The educated self: psychology's contribution to the education of children in twentieth-century North America

Critical scholarship contends that psychology has provided ways of thinking about our selves that are consistent with the Enlightenment notion of persons as autonomous and self-governing. Utilizing this framework, I examined the interrelationships between psychological conceptions and practices of the self, and the education of persons. I conducted a critical review of self, children and schooling in PSYCINFO from 1850 to 2008, and an analysis of self measures in educational psychology. Psychology’s scientific measurements and classifications have produced an increasingly fragmented self, the various aspects of which are presented as amenable to research-based educational interventions. I also conducted an exhaustive review of elementary school curricula in British Columbia, Canada from 1872 to 2008, to understand the ways that public education has contributed to the production of children as selves. Conceptions of the self in school curricula, derived from psychological theory and research, have resulted in an elevation of goals and strategies of self-fulfillment and individual freedom over citizenship and civic virtue. I then examined how psychological theorizing and research on the self translates into B.C. elementary school and classroom practices and policies. Psycho-educational kits, programs and initiatives adopted at school and classroom levels emphasize personal expression and self-responsibility at the expense of social commitment and curricular content. I contend that psychological theories, research, and practices have produced an empirical self that has contributed much to educators' understandings of the selves of children as discrete, calculable sets of competencies that can be developed and enhanced through instructional procedures. Whether the measured self is packaged as scores on self-concept scales, steps in self-esteem programs, or self-regulated skills and strategies, this self encourages judgements, comparisons, and reshaping of students’ selves in accordance with psychological conceptions and practices of self-fulfillment and self-management. Disciplinary psychology has played a critical role in advancing the notion of the radically free individual that is at odds with the notion of the active, responsible citizen. A shift to an ontology of persons contingently positioned as sociohistorically situated agents is necessary. On this view, individual freedom and civic duty are virtues that can co-exist in a community-oriented liberal democratic society.