William James, often considered the father of American psychology of education, began about 1874 to lay the groundwork for his psychophysiological laboratory, which was officially founded at Harvard University in 1891. In 1878 he established the first course in psychology in the United States, and in 1890 he published his famous The Principles of Psychology, in which he argued that the purpose of education is to organize the child’s powers of conduct so as to fit him to his social and physical environment. Interests must be awakened and broadened as the natural starting points of instruction. James’s Principles and Talks to Teachers on Psychology cast aside the older notions of psychology in favour of an essentially behaviourist outlook. They asked the teacher to help educate heroic individuals who would project daring visions of the future and work courageously to realize them.
James’s student Edward L. Thorndike is credited with the introduction of modern educational psychology, with the publication of Educational Psychology in 1903. Thorndike attempted to apply the methods of exact science to the practice of psychology. James and Thorndike, together with the American philosopher John Dewey, helped to clear away many of the fantastic notions once held about the successive steps involved in the development of mental functions from birth to maturity.
Interest in the work of Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytic image of the child in the 1920s, as well as attempts to apply psychology to national training and education tasks in the 1940s and ’50s, stimulated the development of educational psychology, and the field became recognized as a major source for educational theory. Eminent researchers in the field advanced knowledge of behaviour modification, child development, and motivation. They studied learning theories ranging from classical and instrumental conditioning and technical models to social theories and open humanistic varieties. Besides the specific applications of measurement, counseling, and clinical psychology, psychology contributed to education through studies of cognition, information processing, the technology of instruction, and learning styles. After much controversy about nature versus nurture and about qualitative versus quantitative methods, Jungian, phenomenological, and ethnographic methods took their place alongside psychobiological explanations to help educationists understand the place of heredity, general environment, and school in development and learning.
The relationship between educational theory and other fields of study became increasingly close. Social science was used to study interactions and speech to discover what was actually happening in a classroom. Philosophy of science led educational theorists to attempt to understand paradigmatic shifts in knowledge. The critical literature of the 1960s and ’70s attacked all institutions as conveyors of the motives and economic interests of the dominant class. Both social philosophy and critical sociology continued to elaborate the themes of social control and oppression as embedded in educational institutions. In a world of social as well as intellectual change, there were necessarily new ethical questions—such as those dealing with abortion, biological experimentation, and child rights—which placed new demands on education and required new methods of teaching. Traditional movements
Against the various “progressive” lines of 20th-century education, there were strong voices advocating older traditions. Those voices were particularly strong in the 1930s, in the 1950s, and again in the 1980s and ’90s. Essentialists stressed those human experiences that they believed were indispensable to people of all time periods. They favoured the “mental disciplines” and, in the matter of method and content, put effort above interest, subjects above activities, collective experience above that of the individual, logical organization above the psychological, and the teacher’s initiative above that of the learner.
Closely related to essentialism was what was called humanistic, or liberal, education in its traditional form. Although many intellectuals argued the case, Robert M. Hutchins, president and then chancellor of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1951, and Mortimer J. Adler, professor of the philosophy of law at the same institution, were its most recognized proponents. Adler argued for the restoration of an Aristotelian viewpoint in education. Maintaining that there are unchanging verities, he sought a return to education fixed in content and aim. Hutchins denounced American higher education for its vocationalism and “anti-intellectualism,” as well as for its delight in minute and isolated specialization. He and his colleagues urged a return to the cultivation of the intellect.
Opposed to the fundamental tenets of pragmatism was the philosophy that underlay all Roman Catholic education. Theocentric in its viewpoint, Catholic Scholasticism had God as its unchanging basis of action. It insisted that without such a basis there can be no real aim to any type of living, and hence there can be no real purpose in any system of education. The church’s
whole educational aim is to restore the sons of Adam to their high position as children of God. [It insists that] education must prepare man for what he should do here below in order to attain the sublime end for which he was created. (From Pius XI, encyclical on the “Christian Education of Youth,” Dec. 31, 1929.)
Everything in education—content, method, discipline—must lead in the direction of humanity’s supernatural destiny. New foundations
The three concerns that guided the development of 20th-century education were the child, science, and society. The foundations for this trilogy were laid by so-called progressive education movements supporting child-centred education, scientific-realist education, and social reconstruction. Progressive education
The progressive education movement was part and parcel of a broader social and political reform called the Progressive movement, which dated to the last decades of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th. Elementary education had spread throughout the Western world, largely doing away with illiteracy and raising the level of social understanding. Yet, despite this progress, the schools had failed to keep pace with the tremendous social changes that had been going on.
Dissatisfaction with existing schools led several educational reformers who wished to put their ideas into practice to establish experimental schools during the last decade of the 19th century and in the early 20th century. The principal experimental schools in America until 1914 were the University of Chicago Laboratory School, founded in 1896 and directed by John Dewey; the Francis W. Parker School, founded in 1901 in Chicago; the School of Organic Education at Fairhope, Ala., founded by Marietta Johnson in 1907; and the experimental elementary school at the University of Missouri (Columbia), founded in 1904 by Junius L. Meriam. The common goal of all was to eliminate the school’s traditional stiffness and to break down hard and fast subject-matter lines. Three main traits characterized these schools: each school adopted an activity program; each school operated on the assumption that education was something that should not be imposed upon the child from the outside but should instead draw forth the latent possibilities from within the child; and each school believed in the democratic concept of individual worth.
Dewey, whose writings and lectures influenced educators throughout the world, laid the foundations of a new philosophy that affected the whole structure of education, particularly at the elementary level. His theories were expounded in School and Society (1899), The Child and the Curriculum (1902), and Democracy and Education (1916). For Dewey, philosophy and education render service to each other. Education becomes the laboratory of philosophy. Society should be interpreted to the child through daily living in the classroom, which acts as a miniature society. Education leads to no final end; it is something continuous, “a reconstruction of accumulated experience,” which must be directed toward social efficiency. Education is life, not merely a preparation for life.