Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

334 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
on gender and critical developmental psychology. This work questions the patriarchal notion that
atomistc self-determination is both an educational ideal to be pursued as well as the natural end
point of psychological development. In its place it advances a feminist valuing of interdependence
and a socially constructed interpretation of identity.
The critical theory tradition unequivocally condemns the separatist emphasis of self-directed
learning within educational psychology and demonstrates how this emphasis makes an engagement
in common cause—within and outside classrooms—difficult for people to contemplate. A
separatist conception of self-direction severs the connection between private troubles and wider
social and political trends and obscures the fact that apparently private learning projects are
ideologically framed. In the rest of this chapter I wish to explore two contributions to critical
theory that inform this critique of self-directed learning. The first is Erich Fromm’s (1941) notion
of automaton conformity, briefly defined as the self-conscious desire of people in contemporary
culture to strive to be as close to an imagined ideal of normality as possible. Although Foucault
does not build centrally on Fromm’s idea of automaton conformity, I believe Fromm raises issues
that are very close to Foucault’s own articulations of disciplinary power, self-surveillance, and
the technology of the self (Foucault, 1980). The second idea is that of one-dimensional thought as
articulated by Herbert Marcuse (1964). Marcuse argued that under contemporary capitalism our
thought processes are predetermined by the overwhelming need we feel to avoid challenging the
system. One-dimensional thought is wholly instrumental, focused chiefly on making the current
system work better. There is little impulse to generate learning projects that challenge the system.
If we do feel such impulses we dismiss them as irrational Utopianism or signs of approaching
neuroticism. The logic of Marcuse’s position is that in a culture of one-dimensional thought
self-directed learning projects will be framed to underscore the legitimacy of the existing order.
I end the chapter by trying to reposition self-directed learning as an inherently radical process.
SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING AS AUTOMATON CONFORMITY
In The Sane Society (1956a) the critical theorist and social psychologist Erich Fromm laid
out a character analysis of the personality type required for capitalism to function effectively.
At the center of his analysis was capitalism’s need for ideological standardization. In Fromm’s
view modern mass production methods required the standardization of workers’ personalities to
conform to a particular characterlogical mold. Capitalism needed people who were willing to be
commanded, to be told what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction.
Such individuals are educated to crave conformity, to feel part of a mass that feels the same
impulses and thinks the same thoughts in synchronization. They devote a great deal of psychic
energy to ensuring that they conform to an imagined ideal of what it means to be “normal.” This
is the basic thesis of Escape from Freedom (1941) where Fromm attempts to explain the rise of
fascist and totalitarian regimes.
In Escape from Freedom (titled The Fear of Freedom outside the USA) Fromm argued that the
decline of traditional mores and the growth of secularism had made people more and more aware
of the fact that they had considerably increased freedom to choose how to live and what to think.
However, rather than bringing a sense of pleasurable control this recognition was a source of
existential terror to most people. The central thesis of Escape from Freedom is that the isolation,
insecurity, and alienation of modern life has resulted in many people experiencing a sense of
powerlessness and insignificance. Faced with the void of freedom people turned to two avenues
of escape —submission to a totalitarian leader, as happened in fascist countries or a compulsive
conforming to be just like everybody else.
Of these two avenues it is automaton conformity that is the most subtle and intriguing, and ultimately
the most alienating. Individuals attempt to escape the burden of freedom by transforming