THE WORLD OF PEOPLE, THINGS, AND IDEAS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY. HUMAN SCIENCES: PEDAGOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY.
It may be hard to believe, but human sciences as we know them today didn’t even exist in the first quarter of the 20th century.
By the beginning of the 20th century, psychology was making its first steps towards experimenting. Ivan Pavlov, often considered to be the first experimental psychologist, received the Nobel Prize in 1904 for his research on reflexes not in psychology, but in physiology. The theoretical psychological landscape, just at the beginning of the 20th century, was quite barren; even Jung and Adler did not yet come into their full creative powers.
Sigmund Freud published his major works, which greatly stirred public opinion, at the beginning of the 20th century. Child and developmental psychology did not yet exist – Piaget and Vygotsky were still children themselves. Bettelheim and Skinner were still young children, while Bruner, Holt, Gardner, and Bloom had yet to be born. Maria Montessori began her work with intellectually disabled children in 1897, and Janusz Korczak started his work in a Jewish children's home in 1911. Both of them, by education and previous work, were doctors.
The situation with pedagogy was even worse, despite the centuries-old history of schools and education. Pedagogy was considered either a part of philosophy (however, with the Greeks, philosophy was once all-encompassing knowledge), a part of ethics ("pedagogy is a science not of what exists, but of what has to exist"), or a kind of art history ("pedagogy is a science of the art of educating children"). Famous pedagogical texts of the past are scarce, and in terms of general cultural significance, they boil down to the works of Jan Amos Comenius, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Each country has its own authors, of course, but in the world history of schools and education their names are, at best, reduced to a couple of quotes. The right of pedagogy to the status of an independent scientific discipline has not yet been fully established even today, although departments, faculties, and entire research institutes exist everywhere, and academic degrees are continuously awarded.
It was only in 1915 that John Dewey published his famous work "Democracy and Education." Georg Kerschensteiner, recognized by the UN as one of the four most influential educators of the 20th century (along with Montessori, Makarenko, and Dewey), was just beginning to publish his works on the theory and organization of education. Froebel and A.S. Neill were still children, and Freire and Illich had not yet been born.
There are no Nobel Prizes or their equivalents in pedagogy or psychology to this day.
The establishment of a compulsory state education system was thus a purely political decision, had no scientific grounds, and, as shown above, could not have had one -- as the fields simply did not exist yet. By and large, it still doesn't.
But there is an education system, and throughout the 20th century, it grew quite aggressively, first in width, up to the Second World War, and then in "length," involving an ever increasing number of children and, consequently, adults, for increasingly longer periods: from compulsory primary education to incomplete secondary, from there to full secondary, and now almost to universal higher education.
No matter what psychologists wrote or thought about it, the system itself formed and over time partially revised its own ideas not only about norms of development and education but also about teachability in principle.
When the system was introduced, children went to school at the age of seven or eight without any skills in reading, writing, or arithmetic. This was exactly what primary school was supposed to teach them. Unquestioning obedience to the teacher and conscientious completion of their assignments were considered to be the terms for successful learning -- both were achieved by strictness, up to corporal punishment.
High infant and child mortality efficiently reduced the population of potential students almost exclusively to neurotypical children, which for many years determined the system's idea of teachability given the tools and methods available. Some a little faster, others a little slower, but everyone eventually learned to read, write, and count in four to five years of elementary schooling. Those few who still could not be taught were either sent to specialized schools for the intellectually disabled (if such opportunity existed at all) or simply sent home to the care of parents, who were no less, if not more, helpless than the system itself.
In the humanistically inclined and libertarian academic environment, this state of affairs caused immediate objections, and alternative schools like free and democratic schools started multiplying. Though different governments treated such schools differently, they never managed to enter the educational mainstream or significantly influence it.
The establishment of compulsory primary education, though slowed down and complicated by two world wars, maintained a competitive nature of the students’ transition to higher levels of schooling. Only the most academically prepared and highly motivated students were welcome there. Teachers at these next level institutions had no need to care much about improving their teaching methods; their students were ready to basically learn on their own and under any conditions.
Once the selection of the strongest students got dropped by the education levels beyond elementary, their traditional teaching methods immediately got questioned. To this day, we often hear teachers complaining that students were not adequately prepared the year prior. By the early 2000s, this trend caught up with university professors, though they don’t seem to understand the scale of the professional catastrophe that has befallen them and continue to complain en masse about the unsatisfactory level of preparation of new students. While the system as a whole proclaims and pushes for diversity and inclusion, it is confused, lost and unprepared to deal with this influx of diverse learners.
Our adult ideas of how children see the world remain anecdotal and statistically insignificant. We have no reliable means or methods to understand what exactly is happening in a person (we don't even know where exactly - in their mind? in their head? in their soul?) when they grow up, gain selfhood, and then independence. We can only watch carefully, listen, ask, clarify, but children have no means or methods to explain anything to us for a long time. And we don't have time to listen to this mumbling – we always hurry, hurry, hurry.
Few people remember themselves well as children. On the one hand, we had nothing to remember it by; our basic structures of concepts, to which these memories could attach, through which we could make sense of our first impressions, were still forming. On the other hand, even in adulthood, we so carefully suppress those feelings of non-acceptance, external restrictions, helplessness, and inability, that not every psychologist manages to get to them.
Adults usually believe that they do the main work of "raising" children. The burden on parents and teachers is not easy, nobody argues that. However, a child is still doing all the work of growing up, learning, and becoming a person by themselves, unconsciously or consciously. Adults can either help and support or hinder and restrain, but they can never do this work for the growing person.
It is well known, however, that a human newborn does not really become a human being without another human being, this is a bare fact. They could never do it and they still cannot do it now. And this is practically the only thing we are absolutely sure about in the process of becoming/educating a person. The human newborns, like all living things around them, are naturally aimed towards the future; they grow, develop, gradually mature and ripen. Unlike all other living things, they do this among people and in culture, to the extent, however, both are presented in their immediately accessible environment.
In a hundred years, humanity has discovered and harnessed atomic energy, reached the Moon, learned to create new materials, cured and prevented many previously deadly diseases, radically changed and recreated the technologies of thousands of different industries, automated many heavy jobs, invented programming, computers, mobile phones, and communication satellites, discovered the plasticity of the brain, and understood something about the workings of the brain and the specialization of its parts. Psychology has penetrated all the nooks and crannies of our everyday life, noticeably changing our attitude towards ourselves, our experiences, and our loved ones. The list of examples of technological and social changes that have occurred is endless.
But in pedagogy, nothing even remotely significant has happened. The problem of the relationship between nurture vs nature, where nature is what comes from within, and nurture is what comes from upbringing and culture, has not been reformulated instrumentally to make learning easier and teaching more effective. Pedagogy and psychology cannot delineate the areas of their interests and possibilities, cannot agree on their positions regarding the student, the learning person, and what happens between them.
There is no disputing the fact that the object is complex beyond measure. It is constantly changing and elusively escaping researchers. Being integral and voluminous, subject to constantly conflicting influences of an innumerable multitude of different factors, pedagogy does not lend itself to traditional research logic of identifying the dependence of one variable on another. All pedagogy and all psychology still cannot offer teachers a reliable system for successful work with students, and yet some districts and ministries require teachers to conduct their own research and base their work on the latest scientific achievements.
One of the principals I had the opportunity to work for showed his teaching staff two MRI images of a brain - one sleeping (black and white) and one intensely working on some unspecified problem (and shining with all the colors of the rainbow from overwhelming excitement). The principal claimed that the latter was exactly how every student's brain should be shining when they are engrossed in work during any class.
However, in most classrooms and spaces of learning,, students are still left with the task of creating their own education. The constant barrage of “do your homework," "you need to study well," "what do you want to be when you grow up?", "put your phone away and get ready for the test" does not help them a bit and does not motivate them to be excited learners.
End of Chapter
I really enjoyed reading about education in the 20th century! But it seemed to me--and I may have been misinterpreting--that you were saying that even today, there is no reliable body of research into what educational methods are more effective than others. In fact there has been a great deal of such research, done with control groups, replicated reliably. Here is a very readable book that I recommend. (Full disclosure: the primary author is my father. Still, I do recommend the book on its merits.)
https://educationdesignsinc.com/book