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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