What Psychology can do for Education

Abstract

Educators too often rely upon misleading models to account for educational phenomena. These models owe their existence, at least in part, to the failure of philosophy and psychology to work together. Key words often signal that a person has adopted one or more of these models: "skill," "process," "problem-solving," or "domain." Each model is either misleading or useless.

Ordinary language, however, does contain a more useful model for educators—the teleological or purposive model. The teleological model, like the others, pervades talk in the field of education, but conflicts with and contradicts the others in subtle and unrecognized ways.

A remarriage of philosophy and psychology is needed. In cooperation with educators, a subsequent program of research—however imperfect in conception—should be built explicitly and deliberately upon one of the logics of explanation found in ordinary language. Research of this kind would follow from careful analysis of such concepts as achievement, polymorphy and, above all, reception. This latter concept could serve as the basis for a new model of pedagogy, the pedagogy of receptions, to replace the ill-conceived now-dominant pedagogy of skills.