Contribution of psychology to education: A science and its applications
It is obvious too all that teaching had become a highly refined art and education an intricately structured institution many centuries before psychology split off from philosophy and became a distinct area of scientific inquiry. The arts and crafts have always preceded formal science and related technologies in all domains of knowledge. For example, the Romans built magnificent bridges and aqueducts, some of which are still in daily use after two thousand years, long before those experimental and rational elaborations of physics that now undergird civil and architectural engineering. The applied arts with their bench marks and rule-of-thumb principles have always preceded the experimental, analytic, and theoretical operations on which modern science has been constructed. When the artisan is socially and economically pressed to work faster or produce a superior product, he often conjures up a way of accomplishing the assignment even though he remains ignorant of its conceptual origins. The artist’s thinking “… more frequently proceeds to its terminus by a leap than does thinking in the closed system or in experimental science” (Barlett, 1958). Despite the advantage of such leaps in thinking, there are limits to the artisan’s resources for problem-solving, natural restrictions which can be pushed back only by the systematized knowledge of science.
The successful teacher may appropriately ask why he should be concerned with the behavioral sciences, since his currently used principles and methods appear to be adequate, or even superior. Such a questions needs to be answered and, fortunately for science, history offers a reply that usually satisfies the culturally informed majority. The technical arts, restricted as they are to concerns about the here-and-now’s of daily experience, typically approach an upper limit of perfection that defines the asymptote of man’s ingenuity for valid...