The International Emergence of Educational Sciences in the Post-World War Two Years

Quantification, Visualization, and Making Kinds of People

Thomas Popkewitz, Daniel Pettersson, Kai-Jung Hsiao, Thomas Popkewitz, Daniel Pettersson, Kai-Jung Hsiao, Thomas S. Popkewitz, Daniel Pettersson, Kai-Jung Hsiao

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429594113
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

The book brings together contributions from curriculum history, cultural studies, visual cultures, and science and technology studies to explore the international mobilizations of the sciences related to education during the post-World War Two years. Crossing the boundaries of education and science studies, it uniquely examines how the desires of science to actualize a better society were converted to the search for remaking social life that paradoxically embodied cultural differences and social divisions.

The book examines how cybernetics and systems theories traveled and were assembled to turn schools into social experiments and laboratories for change. Explored are the new comparative technologies of quantification and the visualization of educational data used in the methods of mass observation. The sciences not only about the present but also the potentialities of societies and people in the psychologies of childhood; concerns for individual development, growth, and creativity; teacher education; and the quantification and assessments of educational systems. The book also explores how the categories and classifications of the sciences formed at intersections with the humanities, the arts, and political practices.

This informative volume will be of interest to researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of curriculum studies, the history of the social sciences, the history of education, and cultural studies, and to educators and school leaders concerned with education policy.

1
How Contemporary Educational Sciences Became Reasonable

The International Emergence of Educational Sciences in the Post–World War Two Years

Thomas S. Popkewitz, Daniel Pettersson, and Kai-Jung Hsiao

Introduction

The history of what is today called the social science is interesting in itself. Visible in the 19th century in relation to the “social question” in North America and Europe, the sciences emerged with speculative observations of differences to classify poverty, the poor and “deviant” populations in the urban conditions of industrialization, immigration, and the unrestrained capitalism (see for instance Rodgers, 1998; Popkewitz, 2020b). The sciences were mobile and connected in a globalization, traveling and transmogrifying as the arts of state governing in the care of people—which today is thought of as the modern Welfare State. The governing was performed through the technologies of the social and psychological sciences that generated principles about modes of living and their possibilities (see, e.g., Foucault, 1988a, 1988b; Rose, 1999). By the middle of the 20th century, this governing entailed particular technologies for inventing/interpreting data to order and classify daily related to education addressed in this book.

The sciences discussed are entanglements of multiple historical lines that are not of evolutionary history, a popular vision nor a logical progression of the wisdom of people and research. The “reason” of the sciences generated embodies different spaces and tapestries to generate particular rules and standards about the governing of society, people and change. There is a particular epistemic specificity after World War Two to the social and psychological sciences of education as cybernetics and “systems theory” that becomes folds with cultural and social distinctions organizing research. These distinctions embodied philosophical ideals in the objectifications that travel in the sciences about the desired kinds of people that research was to materialize. Further, and important to the book, is how temporal orderings about development and process are sacred and recurrent figures that embody a comparative style of reasoning. The language of science elides these normative qualities of time through systems distinctions about life as structure, function, networks, and process.

The book explores the diverse and complex sets of relations that become visible in the production of knowledge in diverse spaces in Europe, North and South America, and Asia in the middle years of the 20th century. We use the word “midcentury” and phrase “post–World War Two” as markers of different historical lines that join in the mobilizations of science; lines in which new “apparatus” of theories and techniques are expressed for governing change. We have shied away terms like the “Cold War” that signals, for example, an epoch and a causal object. The latter lacks the historicity required, we believe, to understand the emergence of the knowledge practices of the sciences under scrutiny. This book, instead, explores the trans-national sciences formed through uneven and different historical practices in particular settlements that become the social and psychological sciences that we know today. Among these practices were complex classificatory principles in thinking of social life as experimental laboratories for producing “data” about society and populations, abstracted from the culturally dependent practices of representing people and society.¹

The “thinking of the book” moves between two layers. The chapters give attention to the social and psychological sciences activated in efforts to change society and people during the postwar decades. The sciences discussed in each chapter entail different settlements of practices as they act as memories, identities, experiences, and representations of people and societies in generating the objects of change. Historically, then, we approach science as a social actor and agent that generates cultural principles to order and classify the relations of society, individuality, and the problem of change. To study science as a mode of existence in this manner is not to diminish its importance but rather to locate its specificities and to understand the limits of such knowledge.

It is these more general concerns about the pluralities of science that bring a view of another layer of the “thinking” of this book: science is an actor of modernity that performs as a transnational mode of telling the “truths” about people and societies. The introductory chapter pays attention to these transnational movements and their connection with their historical specificities, using cybernetics, systems theories, and the comparativistic reasoning of the sciences as focal points to understand the complexities that are simultaneously transcendent and immanent (see, e.g., Latour, 1991/1993). The book is an exploration of how these seemingly transcendental qualities of the reason of science are given a historicity as the sciences travel and are (re)visioned and activated in different spaces.

Transnational Movements and the Social and Educational Sciences

The transnational travel, translations, and historical specificities of the sciences are given focus through notions of indigenous foreigner and traveling libraries. The two notions explored in this chapter bring together a way of thinking and playing with ideas drawn from a range of discussions in the humanities and social sciences.² These literatures think about the materiality of science as an actor in social life, paying attention to principles about time, space, and people to order what is known, thought, and acted on as the effects of power. The two notions explored are to historicize and locate the problematic of transnational studies in their different settlements. They are not a conceptual scheme applied to each chapter. Rather, they perform as a way to think across chapters—narrated sometimes as national principles (Brazil, Finland, Sweden, the Soviet Union, Taiwan, and the United States) and at other times as epistemic/ontological principles that cross the boundaries of “context,” such as the visual cultures of science, the imagineering of utopic desires, and the comparative styles of reasoning and numbers in producing differences and divisions.

Indigenous Foreigner and the Historical Spaces of Science

Indigenous foreigner appears to be an oxymoron—opposites in conjunction that seem to identify different types of phenomena for understanding the human condition. “Indigenous” is about what seems to have a specificity and is generative of what is local and the original home of belonging. In this sense, indigeneity is often used politically to interrupt and disturb the colonial violence imposed on local cultures and traditions. The indigenous foreigner is used in this chapter differently, as an ironic phrase to historicize how disciplinary projects travel and are assembled and connected in particular historical spaces as if they “belong” or are felt as “at home” to express one’s hopes, desires, and fears that relate to conditions in which coloniality is enacted (Popkewitz, 2005).

The movements, traveling, and settlements of the practices of social science continually entail foreign authors who enter different historical spaces with different coordinates and relations than the places of origin. Karl Marx is one such foreigner who travels and produces multiple “Marks.” There is the Karl Marx who wrote in the 19th-century European industrialization and Enlightenment’s hope of a universalism, the Marx of a political movement and belonging in Soviet Leninism, the Marx of Maoist Marxism, and 1970s Eurocommunism. Russian Lev Vygotsky psychology, which fulfilled the moral agenda of Soviet Marxism, and the Calvinism reform psychology of John Dewey of early-20th-century US progressivism have become fellow travelers in contemporary US learning psychologies (Popkewitz, 1998). The “names” of authors or words (zone of proximal development) seem to travel, but the identities given to the names elide their settlements into dynamics of the grids of practices formed in different historical spaces. The authors and words are disconnected from their origins and activated elsewhere about what is natural or indigenous to experience and desire.³

The indigenous foreigner is to think about the technologies of science that project a seeming universality when instead they come with historical specificities. That universalizing is actually a historically specific relation expressed by Latour (1986) when he talks about how numbers, charts, and graphs function and travel as immobile moving objects in an arrow of time. The objectifications of economy or international student assessments, for example, in charts, graphs, and rankings appear as generalized and stabilized phenomena that are actionable in different social and political spaces. But in fact, the indigenous foreigners in this book—the Swiss Jean Piaget, the Swedish Thorsten Husén; the US-Americans Nor-bert Weiner, Jerome Bruner, and John Dewey; and the French Édouard Claparède—are not universals that can be reductively brought into different spaces in which the sciences operated. The iconic authors are, as Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987; 1991/1994 a; 1991/1994b) suggest, conceptual personae, intermediaries in complex movements, sets of relations, and assemblages to enunciate particular solutions and plans for action. The analyses in this book examine, for example, the historical movements of systems theory and cybernetics in the postwar years as a partial fold in the reasoning of the ordering of conduct and change. The “seeing” and acting of the social life as systems are reterritorized in different places—their settlements embody singularities as well as similarities as systems theories become folds in the complex practices that order American, Brazilian, Swedish, and Taiwanese research.

Traveling Libraries: The Indigenous Foreigner as an Intermediary in Science

Traveling libraries is a phrase to direct attention to how the indigenous foreigner becomes part of the settlements of science in different historical spaces. The seemingly stable, immobile moving objects of systems theory and cybernetics are continually worked on in different cultural landscapes as assemblages. The assemblages or grids of practices of different “authors” are neither reductive nor additive but rather creative, vibrant historical practices. New objects and distinctions between social and individual life are created. Postwar Taiwan, Sweden, and the Soviet Union, for example, connect systems theory alongside the cultural principles of Confucianism, the liberal welfare state norms of statistical administration, and imperial and Marxist–Leninist norms of historical materialism (Hsiao, Mikhalova, & Pettersson and Lindblad, Pettersson, & Runesdotter, this volume).

The notion of a traveling library is used to explore how authors travel with other texts/authors that is metaphorically like having a whole group of books sitting on a desk waiting to be put to the test of “thought.” Dussel’s chapter, for example, explores the interconnections between technology, art, design, and educational research that crosses multiple borders of “authors” in creating particular tactile pedagogies. While the arts, technologies, and science are usually perceived as separate and even peripheral to the models of sense, measure, and calculation in science, Dussel’s argument makes clear that analytic distinctions are historically inadequate. Inadequate as the separations obscure the flows of knowledge and confluences of cybernetics and creativity in the early-20th-century avant-garde movements, most notably from the Italian futurists and the Bauhaus. The tactile pedagogies develop as traveling libraries and unstable settlements as they move from the mundane places of university seminars and laboratories and artistic workshops for children to travel between Milano in Italy; Ulm in Germany; Chicago, Cambridge, and Los Angeles and through the biographical trajectories of design educators who later configured digital media pedagogies and who saw the school, teachers, and children as pedagogical desires.

The reading, thinking, and giving coherence occurs at the interstices of the collective readings that are not merely copies of any single author, nor are they replications of their earlier spaces of action. The order and classification assembled is something else. The inscription of psychological principles assembled with Brazil, Godinho Lima argues in her chapter, is something other than its European and American progenitors. The imported models of biology, US psychology of behaviorism, and Piaget’s genetic epistemology are given a specificity to reasoning about child development that was not merely adding different parts. The Swedish reasoning on educational statistics and measurements imported and transmogrified estimations of the educability of students as policy “truths” concerned the educational expansion and reformist ambitions of its welfare state to increase individual equality and equity (Wärvik et al., this volume).

The transnational task of this book, then, is to consider the creation of the practices of science as the interstices of specific historical lines that travel and work relationally. Traveling libraries methodologically challenge the legacies of philosophical realism that connects with positivism and empiricism in contemporary sciences and the historians’ archival readings of historical documents as “the given word.” The latter creates a Euclidean space that flows as a linear process of movem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• About the Contributors
• List of Illustrations
• 1 How Contemporary Educational Sciences Became Reasonable: The International Emergence of Educational Sciences in the Post–World War Two Years
• Part 1 Mobilizing Science and Desires for Better Societies
• Part 2 Locationless Logics and Fabricating Differences
• Part 3 Systems, Cybernetics: Imagineering Belonging as Social Differentiation
• Index