12
Introduction
As we have seen, nineteenth-century ideas were influenced by the two great 'revolutions' of the eighteenth century: the Industrial Revolution which spread outwards from England, arid the French Revolution which changed the social, political and economic map of the West forever. In this chapter we will need to refer back to Chapter 8 which discussed eighteenth-century ideas which bear directly upon the development of social science. A third 'revolution' of ideas was Darwin's Theory of Evolution which was more important than any other until Freud's ideas on sexuality appeared to cast further doubt on the supremacy of human rationality. Both theories tended to focus on human beings as a unique kind of animal with powerful instincts as well as limited rationality.
The social sciences emerged out of the Enlightenment and from reactions to it. The so-called Enlightenment project of the eighteenth century was concerned to provide rational explanations not only for the physical universe but also for humanity itself. In Chapters 8 and 9 we summarised Enlightenment thinking as five propositions: a belief in the power of scientific reasoning; faith in progress; human rights; freedom of thought and enquiry; and finally, a desire to promote education as a means of furthering the Enlightenment project. Enlightenment thinkers such as the editors of the Encyclopaedia, Diderot and d'Alembert were, generally, optimistic. Some of them were also over-enthusiastic, even fanatical: critics of the Enlightenment sometimes blamed the excesses of the French Revolution on a mixture of exaggerated faith in human reason and too little respect for traditions which they saw as the inherited wisdom or culture of their society. Clearly, the physical sciences were more advanced in the eighteenth century than the social or human sciences. One of the ambitions of some Enlightenment thinkers was to apply the lessons of physics and chemistry to human society. However, after the French Revolution, or at least after the defeat of Napoleon, the European political scene was dominated by conservative or reactionary regimes, and, equally important from our point of view, by conservative writers, for example, Francois René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand (1760-1848) or Joseph Marie, Comte de Maistre (1753-1821). These writers looked back in horror not only at the Revolution but at the Enlightenment itself. Felicité Robert de Lamennais (1782-1854), a Catholic priest and philosopher who attempted to bridge the gap between religious and political thought, expressed the problem eloquently:
From equality is born independence, and from independence isolation. As each man is circumscribed, so to speak, in his individual life, he no longer has more than his individual strength for defending himself...1
It was not until the 1830s that what we might now recognise as the beginnings of social science emerged, by which time the Industrial Revolution had spread from England to other parts of Europe and to America.
The Ideas of Social Science
It is not easy to know where to begin the history of social science. There is a plausible case for beginning with Aristotle who attempted to deal philosophically with many of the questions now considered to be social science. Others have suggested that Francis Bacon was also dealing with social science issues in Novum_Organum (1620), but there is a qualitative difference between the brilliant speculations of Aristotle, Bacon, Montesquieu and others, and the beginnings of the systematic theories of society and empirical studies that characterised the work of such nineteenth-century writers as Auguste Comte, Ferdinand Tonnies and Emile Durkheim.
Sociology and Its Influence on Education
Auguste Comte (1798-1857) and Sociology
Comte not only invented the word 'sociologie' (in 1830), he also developed the tradition in social science known as positivism which became influential in Latin American educational ideas as well as European, providing a secular, 'scientific' alternative to Christian dogma as a value system. Comte stressed the scientific treatment of society in his Cours de Philosophic Positive,2 a huge work about the science of man in which Comte wanted sociology to explain human social life in the same way that biology had accounted for humans as biological animals. We should also note a strong evolutionary strand in Comte's thinking. Darwin's On the Origin of Species was not published until 1859 but evolutionary ideas were current much earlier in the nineteenth century; Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and Karl Marx (1818-83) were, for example, essentially evolutionary thinkers. One further point about Comte and sociology: what he had in mind for his 'science' was that sociology would not be just one of many social sciences, separating politics, anthropology, economics and psychology from each other, but he envisaged sociology as a unified approach to the science of human life.
His ambition was to provide a means of explaining the whole of human life, past, present and future. He divided his science into social statics (permanent features of social life ) and social dynamics (close to what we would now call social change). He was a great innovator but, of course, underestimated the problem of applying the methods of natural science to human beings. Essentially, Comte and other early sociologists were concerned with understanding and explaining the conflicts between medieval (or traditional) ideas and those of 'modern' society. The emergence of the individual in the post-Reformation, Protestant world, had changed social thinking in a number of remarkable ways.
Nisbet, in one of his many books on the history of sociological ideas suggested that while all social sciences were concerned with the individual and society, the sociological approach, which developed from about 1830, should be seen in terms of five unit ideas, words which were either invented or significantly changed in meaning between 1830 and 1900: community; authority; status; the sacred; and alienation. Each one of these five unit ideas has clear implications for education. We will take each of Nisbet's five ideas and extend them into the domain of educational ideas.
Community: One of the major themes for sociologists and the conservative writers who preceded them was loss of community in the modern world. In some respects the apparently irrational forces of traditional community had been replaced by the rational contract. In other respects, face-to-face relations were being replaced by the more abstract 'society'. Such changes caused problems as well as opportunities. The modern individual was in danger of lacking both a sense of commitment and an unconscious feeling of belonging to a community through family, religion, work and other aspects of social life. Durkheim, Tonnies, Weber and Marx all wrote extensively about community. For example, Tonnies contrasted Gemeinschaft (or community) with Gesellschaft (translated as association or society). Tonnies asserted, with many illustrations, that the medieval world and contemporary traditional societies were characterised by strong feelings of identification with their 'community' in which individualism was insignificant or even regarded as deviant.
It is worth noting as was mentioned in Chapter 11, that in education in recent years there has been renewed interest in community. 'The school in the community' and 'the school as a community' are frequent topics for discussion. In addition, the importance of the ethos of the school and analyses of school culture has been reasserted in the search for more efficient and more humane learning institutions.
Authority. The collapse of the order of the ancien régime caused much discussion about the loss of traditional authority, and again, there were advantages as well as disadvantages. Whereas in traditional society authority was taken for granted, deeply embedded in the family, the community and traditional hierarchy, in modern society it was necessary to rationalise and explain authority in order to make it acceptable. We have already referred to Weber's work on authority. One of his interests was the nature of order in society, and why it broke down. Order is connected with power, the probability that an actor will be able to realise his own objectives (get his own way) even against the opposition of others. Military or physical force is one way but astute rulers learn to adopt more subtle methods - authority. Weber postulated three 'ideal types' of authority: traditional; legal-rational (bureaucratic organisations); and charismatic leadership (Jesus, Hitler, Ghandi, Mao). We return to the question of authority in education later in this chapter
Status: Various ideas connected with status such as hierarchy, the great chain of being, rank and degree have a long history, but it was the Enlightenment that mounted a systematic critique of the prevailing social order in Europe, the ancien régime and the French Revolution resulted in a temporary abolition of the French aristocracy and monarchy. Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution was challenging the feudal hierarchy by the rise in importance of the bourgeoisie: money was beginning to supersede rank so that eventually social class would become more important than the 'vestiges of feudalism', the hereditary status of the landed class.
It is now generally agreed by historians and sociologists that the concept of class was a product of the economic and social changes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For Marx, class and class conflict were dominant features of his theory of dialectical materialism and, he believed, would lead inevitably to revolution. His prediction was not to be fulfilled, although some like Wheen3 have quoted the 1848 uprisings throughout Europe as evidence that Marx was not entirely wrong. Nevertheless, many of his ideas have become accepted as part of the methodology of both history and sociology. The history of educational ideas could not possibly ignore Marx although he had little to say directly on the subject of education.
Marx examined the problem of industrial society - capitalist society and was so appalled by the poverty, exploitation and human misery that he was convinced that capitalism was too full of contradictions to survive; he predicted a post-capitalist society in which workers would not be oppressed. He was so 'evolutionary', however, that he was criticised for his economic determinism or historicism which was later condemned by Karl Popper4 and others.
Our ideas of social class have, of course, changed greatly since Marx, and class conflict has not gone in the direction Marx predicted, but the power of 'class' remains a dominant concept in the sociology of modern society and especially in the sociology of education. One of the unsolved problems of twentieth-century democratic societies is inequality of educational opportunity. Attempts have been made to solve problems of inequality by invoking motivational differences and sub-cultural variations in attitude towards learning, as well as more subtle cultural differences such as Bourdieu's5 'cultural capital' and the linguistic differences which form part of Bernstein's6 theories. However, no country has yet solved the problem of eliminating class differences in educational opportunity, and even less so in performance and achievement.
Marx summed up the position:
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.7
Education forms part of the struggle. According to Marx, the bourgeois view of knowledge had become the educational view. His colleague, Engels, once described teachers as 'the hired lackeys of the bourgeoisie'. They were employed to pass on the ideology of the ruling class as well as inculcating habits of industry such as obedience and punctuality. This pessimistic view of schooling was revived several times in the twentieth century and we shall return to it in later chapters.
The Sacred: Most sociologists agree that one of the most important features of modern society compared with the traditional world is a dramatic move away from 'the sacred' to the secular, the profane or the utilitarian. This shift in values has been of particular importance in education. We have seen in earlier chapters that up to the time of the Enlightenment a major purpose of schools and universities was religious. The rational, secular values of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries greatly influenced school curricula and related educational ideas, but the sociological concern was much more than that. Nisbet states:
I use this word [sacred] to refer to the totality of myth, ritual, sacrament, dogma and the mores in human behaviour; to the whole area of individual motivation and social organisation that transcends the utilitarian or rational and draws its vitality from what Weber called charisma.8
Educationists have been slow to recognise the importance of ritual and custom in modern schools. Only towards the end of the twentieth century did sociologists focus their attention on such intangible aspects as school ethos or the culture of the school. Just as a community needs social solidarity, common beliefs and practices to hold it together, so does a school, which may be why it is easier for a school to work well if it has some system of values and beliefs beyond the school curriculum, for example, in some Roman Catholic and some independent schools.
Weber's enormous contribution to this topic includes his development of the concept 'charisma'. Unfortunately the word has crept into common usage in a diluted form to mean any kind of outward show of rank or even competence. Needless to say, Weber meant something much more complex. One aspect of his concept was the type of authority manifested by national leaders such as Moses, Napoleon or Hitler who possessed a form of leadership of a non-rational kind. Weber was much concerned with the question of leadership and in his studies he often encountered a 'sacred' element, but there is another aspect of charisma. Weber made a detailed analysis of the 'routinisation' of charisma, by which he meant that the charisma of a great leader is often taken on by his family (for example, Napoleon I was followed by his nephew, Napoleon III, and many other 'royal' dynasties were founded in this way). Charisma may also be attached to an office - Popes, bishops and, to some extent, priests and teachers.
The relevance of all this for modern education may not be obvious. Once again we have to emphasise the contrast between traditional and modern. Education in a traditional context is encapsulated in the sacred or the charismatic and is thus supported by non-rational elements or factors; modern education, from the Enlightenment onwards but particularly in the twentieth century, relied on rational methods and explanations, but in many cases assumed that the school was still in some way a superior (but not sacred) place. Similarly, it was assumed that the teacher was entitled to respect and obedience by virtue of his office. The philosopher, Richard Peters,9 attempted to square that circle by distinguishing between being 'in authority' and being 'an authority'. Thus the teacher was doubly blessed: he was in authority as someone properly appointed to be a teacher and could expect obedience by virtue of his office, and he was also an authority by virtue of his knowledge, superior - we hope - to that of his students.
As some modern (or postmodern) educationists have pointed out, however, teachers can no longer take for granted the deference, respect and obedience of their pupils - that was for another age. Is there some way by which charisma, of the second kind, can be restored in schools? For Weber, charisma was being replaced by the rationality of bureaucracy, and he feared the consequences. Durkheim was also equally concerned for the future, and believed that even in modern society there was a need for the sacred: thus for him the teacher had to be a kind of secular priest, concerned not only with knowledge, but with society's values and beliefs.
Alienation: One of Marx's key concepts was alienation: man is alienated from the product of his labour; he is alienated from himself because his relationship to work has made him a slave or animal rather than a rational being; and finally, he is alienated from his fellows. His life is dominated by the wishes of his capitalist masters. Their ideas are the ruling ideas of society; the ruling group controls not only the productive forces within society but also the ways of thought, including education. Nisbet's use of alienation includes Marx's well-known use of the word but extends it much wider associating it with both 'progress' and 'individualism', which Comte saw as the disease of the modern world. Other sociologists also had ideas on this subject without necessarily using the word alienation. Comte hoped that his positivism would provide a cure; Marx thought the solution was the abolition of private property; Spencer advocated the extension of education. Weber and Durkheim saw the problem as too great for simple, one-dimensional solutions.
Nisbet defines alienation in the following broad terms:
Alienation is, quite as much as community, one of the major perspectives in nineteenth-century thought - in literature, philosophy, religion, as well as sociology. Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Dostoievsky, Kierkegaard, Weber - to draw from a wide range - all saw past, present and future in ways that would have been generally incomprehensible to the Enlightenment.10
Alienation is used to express not one but two perspectives. The first is concerned with individual alienation; the second is a perspective on alienated society. Alienation was seen to be the inevitable result of faith in progress and also of the exclusive rationality of the Enlightenment. In this sense Nisbet is relating the sociological thinking of Durkheim and Weber with the despair expressed by such post-revolution writers as Chateaubriand, as well as Lamennais who was quoted earlier in this chapter.
Alexis de Tocqueville's (1805-59) analysis is, however, far from optimistic. He took as his exemplar of modern society America, seen from a French point of view, and he was not impressed. His Democracy in America (1835-40), painted a picture of a society based on egalitarian ideology operating in a way which diminished rather than enhanced man. Human life was impoverished as a result of secularisation, of loss of community and loss of meaning in the workplace. We should perhaps beware of accepting too readily a French aristocrat's view of democratic society. It contains valuable insights but is by no means free from bias.
Durkheim's writings, on the other hand, represent a more optimistic view, yet Nisbet asserts that: 'The spectre of modern man's isolation from traditional society hovers over all of Durkheim's work.'11 Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) was French and Jewish, and originally destined to be a rabbi until he lost his faith. This apparently irrelevant piece of biographical data is not unimportant: like many other nineteenth-century sociologists, Durkheim was concerned with the problem of order. The medieval world had possessed the order of religious belief, status, the paternalist family, traditional authority and social cohesion. This had passed away or was rapidly disappearing, and Durkheim's problem was finding a form of order that could replace the traditional. One of his main contributions to social science was to see that there are certain 'social facts', that is behaviour that cannot be explained by the psychology of individuals but must be considered as group behaviour. Another of Durkheim's contributions was his attempt to explain the transition from medieval to modern, or rural to urban-industrial, by distinguishing between two kinds of social solidarity: in traditional social life, the community is held together by essential similarities of interest (mechanical solidarity) as in the family or among neighbours in a simple community; in modern society, on the other hand, in industry, the army or other complex organisations we experience organic solidarity based on the complementary differences of the tasks we have to perform.
This view of social solidarity and order can be interpreted in a reactionary way - everyone has his part to play in a functioning social structure so we should not try to change it. It would be unfair to exaggerate this tendency in Durkheim's thinking, but it is true that he was extremely concerned about the problem of lack of stability in modern society. He was particularly worried about the condition of France at the end of the nineteenth century, when much of the traditional French way of life had gone and the values of the Catholic Church were being weakened by the growth of secularism. He thought the only hope for twentieth century France was education - teachers would pass on moral values as well as worthwhile aspects of traditional national culture. For Durkheim, individualism had separated man from the norms and communities which had provided spiritual life, and the resulting condition he termed anomie. However, he did have an answer: our modern institutions must have secure social bases, and he had faith in education as a means to this end as well as being an end in itself; education for Durkheim was essentially moral and social.
Weber was also obsessed with the problems created in the West by the move from traditional to modern society. In particular, he saw the main pressures of modern society as bureaucracy, the rationalisation of values and the alienation of individuals from community and culture. He did not directly apply these ideas to education but the implications are clear. For Weber, one of the dangers of bureaucratisation was that everything would be taken over. Today, a major complaint about mass education and modern schooling is precisely that. Large impersonal institutions which we still call schools and universities are often said to be in danger of being knowledge-factories or child-processing conveyer belts. They have, it is alleged, lost their spirituality, and possibly their humanity; students are alienated.
Durkheim was also concerned about the loss of moral norms in France and in industrial society generally. The concept of anomie was invented to convey the idea of normlessness which included excessive individualism, personal greed and lack of concern for community. What Durkheim, Weber and other sociologists were demonstrating was that the Enlightenment view of humanity as potentially completely rational was mistaken, but educationists have tended to remain faithful to Enlightenment optimism, despite much evidence to the contrary. The end of the twentieth century was characterised by increased concern about values in education.
Psychological Ideas and Their Influence on Education
Although psychology as a subject or discipline is relatively new, attempts to explain human behaviour, as we saw in Chapter 2, memory and some aspects of learning go back at least as far as fourth-century BC Athens. Aristotle invented the notion of the mind as tabula rasa or empty space to be filled by 'sensations'; he speculated about what we might now categorise as 'association', proposing three forms - similarity, contrast and contiguity. His ideas were accepted for hundreds of years, until they were refined by such philosophers as Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739). In the nineteenth century such philosophical ideas gradually developed into a separate field and became known as psychology.
Even so, many whom we now think of as psychologists started their professional lives as philosophers. For example, Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) began in philosophy but was drawn to spend more and more time on matters of the mind; and believing that there were some questions that needed careful empirical investigation, he established, in Leipzig in 1879, what was probably the first psychological laboratory, thus giving the subject a certain scientific status. From the outset, the subject was controversial and fraught with disputes about what the subject was and what methodologies should be employed. As the history of psychological ideas has progressed through various stages and paradigms, the disputes have continued. There was always a hope among teachers and education theorists that the science of psychology might provide some answers to educational problems, particularly those associated with the curriculum and teaching methods. Psychological terms that have been seized on for conversion into educational practice have included perception, thinking, cognition or learning, memory and personality. As we shall see, the word 'behaviour' has been as problematic in education as in psychology itself.
No attempt will be made here to trace the whole history of psychology. We are confining ourselves to a small number of psychological ideas that became educational issues or terms. The question of how human beings learned (learning theory) should have been crucial; unfortunately, but perhaps inevitably, it became entangled in a methodology issue: to what extent can animal experiments be used when the real question is how humans learn? Educationists have often expressed annoyance that so much psychological experimentation has been concerned with rats and mice rather than children. Part of the problem has been the concern of psychologists - some would say their obsession - to be seen as scientists. Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), for example, wanted to study psychology in the same way as he experimented in physiology. If psychology were to be scientific the barrier between psychology and physiology would disappear. Pavlov's work with dogs on conditioning, although immensely important in the history of psychology has thrown little light on such human problems as learning or the acquisition of language. Nevertheless, one strand of psychological research extended from Pavlov to J.B. Watson (1878-1958) and eventually to Skinner and behaviourism. It is important to say at this stage that some psychological ideas, of which behaviourism is one, have had a clearly adverse effect on educational practice.
Without the benefit of a psychological equivalent to Nisbet, we intend to discuss five ideas in psychology that have become influential in education: behaviourism; human development; language acquisition; human nature and theories of personality; and finally, intelligence and learning.
Behaviourism (and Behavioural Objectives)
In our review of sociology we noted that one early movement, positivism, encouraged social scientists to benefit from the successes of the physical sciences by adopting or imitating their methodology. It did not wholly succeed, partly because the behaviour of human beings is so much more complex than the objects studied in physics and chemistry; and human beings complicate the methodology problem because they change the situation simply by being part of it. The same kind of problem has existed in psychology, but the urge to acquire 'scientific' status has been even stronger and has lasted longer, and there is another complication. As we have seen, one kind of psychology has remained close to physiology and this has encouraged some psychologists to concentrate their attention on what can be seen and physically observed, deliberately ignoring anything 'unseen' such as 'the mind'.
Although the roots of behaviourism may be detected much earlier, it was an American, J.B. Watson, who first outlined a systematic version of behaviouristic psychology which restricted its subject matter to the actions of organisms (including human beings) that could be observed objectively. This limited the field of psychology to organisms responding to stimuli (the stimulus-response or S-R theory derived from Pavlov). Introspection of any kind was forbidden. The advantage of this view was seen to be that records could be kept by independent scientific observers about the same events, just like physicists and chemists. In this way Watson expected that psychology would take its place as one of the natural sciences. The period from 1913 to about 1930 is often regarded as the period of 'classical behaviourism'; later, during the 1930s and 1940s, C.L. Hull and others developed the theory by taking on some of the philosophical precepts of logical positivism which declared that unless propositions could be tested empirically they were meaningless; thus ideas from religion and aesthetics were automatically dismissed as not worthy of discussion or rational consideration. (The use of the word 'positivism' in this context was significant.) This period is sometimes described as the period of 'neo-behaviourism'.
During the 1940s and 1950s the American psychologist B.F. Skinner12 (1904-90) developed behaviourism in ways that brought it closer to educational theory. During the Second World War, he trained pigeons to perform intricate tasks such as piloting torpedoes, and after the war he developed the Air-Crib, a germ-free, sound-proofed, air-conditioned container for a baby for its first two years of life.13 Skinner's experiments with animals which included, for example, training pigeons to play table tennis, led to the development of step-by-step, S-R learning into a theory of 'programmed learning' and then to teaching-machines for humans. He spelt out the application of behaviourism to human learning in Science and Human Behaviour and to the acquisition of language in Verbal Behaviour.14
The critics of Skinnerian psychology accuse the behaviourists of eliminating from their study all the most interesting features of human behaviour and social interaction. The American Noam Chomsky (1928-)15 pointed out that the human capacity for language is different in kind from, say, pigeons' ability to learn table tennis. The relationship between language, thought and behaviour makes the study of human mental activities and thought processes essentially different from the methodology of natural science or of training animals.
During the 1950s and 1960s in the USA, behaviouristic psychology was combined with industrial theories of factory management to produce a curriculum theory which demanded that educational programmes should be planned on the basis of a series of behavioural objectives. This was intended to shift the focus of planning away from teachers' intentions to student outcomes. The only objectives that were acceptable were those that could be pre-specified and eventually measured. In the United Kingdom, Lawrence Stenhouse (1927-82)16 pointed out that the behavioural objectives (BO) model assumed that teachers could always predict what response would be appropriate for every pupil in the class. This was a very doubtful assumption both about the human mind and the nature of knowledge. How could a teacher predict, for example, a 'correct' response to a speech from Hamlet? Ambiguity and uncertainty are essential features of literature and indeed other subjects. Educationists have criticised Skinner's psychology and the whole school of curriculum planning by objectives for reducing pupils to mechanical objects and also for deprofessionalising teachers. Skinner described the teacher's role as a purely mechanical one: the teacher was one who 'arranges the contingencies of reinforcement' by which pupils were conditioned for specified behavioural changes.
Most educationists would now agree that the arguments against curriculum planning by BO have prevailed, but in practice the model seems to survive and behavioural objectives have appeared under different names in many recent curriculum plans - such as outcomes or performance-based curricula. This is one example where the influence of psychology has not been beneficial. Techniques of training which work well for animals and even for some lower level human skills do not apply to the whole of human learning. It is an error to try to force all human learning into the artificial behaviourist mould or to mistake a narrow training model as suitable for higher forms of human learning.
Human Development (and Stages of Development)
We have noted in earlier chapters that many writers on education, at least as far back as Quintilian in Rome, have speculated about the relations between the development of the human mind at various ages and how that might affect both what is taught and how it should be taught. Erasmus emphasised the importance of this factor, and Rousseau went much further and specified a series of stages of development for Emile's curriculum which would correspond with the child's natural sequence of understanding and ability to learn. He was most anxious that the child should be treated as a child rather than as a small adult. Rousseau prescribed this without seeing any need for empirical evidence to support his assumptions or speculations.
The tradition of ages and stages continued into the twentieth century. The philosopher A.N. Whitehead (1861-1947)17 made assumptions about three stages of development: romance, precision and generalisation. The first to collect empirical data along these lines was, however, Jean Piaget (1896-1980).18 On the basis of his studies with children, Piaget postulated four stages: sensory-motor (approximately 0-2 years); pre-operational (approximately 2-7 years); concrete operation (7-11 years); and formal operations (11-15 years). Piaget's ideas have been criticised, revised in the light of more data and refined by later psychologists, but few have challenged the concept of development or the existence of stages provided that they are not regarded as rigid or too closely related to chronological age. Later studies have certainly shown that there are important differences between cultures and that even within Western European cultures environmental factors will influence the stages. Piaget was also criticised by the Russian, Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1934),19 for paying too much attention to the negative aspect of stages rather than concentrating on what children do know and planning progress from that point on. Vygotsky himself spoke about the zone of proximal development (ZPD) and many educationists have built on that concept to develop a view of children's learning that is referred to as 'constructivism'.
In that context the American psychologist and educationist, Jerome Bruner20 (1915-), has also been responsible for a good deal of empirical work and theoretical thinking about human development and the learning process. Bruner preferred a framework consisting of three main stages that he called enactive, iconic and symbolic. Although Bruner's most frequently quoted remark that 'Anything can be taught to any child at any stage of development in some intellectually honest form' may appear to contradict Piaget, Bruner was most anxious to demonstrate that this was not so:
We and the generations that follow us will be grateful for his pioneering work. Piaget, however, is often interpreted in the wrong way by those who think that his principal mission is psychological ... He is deeply concerned with the nature of knowledge per se, knowledge as it exists at different points in the development of the child. He is considerably less interested in the processes that make growth possible ... But in no sense does this formal description constitute an explanation or a psychological description of the processes of growth.21
Piaget was a genetic epistemologist rather than a psychologist. Bruner is a psychologist fascinated by human learning and he saw development in terms of evolution: he considered man's technological progress as having produced three systems which act as 'amplifiers of human capacities': human motor capacities (for example, a knife or weapon or other mechanical devices); amplifiers of human sensory capacities (from smoke signals to radio and television); and finally, amplifiers of human thought processes (from language to myth and to scientific theory and explanation). There is a clear relationship between Bruner's evolutionary idea and his defining developmental levels of knowing as 'enactive, iconic and symbolic'.
All theories of development have in common the concept of 'readiness' which suggests that effective teaching should always take into account the stage of development of the pupil. Bruner referred to the concept of readiness as a 'mischievous half-truth'. There are many studies to show that if 'readiness' is interpreted in a passive way to mean that teachers should wait until children are ready to learn, they may wait a very long time, and may miss important opportunities for encouraging growth and development. Teachers can stimulate children into readiness: the child is not a mechanical object which automatically becomes ready for new learning; the learning process can be speeded up or slowed down by appropriate or inappropriate learning or pre-learning situations as Vygotsky showed and others have built upon. Teachers are still often criticised for being too willing to wait for 'readiness' rather than to attempt to stimulate development.
Language Acquisition (and Language Learning)
One of the features that distinguishes human beings from other animals is the ability to communicate by means of language. We are language-using animals. But how does a child learn to use language and to what extent is it an educational problem? Linguists and psychologists tend to agree that learning ones own mother tongue as a young child is the most complex set of skills that anyone has to learn. Yet most children seem to acquire language 'naturally' with or without parental instruction and become reasonably competent speakers before beginning school. This is only partly true: most children have an aptitude for language acquisition, but they need models to listen to and imitate, and some adults are certainly better models than others. Children also benefit from help. Later on, when those children are older some will display much greater linguistic skills than others, especially when reading and writing are added to speaking as educational aims.
In Chapter 3 we noted that Cato was concerned that good linguistic models should be provided for young Romans: he was worried about the growing practice of affluent Roman parents hiring foreign nurses and servants. When discussing behaviourism earlier in this chapter we pointed out that one area on which psychologists are divided was how children learn to speak. Psychologists have produced an immense number of studies on this subject, only some of which have been regarded as relevant or useful by educationists. Part of the reason for teachers' lack of interest in some kinds of psychological research is that they become responsible for children at the age of four or five, or even later, by which time most children are already accomplished language users. This is deceptive, and may account for the fact that teachers have in the past tended to concentrate on teaching reading and writing rather than oral skills, literacy rather than oracy.
What psychological theories and studies might be of use to teachers? There are interesting studies of deprived children in very extreme circumstances who have been brought up without linguistic models; there are studies of institutionalised children; studies of twins whose linguistic behaviour is sometimes puzzling; and there are many studies of differences in verbal behaviour which are related to scores on intelligence tests. Teachers need to be familiar with such empirical studies as well as underlying theories about language.
In England, when the national curriculum was planned in 1988, there was a heated debate about language learning and how the subject 'English' should be interpreted. When it came to making decisions about the curriculum, psychological theories about learning were less influential than political prejudices. One aspect of the debate centred on the claim that standards in speech, reading and writing had declined because grammar was no longer taught in schools. There was a psychological issue here: would teaching grammar really help young people to use their mother tongue more effectively? One psychologist who had written extensively on issues relevant to that question was Noam Chomsky22 whose research had been in the field of the structure of language as well as about how children learn. His field, psycholinguistics, was relevant to the debate about grammar, but was not always at the forefront of the arguments.
Part of the problem was that there were disputes not only about how children learn to speak but also about how they learned to read and write. Traditionalists tended to argue that only by providing children with knowledge about 'correct' English, including grammar, could they be expected to learn. Progressivists claimed that children learn to talk quite easily without the assistance of teachers (most speaking adequately before they enter schools) and the task of mother-tongue teaching should be to introduce pupils to interesting models of language which they could convert from passive understanding into their own active language use Some extended the argument to the teaching of reading: the best way to learn to read, they asserted, was to be exposed to interesting 'real books'. The opposite point of view, sometimes reinforced by psychological research owing something to behaviourism, was that children needed to be taught 'phonics' in order to crack the reading code - in other words, reading was assisted by the ability to split newly encountered words into consonants and vowels rather than relying on whole word recognition. The battle raged with almost religious intensity, and in the end the official policy in England was declared in favour of phonics, and this policy was converted into almost universal practice by the institution, in 1998, of the literacy strategy and 'literacy hour' which incorporated some phonic techniques.
Those who advocated phonics tended to believe in the explicit teaching of grammar, but after a good deal of semi-political acrimony a reasonable settlement was achieved. The psycholinguists generally agreed that teaching traditional Latinate grammar was of limited value, if any. On the other hand they could demonstrate the effectiveness of pupils being taught 'knowledge about language' including some simplified modern grammar based on the linguistic and psycholinguistic studies of Chomsky and others. A settlement was reached after two national reports on language learning, the Kingman Report (1988)23 and the Cox Report (1989).24 A programme, Language in the National Curriculum (LINC) was set up by the Conservative government and directed by Professor Ronald Carter.25 For a long time the recommendations of this group were regarded by the government as too radical and remained unpublished until Carter defied his political masters and published his findings and recommendations commercially. A strange result for a government dedicated to the free market! It was, however, left to the Labour government in 1998 to incorporate some psycholinguistic ideas into the revised national curriculum and the literacy strategy for primary schools. Teachers were now expected to have some theoretical understanding about language and language learning, and this was incorporated into initial teacher training programmes.26
Human Nature and Theories of Personality (Teaching and Learning Styles)
One of the earliest ideas in education was the observation that individual children differed in temperament and learned in different ways. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance times, for example, the theory of 'humours' was used to explain differences: human beings were categorised as choleric or melancholic, for instance, according to their supposed physical constitution. Differential learning was acknowledged by Renaissance theorists such as Erasmus and Colet, but most schools tended to treat children with little regard for their differences, apart from the fact that some were slower learners than others and needed more time to learn skills and acquire knowledge. The tendency for schools to organise children into 'classes' reinforced the practice of associating achievement with age and treating all pupils in a class as more or less the same. When education for a minority was replaced by 'mass education' in the eighteenth century in some European countries, and the nineteenth century in others, there was a tendency for schools to imitate the model of mass production in factories as we saw in Chapter 10. Monitorial systems, whereby one teacher could delegate some instruction to senior pupils, were developed by Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster in England and by others elsewhere. Variations of the factory model were widespread and even when abolished left their mark in the form of organisational conventions and teacher attitudes.
Psychologists were not to blame for factory-model practices, but their work often did little to challenge the uniformity of teaching. In fact, the work of Piaget and others on stages of development tended to justify the linking of age to class in a rigid way. In some places, as we shall see, educational psychologists moved in the direction of mental testing, dividing children into ability groups on the basis of one-dimensional models of intelligence. Children classified by their intelligence quotient (IQ) could be put into different classes (or even different schools) according to their supposed ability and be taught on the assumption that all pupils in a class were equally able. In many, but not all, countries this strand of psychology was more influential than work on personality and learning styles. H.J. Eysenck (1916-98)27 produced a good deal of evidence to justify categorising human beings as extrovert or introvert associated with many different personality characteristics. His work on IQ was, however, much more influential in the world of schooling.
Brian Simon28 commented on this strange neglect in an essay 'Why No Pedagogy in England?' (It applies to many other countries as well.) Simon argued that educational psychology had mainly concentrated on 1Q testing and classifying children into ability groups rather than attempting the more interesting, and important task of ensuring that all pupils could benefit from teaching. This psychological tradition was made official in England by important policy documents such as the Spens Report on Secondary Education (1938) and the Norwood Report on Secondary Curriculum and Examinations (1943) both of which were illuminated by 'authoritative' evidence from eminent psychologists such as Cyril Burt (1883-1971), whose work emphasised the importance of heredity rather than environment. The result was that on the basis of dubious evidence schools were organised in terms of supposed ability. This development was not coincidental in England and elsewhere: it fitted in well with elitist traditions which fostered the assumption that only a minority were capable of real education, the majority being better served by training for work and civic obedience. It was also assumed that the majority of pupils needed strong discipline and physical punishment to make them work and to prevent delinquency.
There were always theorists and practitioners who argued against such assumptions, invoking the greater importance of environmental influences. From Rousseau to Pestalozzi to progressives such as Edmond Holmes (1850-1936) and A.S. Neill (1883-1973) there have been voices calling for more humane and more efficient teaching methods. They were sometimes supported by psychology. In the case of Neill, the psychological support came from Freud - perhaps an over-simplification of Freud. The effect of that Neill-Freud alliance (or misalliance) was to associate psychology, in the popular mind, with extreme permissiveness and 'progressive' schools. This was unfair, particularly at a time when SR psychology was influential. There were, however, by this time, many educational psychologists working within schools whose task was to diagnose individual difficulties and to find individual, personal solutions. In some respects their task was to put right problems that had arisen because schools had failed to treat children as individuals, but remained trapped within the nineteenth-century factory model.
The trend in recent research29 has been to move away from single-factor personality theories such as learning styles and to concentrate more on individual choices. This kind of research indicates that it might be just as much a mistake to label students as 'convergent' and 'divergent'30 or 'field-dependents and independent'31 or 'holists and serialists'32 as it would be to separate them into 'academic' and 'non-academic' groups. Ultimately every individual has to be expected to behave as a unique, unpredictable individual, not as a type, which does not, of course, mean that we ignore work on learning styles. Unfortunately, at just the time when lessons from both psychology and sociology might have been applied to the classroom, theory of any kind was criticised by politicians. Despite this, in the long run, teachers will again be able to profit from social science ideas.
Intelligence and Learning (and the IQ Problem)
In the previous section we observed that in some countries educational psychology had been dominated by psychometrics or mental measurement. The origins of that specialism are reasonably well known. In France in 1904, Alfred Binet (1857-1911) was entrusted by the Ministry of Public Instruction with the task of devising tests that would diagnose at an early stage those pupils who would have difficulty in coping with normal classroom learning later on, the mentally retarded. He was reasonably successful in setting problems which could predict future success or failure at school subjects.
However, the origin of mental measurement can be traced in a different way. Mental differences can be seen as biological differences determined by heredity. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871) contained notions about evolution which were among the most important in the whole history of ideas. Some of those ideas have been used, or misused, ever since to support arguments that nature is more important than nurture, or that heredity is more important than environment, including teaching. Darwin's theory that the process of 'natural selection' had been responsible for the superiority of human beings, was extended to support the view that natural selection had also determined the fact that some humans were superior to others. Francis Galton (1822-1911), much influenced by Darwin, his cousin, wrote Hereditary Genius (1869) and undertook a genealogical study of scientific families which claimed to demonstrate that 'genius' was inborn and found in significant numbers in those families (including his own). He was concerned to ensure that the process of natural selection should not be impeded in an artificial civilisation where the average level of ability might be in danger of declining as a result of the below average 'over breeding'. He invented the word and the ideology of 'eugenics'. These views were taken up again by the Social Darwinists who, as late as the Thatcher years (1979-90), were ridiculing the ideal of equality, partly on the argument that inequality was 'natural' and should be accepted as part of the status quo.
Meanwhile, at the beginning of the twentieth century, before Gallon died in 1911, Binet was involved in the practical task of testing and selecting. He improved his 1905 test in 1908 and again in 1911. The tests could not only identify the mentally retarded but also those who were above average and bright. Other psychologists on both sides of the Atlantic joined in this kind of research and in 1916 the Stanford-Binet test was devised purporting to predict future ability on the basis of present scores. A further refinement was the concept of Intelligence Quotient which was an expression of the relation between ability and chronological age, translated into a simple number by the following formula: IQ equals Mental Age divided by Chronological Age multiplied by 100. Thus an IQ of 100 was, by definition, the norm or average score, and marks above or below 100 indicated above or below average intelligence. Such tests were used during both World Wars for selecting personnel and allocating them to suitable jobs. Tests were also used, especially but not exclusively in England, to allocate children at about the age of 11 to attend grammar schools if they were in the top 15 per cent or so of the ability range.
Apart from questions about the fairness or validity of the tests, it was also alleged that by allocating a minority to 'academic' schools for able children, the other 85 per cent were regarded as failures. Tests which some psychologists supported as a means of selecting bright but poor children to receive an appropriate education, resulted in 'education for all' becoming a failure system for the majority. This criticism, combined with other evidence that accumulated during the 1950s and 1960s, resulted in IQ testing becoming discredited. The other evidence included the fact that tests were never 100 per cent valid and reliable and, argued Professor Philip Vernon (1905-87),33 and other psychologists, never would predict with complete accuracy. Once again, human beings had demonstrated that they were more complex than animals or robots. Much later the simple, one-dimensional concept of intelligence was itself challenged. Howard Gardner of Harvard University, following the collection of an enormous amount of empirical data, has criticised conventional IQ tests and the theory of intelligence behind them. He recently wrote about 'multiple intelligence' and showed that the notion of intelligence that had emerged out of the Stanford-Binet tradition was only one narrow kind of ability, largely associated with what has become known as 'verbal reasoning'. Gardner34 found it more useful to talk in terms of seven kinds of intelligence.
This psychological research had implications not only for classifying children, but also for school curricula since it was argued that the traditional curriculum concentrated far too narrowly on a limited range of academic knowledge and skills. It was suggested that a broader curriculum was needed and that children should be encouraged to use whatever kind of intelligence or ability they possessed. Three years later, in 1996, another psychologist, D. Golman,35 claimed that even more important than traditional intelligence or any of the multiple intelligences was 'emotional intelligence' which included, for example, the ability to work in harmony with others, and to make judgements about people and relationships. This happened to coincide with the views of employers who claimed that school leavers and university graduates often lacked precisely those abilities that they needed. This presented another pressure on the over-crowded curriculum, but by now, psychologists such as Bruner had long been advocating less specification of detail to be memorised and encouraging teachers to concentrate on developing understanding of the processes involved.
More recently, some psychologists have preferred to explain human learning and intelligence by likening the working of the brain to a computer that processes information. Such psychologists give themselves the same kind of problem as the behaviourists: they have no means of explaining the most interesting features of human intelligence, what Gardner describes as 'the open-ended creativity that is crucial at the highest levels of human intellectual achievement'.36 The computer is a very poor model for understanding the human mind, especially for teachers, but the metaphor will probably continue to be used in ways which will tend to mislead rather than help in the process of teaching and learning.
Other Social Sciences
It would be unwise to conclude this chapter by risking the assumption that only sociology and psychology have influenced education. Whilst those two subjects have exerted very strong influences, politics, economics and other social sciences have also been important. It would be possible to write a good deal about the economics of education and other ways in which the 'dismal science' has exerted pressures on schools and universities. 'Value for money' has changed education policies on many occasions in the later twentieth century, and some critics of the modern world complain that whereas non-economic values were once taken for granted in education, now the dominant force is clearly economic: education has to be justified in terms of commercial or industrial efficiency and competition rather than being concerned with 'a good life'. Similarly, politics has been so influential in education that we shall devote a whole chapter, Chapter 13, to this topic.
References
1. H. Lamennais, 'L'Avenir', Oeuvres Completes (Brussels, 1839), vol.2, p, 440; quoted by R.A. Nisbet in The Sociological Tradition (Heinemann, 1966) p. 115.
2. A. Comte, Cours de Philosophie Positive, quoted by Nisbet, op. cit., p. 56.
3. F. Wheen, Karl Marx (Fourth Estate, 1999), p. 196.
4. K. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), passim.
5. P. Bourdieu and J.C. Passeron, Reproduction (Sage, 1990).
6. B. Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975).
7. K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto in Basic Writings in Politics and Philosophy (Moscow, 1959, reprinted in The Revolution of 1848) (Penguin, 1973), p. 5.
8. R.A. Nisbet, op. cit., p. 221.
9. R. Peters, Authority, Responsibility and Education (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 5.
10. Nisbet, op. cit., p. 264.
11. Ibid., p. 300.
12. B.F. Skinner, Science and Human Behaviour (Macmillan, 1953).
13. This is not to be confused with the Skinner Box, an invention by which the behaviour of animals could be measured to calculate the effect of drugs on their behaviour.
14. B.F. Skinner, Verbal Behaviour (Methuen, New York, 1957).
15. N. Chomsky, 'Review of Verbal Behaviour by B.F. Skinner', Language, 35, 959, pp. 26-58.
16. L. Stenhouse, An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development (Heinemann, 1975), pp. 81-3.
17. A.N. Whitehead, The Aims of Education (Williams and Norgate, 1929).
18. J. Piaget, The Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child (Longman, 1972).
19. L.S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society (MIT Press, MA, 1962).
20. J. Bruner, Towards a Theory of Instruction (Harvard, 1966).
21. Bruner, op. cit., p. 7.
22. N. Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (Mouton, The Hague and New York, 1957).
23. Kingman Report, The Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Teaching of the English Language (Department of Education and Science, 1988).
24. Cox Report, Report of the English Working Party 5-16 (National Curriculum) (Department of Education and Science, 1989).
25. R. Carter (ed.), Knowledge about Language and the Curriculum: the LINC Reader (Hodder & Stoughton, 1990).
26. Department for Education and Employment, Teaching: High Status, High Standards (Circular 4/98) (Department for Education and Employment, 2000).
27. H.J. Eysenck, The Structure of Human Personality (Methuen, 1960).
28. B. Simon, 'Why No Pedagogy in England?' in B. Simon and W. Taylor, Education in the Eighties (Batsford, 1981), pp. 124-5.
29. M. Bloomer and P. Hodkinson, Moving into Further Education: The Voice of the Learner (Further Education Development Agency, 1997).
30. J.P. Guilford, "The Structure of Intellect', Psychology Bulletin, 53, 1956, p. 267.
31. H.A. Witkin, Psychological Differentiation (Wiley, New York, 1962).
32. G. Pask, 'A Fresh Look at Cognition and the Individual', International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 4, 1972, pp. 211-16.
33. P. Vernon, Secondary School Selection (Methuen, 1957) .
34. H. Gardner, Frames of Mind (Fontana, 1993).
35. D. Golman, Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ, (Bloomsbury, 1996).
36. Gardner, op. cit., p. 23.
Further Reading
Bottomore, T. and R. Nisbet (eds), A History of Sociological Analysis (Heinemann, 1979).
McCulloch, G., Failing the Ordinary Child (Open University Press, 1998).