Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Pedagogies and Politics 645
children already possessed. Clearly behaviorist approaches epitomize this, but the other more
nativist theories in circulation around the early twentieth century put forward equivalent projects
to classify, and control by (at best) segregation and surveillance, potentially unruly or undesirable
elements. (I say “at best” since the links between the early psychologists—especially those
who developed the statistical apparatus of psychometric testing—and eugenics are now widely
documented.
Here we see the convergence of political and educational projects. “Catching them young”
clarifies the policing and custodial as well as social engineering agendas that have informed
educational initiatives of all varieties. The modelling of the ideal citizen through educational
practices was there from the inception of modern state-sponsored schooling, and given only a
new liberal twist in the post-World-War II period with the emphasis on building democratic
subjects through appropriate familial and schooling interventions. The rational unitary subject
of the modern nation state was explicitly prefigured within educational philosophies. Piaget and
Dewey were prepared to link their philosophies with their politics, and both saw in education
a way of improving society. As the slogan goes, “our children are our future.” By this we pin
our fantasy of the future onto children as signifiers of futurity, of the world to come or what it
could become, as well as of what is now lost—so highlighting the multiple and mobile character
of the temporal significations effected by childhood. Either way, in so doing we run the risk of
justifying deficits within children’s present for a model of the future (or past)—whether national
or environmental—that they have played no part in formulating, and may not ever be in a position
to enjoy.
Now let me reiterate that I am not implying we should dispense with such agendas. Rather I am
arguing precisely the reverse: that we cannot. Representations of childhood as we know them—
and “we” here extends from Euro-U.S. contexts to all over the world through globalization
and through international aid and development (especially child development) policies—are
shot through with normative assumptions that tie individual to social development. It may well
currently be impossible to disentangle them. But at least we can attend to how they are entangled,
and with what effects. In particular we can look at how the state is configured within such subject
formations—to counter the ways the abstraction of the child works to bolster the privatisation
of the family and so occlude states’ responsibility for constituting the very problems they then
claim to address.
ENGENDERING THE DEVELOPING CHILD
So far I have been talking of “the child” and children in a gender-neutral way. Yet—
notwithstanding the ways childhood functions precisely a warrant for abstraction from the
social-gender and (all other aspects too—class, culture, attributed or assumed sexuality) infuse
representations of childhood. This is not only a matter of grammatical pronoun attribution
(although this is of course indicative not only of how the masculine pronoun “he” is taken as
representative of humanity, but also of how this secures the mother/child “couple” safely and
prefiguratively within the domain of heterosexual relations), but also less directly of cultural
qualities that have gendered associations.
The rational unitary subject of psychology, like the model of the rational, autonomous, selfregulating,
responsible citizen is—culturally speaking—masculine. Piaget’s model of the child as
mini-scientist, information-processing models of cognition and the like all reiterate the culturally
dominant project of modernity: mastery. Learning as an individual, self-sustained process bolsters
a gendered model of the rational, self-sufficient, autonomous, problem-solving subject. Various
commentators have highlighted the covert as well as explicit ways in which educational and