Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

256 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
that focus on training students to conform to preexisting norms. This mechanistic tradition also
prevails in the lack of allowances for contextual delivery of instruction in classrooms. There
is a reliance on a one-size-fits-all micro-managed curriculum that ignores issues that surround
students with varying socioeconomic backgrounds.
WATSON’S THOUGHTS AND BELIEFS
The advent of Watson’s work on behaviorism at Chicago represented an enormous shift from
the functionalist psychology that his colleagues had supported. Functionalism gave the researcher
an affective dimension by providing an opportunity for putting oneself in the place of the animal
one was studying in an attempt to fully understand it. An entry into the affective dimension
via functionalism and consciousness only added to Watson’s consternation with the direction
of psychology as a discipline. He firmly believed in the need for the scientific dimension of
psychology. He attempted to reach this dimension through behaviorism. This search for scientific
validation was important to Watson because it was the first step to having psychology held on
par with other scientific disciplines. In an attempt to put forward his perspective on the field of
psychology, he even proposed that the word introspection be banned from use in psychology.
Watson’s inability to accept critiques of his science is exemplified in his response to education
scholars and philosophers and other critics of his work. In 1910, E. F. Buchner, a professor at Johns
Hopkins who was renowned for his work in education and philosophy, critiqued behaviorism by
questioning how the theory could remain devoted to being purely scientific and still maintain
its practical use. Watson retorted by referring to Buchner as “a high-class Janitor” who came
to Johns Hopkins “to coax these hayseed teachers to eat out of the University’s hand, nothing
more.” When questioned about his thoughts on John Dewey, he said, “I never knew what he was
talking about then, and unfortunately for me, I still don’t know.” These blanket dismissals of other
paradigm’s perspectives personified the stance of the pure behaviorists. Watson’s belief was that
if psychology would pursue the plan he suggested, “the educator, the physician, the jurist and the
businessman could utilize our data in a practical way.” He believed that behaviorism could and
should be used in every possible arena. The practice of trying to make all things fit into one mold
has been a long-lasting agenda of educational psychology. Its origins lie in Watson’s attempt to
use behaviorism in all arenas that involved human interaction. It remains today in the use of IQ
testing as the criteria for measuring and judging human intelligence.
It is therefore also necessary for contemporary students of educational psychology to delve into
a study of comparative psychology as it relates to Watson’s movement from animal psychology
to behaviorism. There is an obvious connection between these two areas of psychology, and
each has exerted a powerful influence on the other. The natural progression usually discussed
in the development from animal to human study by Watson was not necessarily a simple transition
from the study of rats to the study of humans. There was not an end to the study of rats
and then a new clear beginning to Watson’s study on humans. The theoretical positions that
ground behaviorism in humans were grounded in the experimental work that Watson conducted
in animal psychology. Here we uncover the behaviorist belief that if experimentation is empirically
verifiable for the rat, it would also be empirically verifiable in humans. As educational
psychologists study Watson, we must view him not only as a behaviorist but also as an animal
psychologist. There was no evolution, no change of interpretive frameworks from Watson the
animal psychologist to Watson the behaviorist. He was both. Despite Watson’s clamor for having
psychology stand as an individual natural science, the nature of the science that he prescribed
relied heavily on physiology because in essence it was a study of animals. This work can therefore
be interpreted as a study in the earlier discovered and explored discipline of physiology. In