Modern Educational Psychology

An Historical Introduction

E.G.S. Evans

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138060685
• eBook ISBN: 9781351669740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Many contemporary issues in educational psychology become clearer when set against the perspective of their historical antecedents. Originally published in 1969, this book provides a survey of the most important ideas and experiments in educational psychology at the time, showing how they have helped to shape our understanding of the factors that influence child life and growth. Dr Evans discusses the subject under four broad headings: Child Development; Theories of Personality Formation; The Psychology of Learning; and Mental Testing and Measurement. The book provided a valuable introduction to educational psychology for education students at the time, and will now be of historical interest to those involved in educational psychology.

1
Child development

Introduction

A remarkable fact of the present century is the unprecedented interest in the study of children—in the development of their natural life processes and abilities, in the effects of early upbringing on their adjustment to home and school and in the influence of unconscious motivations and conflicts on their thinking and general behaviour. But child psychology was not unknown in previous times, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is clearly evident in the writings of the precursors of the child study movement—Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Froebel—all of whom drew attention to the different stages through which children pass in their development and emphasized the need to educate them through their own self-activity and natural capacities.

Closely following the work of these early educationists came the influence of the theory of evolution which, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, awakened an even greater interest in the study of children. In considering the effect evolutionary doctrine had on the development of child psychology, the writings of three Englishmen— Spencer, Darwin and Galton—were outstanding, and their investigations were quickly followed by other more systematic studies of children. These were of three main kinds: (a) studies of the child mind, as seen in the investigations of Preyer, Sully, Isaacs and Piaget; (b) behavioural studies, mainly American, and associated with the work of Watson, Hall and Gesell; (c) studies of childhood conflicts, stemming from the enquiries of Freud, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and their co-workers.

Precursors

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). If a date is needed to mark the beginning of child psychology it is 1762 when Rousseau published the Emile, or On Education. In this book Rousseau distinguished the various stages of child development which Rusk (1954) has summarized as follows: (i) infancy characterized by habit and the training of the emotions; (ii) childhood characterized by ‘necessity’ and the training of the senses; (iii) boyhood characterized by ‘utility’ and the training of the intellect; (iv) adolescence, the stage of ‘morality’ and of moral aesthetic and social education.

Some fifty years ago the Swiss educational psychologist, Claparede, speaking on the bicentennial of Rousseau’s birth, ascribed to the Émile certain fundamental principles of child behaviour which Kessen (1965) refers to as follows:

The Law of Genetic Succession: The child develops naturally by passing through a number of stages that succeed one another in a constant order.
The Law of Genetico-Functional Exercise: This law really implies two, which can be stated in the following way. (a) The exercise of a function is necessary to its development … (b) The exercise of a function is necessary to the appearance of certain other functions. …
The Law of Functional Adaptation: That action will be elicited which serves to satisfy the need or the interest of the moment….
The Law of Functional Autonomy: The child is not, considered in himself, an imperfect being; he is a being adapted to circumstances which are appropriate for him; his mental activity is appropriate to his needs, and his mental life is integrated….
The Law of Individuality: Every person differs more or less, in physical and psychological characteristics, from other people….

These somewhat formal statements represent the most important of Rousseau’s ideas about children’s mental development. The first, that of genetic succession, shows that Rousseau recognized that nature had endowed the child with certain stages of development to ensure his healthy growth. The order of development started from simple sensory experiences and these were followed in turn by the appearance of higher mental processes—images, perceptions, ideas, reason and judgment. Of all these, however, none was as important to Rousseau as the child’s emotional development. The following quotations from the Émile illustrate this clearly.

The child’s first mental experiences are purely affective, he is only aware of pleasure and pain; it takes him a long time to acquire the definite sensations which show him things outside himself, but before these things present and withdraw themselves, so to speak, from his sight, taking size and shape for him, the recurrence of evolutional experiences is beginning to subject the child to the rule of habit.

Even more significant for the child’s subsequent development are the changes in temperament and character that occur at adolescence.

As the roaring of the waves precedes the tempest, so the murmur of rising passions announces this tumultuous change, a suppressed excitement warns us of the approaching danger. A change of temper, frequent outbreaks of anger, a perpetual stirring of the mind, make the child almost ungovernable. He becomes deaf to the voice he used to obey; he is a lion in a fever; he distrusts his keeper and refuses to be controlled.
With the moral symptoms of a changing temper there are perceptible changes in appearance. His countenance develops and takes the stamp of his character, the soft and sparse down upon his cheeks becomes darker and stiffer. His voice grows hoarse or rather he loses it altogether. He is neither a child nor a man and cannot speak like either of them. His eyes, those organs of the soul which till now were dumb, find speech and meaning; a kindling fire illumines them, there is still a sacred innocence in their brightening glance, but they have lost their first meaningless expression; he is already aware that they can say too much; he is beginning to learn to lower his eyes and blush, he is becoming sensitive, though he does not know what it is that he feels; he is uneasy without knowing why. All this may happen gradually and give you time enough; but if his keenness becomes impatience, his eagerness, madness, if he is angry and sorry, all in a moment, if he weeps without cause, if in the presence of objects which are beginning to be a source of danger, his pulse quickens and his eyes sparkle, if he trembles when a woman’s hand touches his, if he is troubled or timid in her presence, O Ulysses, wise Ulysses! have a care! The passages you closed with so much pain are open; the winds are unloosed; keep your hand upon the helm or all is lost (Kessen).

Several educational implications stem from an acceptance of Rousseau’s views.
Childhood is natural and exists in its own right. As Kessen has written:

Childhood is not a time set aside for adults to finish God’s work, to bring the child (whether filled with sin or epistemologically and morally empty) steadily into closer match with adult behaviour. Childhood is a time important in itself, a time when the behaviour of the child is appropriate to the demands of his needs and his world. Whenever one looks at a child, newborn, in school, adolescent, one sees a whole human being, properly put together for his particular time. It is as well to consider the ape to be an incomplete man as to consider the child to be an incomplete adult. Moreover, Rousseau pointed out that the teacher and parent had better consider the integrity of the child; the educator who proceeded blind to the nature (the naturalness, the integrity) of childhood would produce an ill-made human being.

The acceptance by teachers of the priority of natural development, or as Kessen again points out: ‘…of the normal succession of stages in growth, and especially of the coherence of the child’s mind at every stage—and tailor his pedagogy to the child’.

Above all, Rousseau firmly believed that the child should be permitted to grow up without much adult supervision and direction.

Oh, wise man, take time to observe nature; watch your scholar well before you say a word to him; first leave the germ of his character free to show itself, do not constrain him in anything, the better to see him as he really is….
Zealous teachers, be simple, sensible and reticent; be in no hurry to act unless to prevent the actions of others. Again and again I say, reject, if it may be, a good lesson for fear of giving a bad one. Beware of playing the tempter in this world, which nature intended as an earthly paradise for men, and do not attempt to give the innocent child the knowledge of good and evil; since you cannot prevent the child learning by what he sees outside himself, restrict your own efforts to impressing those examples on his mind in the form best suited for him!

The relation of the child to the world is an active searching one. Kessen has expressed Rousseau’s attitude as follows:

The child engages his environment, using it to suit his interests. He fits his abilities to the world in play and in the solving of problems, not as a passive recipient of the tutor’s instruction, nor as a victim of Hume’s contingencies, but as a busy, testing, motivated explorer. Knowledge is not an invention of adults poured into willing or unwilling vessels; it is a joint construction of the child in nature and the natural world.

Rousseau’s enduring contribution to education, therefore, was his insistence on the importance of the natural stages of mental development in childhood and adolescence, especially emotional development, which he tended to emphasize to the neglect of the individual’s social development.

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) Another precursor of modern child psychology, moved by Rousseau’s vision, was Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827). He, more than Rousseau, recognized the importance of all aspects of a child’s development, and in his writings expressed a point of view which was committed to the need for parents and teachers alike to give, before all else, loving care, sympathy and attention to children, especially in their early education. For Pestalozzi, the child’s mother was the first and most important educator. This fact, and his emphasis that learning must be based on the activity of the child, are the essential features of the Pestalozzi method.

Pestalozzi built his theory of children round the notion of Anschauung, a difficult word to define in English. It denotes an active principle of mind and, more specifically, the means by which a child comes to acquire some sort of personal faith, identity, and integrity for himself and, at the same time, an appreciation of the world around him—a world-picture and a vision of life. Anschauung bears slight relation to Spearman’s (1923) principles of cognition and neogenesis, being much more comprehensive than these. It is closer to Herbart’s (1816) concept of apperception, which came from Leibnitz and refers to the totality of conscious activities that are involved in the choice of interpretation of anything, i.e. the sum total of all experiences that are involved in giving meaning to anything. Again, Anschauung has affiliation with Burt’s (1955) view of intelligence as the ‘integrative capacity of mind’ and with Piaget’s (1947) notion that a child’s mental life is essentially active and constructive and intimately bound up with language, play and the whole physical and social world.

But Pestalozzi also believed that Anschauung would not develop naturally by itself and, moreover, could be weakened and destroyed by the educational practices of his day. He therefore proceeded to devise his own educational programme consisting of exercises, drills and techniques which aimed to develop Anschauung to the fullest possible extent. Pestalozzi claimed that by starting from children’s early sense impressions and from what they observe for themselves, three fundamental elements of knowledge—language, form and number—could be built up and thus used to foster Anschauung. his day. He therefore proceeded to devise his own educational programme consisting of exercises, drills and techniques which aimed to develop Anschauung to the fullest possible extent. Pestalozzi claimed that by starting from children’s early sense impressions and from what they observe for themselves, three fundamental elements of knowledge—language, form and number—could be built up and thus used to foster Anschauung.

Pestalozzi this as follows:

Friend! When I now look back and ask myself: What have I especially done for the very being of education? I find I have fixed the highest, supreme principle of instruction in the recognition of sense-impression as the absolute foundation of all knowledge. Apart from all special teaching I have sought to discover the nature of teaching itself; and the prototype, by which Nature herself has determined the instruction to three elementary means (form, number and language); and have sought for special methods which should render the results of all instruction in these three branches absolutely certain.
Lastly, I have brought these three elementary means into harmony with each other, and made instruction, in all three branches, not only harmonious with itself in many ways, but also with human nature and have brought it nearer to the course of Nature in the development of the human race (Kessen).

By the same means, the child’s own personal integrity and individuality were able to be secured so that he becomes somebody unique and complete in himself. For Pestalozzi, ‘being’ somebody is far more important than acquiring knowledge. He states: ‘The reading, writing and arithmetic are not after all what they most need. It is well and good for them to learn something, but the really important thing for them is to be something’ (Quick, 1895). For Pestalozzi, ‘being’ was as important as ‘doing’. Again and again he maintains that ‘being’ and ‘doing’ come before ‘knowing’, that knowledge is utterly valueless unless it is based on action. In Leonard and Gertrude he writes:

Although Gertrude exerted herself to develop very early the manual dexterity of her children, she was in no haste for them to learn to read and write; but she took pains to teach them early how to speak; for, as she said, ‘Of what use is it for a person to be able to read and write if he cannot speak, since reading and writing are only an artificial sort of speech’…. She did not adopt the tone of an instructor towards the children … and her verbal instruction seemed to vanish in the spirit of her real activity, in which it always had its source. The result of her system was that each child was skilful, intelligent and active to the full extent that its age and development allowed (Quick).

Although Pestalozzi believed that learning must be based on the activity of the child, developed through Anschauung, it could not be achieved without the background of a loving home and mother. The importance Pestalozzi attaches to this is evident in the following quotations from How Gertrude Teaches her Children.

From the moment that a mother takes a child upon her lap, she teaches him. She brings nearer to his senses what nature has scattered afar off over large areas and in confusion, and makes the action of receiving sense-impressions and the knowledge derived from them, easy, pleasant and delightful to him.
The mother, weak and untrained follows Nature, without help or guidance, and knows not what she is doing. She does not intend to teach, she intends only to quiet the child, to occupy him. But, nevertheless, in her pure simplicity she follows the high course of Nature without knowing what Nature does through her; and Nature does very much through her. In this way she opens the world to the child. She makes him ready to use his senses, and prepares for the early development of his attention and power of observation (Kessen).

The same attitude is expressed in a paper called the Swiss Journal which Pestalozzi started in 1782.

The child at his mother’s breast is weaker and more dependent than any other creature on earth, and yet he already feels the first moral impression of love and gratitude. Morality is nothing but a result of the development of the first sentiments of love and gratitude felt by the infant (Quick).

The great earnestness with which Pestalozzi addressed himself to mothers was prompted by a belief that the powers they possessed over their infants was of a God-given quality.

The mother is qualified, and qualified by the Creator Himself to become the principal agent in the development of her child … and what is demanded of her is—a thinking love…. God has given to thy child all the faculties of our nature, but the grand point remains undecided—how shall this heart, this head, these hands, be employed? To whose service shall they be dedicated? (Quick).
Maternal love is the first agent in education…. Through it the child is led to love and trust his Creator and his Redeemer (Quick).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Child development
• 2 Theories of personality formation
• 3 The psychology of learning
• 4 Mental testing and measurement
• Further reading
• Bibliography