The Disciplined Mind: How Mid-19 th Century North American Teachers Described Students' Mind, Mental Ability, and Learning

Introduction The discipline of educational psychology emerged in the last two decades of the 19th century with an ever more intense attempt to collect measures of human conduct. As researchers in this nascent discipline determined which measures were to be collected and how implications might be construed from such measures, they were, at the same time, articulating interpretations about what they held the mind to be. Such interpretations often involved the application of presuppositions, philosophical premises, and folk understandings (Danziger, 1990; Rose, 1996) that pre-existed the measures under examination. For example, G. Stanley Hall (1893) argued that a child's ability to recognize objects and the child's connection of ideas with these objects were predictors of that child's mental ability. Hall's belief that mental ability involved making connections among objects and ideas was not a novel psychological hypothesis. Rather, Hall was investigating a notion of mental ability and a popular theory of its constitution that, as we will discuss, had been commonly held by educators in the United States for at least half a century. Although early studies were often influenced by commonly held beliefs such as those surrounding mental ability, educational psychologists also asserted the value of their work by contrasting with, and refuting, popular beliefs about mind, learning, and mental ability. Thorndike's (1903) refutation of "faculty psychology," for example, was a refutation of beliefs about the generality of relationships among reasoned principles, ideas, and mental ability that had been popularly held for half a century and had sources in the philosophical discourse of the European Enlightenment. In short, educational psychology did not start with a blank slate. In terms of both the conceptions that shaped interpretations of quantitative data and the conceptions that were challenged by this new discipline, researchers were influenced by presuppositions, philosophical premises, educational theories, and folk understandings that had sources in the ideas and practices of earlier generations. In order to understand the foundations upon which key psychological concepts and educational theories have been developed, then, it is helpful to understand how mind, mental ability, and learning were understood prior to the emergence of psychology as a formal discipline. In this article, I examine the discourse of four American educators from 1859. By this time schools were widespread across the United States and there was a burgeoning of journals and books concerned with education. By 1859, a corpus of professional educators had emerged, centered in the towns and cities of New England. These educators were concerned with many of the questions that later became central to the discipline of educational psychology: questions of mental ability, how people learn, and how the mind connects and relates with the world. The four educators examined herein published treatises on education in 1859 that involved discussion on how children should be taught. Through these discussions, it is possible to construe how each of these educators articulated an understanding of mind, mental ability, and learning. The article is divided into four sections. The first section provides a brief introduction to the historical context within which these texts were written. The second section introduces each educator and, with as low level of inference as possible, provides a description of how each educator referred to mind, mental ability, and learning. The third section considers some possible influences--social, intellectual, and theological--that may have influenced each educator's perspective. The fourth section provides an interpretation of the philosophical and moral sources implicit in the descriptions of mind, mental ability, and learning provided by each educator. 1859 Context In the first half of the 19th Century there was a steadily growing social movement towards the establishment of common, state run schools (Beck, 1965; Cremin, 1976; Cubberley, 1948; Gutek, 1984). …