The Psychological Record, 1975, 25, 315-323.
EDUCA TION IN PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE' J.R.KANTOR University of Chicago
As a general object of investigation, education is, of course, a great composite of interrelated institutions and events. Consequently, it can be approached from a number of different angles-social, political, reliiious, economic, psychological, and soon. In this article educational institutions and practices are examined in the perspective of scientific psychology. Unfortunately, much of what is regarded as scientific psychology is contaminated with traditional metaphysics. Accordingly, this analysis is based upon interbehavioral psychology, which rejects venerable but misleading authority in favor of free observation of organisms as they interbehave and develop in contact with environing objects and conditions. Only such a psychological perspective can illuminate the nature and problems of education and educational procedures.
EDUCATION AND SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY Education envisaged in psychological perspective consists of the evolution of personalities. Group-related education comprises techniques for inducing individuals to acquire such traits of behavior as appear to their biological and societal forebears as necessary or desirable for membership in their particular communities. Autodidactism, too, promotes the personality-building process, though the goals are autogenous and highly variable. Whether education is idiosyncratic or social, psychology plays a great part in the theory and practice of education. Although it is understandable that those who live in complex industrial and technological societies should view education as a giant system of organized mechanisms for the conversion of incomers into a group's citizenry and usually to mold offspring on the pattern of their progenitors, education is certainly much different from that. In brief, education consists of the inevitable process of evolving individuals beyond their bio-embryological status. Educational processes constitute the metamorphosis of organisms from more or less purely biological beings into members of the human or cultural population. The mechanisms of conventional education, including schools and their financing, curricula, teaching systems or methods, and techniques, are important and frequently indispensable but still are auxiliary and peripheral factors. When account is taken of the educational processes of the simpler communities and cultures as well as of more complex societies, striking differences are observed 'Requests for reprints should be addressed to Dr. J. R. Kantor, 5743 Kimbark Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637.
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as between regulated education and the more general psychological development of persons at all stages from infancy to adulthood and beyond. It is surely supererogatory to mention that it is the province of psychology to analyze and characterize the behavioral nature of organisms. Obviously, it is to psychology that we resort for expertise respecting the modification of behavior , the potentialities and limits of the developing and learning process, the problem of capacity whether innate or acquired, the ability periodically to reperform previously acquired reactions, the basis for applying acquired skills, information, and modes of adaptation to environing things and condi tions. Unfortunately, psychology itself cannot be universally regarded as a natural science. It is still contaminated with traditional spiri tis tic notions. Like all the sciences which are the works of human individuals, psychology also operates in the shadow of cultural institutions, including traditional philosophy. Only by extruding misconstructions of antiquated philosophy can psychology become serviceable in support of education. THE CRITERIA OF SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY The first step in the evaluation of psychology as a science is to determine whether or not the discipline operates entirely on the basis of observing the interbehavior of organisms as they evolve in constant and more or less effective interaction with things and events of their environment. It is only such activities that conform to the canons of natural science. We adopt the name "interbehavioral" for such a psychological discipline. To adhere to the study of concrete interactions is to depart radically from the imposition of traditional constructs upon events. Interbehavioral psychology, as a scientific discipline, has no place for the imaginary constructs of soul, mind, consciousness, or such oppositions as' 'mind-body" or "nature and nurture." Psychological interactions or interbehavior may be regarded as evolutions and elaborations of the biological interactions. Probably the most effective approach to psychological events is to think of them as resulting from a fourth evolution following: (a) the inorganic evolution of physiochemical elements, compounds, and processes, with later interactions leading to the development of the sun and planets and galactic systems, (b) the phylogenetic biological evolution, and (c) the ontogenic biological evolution. EDUCA TION IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF INTERBEHA VIORAL PSYCHOLOGY Assuming the suggested basic tenets of scientific psychology, we examine briefly some aspects of education as reflected in the perspective of interbehavioral psychology.
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The first step in defining or describing an educational field is to differentiate between (a) the conventional situation of public or pri vate schoOling, including formal apprenticeships, and (b) the more general and casual processes of personality development through innumerable individual experiences. In both types of situation we must take account of three outstanding factors: (a) the person concerned, (b) the things and conditions with which he interacts, and (c) the situation or auspices under which he interacts. With respect to the person, information is required about his past and present circumstances, including as many developmental facts as possible. It is such information that aids in understanding the psychological development of persons and in the improvement of measures taken to promote personality development in formal education situations. No less important are the particular objects, persons, and circumstances with which individuals come into contact. Here may be mentioned the socioeconomic status of family and community. Clearly, such opportunity for contacts with things and conditions are very different as between (a) passing through a school system or (b) developing as a particular individual. In all situations the specific changes and conditions used must be inquired into. For example, school situations may employ radio, television, charts, diagrams, and the functioning of computer mechanisms. Parents, teachers, school authorities, and social institutions are regarded as parts of the educational setting so that their personality equipment, training, and general competence must be examined for their influences upon educational situations. In a genuine sense it is these persons who are responsible for setting up the goals of the educational process. For example, the aim of education might be the democratic one of making persons alike in some way or in every way or facilitating the actualization of potentialities created by earlier developments of particular individuals. The description of educational fields clearly pOints up the interbeha vioral processes specified by scientific psychology. This is the case whether we stress personality development or just environmental adaptations, school curricula, educational fashions, or rights and privileges of teachers. To regard the educational process as exclusively affecting the responding individual is to open the way to a belief in all sorts of mythical powers and conditions. Such an exclusivist view brings in its train instincts, innate powers, and in general serious misinterpretations of psychological events. Interbehavioral psychology places teachers in proper perspective when they are considered as part of the setting of educational situations. They provide specific favorable or unfavorable circumstances for the advantage or disadvantage of acquiring reactions, accomplishing tasks, and setting up opportunities for development. Not only are teachers peripheral factors in learning
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situations, but they can only operate in conjunction with background and foreground features surrounding the modification of the taught. Other peripheral factors may be located in the attitudes of parents with respect to schools. An interesting' observation concerning parents as peripheral factors in educational situations is that of parents who themselves are without formal education but who are stimulated to want their children to reveive such an education. Their ambition is stimulated by emulation, a desire to stand out in the community, and the hope for a rise in the socioeconomic scale. The range of motives for sending children to school extends downward from actual personal improvement to the use of schools as custodial locales for bothersome children, with a midpoint in the compliance with the laws of the community. Continuity of Educational Processes
Assuming that education is a process of personality building, it must be looked upon as a continuous process. Despite the great differences between formal education (schooling and tutorial experiences) and the general evolution of an individual or personality, the basic developments are located on a single continuum. Paralleling the biological maturation stages of the individual, an evolution of acts and traits begins under family auspices and continues throughout school attendance and later vocational or domestic careers. Through contact with many kinds of persons, episodes, and institutions, the individual becomes culturalized, molded, and modified. Education Controlled
Both formal and casual education are subject to various kinds of direct or indirect interferences. Direct interferences are clearly illustrated where formal educational facilities and procedures are hedged about by social, political, and economic factors, with a resulting neglect of intrinsic individual differences engendered by variations in the confrontations of persons in different human situa tions. Direct control of educational processes is exemplified by the difficulties experienced by educators with teacher-pupil ratios, the overcrowding of classrooms, and the more serious problems of standardization by the subjection of individuals to religious or secular curricula. The general effect of such constraints is, of course, to reduce actual or potential originality. Indirect interference with personal development is well illustrated by the objective circumstances of families and communities which preclude the undesirable traits. Light is thrown upon this circumstance by the contrary situation in which unrestricted individuals build up many types of behavior both approved and disapproved of by the communities in which they live. Generally speaking, educational controls, while they sometimes promote advantageous personality development, more often clash
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with the scientific psychological rule of individual differences. To abide by the rule eliminates constraints upon the educatee and allows for the possible freedom and spontaneity of behavior that he may display. It is to loosen the barriers of biological age. It is counted as educational research to determine how many syllables are best allowed for each age group in reading books for children. A similar control over individual differences is to limit the reading of children to certain grades of books according to their chronological ages. It is an interesting question how much arbitrary controls contribute to the retardation of children's development. To conform to scientific psychology, the education of individuals must be considered as dynamic processes, since the individual will grow because of the possibilities of contacts with all sorts of novel objects and conditions. Here the suggestion is to develop means of interacting with new situations and objects on a personal or individual plan. Simply to be aware of things is not enough.· To develop personal efficiency, it is required to develop comparisons, evaluations, analyses, and criticisms. Implied here is that effective education requires that even from early childhood on, free curiosity should be kept alive and the child be encouraged to interbehave with things within his capacity and opportunity at the time. Sequential Order in Educational Development
Because personality evolution is cumulative and often progressive, following and paralleling biological maturation, it varies somewhat on the basis of age and more definitely upon adaptations to social circumstances. On the whole, the greatest number of new traits are more easily and more rapidly developed in the earlier life of individuals. Infants and children must develop reactional equipment in order to become oriented and adjusted to novel and demanding environments and at the same time not be hampered by a prior accumulation of behavioral equipment. It is this early development of habits, inclinations, likes, and dislikes which regulates and facilitates future development in particular directions. By contrast with the ease and smoothness of trait development in young persons, adult trait development in more complex circumstances is complicated by problems of direction, obligation, responsibility, and duty. On the other hand, of course, the adult period may be marked by knowledge and wisdom which favor particular lines of future growth. The sequential order of education or personality development can be effectively observed in the actual psychological development of persons. In the earliest stage the entire behavioral repertoire is centered on interbehavior with the mother and is gradually enlarged through contacts with other factors in the fami1y. In later contacts with a gradually expanding world, the individual becomes beha viorally better equipped, more or less independent of the family, and increasingly adapted to the social conditions in which he lives.
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Education in Simple and Complex Cultures
Scientific psychology differentiates between the educational processes localized in different milieux. Accordingly, the psychologist observes the variation in the process as practiced in the sparsely populated simpler cultures as compared with thickly populated and complex groups. In the Simpler societies personality development is primarily casual and more or less haphazard, though not without the effectiveness of adjustment required by membership in a particular community. The casual-contrived distinction derives, of course, from the general psychological differentiation between the adventitious accumulation of traits in adjustmentalsituations and the contrived behavior development constrained and ruled by societal traditions and managerial authorities. A good example of casual behavior development is the free and easy way young children acquire foreign speech by mere contact with native children. So simple and effective is the process that writers have invented instincts of language and innate language capacities. Educational Goals and Values
Problems of goals and values touch upon both the psychological center and the cultural periphery of the educational process. Since educational procedures are intimately conditioned by the cultural institutions of communities, what individuals learn and how are powerfully influenced by local cultural institutions via the agencies of school authorities, teachers, and parents. Now, obviously, educational "goals" may be proper and advantageous or improper and disadvantageous and thus inseparable from problems of value. It is the variation in values that dictates the development of parochial schools alongside the public institutions. Schools in a nation or community established on the basis of a separation of state and church emphasize the three R's, while parochial institutions aim at the cultivation of moral and religious traits. Furthermore, it may be the educational goal ofa community to require newcomers to adapt themselves to local traditions and conditions without question as to the propriety of existing institutions. Other goals may be to cultivate individuals to worship economic or political success at any cost, or to become "leaders" even by aggression or chicanery of any sort. In general, the problem of educational goals runs directly into the relations of individuals and the groups in which they are ensconced. While it is true that individuals are dominated by groups, it is also true that individuals by their inventions, productivity, and general creativity exert powerful influences upon the communities among which they live and others related to them. Always there remain the facts of individual differences which the exigencies of individual and social living inevitably produce. Such are the exigencies of human living that they res'ult in the development of many varieties of personality. Criteria are not lacking for the categorization of some as inferior and some as superior. The criteria invoked range in value for traits of knowledge, skills, creativity, affectivity, and so on.
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Clearly, the influences of groups upon individuals and individuals upon groups are invariably reciprocal. This fact throws considerable light on the problem of elitism and its value for social life. Though we banish the fallacies of innateness, it cannot be denied that the development of superior and inferior personalities carry many potentialities for social disharmony and conflict. However, it is still probable that the emphasis upon expertness, knowledge, good judgment, individualism instead of mass conformity, reasoning, and sensitivity to natural and artistic beauty can have a salutary influence upon the condition of man and his civilization. Technology and Engineering in Education
As a final item in the psychological examination of the educational process, we glance briefly at the technological and engineering aspects of educational events. Ours is an age oftechnology. We can move mountains, put men on the moon, direct missiles to distant lands capable of annihilating entire populations, and produce computers that simulate complex intellectual feats. It is small wonder that machines are worshipped as ·modern golden calves and that apparatus is devised for the educational province of our culture. Our task, then, is to consider the nature of technology and its applicability to education. Technology is essentially an enterprise of extending and amplifying human powers of coping with difficult situations by devising and inventing tools and machines to produce effects not possible without such aids. Although technology should not be regarded as limited to work with inorganic or physiochemical materials, it is such things as levers, wheels, wires, cogs, and electrodes that most readily illustrate engineering activities. Functionally, all technological processes are variant means toward ends, which are otherwise set up. The applicability and value of engineering actions and tools presuppose specifications for the purpose for which they are fashioned and improved. In most instances technological designs represent accretions of already existent things. This is not to deny technological invention, but the things dealt with and the results accomplished are on the whole fixed and determined. Technological functions being strictly limited to the mechanical and relatively static have little relevance in educational situations. At best they relate to the very early periods of interbehavior, as, for example, in primary and secondary schools. In such situations the engineer can exercise his talents in the production and use of visual aids, television, radiO, teaching machines, and programs of various sorts, including those for computer operations. In such definitely contrived situations, technological aids prove to be of great value. Educational machinery may conserve time and effort and sometimes accelerate the development of simple types of behavior but do not advance the development of more Significant behavior traits of individuals. It is certain that even in simple
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situations the employment of technological implements benefits more the teachers and administrators than the pupils. From our review of the spontaneity of complex interbehavior, it is clear that technology is hardly applicable to the events of biology or psychology. That is why technology in education is limited to the learning of statements and sentences, the spelling of words, and similar minor tasks that can be reduced to mechanical simplicity. When personal interbehavior and habits of social propriety are concerned, nothing of a technological nature is even thought of. That is, behavior both in the case of children and adul ts is developed in the casual manner we have discussed in the early part of this paper. In this connection, attention may be directed to a recent interesting letter in Science (Elias, 1972), which contrasts the kind of technological activity sufficient for the fantastic feat of putting men on the moon with the current unyielding search for the nature and conquest of cancer. Now that it is possible to cultivate a psychology free from the mystifications now infecting them, it is not difficult to conceive a biological and medical education that will prove effective for the understanding of normal and malignant tissue. SUMMARY
Two primary postulates underlie the present article. The first is that educational processes are fundamental for the existence and value of human beings and their civilization. Education is assumed to be the general process by which biological organisms are transformed into culturalized persons; it is not just school learning. The second postulate is that since educational institutions rest upon a psychological foundation, a naturalistic and scientific psychology is of special significance for educational theory and practice. Scientific psychology with its interdisciplinary tangential affiliates, biology and anthropology, light up glaringly the processes of education. Indispensable for educational theory and practice is a psychology rooted in the study of interbehavior, instead of verbal formulae concerning soul, mind, or other psychic processes. Only interbehavioral psychology furnishes proper answers to the questions concerning the nature and method of learning and its improvement as well as contributes to the general understanding of trait development for effective adjustments to interpersonal situations as well as to nonhuman environments. Specifically, an interbehavioral psychology is capable of offering verifiable descriptions of personality and various types of performance such as remembering, feeling, perceiving, reasoning, and understanding. Because of the close interdisciplinary relation of psychology and biology, psychology receives strong support from biology in counteracting the tradition of multiple species of men, and thus can topple the axiom of races with different capacities for learning and education. The same may be said about all the specious views about
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the brain being a master organ replete with non spatial capacities to store ideas and fitted with the power to remember, think, and reason. Similarly, cultural anthropology makes a great contribution to the psychology of education by providing psychology with data concerning the stimulational basis for interbehavioral action and its conditions. As the study of the varying behavior of persons with other persons, objects, and institutions of particular groups of people, it contributes immensely to our knowledge of the origin and changes of personality traits under the influence of different ethnic systems. In the latter part of this article, the writer analyzed various phases of the educational enterprise in order to consider at what points the interbehavioral hypothesis could increase the efficiency and the value of the effort. Among the situations considered were the relations between teachers and those they taught, the difference between casual and contrived behavior development, the goals of education, and the introduction of technological methods. The implication was suggested that the interbehavioral hypothesis adequately assessed the need for changes in both the theory and practice of education. At this point the question arises: Even if interbehavioral science is an improvement over those now prevalent, would it be feasible to put it into force? It must be admitted that since educational matters are only components in grand societal complexes, many social, political, and economic obstructions stand in the way of implementing what may appear as a desirable intellectual revolution or even an unrealizable ideal. But great as the difficulties may be, the counterquestion arises: At what point can limits be set to the freedom of discovery and the cultivation of human ingenuity? REFERENCE ELIAS, H. 1972. Cancer research. Science, 175, 1312.