Abstract
The article discusses the allegedly decontextualized and ahistorical traits in positivist educational research and curriculum by examining its emergence in early twentieth-century empirical education. Edward Lee Thorndike’s educational psychology is analyzed as a case in point. It will be shown that Thorndike’s positivist educational psychology stressed the need to account for the reality of schooling and to produce knowledge of the actual contexts of education. Furthermore, a historical analysis informed by Michel Foucault’s history of the human sciences reveals that there are multiple historical temporalities involved in Thorndike’s educational psychology. This allows a new critical angle to be taken on positivist educational research. The question concerning the contexts of empirical education turns to examining the way the conditions of possibility for scientific knowledge in education involve practices of contextualization as well as paradoxical and self-defeating elements.
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Notes
De Landsheere summarizes Thorndike’s significance to educational research: ‘Thorndike can be considered as the most characteristic representative of the scientific orientation in education. (…) He dealt with all aspects of educational research. He was the first person to conceive of teaching methods in terms of an explicitly formulated and experimentally tested learning theory. In so doing, he opened a new teaching era. The influence in the field of educational research can be compared with the influence of Wundt in experimental psychology’ (de Landsheere 1997, pp. 10–11).
In his study on the history of positivism, Halfpenny (1982) has found twelve different definitions of positivism in the social sciences.
This connection between mass schooling and statistical methods changed the face of not only educational psychology, but psychology in general. Kurt Danziger sees that as statistical methods were considered to be more useful in classifying and predicting behavior at a populational level, other psychological research methods (such as experimental laboratory research) was relegated to a marginal position in American psychology (Danziger 1990, pp. 101–106).
Kurt Danziger sees a similar line of argumentation in the narratives of the history of psychology. The objects of psychology are just like those of the natural sciences. The philosophers from the Antiquity to the dawn of modern age have tried to decipher, but alas, with only speculative methods. It is the task of the psychologist to finally uncover them (Danziger 1990, p. 2).
Other critiques of early twentieth-century psychology have pointed out that the claims of Thorndike and his colleagues concerning gender and race, for example, were more reflective of their misogynist and racist ideologies than the results of valid scientific research (see e.g. Winfield 2007; Gould 1996).
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Saari, A. Knowledge Without Contexts? A Foucauldian Analysis of E.L. Thorndike’s Positivist Educational Research. Stud Philos Educ 35, 589–603 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-016-9527-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-016-9527-2