfred Binet’s test and the failure to understand his ideas. Prologue to that book was my paper, “The Unfortunate Fate of Alfred Binet and School Psychology” (1973, a paper that illustrates how fateful the Southbury experience was for my development. With the end of War War II, I went full time to Yale to help develop their doctoral program in clinical psychology. Shortly after that I began a research project on test anxiety, a direct consequence of the Southbury experience. That project had several purposes, and one of the most important was to demonstrate how test performance was a function of situational and personality factors which, if not recognized and taken into account, could grossly distort conclusions from the assessment process. Another purpose was to emphasize how these factors could inform efforts to prevent adverse intrusions in learning and performance. The first purpose we achieved, the second purpose we did not, if only because the school setting is, for all practical purposes, inimical to the preventive orientation. That is to say, the modal school or school system is so taken up with the problems of remediation and repair, so focused on diagnosis,
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that to talk and think about prevention is an unattainable luxury, an exercise in fantasy. Schools are reactive, not proactive, characteristics again not explainable by riveting attention on schools and their personnel. Let me now turn to an event that was enormously fateful for me, clinical psychology, and school psychology. I refer to the 1950 Boulder Conference that was so important in determining the directions clinical psychology would take. The point I wish to make is contained in my paper, “An Asocial Psychology and a Misdirected Clinical Psychology” (1981): Boulder was fateful not because it moved clinical psychology in new directions, but because it legitimated an orientation that had already been established during and immediately after the war. Boulder was sponsored by the Veterans Administration and the National Institute of Mental Health, a not unimportant fact because it indicates what outcomes were expected, if not in detail then in broad outline. As conferences go, and they rarely really go, Boulder was exceptional in terms of length, seriousness, level of intellectual discussion, and pursuit of goals. There was an unusual self-consciousness about the fact that a new field was being shaped which would impact on society and pscyhology as a field. The outcome was not surprising in terms of tying clinical psychology to medical-psychiatric settings, but this was not because the conference discussion did not permit challenges to its main thrust. It was as open a conference as has ever been held. Every criticism and reservation I voiced earlier about tying clinical psychology to the psychiatric setting was explicitly brought up at the conference. I was at the conference as a young, upstart, nontenured associate professor who was inevitably in awe of the well-known, influential psychologists who were there. During graduate school at Clark University, I had had an externship at Worcester State Hospital, which was one of the few places (in my opinion, the only place) where there was real intellectual substance to what was then clinical psychology. But I also learned at Worcester State Hospital what it meant to be a second-class citizen in a psychiatric setting. If I had any doubts on this score, they evaporated after I took my first job at a new educationally oriented institution that had no psychiatrists and the superintendent of which, an educator, had been appointed over the most strenuous objections of the medical community. So coming from these experiences to Yale, and representing Yale at Boulder, I had strong convictions about tying clinical psychology to the medical-psychiatric setting. We were, I believed, not only asking for trouble but walking into a fight with chin out, hands down, and blurred vision. Why must the internship be in a psychiatric setting? Would psychology be capitalizing on its research traditions if clinical students were unsophisticated in psychotherapy? How could one justify the clinical emphasis at the expense of a preventive orientation? Would not psychology be more responsive to societal needs if it made a commitment to the public schools? Why should clinical psychology be tied to a setting that would not expose its members to such areas as mental retardation, criminality, physical handicap, and vocational planning and adjustment? Why was the curriculum that was being outlined weighted in favor of such elective courses as neurophysiology, pharmacology, and neuroanatomy? These issues were raised and
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joined, and the outcome was predictable. took the position I did.
Only a handful of people at Boulder
What I argued for at Boulder was an integration of clinical and school-educational psychology. I was not conducting a vendetta against psychiatry and the medical setting but simply reflecting where, from the standpoint of the larger society, I thought psychology could have the most impact. What was also upsetting to me about Boulder was the emphasis being put on the doctorate as a form of credentialing, as a way of allowing some people to enter a profession and keeping others out. I could not disagree with the Boulder attempt to raise standards and improve the quality of practice, but it was obvious to me that in pursuing that effort there was the real danger of widening the gap between the numbers needing service and the numbers available to meet those needs. From my perspective, the decades following Boulder have confirmed my early fears. By the early sixties I found myself considering how to act on two conclusions: that the emphasis on repair and the clinical endeavor was shortsighted, and that the school setting was where a preventive orientation in psychology would best be implemented. The result was the creation of the Yale Psycho-Educational Clinic. It existed for a decade and provided me and exciting colleagues (quite heterogeneous in education and background) marvelous opportunities to work in new and diverse ways in schools and the larger community. Of particular relevance are the new ways we developed to work with teachers in and out of classrooms, ways designed to demonstrate that psychologists had more to contribute than to administer tests. To develop and sustain these new roles met with many obstacles. Organizations, like individuals, do not take kindly to new ideas and the need to change. What we did and learned was written up in Psychology in Community Settings (Sarason, Levine, Goldenberg, Cherlin, & Bennet, 1966). The clinic received a fair amount of attention, and I would like to believe that it was one small factor in the process of widening and deepening the role in schools of psychology in general and school psychology in particular. The sixties were turbulent and nowhere was the turbulence greater than in our schools. Race, poverty, civil rights, the Vietnam war-in combination they impacted on every major institution in our society, polarizing groups within our communities, exacerbating power struggles for control of schools, and bringing to the fore old questions in new contexts. What should be done about failing achievement scores? In what ways and to what extent were psychological tests part of the problem and not the solution? To someone who did not live through those days, it is hard to comprehend how diverse and strong were the pressures for educational change. At the Psycho-Educational Clinic we were fortunate to be in the midst of all of these happenings: acting and reacting, soaking up experiences, and trying not to confuse change with improvement. The fact is that as the sixties picked up its head of angry steam, as monies poured into schools for this or that program, as the educational fashions of one year were replaced by those of the next, as panaceas were proclaimed as if in endless supply, 1 was becoming increasingly critical of the value of much that was being done. Two things became apparent to me: that those outside the schools (e.g., the Office of Education, academics who became instant educators, and curriculum makers) had the most superficial and distorted conception of the culture of schools, and that this was only slightly less true of those who were inside the schools. If I came to these conclusions, it was in part because of my awareness of how much I had had to unlearn about the
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culture of schools. More specifically, focused as we at the clinic were on role and organizational change, immersed as we were in schools, and increasingly upset at the failure of the new programs schools were implementing, it was hard to avoid recognizing that schools had a distinctive culture hardly recognized by the self-proclaimed “change agents.” How to account for these well motivated but seriously flawed efforts? My answer was contained in two books: The Creation of Settings and the Future Societies (1972) and The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change (First edition, 1971; Second edition, 1982). There is no greater satisfaction for an author than to receive a stream of unsolicited letters saying that what he or she has written helped readers understand why their efforts at educational change and innovation did not achieve their purposes. Although it is disheartening to hear about failures, the tortures of writing are somewhat justified when you feel you have learned something about the ways our world works. But, I must confess, that justification in regard to those two books loses a good deal of its force when I confront the fact that the modal process of implementing educational change is as self-defeating today as it was when I wrote those books. I shall say more about this at the conclusion of this paper. Insofar as my development as a school-educational psychologist is concerned, I must refer to a sustained experience that was prior to the clinic years. In the mid fifties Burton Blatt came to Southern Connecticut State College to be chairman of its department of special education. Southern and Yale are in the same small city, but in terms of interaction they might as well be on different continents. Southern had only recently been transformed from a teachers to a liberal arts college, a fact of no moment to Yale which was about to eliminate its graduate department of education, an elimination which spoke volumes about its attitude toward the field of education. Given my interests in education generally and schools in particular (especially in regard to special education because of my Southbury days) there truly was no one at Yale who shared those interests. So down the road comes Burt Blatt. Anyone who knows Burt, personally or through his writings, is forever changed. His energy is matched only by his decency, courage, leadership qualities, and innovative thinking. We met (at a town, not gown, cocktail party, of course), he invited me to visit and talk, I did, and that started a life-long friendship and collaboration. (Today, he is dean of education at Syracuse where I visit as often as I can). Both of us were dissatisfied with teacher education and Burt was intent on moving in new directions. We quickly agreed on one point: The substance and procedures of teacher education ill prepared students for the realities of classrooms, schools, and school systems. We began to experiment. Burt arranged for the department to house a teacher and a class of children, connected to which was an excellent observation room. We developed an “observation seminar” that was enormously instructive to all of us. I had the opportunity to broaden my view of how a psychologist could be helpful in a classroom and about the complex task that teaching was. I spent as much time at Southern as I did at Yale. I felt at home there, not only because being with Burt was an intellectual and personal pleasure but also because I was learning a lot. That experience was written up in a book The Preparation of Teachers. An Unstudied Problem in Education (Sarason, Davidson, 8~ Blatt, 1962). The point of that book was not only that the preparation of teachers was largely irrelevant to what teachers experienced in “real life” but that this point had, for all practical purposes, not been studied. The book came out at a time when there was a fantastic shortage of teachers and no one was disposed critically to evaluate the quality and goals of the preparation of teachers. The book went out of print very quickly!
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Years later, when the world had changed and the issues surrounding “competency based” teaching came to the fore, some people were kind enough to note that the major points of that book still had not received the attention they merited. We regarded that book as a glimpse of the obvious. But rarely do we take the obvious seriously. It is as if that book had never been written. This is not said in despair or from the sense of rejection or because of an overevaluation of one’s ideas. As I said, we regarded that book as a glimpse of the obvious, not as a new idea or finding. What would require explanation would be if that book had been taken seriously, because it called for changes for which the inertia of custom and tradition would be predictably a major obstacle. I know how that inertia operated in me in certain spheres of my professional development, and I have learned to be tolerant when I see it operating in others. Whatever imperfections I can see in others, I have seen in myself. If I have had any advantage over some people, it has been a modest ability to learn from my mistakes. And when I say modest, I am not being modest. As a field, school psychology has made a valiant effort to broaden its horizons. The readers of this paper do not have to be told why and how this broadening has taken place. However, if I were asked to develop a training program in school psychology I would place even greater emphasis than is usually given to school psychologistteacher-community relationships. Permit me to illustrate this by quoting from the concluding pages of “The Unfortunate Fate of Alfred Binet and School Psychology” (1973, a paper which was in the form of an invited address to the 1975 convention of the National Association of School Psychologists: I must confess that when I hear people say “we want to meet the needs of all children so that each child has the opportunity to realize his potentials” I do not know whether to laugh or cry- to laugh because behind that statement is the invalid assumption that to accomplish these goals all we need do is to hire more and more of the kinds of personnel who now inhabit our schools. This assumption, even if it were true, is scandalously unrealistic. And I want to cry because that well-intentioned statement fails to recognize that the problem primarily reflects our accustomed ways of thinking of what a teacher is, how a classroom should look, and how a school should be organized. Let me give an example with which most adults are familiar. When do most parents come to their child’s school? One of these times is when they have been asked to come to discuss a problem in connection with their child. That is to say, they come after the school is fairly sure there is a problem, and usually that is well after the school found itself asking if there was a problem. The other time is several weeks after the school year has begun, when there is “open house” or “parent’s night” usually in conjunction with the first PTA meeting. Parents are encouraged to come and visit their child’s classroom, meet the teacher, hear about the curriculum, and to talk with the teacher about their child, if they so desire. These evenings are, by common consent, among the most uncomfortable, unsatisfying social rituals invented by humans-albeit one of the less hostile examples of man’s inhumanity to man. At the end of the evening everyone breathes a sigh of relief that this charade is over, that a function designed to be informative and to redound to the interests of children has been lived through without casualties (except for the purposes for which the meeting was intended).
Sarason Is there another way of thinking about how to get parents and teachers meeting around the individual needs of children? Can this be done so that the interests and knowledge of both stand a chance of being articulated in a way which could be used to meet the needs of individual children-at least to recognize these needs to a greater extent than they now are? Suppose that before the first day of class appointments are made with the parents of each child. (To make it possible for both parents to come, teachers would be available in the evenings and even over the weekend-you deliberately and willingly adapt to the circumstances of parents and not vice versa). And suppose that the teacher said to the parents: “I was eager to get together with you before class begins because I wanted to learn as much as possible about your child so that I can be of as much help to him (her) as possible. Obviously, you know your child extremely well and even after I have gotten to know him I will not know him in the same way you do. You know his likes and dislikes, his strong points and weak points, what turns him on and what turns him off, what works with him and what doesn’t. You know a great deal I ought to know if I am to treat and teach your child in ways suited to himsome ways are more suitable for some children than they are for others. So you can see that if I am to help your child you have to help me with what you know.” Note that one cannot approach parents in this way unless you truly believe that what they can tell you will be helpful to you in your relationships with their child. If you view parents as hopelessly prejudiced and blind about their child, as people who do not or cannot recognize positive and negative features in their child, as people who would rather withhold than reveal information about their child-if you tend to view parents in these ways you usually structure your relationship with them so that you end up proving you were right in the first place. If, however, you are not intent on proving your superiority to parents, your all-knowingness, and you have no trouble accepting as a fact that parents can be helpful to you, that they can reveal “bad” things about their child, that indeed many parents want to do just that without the fear that it will be held against their child, you will learn a good deal which will help you react differentially to their child. In short, I am not suggesting role-playing but rather some values and a way of thinking about how you learn about individual children and how you begin a relationship with parents that is not likely to become an adversary one, or one in which people talk to and not with each other. Whatever its other benefits would be, the relationship I am suggesting is far more humane than the dishonesties of Parent’s Night or the usual after-school parent-teacher conference characterized by as much openness and candidness as a high-stakes poker game. Can there be any doubt that my suggestion holds out greater hope than present practice that a teacher will learn something which could be useful in meeting individual needs? To follow my proposal requires no additional money or personnel, just another way of thinking. But where will teachers be aided to think in these ways? As we (Sarason, Davidson, & Blatt, 1962) pointed out years ago: Even though talking to parents is considered a crucial function of the teacher-a function they are required to perform-they receive absolutely no instruction for the function in their training. Similarly, even though principals and other administrators spend a fair amount of their time organizing
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and running meetings, they too receive no exposure in their training to the issues (technical, theoretical, and moral) contained in such a function. Unless one believes that performing such functions is a matter of genes or divine guidance the issues have to be directly confronted in training. School psy-
chology can and should go in several directions but dealing with and helping others deal with parents and others in the community should surely get a high priority. Can anyone deny that a most fateful change in education in the past fifteen years has been the degree and quality of the relation between school and community individuals and groups? And can anyone deny that this change has been stormy, frequently destructive, andpolarizing? To improve the situation is not a technical matter. It is not a matter of ‘how to do it”- let us not trivialize this problem the way we did Binet’s contributions. There is too much at stake to make that kind of mistake again. It is obvious that I see the school psychologist as looking in two directions: the school and its community. How can you make the boundaries between the two more permeable? How do you learn to see any school problem-be it that of an individual, group, or program-as one that inevitably reflects what is inside and outside of schools? How do you learn to act appropriately on the fact (and it is a fact) that schools never had, and probably will never have, internal, paid resources to accomplish their stated goals? How do you begin to redefine resources internal and external to the school in ways that make more resources available at the same time that they make the school less physically and socially isolated from the surrounding community? This is asking a lot of school psychologists, and I am quite sensitive to the many obstacles that this enlargement of role would encounter. And most of those obstacles are internal to the school, characterized as the school is by specialized roles that exacerbate issues of hierarchy and turfdom, with the result that school personnel become unduly and self-defeatingly focused on what is inside of schools. These are not problems that over time can be influenced by schools alone. These problems have diverse origins and among them is the way in which our schools of education areso structured as to keep and train apart the diverse professionals that work in schools. Turfdom does not originate in schools; it is largely a direct consequence of how schools of education are structured and the narrow outlooks they provide their students. I am only being half-facetious when I say that I am convinced that when the final history of the human race is written, narrow professionalism will have turned out to be the worst disease of all. A final note: In the course of doing the second edition of the school culture book, I realized that there was one major axiom undergirding the millenia-old conception of education. The axiom is: Education should and does best take place inside of schooling buildings. How valid is that axiom? After finishing that second edition, I found myself increasingly dubious about that axiom’s validity. The result was another book: The School as Scapegoat and Salvation (1983). I would be surprised if that book will sit well with either educators or their critics. I wrote that book because there is too much at stake to continue to proceed as if the current malaise will be overcome by money, renewed motivation, and another national resolve to improve what goes on inside of schools. We have all been victims of an uncritical, indeed unverbalized, acceptance of that axiom. If challenges to that axiom should ever be taken seriously, school psychology will begin to be transformed into a more encompassing community psychology.
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REFERENCES Sarason, S. B. The culture of the school and theproblem of change. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1971. Sarason, S. B. The creation of settings and the future societies. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1972. Sarason, S. B. The unfortunate fate of Alfred Binet and school psychology. Teachers College Record, Columbia University, 1975, 77, 579-592. Sarason, S. B. An asocial psychology and a misdirected clinical psychology. American Psychologist, 1981, 36, 827-836. Sarason, S. B. Psychology misdirected. New York: Free Press, 1981. Sarason, S. B. The culture of theschooland theproblem of change, (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1982. Sarason, S. B. The school as scapegoat and salvation. New York: Free Press, 1983. Sarason, S. B., Davidson, K., & Blatt, B. The preparation of teachers. An unstudiedproblem in education. New York: John Wiley, 1962. Sarason, S. B., Levine, M., Goldenberg, I. l., Cherlin, D. L., & Bennett, E. Psychology in community settings. New York: John Wiley Br Sons, Inc., 1966. Seymour B. Sarason Institution for Social and Policy Yale University 70 Sachem Street New Haven, CT 06520 Manuscript
received:
September
Studies
15, 1982
SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGY:
0022.4405/83i$O3.OU/O ( 1983 The Journal ol School Pryhology. Inc.
1983
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
SEYMOUR
FRAGMENT
B. SARASON
Yale University
Summary: This paper describes some of the dramatic changes that have transformed the field of school psychology over the last 40 years, a period during which the author was part of that field. The most important change was from the restricted and stultifying role of “Binet Tester” to one encompassing the culture of the school setting and its relationship to the community. These changes have been slow but steady. Many obstacles-professional preciousness, protection of turf, conceptual narrowness, an American psychology riveted on the individual-had to be overcome. The battle is far from won. These obstacles and changes are illustrated by events and programs of which the author was a part. A basic remaining problem is how to define and redefine the human resources that will meet more productively the needs of our educational system.
I never intended to enter the field of school psychology. In fact, in 1941-42, my last year in graduate school, I did not know (nor did I feel I had control over) where in psychology I would find a place. That was the year the United States became part of World War II, and there was a serious question about how many and in what ways colleges and universities could survive the loss of students and faculty to the armed services. Aside from the unclear consequences of the war, there were other factors that made me feel like a dangling man with no control over where I was going. I was Jewish, and in those days that made a teaching job a very dim possibility. I was getting my doctorate from Clark University, from which several leading members of the psychology department had left a few years earlier, mammothly diluting the department’s quality, strength, and reputation. The department did have some young stimulating faculty (e.g., Donald Super, Saul Rosenweig, R. B. Cattell) but they were of no help in terms of placing their students. I knew early on in my graduate experience that I was most likely to get a job that would involve testing, and in my last year I was able to arrange for an externship at Worcester State Hospital, which at that time was probably the best place to receive experience with a clinical population. And experience meant psychological testing. That psychologists could or should have a role outside of testing was hardly an issue. Psychologists were “slotted.” That restriction in role never made any sense to me, and my experience at Worcester State Hospital made me forever sensitive and sympathetic to groups who were the objects of professional preciousness and imperialism. So, for example, I have always fought against the use of advanced degrees as 28.5
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criteria for membership in professional organizations and for restricting opportunities that would enlarge what people can learn to do. I am, of course, not against standards of quality and experience, but I am against confusing degrees with competence and denying opportunities for new learning other than on the basis of demonstrated potential. I learned the hard way how the understandable and laudable goals of professionalism too frequently are transformed into the self-serving rhetoric of guildism. These beliefs, obviously deeply personal in their origins, did enter into my decision to take a position at the Southbury State Training School in Connecticut. In the fall of 1941 I took a civil service exam in Connecticut, and in late spring of 1942 I had a choice of positions in three institutions. One was in a state hospital where there was a good and growing department of psychology, but if I went there I would be a “guest” in someone else’s house: the psychiatrist’s. Only as a last resort would I take a position there. The second position was in the first and oldest state training school for epileptic and mentally retarded individuals. The superintendent, a psychiatrist, was as stultifyingly traditional and foreboding as the institution’s architecture. He started the interview by asking for the ethnic origins of my name, and I knew that I would rather starve than work for and under him, He also told me that I would have to use the 1917 Binet and not the 1937 revision! It’s one thing to be a secondclass citizen, it’s another thing to be a slave or drone. The third position was at Southbury, which had just opened its doors. And what a refreshing vista those opened doors presented! Suffice it to say that Southbury was architecturally a most innovative institution located in a bucolic valley in the middle of nowhere in beautiful rural Connecticut. No less significant than the architecture was the superintendent; Mr. Ernest Roselle, who had a masters degree in education, had been superintendent of a residential institution for troubled youngsters of members of the Loyal Order of the Moose and had been hired as a full-time consultant to the board of trustees responsible for planning and building Southbury. Southbury was Mr. Roselle’s creation, and if it was for at least two decades an international showcase, it was because of him. He was appointed superintendent over the objections of the medical fraternity, no mean feat in those days. Mr. Roselle was an entrepeneur in the best sense of that word. Had he not been the moral person he was, he could have sold the Brooklyn Bridge to anyone. He knew little about mental retardation, but he knew everything about man’s obligation to man and that included the obligations of staff to residents. He and the board of trustees were crystal clear that Southbury was to be an educational and not a custodial institution. I was to start a psychology department independent of any of the other departments: medical, cottage life, social service, school, etc. Neither in my interview with Mr. Roselle nor in subsequent years did he tell me how I should conduct myself professionally. Of course my major function was to develop a testing program, but there were no restrictions against my doing anything else that would be helpful to residents. Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity to work at Southbury. The limitations of space preclude a detailed discussion of how the several years at Southbury forged my identity as a school and educational psychologist. Indeed, everything I have ever done or written has its origins in my Southbury experience. Let me list some of the things I learned and experienced there: 1. The use of psychological test scores for the purpose either of labeling or administrative action is unconscionable. We (Dr. Esther Sarason and I) spent a good deal of time trying to return to the community individuals who had “low” test scores. Enamorment with test scores and using them as a basis for affecting the lives of peo-
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ple were not peculiar to the general public but also characterized the practice of what in those days were called “Binet Testers.” Psychological tests-their contents, the occasions on which they were used, the purposes for which they were used-are never neutral affairs. 2. In any institutional setting there is almost always (I would say always) a built-in conflict between the needs and traditions of the organization, on the one hand, and the needs of the individuals it serves, on the other hand. That those the organization serves experience that conflict goes without saying, but it is no less the case for the school psychologist. To deny this conflict or to gloss over it is to deny the realities of social living and to push ethics and morality into the background. To recognize and live with that ever present conflict is no easy matter, but to practice as if that conflict does not exist is ultimately maladaptive for everyone. 3. The major justification for psychological testing is to gain knowledge that is the basis for helping an individual. But the knowledge gained from the testing situation has to be integrated with knowledge about the individual’s behavior and performance with other people in his or her major sites of behavior and performance. To the extent that the school psychologist has little or no knowledge of these other sites-or, worse yet, has no access to them- the ability to help is drastically limited and the chances that the test report will be wrong or misleading are much increased. Put in another way, by assuming the obligation to help, the school psychologist is obligated to try to illuminate the significances of the relationships between the testing and other situations. A psychological report that deals only with the testing situation undercuts the goal of being helpful. 4. Few things are as destructive of the sense of personal and professional worth as the perception that one’s knowledge and capabilities are underutilized or the feeling that one is being prevented from expanding one’s accustomed role. I was indeed fortunate that at Southbury I was not told “This is the way you can or should be helpful” but instead was encouraged to be helpful in any way I could justify as promising. When I became aware how different my role was (and became) from those of colleagues in other institutions and public school systems, I realized that what was then the field of school psychology had been put into a rigid, impoverishing mold from which it might not be freed in my lifetime. If I was and remain pessimistic on this score, it is because of several factors, not the least of which is the fact that the field of education has never been an important part of mainstream American psychology, a manifestation of snobbishness no less true today than in the past. It was at Southbury that I began to have trouble answering such questions as: “What do you do? What kind of psychologist are you ?” If I said I was a clinical psychologist, I felt that was an incomplete or misleading answer. I felt the same when I said I was a school psychologist. And when people asked me what I did, they really wanted a 15-second reply and not one that I could not answer well even if they would be willing to listen for a half an hour. Professional labels are as meaningful as test scores and no less mischievous in what they convey. Candor requires that I admit that when “forced” to say what kind of a psychologist I would say I was a clinical psychologist, and for one guilt-producing reason: I could not be proud being identified with what was then school psychology, I was as sure as I was sure of anything that the school setting was where psychology could make its most socially-productive contributions. However much I liked and respected the clinical role, it was obvious to me that prevention rather than repair had to become a central focus and no setting rivaled the school for the opportunities it afforded to such a focus.
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There has not been a time in my professional life when I have not been associated in some way with public schools. While I was at Southbury I was, of course, immersed in matters of schooling, and it also brought me into contact with many school systems, especially those that wanted to close their special classes and literally dump the children into Southbury. In 1944 (while I was still at Southbury) I was given a clinical appointment in the Department of Pediatrics at Yale to supervise the practicum experience of a couple of psychology graduate students. I also was part of that department’s mini-child guidance unit headed by Dr. Edith Jackson, a unit that helped open my eyes to the enormous discrepancy between what school psychologists did and what needed to be done. It should be apparent that my view of school psychology developed in an atypical fashion, i.e., I have never functioned full time inside a public school system; I was always a kind of “outsider.” That could have been a major disadvantage in terms of understanding the culture of the school and the roles of people in it, making it all too easy to arrive at oversimple conclusions reflecting the ignorance and biases of the outsider. To an extent, I am sure that disadvantage operated in me, but I would like to believe that I also benefited from the potential advantage of the outsider: to see how total immersion in a particular type of setting restricts the universe of alternatives that people in that setting are able to be aware of. That is true of professionals in schools, academics in the university, executives in industry, etc. The education and socialization of the professional inevitably narrows his or her outlook and, as an outsider, I was coming to the conclusion that nowhere was this narrowing of outlook and role more clear than in the case of the school psychologist. Fortunately, early on I realized that this unwholesome situation was not a matter of the personality, intelligence, and motivation of school psychologists but a manifestation of some of the dominant features of our society, e.g., mass education, immigration and ethnic and racial diversity, the prepotent tendency to segregate “deviants or failures,” the worship of numbers and technology, increasing specialization in role, and an American psychology that was quintessentially a psychology of the individual unrelated to a social-historical context. For reasons still not clear to me, I knew that to understand why a particular professional group performed as they did, one needed to go beyond an individual psychology. John Dewey knew that, but American psychology was not set to comprehend what he was saying. This is an issue I was only able to formulate to my satisfaction decades later in Psychology Misdirected (1981), a book dedicated to John Dewey and containing a long chapter on the misuse of Alfred Binet’s test and the failure to understand his ideas. Prologue to that book was my paper, “The Unfortunate Fate of Alfred Binet and School Psychology” (1973, a paper that illustrates how fateful the Southbury experience was for my development. With the end of War War II, I went full time to Yale to help develop their doctoral program in clinical psychology. Shortly after that I began a research project on test anxiety, a direct consequence of the Southbury experience. That project had several purposes, and one of the most important was to demonstrate how test performance was a function of situational and personality factors which, if not recognized and taken into account, could grossly distort conclusions from the assessment process. Another purpose was to emphasize how these factors could inform efforts to prevent adverse intrusions in learning and performance. The first purpose we achieved, the second purpose we did not, if only because the school setting is, for all practical purposes, inimical to the preventive orientation. That is to say, the modal school or school system is so taken up with the problems of remediation and repair, so focused on diagnosis,
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that to talk and think about prevention is an unattainable luxury, an exercise in fantasy. Schools are reactive, not proactive, characteristics again not explainable by riveting attention on schools and their personnel. Let me now turn to an event that was enormously fateful for me, clinical psychology, and school psychology. I refer to the 1950 Boulder Conference that was so important in determining the directions clinical psychology would take. The point I wish to make is contained in my paper, “An Asocial Psychology and a Misdirected Clinical Psychology” (1981): Boulder was fateful not because it moved clinical psychology in new directions, but because it legitimated an orientation that had already been established during and immediately after the war. Boulder was sponsored by the Veterans Administration and the National Institute of Mental Health, a not unimportant fact because it indicates what outcomes were expected, if not in detail then in broad outline. As conferences go, and they rarely really go, Boulder was exceptional in terms of length, seriousness, level of intellectual discussion, and pursuit of goals. There was an unusual self-consciousness about the fact that a new field was being shaped which would impact on society and pscyhology as a field. The outcome was not surprising in terms of tying clinical psychology to medical-psychiatric settings, but this was not because the conference discussion did not permit challenges to its main thrust. It was as open a conference as has ever been held. Every criticism and reservation I voiced earlier about tying clinical psychology to the psychiatric setting was explicitly brought up at the conference. I was at the conference as a young, upstart, nontenured associate professor who was inevitably in awe of the well-known, influential psychologists who were there. During graduate school at Clark University, I had had an externship at Worcester State Hospital, which was one of the few places (in my opinion, the only place) where there was real intellectual substance to what was then clinical psychology. But I also learned at Worcester State Hospital what it meant to be a second-class citizen in a psychiatric setting. If I had any doubts on this score, they evaporated after I took my first job at a new educationally oriented institution that had no psychiatrists and the superintendent of which, an educator, had been appointed over the most strenuous objections of the medical community. So coming from these experiences to Yale, and representing Yale at Boulder, I had strong convictions about tying clinical psychology to the medical-psychiatric setting. We were, I believed, not only asking for trouble but walking into a fight with chin out, hands down, and blurred vision. Why must the internship be in a psychiatric setting? Would psychology be capitalizing on its research traditions if clinical students were unsophisticated in psychotherapy? How could one justify the clinical emphasis at the expense of a preventive orientation? Would not psychology be more responsive to societal needs if it made a commitment to the public schools? Why should clinical psychology be tied to a setting that would not expose its members to such areas as mental retardation, criminality, physical handicap, and vocational planning and adjustment? Why was the curriculum that was being outlined weighted in favor of such elective courses as neurophysiology, pharmacology, and neuroanatomy? These issues were raised and
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joined, and the outcome was predictable. took the position I did.
Only a handful of people at Boulder
What I argued for at Boulder was an integration of clinical and school-educational psychology. I was not conducting a vendetta against psychiatry and the medical setting but simply reflecting where, from the standpoint of the larger society, I thought psychology could have the most impact. What was also upsetting to me about Boulder was the emphasis being put on the doctorate as a form of credentialing, as a way of allowing some people to enter a profession and keeping others out. I could not disagree with the Boulder attempt to raise standards and improve the quality of practice, but it was obvious to me that in pursuing that effort there was the real danger of widening the gap between the numbers needing service and the numbers available to meet those needs. From my perspective, the decades following Boulder have confirmed my early fears. By the early sixties I found myself considering how to act on two conclusions: that the emphasis on repair and the clinical endeavor was shortsighted, and that the school setting was where a preventive orientation in psychology would best be implemented. The result was the creation of the Yale Psycho-Educational Clinic. It existed for a decade and provided me and exciting colleagues (quite heterogeneous in education and background) marvelous opportunities to work in new and diverse ways in schools and the larger community. Of particular relevance are the new ways we developed to work with teachers in and out of classrooms, ways designed to demonstrate that psychologists had more to contribute than to administer tests. To develop and sustain these new roles met with many obstacles. Organizations, like individuals, do not take kindly to new ideas and the need to change. What we did and learned was written up in Psychology in Community Settings (Sarason, Levine, Goldenberg, Cherlin, & Bennet, 1966). The clinic received a fair amount of attention, and I would like to believe that it was one small factor in the process of widening and deepening the role in schools of psychology in general and school psychology in particular. The sixties were turbulent and nowhere was the turbulence greater than in our schools. Race, poverty, civil rights, the Vietnam war-in combination they impacted on every major institution in our society, polarizing groups within our communities, exacerbating power struggles for control of schools, and bringing to the fore old questions in new contexts. What should be done about failing achievement scores? In what ways and to what extent were psychological tests part of the problem and not the solution? To someone who did not live through those days, it is hard to comprehend how diverse and strong were the pressures for educational change. At the Psycho-Educational Clinic we were fortunate to be in the midst of all of these happenings: acting and reacting, soaking up experiences, and trying not to confuse change with improvement. The fact is that as the sixties picked up its head of angry steam, as monies poured into schools for this or that program, as the educational fashions of one year were replaced by those of the next, as panaceas were proclaimed as if in endless supply, 1 was becoming increasingly critical of the value of much that was being done. Two things became apparent to me: that those outside the schools (e.g., the Office of Education, academics who became instant educators, and curriculum makers) had the most superficial and distorted conception of the culture of schools, and that this was only slightly less true of those who were inside the schools. If I came to these conclusions, it was in part because of my awareness of how much I had had to unlearn about the
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culture of schools. More specifically, focused as we at the clinic were on role and organizational change, immersed as we were in schools, and increasingly upset at the failure of the new programs schools were implementing, it was hard to avoid recognizing that schools had a distinctive culture hardly recognized by the self-proclaimed “change agents.” How to account for these well motivated but seriously flawed efforts? My answer was contained in two books: The Creation of Settings and the Future Societies (1972) and The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change (First edition, 1971; Second edition, 1982). There is no greater satisfaction for an author than to receive a stream of unsolicited letters saying that what he or she has written helped readers understand why their efforts at educational change and innovation did not achieve their purposes. Although it is disheartening to hear about failures, the tortures of writing are somewhat justified when you feel you have learned something about the ways our world works. But, I must confess, that justification in regard to those two books loses a good deal of its force when I confront the fact that the modal process of implementing educational change is as self-defeating today as it was when I wrote those books. I shall say more about this at the conclusion of this paper. Insofar as my development as a school-educational psychologist is concerned, I must refer to a sustained experience that was prior to the clinic years. In the mid fifties Burton Blatt came to Southern Connecticut State College to be chairman of its department of special education. Southern and Yale are in the same small city, but in terms of interaction they might as well be on different continents. Southern had only recently been transformed from a teachers to a liberal arts college, a fact of no moment to Yale which was about to eliminate its graduate department of education, an elimination which spoke volumes about its attitude toward the field of education. Given my interests in education generally and schools in particular (especially in regard to special education because of my Southbury days) there truly was no one at Yale who shared those interests. So down the road comes Burt Blatt. Anyone who knows Burt, personally or through his writings, is forever changed. His energy is matched only by his decency, courage, leadership qualities, and innovative thinking. We met (at a town, not gown, cocktail party, of course), he invited me to visit and talk, I did, and that started a life-long friendship and collaboration. (Today, he is dean of education at Syracuse where I visit as often as I can). Both of us were dissatisfied with teacher education and Burt was intent on moving in new directions. We quickly agreed on one point: The substance and procedures of teacher education ill prepared students for the realities of classrooms, schools, and school systems. We began to experiment. Burt arranged for the department to house a teacher and a class of children, connected to which was an excellent observation room. We developed an “observation seminar” that was enormously instructive to all of us. I had the opportunity to broaden my view of how a psychologist could be helpful in a classroom and about the complex task that teaching was. I spent as much time at Southern as I did at Yale. I felt at home there, not only because being with Burt was an intellectual and personal pleasure but also because I was learning a lot. That experience was written up in a book The Preparation of Teachers. An Unstudied Problem in Education (Sarason, Davidson, 8~ Blatt, 1962). The point of that book was not only that the preparation of teachers was largely irrelevant to what teachers experienced in “real life” but that this point had, for all practical purposes, not been studied. The book came out at a time when there was a fantastic shortage of teachers and no one was disposed critically to evaluate the quality and goals of the preparation of teachers. The book went out of print very quickly!
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Years later, when the world had changed and the issues surrounding “competency based” teaching came to the fore, some people were kind enough to note that the major points of that book still had not received the attention they merited. We regarded that book as a glimpse of the obvious. But rarely do we take the obvious seriously. It is as if that book had never been written. This is not said in despair or from the sense of rejection or because of an overevaluation of one’s ideas. As I said, we regarded that book as a glimpse of the obvious, not as a new idea or finding. What would require explanation would be if that book had been taken seriously, because it called for changes for which the inertia of custom and tradition would be predictably a major obstacle. I know how that inertia operated in me in certain spheres of my professional development, and I have learned to be tolerant when I see it operating in others. Whatever imperfections I can see in others, I have seen in myself. If I have had any advantage over some people, it has been a modest ability to learn from my mistakes. And when I say modest, I am not being modest. As a field, school psychology has made a valiant effort to broaden its horizons. The readers of this paper do not have to be told why and how this broadening has taken place. However, if I were asked to develop a training program in school psychology I would place even greater emphasis than is usually given to school psychologistteacher-community relationships. Permit me to illustrate this by quoting from the concluding pages of “The Unfortunate Fate of Alfred Binet and School Psychology” (1973, a paper which was in the form of an invited address to the 1975 convention of the National Association of School Psychologists: I must confess that when I hear people say “we want to meet the needs of all children so that each child has the opportunity to realize his potentials” I do not know whether to laugh or cry- to laugh because behind that statement is the invalid assumption that to accomplish these goals all we need do is to hire more and more of the kinds of personnel who now inhabit our schools. This assumption, even if it were true, is scandalously unrealistic. And I want to cry because that well-intentioned statement fails to recognize that the problem primarily reflects our accustomed ways of thinking of what a teacher is, how a classroom should look, and how a school should be organized. Let me give an example with which most adults are familiar. When do most parents come to their child’s school? One of these times is when they have been asked to come to discuss a problem in connection with their child. That is to say, they come after the school is fairly sure there is a problem, and usually that is well after the school found itself asking if there was a problem. The other time is several weeks after the school year has begun, when there is “open house” or “parent’s night” usually in conjunction with the first PTA meeting. Parents are encouraged to come and visit their child’s classroom, meet the teacher, hear about the curriculum, and to talk with the teacher about their child, if they so desire. These evenings are, by common consent, among the most uncomfortable, unsatisfying social rituals invented by humans-albeit one of the less hostile examples of man’s inhumanity to man. At the end of the evening everyone breathes a sigh of relief that this charade is over, that a function designed to be informative and to redound to the interests of children has been lived through without casualties (except for the purposes for which the meeting was intended).
Sarason Is there another way of thinking about how to get parents and teachers meeting around the individual needs of children? Can this be done so that the interests and knowledge of both stand a chance of being articulated in a way which could be used to meet the needs of individual children-at least to recognize these needs to a greater extent than they now are? Suppose that before the first day of class appointments are made with the parents of each child. (To make it possible for both parents to come, teachers would be available in the evenings and even over the weekend-you deliberately and willingly adapt to the circumstances of parents and not vice versa). And suppose that the teacher said to the parents: “I was eager to get together with you before class begins because I wanted to learn as much as possible about your child so that I can be of as much help to him (her) as possible. Obviously, you know your child extremely well and even after I have gotten to know him I will not know him in the same way you do. You know his likes and dislikes, his strong points and weak points, what turns him on and what turns him off, what works with him and what doesn’t. You know a great deal I ought to know if I am to treat and teach your child in ways suited to himsome ways are more suitable for some children than they are for others. So you can see that if I am to help your child you have to help me with what you know.” Note that one cannot approach parents in this way unless you truly believe that what they can tell you will be helpful to you in your relationships with their child. If you view parents as hopelessly prejudiced and blind about their child, as people who do not or cannot recognize positive and negative features in their child, as people who would rather withhold than reveal information about their child-if you tend to view parents in these ways you usually structure your relationship with them so that you end up proving you were right in the first place. If, however, you are not intent on proving your superiority to parents, your all-knowingness, and you have no trouble accepting as a fact that parents can be helpful to you, that they can reveal “bad” things about their child, that indeed many parents want to do just that without the fear that it will be held against their child, you will learn a good deal which will help you react differentially to their child. In short, I am not suggesting role-playing but rather some values and a way of thinking about how you learn about individual children and how you begin a relationship with parents that is not likely to become an adversary one, or one in which people talk to and not with each other. Whatever its other benefits would be, the relationship I am suggesting is far more humane than the dishonesties of Parent’s Night or the usual after-school parent-teacher conference characterized by as much openness and candidness as a high-stakes poker game. Can there be any doubt that my suggestion holds out greater hope than present practice that a teacher will learn something which could be useful in meeting individual needs? To follow my proposal requires no additional money or personnel, just another way of thinking. But where will teachers be aided to think in these ways? As we (Sarason, Davidson, & Blatt, 1962) pointed out years ago: Even though talking to parents is considered a crucial function of the teacher-a function they are required to perform-they receive absolutely no instruction for the function in their training. Similarly, even though principals and other administrators spend a fair amount of their time organizing
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and running meetings, they too receive no exposure in their training to the issues (technical, theoretical, and moral) contained in such a function. Unless one believes that performing such functions is a matter of genes or divine guidance the issues have to be directly confronted in training. School psy-
chology can and should go in several directions but dealing with and helping others deal with parents and others in the community should surely get a high priority. Can anyone deny that a most fateful change in education in the past fifteen years has been the degree and quality of the relation between school and community individuals and groups? And can anyone deny that this change has been stormy, frequently destructive, andpolarizing? To improve the situation is not a technical matter. It is not a matter of ‘how to do it”- let us not trivialize this problem the way we did Binet’s contributions. There is too much at stake to make that kind of mistake again. It is obvious that I see the school psychologist as looking in two directions: the school and its community. How can you make the boundaries between the two more permeable? How do you learn to see any school problem-be it that of an individual, group, or program-as one that inevitably reflects what is inside and outside of schools? How do you learn to act appropriately on the fact (and it is a fact) that schools never had, and probably will never have, internal, paid resources to accomplish their stated goals? How do you begin to redefine resources internal and external to the school in ways that make more resources available at the same time that they make the school less physically and socially isolated from the surrounding community? This is asking a lot of school psychologists, and I am quite sensitive to the many obstacles that this enlargement of role would encounter. And most of those obstacles are internal to the school, characterized as the school is by specialized roles that exacerbate issues of hierarchy and turfdom, with the result that school personnel become unduly and self-defeatingly focused on what is inside of schools. These are not problems that over time can be influenced by schools alone. These problems have diverse origins and among them is the way in which our schools of education areso structured as to keep and train apart the diverse professionals that work in schools. Turfdom does not originate in schools; it is largely a direct consequence of how schools of education are structured and the narrow outlooks they provide their students. I am only being half-facetious when I say that I am convinced that when the final history of the human race is written, narrow professionalism will have turned out to be the worst disease of all. A final note: In the course of doing the second edition of the school culture book, I realized that there was one major axiom undergirding the millenia-old conception of education. The axiom is: Education should and does best take place inside of schooling buildings. How valid is that axiom? After finishing that second edition, I found myself increasingly dubious about that axiom’s validity. The result was another book: The School as Scapegoat and Salvation (1983). I would be surprised if that book will sit well with either educators or their critics. I wrote that book because there is too much at stake to continue to proceed as if the current malaise will be overcome by money, renewed motivation, and another national resolve to improve what goes on inside of schools. We have all been victims of an uncritical, indeed unverbalized, acceptance of that axiom. If challenges to that axiom should ever be taken seriously, school psychology will begin to be transformed into a more encompassing community psychology.
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REFERENCES Sarason, S. B. The culture of the school and theproblem of change. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1971. Sarason, S. B. The creation of settings and the future societies. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1972. Sarason, S. B. The unfortunate fate of Alfred Binet and school psychology. Teachers College Record, Columbia University, 1975, 77, 579-592. Sarason, S. B. An asocial psychology and a misdirected clinical psychology. American Psychologist, 1981, 36, 827-836. Sarason, S. B. Psychology misdirected. New York: Free Press, 1981. Sarason, S. B. The culture of theschooland theproblem of change, (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1982. Sarason, S. B. The school as scapegoat and salvation. New York: Free Press, 1983. Sarason, S. B., Davidson, K., & Blatt, B. The preparation of teachers. An unstudiedproblem in education. New York: John Wiley, 1962. Sarason, S. B., Levine, M., Goldenberg, I. l., Cherlin, D. L., & Bennett, E. Psychology in community settings. New York: John Wiley Br Sons, Inc., 1966. Seymour B. Sarason Institution for Social and Policy Yale University 70 Sachem Street New Haven, CT 06520 Manuscript
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