What has psychology got to do with education?

Abstract

In an earlier paper in this periodical (Wetherick, 2017) I considered general philosophical issues that confront all scientists whatever their discipline. How is it that evolution has produced organisms that, being fully subject to the laws of chemistry/physics, can nevertheless formulate systems of law that govern the whole material world of which they form part? It is the essential characteristic of human beings that they produce models of their world, and psychology is concerned with the capacity to do that. In the second part of the paper I consider implications for educational psychology, arguing that it is hard to improve on the capacities for learning that have devloped through evolution, and that the scope of what can be achieved through education is limited. I go on to consider certain specialist areas of applied psychology (e.g. Autism, Mental Defect) which face problems of their own as practised at present.