Will school psychology exist?

Journal of School Psychology 1968-69 * Vol. 7, No. 2

WILL

SCHOOL

PSYCHOLOGY

EXIST? I

MARY ALICE W H I T E Teachers College Columbia University

Summary: A review of psychology's contribution to education in the first half of the twentieth century indicates that it started with education as the grand arena. The author presents the argument that the old faith camps and the data-oriented camps are now willing to merge in response to social needs. But the issues from now until 2000 will be schooling itself, not the conditions of learning in public schooling as we know them today. Schooling is already the prime political, social, and economic problem of all developing and developed countries. The role forecast, therefore, is that of psychologists of schooling, not school psychologists.

rise and fall of psychology in education during the first half of our century. I offer one interpretation. In the 1930's Freudian theory appeared on the American scene. From the 30's until the 60's, it dominated most applied efforts of psychology. Especially after World War II, the thing to do was to go into clinical, and into analytic therapy. During this HighFreudian era, any psychologist working in the applied area was practically driven from the fold if he questioned the evidence for Freudian theory, the data which supported its effectiveness, or even the logic of the model which the theory assumed. The answer to any such question was in circular Freudian logic. There were two answers, essentially. The first was that tmtil you have been analyzed yourself, you cannot understand its effectiveness, so you are in no position to criticize it. The second answer, more common among fellow psychologists, was: Why are you so defensive about it? What's your problem, analytically speaking? For some, this was the new faith, with its own high priests and converts. One did not question faith or the logic of its view of man; one did not ask for evidence of the dlvine revelation. Faith had replaced empiricism in a very young field which, once it broke its ties with philosophy, had called itself a sdence. Even as a part of philosophy in the United States, psychology had insisted on inquiry and empirical

PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION

1970-2000 Question of the future can sometimes be best answered by the past. A question we might ask ourselves today is: What has psychology contributed to education in the first half of the 20th century? It began nobly. James, Thorndike, Dewey, Binet, Cattell, and Watson saw education as the crucial issue, as the great hope for a better mankind, as the means to an ideal society of more able and informed adults. These early 20th century psychologists thought education was the grand arena for the new science of psychology. Naively perhaps, Watson believed that we would specify the conditions under which particular abilities could be shaped and developed. There were overtones then, since augmented, of an engineenng approach to education which has caused recent critics to think that Huxley's Brave New World was a prescient nightmare. What has happened to psychology's contribution since then? There seems to have been a hiatus in work in the grand arena from the 1930's until the present revival of interest in cognition, in learning, even in education. Many explanations could be offered for the 1This paper was originally prepared for Symposium (Division 16): School Psychology--This year and the future. It was delivered at the American Psychological Association meetings, San Francisco, September 1968.

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JOURNAL OF SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGY

search; a Jamesian approach. However mystical Titchner might appear to us in retrospect, at least he was trying to apply scientific methods to man's inner life. As psychologists, presumably we had all taken the vow that we were both scientists and practitioners, a muddy phrase which implies to me letting opinions flow from the data. T h e schools during the High-Freudian era made tremendous efforts to persuade American parenthood how to raise its children, and to persuade teachers how to treat, not teach, pupils. Applied psychologists bought Freudian theory wholesale and sold it retail to PTA's, to in-service teacher groups, to clubs, to parent organizations. Personality development and adjustment were kings of the educational mountain. To the extent that cognitive demands or intellectural rigor appeared to interfere with adjustment, the schools often resolved this dilemma in favor of personality development. The Freudian era appeared in the schools at an interesting historical moment in which Freudian theory became a hand-maiden to a distorted form of "progressive education." While faith dominated the applied scene, an opposite trend was maintained in the so-called pure or experimental side of psychology. Laboratories worked on vision, hearing, serial learning, and memory drums, but this work excited only a few followers. In the 40's Skinner surfaced as the leader of this movement, welcomed because he used laboratory methods as a basis for theory and because he approached human behavlor with a no-nonsense empirical and quantitative explanation. Skinner accepted as data only that which could be seen, counted, or measured. The Freudians were horrified. When Skinner's advances reached education in the form of programmed learning, there was anguish over the image of America's children being taught by cold, unemotional machines, which obviously would not serve as adequate

father-figures. By over-simplifying, we can identify two developing groups within psychology in education. One saw itself as humane, child concerned, deeply committed to the indMdual and to the quality of emotional experience. In doing so, this group made a commitment, based on faith, to a plumber's blueprint of hydranlic pressures which implied a philosophy of developmental doom. In retrospect, we might criticize this group for buying a theory which denied individual differences, or which implied developmental doom, or for not, as promised, letting opinions flow from data. (I would choose only the latter criticism.) The experimental group, which prided itself on an objective approach to human behavior and on its adherence to data, suffered from an apparent lack of concern with values, with reality, with ultimate goals. Today, this group seems to be more concerned with the efficiency of the behavioral act than with the intrinsic or ultimate value of the behaviors which will follow. For example, the non-measurable goals of education are not their concern; they care only about those which can be stated in operational terms. Today, we school psychologists can say we have contributed learning theories to the school. But some find them hard to apply in the classroom. We can say that we have brought diagnosis and treatment of emotional disorders to the school. But all the children of the 40's and 50's were not cured through our efforts. We can say that we have learned how to detect maladjustment at an early age, and so prevent later mental illness. T o the best of my knowledge, the only reduction in mental illness has been due to the discharge of patients from state hospitals through maintainance on drug therapies. We have helped to invent a network of clinics and guidance centers, and a super-network of classification centers where we use our exper-

SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGY rise to label children and then to refer them so they can be reclassified, relabelled, and given some sort of therapy or residential treatment which has not - - , according to the data at hand, been a howling success. We helped to invent special education, which is beginning to look like another classification empire of its own, but which may not have made much of a contribution to explaining how different children learn differently, or how they might be taught more effectively. It is ironic that the group which claimed the most concern over individual personality development has been largely responsible for setting up a tracking system of labels within our public schools. I t is also ironic that the more experimentally minded group, which at least stayed with the issue of learning, is now applying computerassisted instruction in the hope that this will provide the ultimate in individual instruction. Perhaps we would not need the labels, the network, or the special classes, if only we could invent a custom-made learning environment for every child. This could be the more humane and compassionate solution, even if it did use cold machines. Today, looking back over our contributions to public education, we might say of ourselves that we have failed to utilize our methodology and theories for classroom learning, and even failed to apply our own criteria to the personality theories we were so busy selling. We tried to persuade a generation of parents and school staff that learning problems were basically emotional, and having failed (in my view) to demonstrate that such an approach was effective, we are in no position to congratulate ourselves. Nor should we be surprised that teachers and principals are less than enchanted with the word "psychologist." Today we could be closer than ever to the noble start at the beginning of this century. Many psychologists are

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now very concerned with learning and teaching, some thinking that these may be essentially cognitive problems. We are, for the most part, data oriented and willing to use or invent new strategies for finding out what education works, for whom, and under what conditions. But the old split is still there. At the moment, the empirical approach is favored, but there are groups and movements active in the faith camp. My colleagues might characterize the two camps along different lines, such as cognitive vs. emotional, science vs. practice, experimental vs. applied. Personally I would argue that being dataoriented is the discriminating characteristic. What will these two camps be doing in the educational arena in 1970-2000? Before that question can be answered, we must discover what the educational issues will be. In our own history, some say we have been more obsessed with in-fighting over our territorial lines than with educational needs. This criticism seems reasonably just. The freshness of our approach in the past few years is that we have at least responded to the social issues in education. Each of us should weigh which of our responses have been data-oriented. With the rise of urgent social issues in education, we have also become more tolerant of both camps. It is hard to berate an experimentalist's approach if it appears to work for disadvan.taged children (unless, of course, it is Bereiter). If machines can really help slum children learn to read, we may all share a sense of social gain. And if increasing their motivation, or their self-concept, or their sensitivity will help such pupils to achieve in school and to find choices for mobility, few of us will fault such approaches. But at the risk of being run out of the union for a second time, I predict that even larger issues than these will face education in the last third of this century. How education shall serve our

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JOURNAL OF SCHOOL PSYCHOL00Y

minorities will not be a minor issue: it will be a major one. But I think we may be operating here with our own type of tunnel vision. (For example, we may be buying another theory of developmental doom ~ la Piaget.) If we ask under what classroom conditions the learning of pupils will be accelerated, especially the low-rate-oflearning pupils, we have asked a selflimiting question: the same question, almost, as that asked in the first third of this century, but with a specific social urgency. If we persist in fiddling only with educational technology, or the engineering specifications of class size, tracking, methodology, and so on, we will limit our findings. I believe the issue of 1970-2000 will be schooling itself, as we know it. For every nation, whether developing or developed, schooling will be the number one economic problem, the number one social problem, the number one class or mobility problem, the number one political problem. The developing nations are already asking what kind of schooling systems will deliver the appropriate skills for the job markets, at a rate that will increase the gross national product (GNP) faster than it is absorbed by population growth. This is crucial to solving the social, economic, class, and political problems of their current governments. This problem should engage the energies of quite a few psychologists and members of other disciplines. In the developed countries, the question will be essentially the same, but aimed at the relative mobility rates of certain internal groups: What are the alternatives to our present system of public schooling that will provide increased educational, social, economic, and political mobility for less advantaged groups? Today, we should ask ourselves whether the U.S. common school, as we have known it, is the best or only answer to such questions. The common school is not likely to be the most appropriate structure to alter relative rates. The common school was

intended to offer universal education to our developing country, where GNP and resources were far ahead of population growth; to provide some essential skills of literacy; and to form a basis for national citizenship. This it has done remarkably well, so one reads, but it has done so while there were alternate methods for mobility. I seriously doubt that the common school was the universal vehicle. The situation today, and increasingly so, is that we have no alternate mobility ladders, other than education. We shall either have to find them or find alternate schooling systems for those groups which do not make the same relative gains through existing schooling which the majority does. It does not make the slightest political difference, for example, that today American Negroes have a better educational rate than do Western European whites. The criterion is relative--relative to who is on top here, to who is getting the most economic and social advantages in a world which, once it has enough to eat, hungers for those advantages. It is not that we cannot hide poverty: we cannot hide affluence or relative affluence, and in 1968 most of the people in this world have decided that they too have a right to their share. Economic democracy is the name of the game. The search for alternate schooling systems or alternate mobility systems will call for some new kinds of psychology and psychologists. One hesitates to think of the fields of knowledge they will have to master. We are going to have to deal with education as an economic and political force. Education is the big bread-and-butter issue for those who want up, which is everybody. If alternate means for mobility are discovered, as we hope they can be, then some of the pressure will be taken off education. However much each of us may delight in the philosophies of education, in its values, in the discovery method versus the rote method, the

SCHOOL PSYGHOLOGY

overwhelming problem will be the economic one. Education has never been more vocational than it is today. Being able to read above a fifth grade level leads to jobs which can bring a share of affluence, not to mention a more egalitarian society. Education is also a major road to political power. It is hardly surprising that education is the prime political arena--the new grand arena---of our society, and of every society today. Just as the economic aspects of education may be the prime question, the corollary is that economic tests of educational effectiveness are not only coming, they are here. Systematic management is a product both of the complexity of problems faced by huge bureaucracies and of the technology which renders such problems measurable and manipulable. Education is a huge bureaucracy; its budget involves a large part of our national resources. The obvious question which will arise is: How much can this alternative educational program deliver, to what target populations, and at what cost? This brings us to the crucial point: who is going to make that decision? In the final analysis, it will be a political decision. It should be. But before the political decision, trained people will offer data, judgments, and recommendations. It is realistic to have nightmares about educational bookkeepers who will make entries ha their ledgers of one gross of learning bought at $12.49 per unit with depreciation figured at 3 3 ~ % per year. Educational management is coming; it is almost here. T h a t phrase may repel you: it sounds like business, economics, or politics, which psychologists dislike. Soon we shall have to determine the

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effectiveness of alternate mobility programs and of alternate schooling systems. Somebody will have to determine what worked for whom, under what conditions, and at what educatlonal cost, at what financial cost, and at what cost in the quality of human life. I, for one, am totally unwilling to leave that assessment to bookkeepers or to falth-followers. I want to see dataoriented people doing this job, dataoriented people deeply committed to the intellectual Side of education as well as to the quality of human life which goes on within schooling. They should be without prejudice as to what might work, but very prejudiced in the sense that they are morally concerned with each single child, with how people deal with each other, and with the quality of educational transaction. This is where I see psychologists of the future making a real contribution to education. Many of them Will exhibit the odd combination of hard-headedhess and kind-heartedness, a combination I value. Future "psychologists of schooling," not school psychologists, will continue to bring their concern for individual pupils to bear on such problems while they devote a high degree of technical skill to the enormous problems of evaluating educational effectiveness. The task of training such people is staggering. I am speaking here of Research and Development directors for education. It is in this role that the two camps of psychology could join. This is where I see the future of school psychology. Mary Alice White Professor of Education and Psychology Teachers College, Columbia University

Box 227 New York, New York 10027 Received: September 17, 1968