Wundt!
The great energy that
drives modern schooling owes much to a current of influence arising out of the psychology
laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig in Saxony. With a
stream of international assistants,
Wundt set out to examine how the human machine was best adjusted. By
1880, he laid the basis for Pavlov's work and the work of Watson in America, for the medical procedure of
lobotomy, for electroshock
therapy, and for the scientific view that school was a ground for social
training,
"socialization" in John Dewey's terminology.
Among Wundt's principal assistants was
the flamboyant American, G. Stanley Hall, who organized the psychology lab at Johns Hopkins in 1887,
established the American Journal
of Psychology, and saw to it that Sigmund Freud was brought to America for
a debut here. Stanley Hall's own
star pupil at Hopkins was the Vermonter, John Dewey. Wundt's first assistant, James McKeen Cattell, was also an
American, eventually the patron
saint of psychological testing here. He was also the chief promoter of
something called "the
sight-reading method," the dreadful fallout from which helped change the direction of American society. Cattell
was the first "Professor of Psychology" so titled in all the world, reigning at the
University of Pennsylvania. In 1894, he founded The Psychological Review. Over the next twenty- five years, he
trained 344 doctoral candidates.
In these stories and many others like them, the influence of Wundt and Prussia multiplied. Cattell later
created the reference books Leaders in Education, American Men of Science, and The Directory of American
Scholars and, for good measure,
founded Popular Science, all of which boosted the stock of the infant
discipline.
Other Wundtian Ph.D.s in the United
States included James Baldwin who set up the psych lab at Princeton, Andrew Armstrong who did the same at
Wesleyan, Charles Judd who became
director of education at the University of Chicago, and James Earl
Russell, president of Teachers
College at Columbia. There were many others.
Russell's Teachers College, the
Rockefeller-sponsored, Prussian-inspired seminary on 120th Street in New York City, had a long reign dominating
American pedagogy. By 1950, it had
processed an unbelievable one-third of all presidents of teacher-training institutions, one-fifth of all American
public schoolteachers, one-quarter of all
superintendents. Thus the influence of Prussian thought dominated
American school policy at a high
level by 1914, and the Prussian tincture was virtually universal by 1930.
Some parts of the country were more
resistant to the dumbing down of curriculum and the psychosocializing of the classroom than others, but by a
process of attrition
Prussianization gained important beachheads year by year — through private
foundation projects, textbook
publishing, supervisory associations, and on through every aspect of school. The psychological manipulation
of the child suggested by Plato had been
investigated by Locke, raised to clinical status by Rousseau, refined into
materialist method by Helvetius
and Herbart, justified philosophically as the essential religion by Comte, and scientized by Wundt. One
does not educate machines, one adjusts them.
The peculiar
undertaking of educational psychology was begun by Edward Thorndike of Teachers College in 1903. Thorndike,
whose once famous puzzle box became the
Skinner box of later behavioral psychology after minor modifications,
was the protege of
Wundtians Judd and Armstrong at Wesleyan, taking his Ph.D. under
Wundtian Cattell before being
offered a post by Wundtian Russell at Teachers College.
According to
Thorndike, the aim of a teacher is to "produce and prevent certain responses," and the purpose of
education is to promote "adjustment." In Elementary Principles of Education (1929), he
urged the deconstruction of emphasis on "intellectual resources" for the young, advice
that was largely taken. It was bad advice in light of modern brain research suggesting direct ties between the
size and complexity of the brain
and strenuous thought grappled with early on.
Thorndike said
intelligence was virtually set at birth — real change was impossible — a scientific pronouncement which helped
to justify putting the brakes on ambitious curricula. But in the vitally important behavioral area — in
beliefs, attitudes, and loyalties —
Thorndike did not disappoint the empty-child crowd. In those areas so important to corporate and government
health, children were to be as malleable as anyone could want them. An early ranking of school kids by
intelligence would allow them to be
separated into tracks for behavioral processing. Thorndike soon became a
driving force in the growth of
national testing, a new institution which would have consigned Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Carnegie to reform
school and Edison to Special Education. Even before we got the actual test, Thorndike became a
significant political ally of the
semicovert sterilization campaign taking place in America.
That pioneering eugenic program seemed
socially beneficial to those casually aware of it, and it was enthusiastically championed by some genuine
American legends like Oliver
Wendell Holmes Jr. But if you find yourself nodding in agreement that
morons have no business with
babies, you might want to consider that according to Thorndike's fellow psychologist H.H. Goddard at Princeton,
83 percent of all Jews and 79 percent of all Italians were in the mental defective class. The real
difficulty with scientific psychology
or other scientific social science is that it seems to be able to
produce proof of anything on
command, convincing proof, too, delivered by sincere men and women just trying
to get along by going along.
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