Although its historians have tried to drag in anyone from Aristotle to Rousseau as early psychologists (rather in the way that the Mormons retrospectively convert their ancestors), psychology as a separate discipline is really a very late child of the enlightenment, only separating itself from philosophy towards the latter half of the nineteenth century. As G.S. Hall published The Content of Children's Minds in 1883 and set up a pedagogical seminary in Clark University four years later, it can be seen that education was one of the very first interests of psychologists.
This emphasis has continued to the present day. Though there are numerous subdisciplines (all those psychology graduates have to go somewhere, after all), the majority of the people employed as psychologists are either in the field of health – helping to treat the “mentally abnormal” or in the field of education – helping to develop the “normal child”. The timing of its emergence was, perhaps, unfortunate. Psychology, as it escaped from the woollier side of philosophy, was very rapidly captured by crude mechanicians, from Binet to Watson. This meant that psychologists started measuring before they started to think about what it was that they were measuring. In spite of all the modern developments in genetics (and it is, perhaps, significant that Hall's journal The Pedagogical Seminary changed its name to the Journal of Genetic Psychology) there is still a deep and confusing divide between the believers in the “tabula rasa” – that any child, taken early enough, can be turned into anything, and those who think that genetic makeup decides before the child's birth what colour socks it will want to wear as an adult. The timing also meant that psychology and, in particular, educational psychology, emerged as a discipline coincidentally with the growth of “governmentality” – the centralisation and increase of government power and of the growing body of knowledge which presents itself as “scientific” and whose rituals contribute to this growth. The French under Napoleon had assumed state responsibility for education at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but in spite of Disraeli's dictum “Gentlemen, we must educate our masters” the debate as to what role, if any, the state should play in controlling education continued in Britain right through the century. The argument has now been won (or lost, depending which way you look at it). Most governments now seem to have an obsession with the surveillance, monitoring and grading of children, practically from birth, based on some very narrow ideas from the mechanistic end of the educational psychology spectrum.
Given this growth in governmentality in America, from A Nation at Risk (1983) to Bush Sr's America 2000, and the way in which Britain and other anglophone countries are following in America's footsteps, the time is ripe for a major study of the philosophical implications of developments in educational psychology.
This Handbook goes some of the way toward meeting this need, and is therefore well worth considering by libraries concerned with education, psychology or public policy. J.L. Kincheloe is Professor of Education at McGill University in Canada and has been a leading figure in the study of the cultural context of education. Many of the hundred or so contributors are the usual crop of American associate professors, but they have gathered a few postgraduate students, postmodernist philosophers, and even a few non‐Americans to leaven the mass. There are 36 biographical chapters in the first volume, along with a lengthy introduction and a historical timeline. The remaining volumes contain about 80 chapters, arranged in broad subject order, discussing a wide range of social and philosophical issues affecting educational psychology. This is not a practical textbook or manual, and should not be treated as such. It is a collection of discussions of ideas relating to the ways in which children are brought up – a subject of considerable importance to us all.
My criticisms of this book mainly lie in the areas of editing and production. Quite a lot of the contributions have clearly not been properly proofread. SpellCheck will quite happily accept that Emma Goldman moved to the “Untied” [sic] States, but it leaves me with the feeling that if the author could not be bothered to read through his own work properly, I do not see why I should be expected to do so. When editing a multi‐authored book it used to be very difficult to allow contributors to read through each other's work before publication to reduce overlaps and to settle contradictions, but the technology for doing so is now simple so that there is no reason for not encouraging every contributor to look through every contribution before finally putting the book together. A small amount of flab could be removed by doing this.
Even without this sort of trimming, I find it hard to see the justification for publishing in four volumes. Allowing for unnecessary repetition – publishing the complete contents list in every volume, etc., there are about 1,000 pages of text here. These could comfortably fit into two volumes, with considerable scope for a reduction in price. This is particularly important for libraries on the margins of the subject. My own institution, for example, contains a number of child psychiatrists and philosophically orientated clinical psychologists who would have an interest in the topics discussed here. I can imagine myself suggesting the purchase of a two‐volume work at £100‐£150, say, but the price of this is rather much for a book on a marginal topic. I assume that Praeger's marketing department know what they are doing, but I suspect that only libraries catering for major teacher training courses and the larger academic psychology libraries will find this worth considering, and that social policy libraries and public reference libraries will not. Perhaps, having got this one out of the way, Kincheloe and Horn should write (not edit) a book discussing these ideas more succinctly and economically. In the mean time, this book can be recommended to those core libraries.
