Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

110 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
if at all. He based his belief on the fact that great leaders in the past such as Charlemagne were
illiterate, and other figures he considered important, such as the Virgin Mary, achieved great
things without the need for literacy. In Hall’s view, the true nature of the child—which owed itself
completely to heredity—would lead the child to achieve as much as he or she would be able to,
without the interference of education.
Hall’s belief in the power of heredity over instruction greatly influenced those who became
his students at Clark University, such as Henry Goddard, who was an advocate of eugenics,
and Lewis Termin, who revised the Binet intelligence test into the Stanford-Binet test. Hall’s
work and recommendations in this area are at odds with those today who strive for a postformal
understanding of cognition that allows for intelligences and knowledges that are not honored by
such tests or that differ from knowledges legitimized by middle class, white culture.
Developmental Psychology and the Child Study Movement
Hall’s developmentalist approach came out of the belief that the study of child development
was the most scientific approach to determining instruction, and was directly influenced by his
study of psychology. This perception of pedagogical theory emerging from “scientific” research
appealed to the increasingly science-obsessed world of academia. When he became president of
Clark University Hall he founded a pedagogical “seminary” for the scientific study of education,
out of which came the journal Pedagogical Seminary that later became the Journal of Genetic
Psychology. Even earlier in his career Hall encouraged his colleagues and students to collect
“scientific” data about children, their innate knowledge, and their physical and psychological
development. He felt it was of the utmost importance and the highest achievement of a scientific
understanding of education to get to the point where the school system would be aligned with
the child’s “nature and needs” rather than trying to force the child into aligning with the needs
of the school system. He advocated the use of questionnaires to find out everything from what
children entered school knowing to their habits and their fears. By 1915 Hall and his colleagues
had developed 194 questionnaires by his own count.
Many of the questions that Hall had about the knowledge of children in industrial cities stemmed
from his own childhood which he describes in his 1927 autobiography, Life and Confessions of
a Psychologist, as bucolic. He considered it his good fortune to be born on a farm removed from
even the closest village by more than a mile and exposed to the influences of the natural world
throughout his childhood. In his 1883 work, The Contents of Children’s Minds,Hallshowedthat
the children of Boston had no idea of the natural world due to their urban experience and he
proposed that classroom teachers made too many assumptions about what the children arrived
understanding. In response to the popularity of Hall’s work—a popularity which he attributed
in part to the increase in urbanization and the problems that were arising for children, families,
and schools in that setting—the National Education Association founded a Department of Child
Study in 1894.
Sexist Psychology, Hall and Women
Though in his written work Hall mentions with respect many woman colleagues and students, he
held some of the typical beliefs of the nineteenth century regarding women. Hall, like many men of
his era, believed that too much study interfered with a woman’s reproductive system. He was also
concerned about the potentially detrimental psychological effect of the overwhelming presence of
women in schools both as teachers and students during a male’s adolescent years and advocated
separation of the sexes for the upper grades. He wrote of psychology identifying pathological
traits in adolescent girls, such as a penchant for deceit, and declares the stereotypical belief that