What Educational Psychology Can Contribute to Educational Philosophy

Nicholas C. Burbules

University of Illinois

(Published: Educational Psychologist, Vol. 38 No. 3 (2003): 183-185)

I am pleased to participate in this important symposium — important because of who else is part of it, and important because of the timeliness of the topic, the relevance of philosophy to educational psychology (and, as I will address, the relevance of educational psychology to philosophy). Given the generous hand of welcome these writers extend toward philosophy on behalf of educational psychology, it would be unseemly to do less than to return the hand of greeting from my point of view.

Patricia Alexander, John McDermott, Karen Murphy, Jonna Kulikowich & Thomas DeFranco, Jerry Rosiek, and Bradford Woods all describe the estrangement of educational psychology from philosophy, and note that for many philosophers — most notably those from the pragmatist tradition of Dewey, Peirce, and James — this separation would be seen as puzzling and counterproductive. They touch upon many points at which philosophy has fundamentally shaped theories and concepts in educational psychology, and the price that educational psychology pays when it neglects its philosophical roots. I could not improve on their analysis. But I can respond to it with some reciprocal questions: What trends have worked to keep the two fields separate? and, Who is estranged from whom?

Since autobiographical notes seem to be in order here, I do want to start by explaining that since my own initial exposure to educational psychology was largely through the work of such people as Richard Anderson, David Berliner, John Seely Brown, Allan Collins, Lee Cronbach, Marcia Linn, Ralph Reynolds, and Lee Shulman — all well-informed about philosophy and open in acknowledging the roots of their own thinking in the work of philosophers such as Kant, Wittgenstein, and the major pragmatists.[1] And many of my own early mentors and colleagues in philosophy of education, including Denis Phillips, Nel Noddings, Robert Ennis, Gary Fenstermacher, Michael Parsons, and others, all collaborated with psychologists or wrote on psychological themes. So it never occurred to me in my formative years to think of these fields as antagonistic. But if they seem more distant from each other lately, it is worth pondering why this might be so.

The concern of the contributors here is primarily with the reasons why educational psychology has lost touch with its philosophical roots. But it is just as true to say that if for many philosophers the fields of philosophy and psychology were never separate to begin with (recall that Dewey held the Chair in Philosophy and Psychology when he was at University of Chicago), it is philosophy’s loss to forget its own affiliation with psychology too. As I will argue that affiliation may be more salient today than ever for both fields.

Woods cites the recent essay by Rene Arcilla that we published in Educational Theory: “Why Aren’t Philosophers and Educators Speaking to Each Other?”[2] That essay in turn sparked a symposium that came out in the Summer 2002 issue, which included essays by Kathleen Knight Abowitz, Don Arnstine, Eric Bredo, Fred Ellett, Gary Fenstermacher, Harvey Siegel, Barbara Stengel, and Audrey Thompson, variously replying to the issues raised by Arcilla’s piece.[3] Here I want to address one strand of his argument, that the “social sciences” (here meant to include psychology) have supplanted philosophy as an influence upon educational policy and practice. This thesis was vigorously questioned by several of the authors in the symposium (as was the underlying premise of his title, the assumption that philosophers of education aren’t talking with educators — which many of the respondents disputed), but I think this debate is on to something important. It is not a matter, in my view, of simply whether philosophy is “relevant” to education or not, but of how decisions about educational policy and practice get made today — and the fact is that by and large academic research of any stripe (including most social science research) is generally ignored. There are numerous examples of popular policies and practices being established, or perpetuated, in the face of clear, unambiguous research on the other side. And recent proposals by the present Bush administration to emphasize more “scientific” research, and to cull from government archives previous studies that supposedly fail to meet today’s methodological standards, is pretty clearly guided by a selective distaste for research that does not support government proposals being made on other, more political and ideological grounds.

I emphasize this trend because the philosophically inflected view of educational psychology favored by the authors in this symposium is equally threatened if the narrowly scientistic view of educational research gains leverage in the funding, publication, and employment of future education scholars. It will be less a matter of the relevance of philosophers and (these) educational psychologists to each other, but of the relevance of either if the conceptions of knowledge, inquiry, and methodology implicit in the scientistic view of educational research take hold. This is what makes the essay here by Rosiek so timely and important.

Rosiek draws from Deweyan arguments about the reflexive and transactional nature of inquiry to emphasize the responsibility of researchers to more than just a narrow sense of empirical truth. Woods, similarly, stresses that research needs to be meaningful, and not just “true.” Rosiek’s idea of “qualitative experimentalism” is meant to highlight three key ways in which the pragmatist emphasis on outcomes cannot be turned into a simple instrumentalism: first, that determinations of truth and purpose always rely upon tacit value commitments; second, that judgments about individual outcomes are inseparable from judgments about broader social outcomes; and third, that proximate effects cannot be studied or evaluated apart from considering longer-term consequences as well. This argument, in the classical Deweyan mode, is in no way anti-scientific or anti-empirical or anti-experimental; but it wants to reconceptualize these in terms that are more philosophically complex and overtly value-laden. This is an important part of what philosophy can offer to an empirical discipline like educational psychology.

But at the same time I want to pick up a question that comes up at the end of Murphy’s essay: not just what educational psychology can learn from philosophy, but also what philosophy can learn from educational psychology (or at least educational psychology of a certain type). In order to address this question, I have to return to the question of why they have become estranged from each other in the first place.

It seems to me that educational psychology and philosophy (or, in the present context, educational philosophy) have been on very different trajectories since Dewey’s time. Alexander and Murphy both trace the evolution on the side of educational psychology quite clearly: it was unremarkable for people to see Dewey or James as psychologists at the time they wrote. Academic disciplines were less narrowly professionalized, for one thing. Educational psychology, as Rosiek points out, was eclectic, “experimental” in the broad sense of exploration and innovation. But over the course of the twentieth century it became more homogeneous, more empirical, more behavioristic — more “experimental” in a scientifically narrow and more instrumental sense. (There is an interesting controversy over the extent to which Dewey’s occasionally ambiguous comments about science and inquiry can be held culpable in this evolution; but it is certainly true that here as in other areas his legacy is often invoked by disparate and even contradictory positions.)

Meanwhile, American philosophy of education, which while never monolithically pragmatist certainly had a clear sense of itself and its worth during Dewey’s reign, has followed the opposite trajectory. Over the last century it has become increasingly eclectic, pulled to and fro by a series of “isms” and schools of philosophical thought chiefly defined by their antagonisms to other schools of thought (the analytics versus the continentals; the critical neo-marxists versus the liberals; the feminists versus the more masculinist traditions of philosophy; the postmodernists and poststructuralists versus nearly everyone else). This dynamism has yielded a tremendously rich and exciting intellectual climate, but it has also shaken the clear self-conception of what educational philosophy is and what its value to educational thought and practice should be: Is its value reconstructive? Deconstructive? Prescriptive? Critical? Analytic and clarificatory? Does it need to concern itself with ground-level issues of education at all? In Deweyan terms, it is the mirror image of educational psychology today; if educational psychology is becoming insufficiently “experimental” in the broad sense of exploration and innovation, if it is too unreflexive, in Rosiek’s terms, then educational philosophy is becoming insufficiently “experimental” in the sense of testing its theoretical disputes against the standard of practical consequences — it is often too “meta” in its preoccupations, and too quick to pull up its own roots for reflexive examination.

And so, in this instance as in many others, I see the most desirable outcome not as one discipline establishing sovereignty over the other, or “teaching” the other, but a relation of collaboration, albeit one with some differences and tensions built in. The educational psychologists and educational philosophers I mentioned in my brief autobiographical discursus all provide models for doing this. What can philosophy gain from educational psychology? Philosophy likes to regard itself as the queen of the disciplines or, to give a very different metaphor, the ultimate foundation for all the rest. Self-flattering as it might be to think this way, I think Richard Rorty has it right to argue that philosophy does not deserve such primacy, and suffers when it presumes this status for itself — suffers, I would say, because so many philosophical questions turn out to be, at base, educational questions. Questions of ethical improvement must be, in part, questions of moral development. Questions of epistemic truth must be, in part, questions of how we form more perspicacious thinkers and more rigorous communities of inquiry. Questions of democracy and justice must be, in part, questions of how we foster civic virtues in citizens worthy of such free and open societies. Hence, these philosophical concerns all raise issues of teaching, learning, and development — and, needless to say in the present context, they are all issues that educational psychology can contribute to understanding.

Yet in such a collaborative relation it is more than a matter of educational philosophy prescribing the what (the aims, the content) and educational psychology prescribing the how (the most effective methods). On the one hand, methods always must be judged by more than merely their effectiveness; there are implicit moral dimensions in every human choice and activity. On the other hand, identifications of aims or values that have no tether to what is realistic or possible are merely an intellectual exercise. Speaking to my side of this relation, one of the reasons why philosophy of education suffers periodic anxieties about its “relevance” is because it has often found it easier to find fault with prevailing educational policies and practices than to help identify and encourage better, workable alternatives; yet the hard labor of doing so, which I have called “situated philosophy,” entails forging a partnership with other fields of educational inquiry and practice and accepting the fundamentally pragmatic nature of this endeavor — and not in a sense that one must be a “pragmatist” per se to accept.[4] For example, McDermott’s invocation of existentialism raises another very different way in which philosophy needs to be “grounded.”

One of the areas in which this collaboration is especially pertinent today is in coming to grips with the educational potential, and the dangers, of new information and communication technologies. This is a case where learning theories, cognitive science, social constructivist notions of identity, theories of virtuality, communication theory, conceptions of globalization and networking, and the epistemology of how “information” becomes “knowledge” have all played a part in rethinking how these resources can support new models of teaching and learning communities — not only “delivering” standardized pedagogical content more cheaply, more efficiently, or at a distance. In this rethinking educational psychologists, philosophers, and a host of others are playing important roles in reimagining the possible; and because these new technologies, for all their limitations, still remain relatively unregulated, decentralized, and noninstitutionalized, these possibilities are less constrained by traditions, regulations, and standardized practices, as many areas of schooling are. Here the boundaries of radical innovation remain largely undetermined, and so these new technologies provide greater latitude to an “experimentalism” that is both open and grounded; both creative and imaginary and related to what theory tells us about how learning takes place. It is a space where educational philosophy and educational psychology can collaborate, and are collaborating.

If I have any difference of opinion with these essays, it is merely in wanting to insist that the relation of educational psychology to philosophy does not depend on the particular connections described by the pragmatists. There are reasons why their concepts, and the way in which they saw their own work as spanning the disciplinary gulf, provide especially clear and apt examples of the general point. But as is hinted at in some of these essays (McDermott’s and especially Kulikowich and DeFranco’s), parallel but quite different arguments could be developed about the potentially fruitful connections between these disciplines, drawing from the work of Wittgenstein, say, or Husserl, or Merleau-Ponty, or Deleuze. The challenge to philosophy (or philosophy of education) of varying stripes is to reconceive the experimental ethos — whether pragmatist or not — in a manner that makes its theories answerable and revisable in the face of real-world consequences. The challenge to educational psychology, these essays make clear, is to reconceive the experimental ethos in a manner that is not narrowly empiricist or merely instrumental. These twin challenges, each mirror images of the other, provide a starting point, I would suggest, for the conversation called for in this symposium.

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[1] Interestingly, many of these same figures are cited by Kulikowich and DeFranco, whose essay reads as a case study of the fertility of thinking at the margins of these two disciplines.

[2] Arcilla, R. V. (2002). Why aren’t philosophers and educators speaking to each other? Educational Theory, 52 (1), pp. 1-11.

[3] Educational Theory, 52 (3), Summer 2002.

[4] Burbules, N.C. (2002). The dilemma of philosophy of education: “Relevance” or critique? Educational Theory, 52 (3), 257-261, 349-357.