On educational psychology

The relevancy of an applied area depends in part upon the definition of the process, institution or event to which it is applied. The contribution that can be made by educational psychology is partially a function of the particular meaning invested in ‘education’. This statement is not merely the usual innocuous preface to an extended discussion. Indeed, it is our major thesis. Too many teachers and administrators have thought of educational psychology as consisting only of an ordered catalogue of educational prescriptions, which, together with those provided by the other foundational fields in education, ‘tell’ the teacher ‘how to teach’ and the administrator ‘how to administer’. The fallacy lies not only in the much too complimentary respect for the status of our knowledge in these areas but, more fundamentally, in the conception of education as a collection of successful recipes – the teacher or administrator is a person who has been armed with a bag-of-tricks into which he reaches for a decision regarding any given specific professional problem. Although this unfortunate orientation becomes an increasingly less frequent one, it still exists and may be partially attributable to the turn-of-the-century efforts to make education ‘scientific’ by attempting to make it merely more factual . 1