(Routledge Research in International and Comparative Education) Thomas S. Popkewitz, Daniel Pettersson, Kai-Jung Hsiao - The International Emergence of Educational Sciences in The Post-World War Two Y

The International Emergence
of Educational Sciences in the

Post-World War Two Years
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 were 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.
Thomas S. Popkewitz is a professor of curriculum and instruction and

the Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison, USA.
Daniel Pettersson is an associate professor in pedagogy at the University

of Gävle and Uppsala University, Sweden.
Kai-Jung Hsiao is a PhD student of curriculum and instruction at the

University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA.
Routledge Research in International and Comparative
Education
This is a series that offers a global platform to engage scholars in continu-

ous academic debate on key challenges and the latest thinking on issues
in the fast-growing field of International and Comparative Education.
Titles in the series include:

Japanese Schooling and Identity Investment Overseas
Exploring the Cultural Politics of “Japaneseness” in Singapore
Glenn Toh
Considering Inclusive Development across Global Educational

Contexts
How Critical and Progressive Movements can Inform Education
Christopher J. Johnstone
Blended and Online Learning for Global Citizenship

New Technologies and Opportunities for Intercultural Education
Edited by William J. Hunter and Roger Austin
The International Emergence of Educational Sciences in the

Quantification, Visualization, and Making Kinds of People
Edited by Thomas S. Popkewitz, Daniel Pettersson, and
Kai-Jung Hsiao
Teaching and Learning for Comprehensive Citizenship

Global Perspectives on Peace Education
Edited by Candice C. Carter
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

com/Routledge-Research-in-International-and-Comparative-Education/
book-series/RRICE
The International Emergence
of Educational Sciences in the
Quantification, Visualization,
and Making Kinds of People
Edited by Thomas S. Popkewitz,

Daniel Pettersson and Kai-Jung Hsiao
First published 2021
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Preface viii
About the Contributors xiv
List of Illustrations xvii
1 How Contemporary Educational Sciences Became

Reasonable: The International Emergence of Educational
Sciences in the Post–World War Two Years 1
TH O M A S S . PO P KE WITZ, DAN IE L P E TTE RSSON, AND
K A I - J U N G H SIAO
PART 1
Mobilizing Science and Desires for Better Societies 25
2 Science as “the Beacon” for Social Change: The Reason of

Systems in American Educational Research and Development 27
TH O M A S S . PO P KE WITZ
3 Tactile Pedagogies in the Postwar: Cybernetics, Art, and

the Production of a New Educational Rationale 51
I N É S DU S S E L
4 Science as Utopia: Infrastructures, Pedagogies, and the

Prophecy of Design 71
J U N Z I H UA NG
vi Contents
PART 2
Locationless Logics and Fabricating Differences 89
5 Post–World War Two Psychology, Education, and the Creative

Child: Fabricating Differences 91
CATA R I N A S ILVA MARTIN S
6 Objectification of Human Nature: “Adolescent” as a

Taxonomy of Postwar Taiwan Actors 109
K A I - J U N G H SIAO
7 The Development of the Child and National Progress:

Behaviorism and Cultural Deprivation in Brazil 128
A N A L AU R A GO DIN H O L IMA
8 The Embrace of Systems in Post-World War Two Teacher

Education Research 149
S U N YO U N G L E E
PART 3
Systems, Cybernetics: Imagineering Belonging as Social
Differentiation 167
9 Diagrams of Feedback: Behaviorism, Programmed Instruction,

and Cybernetic Planning 169
A N TTI SA A R I
10 From “Threat” to “Treat”: Cybernetics in the Soviet Union 187

TATI A N A M I K H AYL OVA & DA N IE L P E TTE RSSON
11 School Differentiation and Re-forming Human Kinds in

Swedish Welfare State Education After the Second World War 207
G U N - B R I TT WÄRVIK, SVE RKE R L IN DB L A D, DANIEL PET T ERSSON
A N D CA RO L IN E RUN E SDOTTE R
12 Quantification of an Educational System: Numbers in the

Social Differentiation of Brazil 225
N ATÁ L I A D E L ACE RDA GIL
Index 242
Acknowledgments
The process of organizing this book as an intellectual project involved

the support of many people and organizations. In particular, we thank
Sverker Lindblad and Gun-Britt Wärvik, with whom we have been work-
ing to understand the changing relation of science, society, and policy,
focusing especially on international student assessments (funded by the
Swedish Research Council). Our conversations were always productive
as we proceeded in this book.
Toward the end of the project, we had the luxury of organizing an
international seminar to discuss the papers related to the themes of the
book, of which many later became the chapters in this book. That semi-
nar was held at the Uppsala University in May 2019. We appreciate the
generosity of the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond for providing support for
this seminar. We also express our deep appreciation to the Uppsala Uni-
versity research group STEP (Studies in Educational Policy and Philoso-
phy) for its strong support and participation in our conversations. The
appreciation also extends to the participation of the researchers from
Sweden and other countries.
The support of Chris Kruger in the Department of Curriculum and
Instruction, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has been important
to the production of the book. She was an alter ego in the preparation of
the manuscript: She ensured its production integrity and kept us on track.
For multiple reasons involving the nature of the scholarship that had
to be engaged by the contributors of the book, the time it required went
well beyond what was originally planned. Elsbeth Wright, editor for both
Education, Psychology & Mental Health Research and Taylor & Francis
was superb. She continually steered us in a thoughtful way, getting the
book into the production process. It was a longer process than expected,
and Elsbeth continually recognized that in the back of timetables were
unregulated issues of life and scholarly work.
Preface
The book focuses on the international movements and settlements of the

post–World War Two social and educational sciences related to educa-
tion. It explores the diverse and complex sets of relations connected in the
production of knowledge in diverse spaces in Europe, North and South
America, and Asia. The expansions of the welfare state and changes in
the political regimes across the Atlantic and Pacific directed attention to
problems of recovery, reconstruction, and the reimagining of societies
and education. Institutionally, the “old regimes” were viewed in ruins,
and humanity’s defeat of fascism and the end of colonialism created a
feeling that there was an opportunity to realize a generalized Enlighten-
ment’ dream of universal peace and prosperity.
Post–World War Two sciences provide important intervention for
enacting these utopic desires. Embodied in the sciences were the hopes
of actualizing a better society that was viewed as bringing together eco-
nomic prosperity with a higher degree of equality and a cosmopolitan-
ism of designing possibilities for human betterment. They mobilized as
knowledge practices to find solutions to social problems, responses to
technological changes, and “a beacon” for modernization, equity, and
globalization. The desires were often converted into the search for
remaking social life through the knowledge, skills, and performances of
individuals and, at the same time, undoing the social wrongs created in
modernity related to social inequalities. Each of these desires embodied
its own paradoxes.
This book explores these Post–World War Two social and psychologi-
cal sciences associated with education as “actors,” productive in gener-
ating cultural principles about the relation of society and individuality.
Particular epistemic principles about the “nature” of people and society
were generated in the psychologies of childhood; concerns for individ-
ual development, growth, and creativity; the production of measures to
assess what people think and do in the present, and they presented the
potentialities of a desired society and its order. The “reason” that ordered
the postwar sciences related to education, however, entailed complex
historical lines that permeated sociological literatures, classifications of
Preface ix
cultures to differentiate anthropological studies, and, as some chapters
explore, formed at the intersections of the humanities, the arts, and politi-
cal practices.
The postwar transnational sciences that institutionally and epistemo-
logically order and plan the social and populational changes explored
in the book is the history of the present. The questions that underlie
the project emerged with studies of contemporary research, inquiring
into the conditions that gave intelligibility to today’s learning sciences,
teacher education research, and international assessments of student per-
formances in the designing of national efforts to modernize and produce
more-effective schools. The historical trajectories and patterns explored,
we believe, are significant for considering borders and a concreteness in
current doxa about social life and the desires for change that work into
initiatives about quality and effectiveness in reforming schools.
The preparing of this book brings together different odysseys. There is
the long-term interest of authors in the comparative styles of reasoning
as a central historical practice in the social and educational sciences in
which the concern with change and “social improvement” paradoxically
generates principles of exclusion and abjection (see Popkewitz, 2008,
2020). With this interest come our more recent concerns with big data
and the production of numbers as an “actor” in how truth is told about
society and people (Elde Mølstad and Pettersson, 2019; Lindblad, Pet-
tersson & Popkewitz, 2018).
These trajectories were rearticulated in the study of contemporary
research concerned with macro-quantitative international assessment
of students. The systematic research review of large-scale international
assessments of Organization of Economic Cooperation and Develop-
ment’s (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
and International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achieve-
ment’s Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)
brought to light the inscription of systems theory and cybernetics in
formulating ways of “seeing” educational performances and models of
change.1 The international assessments brought into view particular tech-
nologies and visual cultures in which numbers articulated social phenom-
ena through comparative measures. The questions raised were enlarged
and explored in the study of science as the agora, the space in which sci-
ence, society, and policy work with the international agencies.2
What was odd in these different trajectories was that the epistemic
principles that compare nations and populations through systems theory
and cybernetics are taken as natural and unquestionable; the statistical
measures and the comparative distinctions are taken as “truth” to act as
policy and in research in education. They are naturalized and so much
part of the commonsense that they seem to require no examination of
their principles in organizing the study of education. The questioning
that does appear tends to focus on whether the measures and numbers
x Preface
capture enough dimensions for thinking about schools and students’
skills and knowledge.
The book questions and historicizes the relations of science and the
agora but also the doxa of the sciences as providing practical and use-
ful knowledge for social and educational change. The proximity of the
past to the present brought studies of the postwar sciences for thinking
about the practices of present science that was not merely a presentism.
To complicate this historical recognition was to think relationally of the
transnational traveling and translations that allowed for thinking rela-
tionally about the epistemic qualities of the sciences, heeding Walter Ben-
jamin’s (1955/1985) warning against the emptying of history in historical
studies.
The introductory chapter was written to think about the complexities
of the historical challenges in the collaboration of writing this book. The
intellectual challenge has required an odyssey to bring people together and
four years of discussions, meetings, and writing to overcome the difficul-
ties of completing this project. One of these difficulties related to systems
theory being a transnational event to study. There was a small emerging
literature related to the postwar years in science and technology stud-
ies. The references to education in the literature were marginal, at best:
they were often limited to only a section or few sentences that focused
on systems theory and cybernetics as an epistemic form and on origins,
debates, differences, and changes over time. This literature is important
for the forming of this book but was not sufficient for the historical anal-
ysis required. Our interest was in how systems theory and cybernetics
were attached in complex and dynamic social and cultural spaces, discon-
nected from their original historical practices. Practically, this meant that
systems and cybernetics were not treated as transcendental, logical sets
of principles acted on in different social places. The historical problem,
in contrast, was to understand the historical entanglement that formed as
multiplicities about society, kinds of people, and change. This relational
and historical strategy is expressed in the introductory chapter through
the notions of indigenous foreigner and traveling libraries.
A second difficulty was to bring into the study of the sciences in the
postwar years concerns for the inscriptions of the comparative style of
reasoning. This was difficult because, like the naturalization of systems
and cybernetics, it was also naturalized and woven into the common sense
of science. Typically, critiques of the comparativeness of international
studies focus on the adequacy or inadequacy of the comparison and the
epistemic ordering that produces the comparing; science and technology
studies were not much help. To make sense of this interest requires bring-
ing in different literatures as part of the study of science, such as litera-
tures of postcolonial, feminist, and Foucauldian studies. These literatures
rarely engage in historical studies of science, so they leave unproblema-
tized the logics of representation and identity, Cartesian dualism, and the
comparativeness enacted in research.
Preface xi
The difficulty of not having a clear set of prior studies about the edu-
cation science to draw upon afforded the luxury of creating its intel-
lectual lines as a common ground as the project developed. The writing
of chapters for the book was pragmatic as well: to call on people who
had the intellectual interests and the historical archival sensitivity for the
intellectual task of historicizing the postwar sciences. Finding people to
participate was, on the surface, not easy. There are few historians inter-
ested in studying social and psychological sciences in the postwar years.
There are even fewer who brought the intellectual sensitivities associated
with this project to the historian’s craft.
This book also added historians who could engage in transnational
studies. The transnational group of scholars was identified mostly
through past collaborations in other projects and included those who
agreed to focus (in some cases refocus) their research. The conversations
brought us together over four years. Many who began the project stayed
and provided its continuity. Some started but for various professional (or
personal) reasons had to drop out, and others joined. The resulting con-
tributions cross the fields of educational studies, the history of education,
curriculum studies, visual cultures studies, and science and technology
studies.
The pragmatic side in this odyssey was organizing multiple sympo-
sia at professional conferences to provide a space for the conversations
necessary to write this edited volume. The actual working on drafts was
organized as symposia at several international conferences, such as the
annual meetings of the Comparative and International Education Soci-
ety (CIES), the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the
International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE),
and the European Educational Research Association (EERA). These
meetings brought us together to talk about drafts of papers that also pro-
vide a comparative lens to think about what was transported as science
and its actualizations in different spaces. Our last meeting was held as a
seminar at Uppsala University, hosted by the research group STEP (Stud-
ies in Educational Policy and Philosophy).3
The intellectual crossings of the chapters bring into view five qualities
for the study of science as a historical practice.
1. Research as an actor in social life: The book addresses the often-

unexamined politics of research as an actor in social affairs by inves-
tigating the principles generated about what is thought and done in
schooling and their efforts for reform and change. It thus contrib-
utes to science and technologies studies in examining how research
“acts” in social arenas through the principles generated about the
types of objects recognized, the classifications giving directions to
explanations, the problems and evidence necessary for managing
and predicting, and the modalities on which change is calculated and
administered.
xii Preface
2. The comparative mode of science and the production of differences:
One persistent quality of the social and psychological sciences is the
comparative mode of reasoning. The comparative style of thinking
was embedded in the emergence of the 19th-century moral sciences
that embodied universalist qualities of representations and identities
to differentiate civilizations and deviances. Comparative reasoning
made its way into the recesses of theories and methods that formed
the education sciences. The comparative style of reasoning, although
rarely discussed, is embodied in the ranking and numbers of inter-
national assessments and their cultural principles—with the ranking
not only being about nations but also about people and differences.
3. Problem-solving as science and change connected to cybernetics
with systems theories: Crossing different geographical places (but
not necessarily in the same ways) were, first, the mobilization of sci-
ence as a “problem-solving” system that held the optimistic belief
that research of “good intentions” could be conveniently translated
into applied research and policy, development, and ultimately greater
welfare—the idea is that knowledge is practical/useful—and, second,
the systems theories with cybernetics as a redefinition of how things
were “seen” and given a “nature.”
4. Quantification and numbers in science: Numbers are given as the
evidential agent for telling the truth (i.e., the “scientific evidence of
what works” today) about society, populations, and individuality.
Alongside this visibility is the production of numbers in visual cul-
tures through the cultural and social functions of lists, ranks, charts,
and graphs as narratives about truth and the real.
5. Research as actualizing desires: Research generates desires not as
psychological characteristics but in how theories and methods of sci-
ence direct attention to future potentialities, which orient and extend
into creating actionable spaces. The ideas of change and progress in
research involve desires for social improvement, inscribing the utopic
vision that governs the present, with present research embodying
multiple temporalities in what is seen as “the arrow of time,” making
change, social improvement, and “learning”—which are all about
how the present embodies the potentialities of the future and how it
is governed.
The qualities given in the historical work, we believe, ask different kinds
of questions about science as a practice than what typically organizes sci-
ence studies. Important in the studies was the relation of the sciences to
education, often treated as not signifcant but rather as an observational
note within studies of privileged disciplinary felds. This lack of atten-
tion is odd for a number of reasons. The monetary resources, people,
and volume of academic publications of educational research occupy a
broad space in the practices of the social and psychological sciences. At
Preface xiii
the University of Wisconsin–Madison, its educational research center
generates more grant research money than all of the campus social and
psychological sciences combined. The lack of studies on the educational
sciences is odd also because of the strong relation of these sciences to the
art of state governing that was pronounced in its institutionalizations at
the turn of the 20th century, in which the founders of sociology and psy-
chology research, for example, continually intersected with education.
These intersections appear in the transnational mobilizations in govern-
ing during the postwar years.
Notes
1. The project SKOLFORSK was sponsored by The Swedish Research Council.
2. This was funded by Swedish Research Council and includes Sverker Lindblad
and Gun-Britt Wärvik of Gothenburg University, who contributed to this vol-
ume and to the planning of the conference discussed later.
3. The seminar was funded by the Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.
References
Benjamin, W. (1955/1985). Theses on the philosophy of history (H. Zohn, Trans).
In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations: Essays and reflections (pp. 253–264). New
York: Schocken Book.
Elde Mølstad, C., & Pettersson, D. (2019). New practices of comparison, quan-
tification and expertise in education: Conducting empirically based research.
London & New York: Routledge.
Lindblad, S. Pettersson, D., & Popkewitz, T. (Eds.). (2018). Education by the
numbers and the making of society: The expertise of international assessments.
New York: Routledge.
Popkewitz, T. (2008). Cosmopolitanism and the age of school reform: Science,
education, and making society by making the child. New York: Routledge.
Popkewitz, T. (2020). The impracticality of practical research: A history of sci-
ences of change that conserve. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
About the Contributors
Natália de Lacerda Gil, Faculty of Education of the Federal University of

Rio Grande do Sul, UFRGS, Brazil. Her research and journal articles
focus on the sociohistory of education statistics. Her recent book is
Estatísticas da escola brasileira: um estudo sócio-histórico [Statistics
of the Brazilian School] published in Brazil in 2019. She coordinates
the research project Exclusão escolar na história brasileira: persistên-
cias e resistências (1920–2020) [School exclusion in Brazilian his-
tory: Persistence and Resistances (1920–2020)] funded by CNPq/
Brazil.
Inés Dussel, Department of Educational Research, CINVESTAV, Mexico.
Her research interests focus on the relationships between knowledge,
school, and politics, in a historical and sociological approach. She is
currently studying the intersections between schools and digital visual
culture and the history of visual technologies and pedagogies. She
served as the director of the Education Area, Latin American School
for the Social Sciences (Argentina).
Ana Laura Godinho Lima, Faculty of Education of the University of São
Paulo, Brazil. Her research is in the history of education and educa-
tional psychology, focusing on the discourses of psychology about
child education. Her recent book is A “criança-problema” na escola
brasileira: uma análise do discurso pedagógico [The problem child in
Brazilian school: an analysis of pedagogical discourse] (2018). She
coordinates the research project O Imperativo do Desenvolvimento
na Educação: uma análise dos discursos da psicologia dirigidos a pro-
fessores” [The development imperative in education: an analysis of
psychology discourses addressed to teachers] (FAPESP).
Kai-Jung Hsiao, Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin–Madison, USA. Her research focuses on the inter-
section between the fields of education history, global studies, cultural
studies, and philosophy of education. She is currently writing her dis-
sertation on the historical construction of a politics of self in citizen
formation in Taiwan.
About the Contributors xv
Junzi Huang, Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin–Madison, USA. Her research interest focuses on
social theories and philosophy of education. She is currently writ-
ing her dissertation on how contours of social sciences, medicines,
urbanism, and educational reforms have come together to establish a
form of state racism in the long 20th century in China. https://orcid.
org/0000-0002-1508-2200.
Sun Young Lee, Department of Teacher Education at Weber State University,
USA. Her research lies in curriculum study, teacher education, and cultural
studies focusing on how the common practices of observation contribute
to knowledge production and teacher professionalization. Her current
project historically and contemporarily explores the algorithmic systems
of reasoning in teacher education. She is the co-chair of Post-foundational
Approaches SIG in the Comparative and International Education Society.
Sverker Lindblad, Department of Education and Special Education at
the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He has carried out research
in education governance, knowledge politics, curriculum theory, and
comparisons in and on education systems. His current work is on
issues dealing with international understanding of knowledge produc-
tion and the organization of educational research. He served as the
president of the European Educational Research Association. He is
currently the president of the Swedish Educational Research Associa-
tion and a member of the research group Pedagogik och politik [The
Political in Education] (the POP group).
Catarina Silva Martins, Department of Arts Education at the Faculty of
Fine Arts, University of Porto, Portugal. Her research lies in rethink-
ing arts education curriculum studies in the present from a historical
approach focusing on the systems of reason that govern policy and
research. The research is at the historical intersection of art education
with cultural distinctions and divisions inscribed in notions of the artist,
inventiveness, and genius that emerged at the turn of the century in Por-
tugal. Her current project is focused on the making of the creative child
through arts education practices in the long 19th century. She is the coor-
dinator of Laboratório de Investigação em Educação Artística [LabEA—
Laboratory of Research in Arts Education] at Instituto de Investigação
em Arte, Design e Sociedade [i2ADS].
Tatiana Mikhaylova, Department of Education at Uppsala University and
University of Gävle, Sweden. Her research focuses on private tutoring in
Russia, comparative curriculum studies, and the history of education.
She is a member of the STEP research group (Studies in Educational
Policy and Philosophy) at Uppsala University.
Daniel Pettersson, Academy for Education and Economy at the University
of Gävle and Department of Education at Uppsala University, Sweden.
xvi About the Contributors
His prime research centers on international educational comparisons,
the history of education, and curriculum studies. He is a member of
the STEP research group (Studies in Educational Policy and Philoso-
phy) at Uppsala University. He is the editor for the scientific journal
the Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy.
Thomas S. Popkewitz, Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the
Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies at the University of
Wisconsin–Madison, USA. His studies focus on the systems of reason
that govern curriculum reforms, the sciences of education, teacher edu-
cation, and policy. His research crosses the fields of curriculum studies,
the political sociology of education, cultural history, and transnational
studies. Central to the studies are how science functions as an actor
in social life through its ordering and classifying of people and events
and through its paradoxes of exclusion and abjection in its efforts to
include.
Caroline Runesdotter, Department of Education and Special Education,
University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research interests are presently
focusing on aspects of educational change and challenges in teachers’
professionalism and include studies of media and its impact on educa-
tion and educational policy. She is a member of the research group
Pedagogik och politik [The Political in Education] (the POP group).
Antti Saari, Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University, Fin-
land. His research interests include history, philosophy of education,
and curriculum studies. His research focuses on the contemporary and
historical interfaces between expert knowledge and educational poli-
cies, including how psychological and sociological discourses are trans-
lated into practices of evaluation, classroom management, and the use
of instructional technology. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3777-6948.
Gun-Britt Wärvik, Department of Education and Special Education,
University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research interests concern
the political aspects in educational phenomena, including educational
restructuring and policymaking, lifelong learning, and the study of
professions. She coordinates the Research Training Partnership Pro-
gram in International and Comparative Education, in close collabora-
tion with researchers at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. An overall
theme of this partnership project is education in a fragile context. She
is a member of the research group Pedagogik och politik [The Political
in Education] (the POP group).
Illustrations
Figures
2.1 Major components of individually guided education 36
2.2 Multiunit organization of an IGE school of 400–600
students 37
2.3 Instructional programming model in IGE 39
8.1 Flanders’ interaction analysis: Observation results in
the 10 × 10 matrix 155
9.1 The teaching event 173
9.2 The adaptive teaching machine system 178
9.3 The human equivalent of a teaching machine system 178
10.1 Frequency of use of the word кибернетика [cybernetics]
in written Russian sources 194
Tables
8.1 Categories of Flanders’ systems of interaction analysis 154
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; Popke-
witz, 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 psy-
chological 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 technolo-
gies 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 pro-
gression of the wisdom of people and research. The “reason” of the sci-
ences 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 dis-
tinctions 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 rea-
soning. The language of science elides these normative qualities of time
2 Thomas S. Popkewitz et al.
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 gov-
erning 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 prac-
tices 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 pro-
ducing “data” about society and populations, abstracted from the cultur-
ally 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 prin-
ciples to order and classify the relations of society, individuality, and the
problem of change. To study science as a mode of existence in this man-
ner 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
Educational Sciences Became Reasonable 3
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 atten-
tion 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 dif-
ferences and divisions.
Indigenous Foreigner and the Historical Spaces of Science

Indigenous foreigner appears to be an oxymoron—opposites in conjunc-
tion that seem to identify different types of phenomena for understand-
ing 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 Euro-
pean 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 discon-
nected 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 assess-
ments, for example, in charts, graphs, and rankings appear as general-
ized 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 dif-
ferent spaces in which the sciences operated. The iconic authors are, as
Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987; 1991/1994a; 1991/1994b) suggest,
conceptual personae, intermediaries in complex movements, sets of rela-
tions, 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 dif-
ferent places—their settlements embody singularities as well as similari-
ties 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 histori-
cal 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 dif-
ferent “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 prin-
ciples 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 knowl-
edge 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 psychologi-
cal principles assembled with Brazil, Godinho Lima argues in her chap-
ter, 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 devel-
opment 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 chal-
lenge the legacies of philosophical realism that connects with positiv-
ism 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 movements from an
origin to other historical spaces in linear time (Popkewitz et al., 2014).
The ideas of indigenous foreigner and traveling libraries “decenter the
subject” through a relational logic that considers different historical
flows and grids of practice in which science “acts” to order what is seen,
thought, and acted on—an important element of the politics of modernity.
Materializing a Social Science Apparatus

It is possible to think of the 19th-century sciences in Europe and North
America as having a double quality related to the Enlightenment and
its cosmopolitanism (Popkewitz, 2008). This double quality embodied
the hopes of science in liberating the human spirit and as a panacea for
equality by bringing about the inevitable and harmonious process of
development. This hope was joined with fears of decay and degenerations
that enacted double gestures through a comparative style of reasoning.
With the gestures of the hope of science were different gestures of fears
of the dangers and dangerous populations.
Our focus on this historical notion of cosmopolitanism, however, does
not claim that other notions of Enlightenments (in plural) did not exist;
nor does it view cosmopolitanism as a teleological history. For us, first,
cosmopolitanism registers the commitment to a particular attitude about
human reason and rationality as central to the emergence of the human
sciences in the 19th century, and second, it explores how that attitude
takes particular historical turns that do not recapitulate its narratives and
images. It is part of a traveling library that (re)visions and mobilizes an
anticipatory practice about the recovery, reconstruction, and reimagining
of societies and education across the East and the West and in colonial-
izations (see, e.g., Mikhaylova & Pettersson and Hsiao, this volume).
Our interest is in imagining and engineering—or imagineering—the
parameters of the good life that emerged in the formation of a social sci-
ence apparatus in the postwar decades (see, e.g., Savage, 2010).4 Society
became an experimental laboratory that produced new objects for think-
ing about experience as comparative data for planning and programing
the utopic images of the good life.
The formation of a social science apparatus, discussed in the following
sections, entailed new institutional structures and actors. Many Western
universities became sites to administer large governmental grants for
research to organize large data sets about targeted populations and to pro-
vide the technical expertise for the methodological development of mass
observational techniques. Before World War Two, if we use Sweden and the
United States as examples, academic research had only a nominal role in
social policy.5 During and following the war, governments poured resources
into forecasting “future studies” that were directly linked to research and
development (R&D) (Kaijser & Tiberg, 2000; Andersson, 2018; see also,
e.g., Wärvik et al. and Popkewitz, this volume). The United Nations Edu-
cational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization; the Organization of Eco-
nomic Cooperation and Development (OECD); and the First International
Mathematics Study (FIMS; now called TIMSS), institutionalized between
1945 and the 1960s, were created as international agencies whose algo-
rithms provided comparative data to identify developmental pathways to
anticipated national potentialities (Elde Mølstad & Pettersson, 2019).
The Study of Social Life as an Experiment and Laboratory

The technologies of science were given new empirical forms as social and
personal life was viewed as experimental and as laboratory sites. The
notion of society as a site for experimentation was not necessarily “new”;
it could be found in the sample research on mass communication and the
experimental psychology in the 1920s and 1930s that organized human
subjects as anonymous passive actors represented by the experimenter in
terms of numeric systems (see, e.g., Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955; Morawski,
2007). The social science apparatus of the postwar years shifted the desire
of the earlier research—for example, from evaluating the moral standing
and respectability of groups to the experimental methods that gave atten-
tion to the abstract social relation, conditions, and populations as objects
to change the social order.
Society as site was made accessible in almost every arena of social
life (Popkewitz, 2020b). Sociology, anthropology, psychology, econom-
ics, and political science reterritorized the experiences of everyday life
into the abstract spaces that spoke about the conditions of mass society.
Research focused on, for example, the organization of humankind, studies
of American urban street corner life as the consequences of poverty and
the densities of the city, and the “culture” of the classroom and princi-
pal’s office on living in schools. Observations aggregated immediate and
face-to-face experiences into distinctions that function as coordinates of
“belonging” in social interactions and power in mass society, which was
captured in Vidich and Bensman’s (1958) study of a small town outside of
Ithaca, New York, as a microcosm of the larger issues of modernity: Small
Town in Mass Society: Class, Power, and Religion in a Rural Community.
Analogous to the natural and biological sciences, society, and popula-
tions were studied as natural experiments in which mass observations
created data points to produce social identification and belonging. The
reterritorization of data was given a materiality as malleable distinctions
represented in a history of timelines development. The classificatory
practices of data were visual idioms whose codifications measured and
forecasted temporal tendencies separated from particular cultural events.
Gross domestic product (GDP), for example, was an invention of Keynes-
ian economics about an aggregate model whose data provide predictable
correlations, tendencies, forces, and rates related to family incomes, fam-
ily planning, and other variables representable in equations and graphs
(Murphy, 2017). Details of ordinary life were placed into models whose
data points were woven together to visualize and shape culture, society,
and upbringing as relations of an “economized life.”
The data in the 1950s of society as experimental laboratory brought
into being a way of telling the “truths” about the social world and change.
Statistic data were given as objects that have a materiality independent
of the things in the world that they claim to represent. The data were
events and qualities of people standardized as independent objects (e.g.,
the number of children who attend schools) to be managed, corrected,
and analyzed. The macro-statistical analyses in sample surveys, micro-
observations, and interviews became commonplaces of the technologies
of sciences to effect reform and change. Interview and survey techniques,
initially developed in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States and the
United Kingdom for psychoanalysis and therapy and for disclosing infor-
mation by doctors and social workers, took the mundane activities and
smaller numbers related to daily life into new idioms of the observations
of the collective attributes of individual development that could be sta-
tistically manipulated as variables. The household became a privileged
site in which interview data differentiated social attitudes and identities,
norms, and roles (cf. Savage, 2010).
The production of data used a “locationless logic” (Savage, 2010),
organizing analytic tools to describe social conditions, circumstances of
people’s ordinary lives, and strategies for change. The research explored
throughout this book continually references how daily life was revisioned
as experimental laboratories to give coherence to the collective identity
that was otherwise observed as threatened and fragmented. Educational
statistics and measurements, for example, gave a homogeneity from
which differences from a collective identity were expressed. The statis-
tical procedures of measurements that traveled into Brazil to test stu-
dents, Lacerda Gil argues, performed as technologies of an experimental
logic in the ordering of data that inscribed cultural principles and desires.
Hsiao’s chapter examines “the adolescent” as a kind of actor in Taiwan-
ese research and policy, paradoxically, made possible through a “loca-
tionless logic” formed through the international movements of “ideas”
connected with particular historical principles that gave expression to the
complexities of the nation, society, belonging and alienation, and power.6
If we return to the earlier discussion of traveling libraries, the experi-
mental logic of research was connected with systems theories and cyber-
netics. They were formed in the spaces of cognitive psychology, political
science, sociology, and anthropology, to name a few, that were activated
with cultural and social theories in research projects of human develop-
ment (research and development, or R&D). Early-20th-century notions
of systems were connected with cybernetics, developed during the war
effort to think of social analysis as the relation between mind and
machine—the machine as the computer and its analogy to the mind as
artificial intelligence (Halpern, 2014; Erickson et al., 2013).
Systems theory assembled particular hopes, desires, and fears as cul-
tural narratives, as is argued in this book, in education research and its
reforms. The assembly of the new technologies for seeing and thinking
about social life remade the relation between knowledge, skills, and
techniques of science. In Soviet sciences related to education, Mikhay-
lova & Pettersson argue (in this book), societal and educational problems
were understood as the functioning of a complex machine by creating
an analogy between the human nervous system and a central telephone
switchboard. The control of this switchboard imagineered Soviet soci-
ety as comparable to how molecules and atoms functioned as natural
phenomena. Cybernetics provided the model to order, standardize, and
modernize social relations through the rationalizing of the education pro-
cess, described as communication control, feedback, and automation.
The empirical data of the technologies of the mass observations become
the historical agents of the human condition that standardized the
abstraction of systems theory in the sciences. Taiwan’s modernization
of education, Hsiao argues in her chapter, connected systems theory to
narratives of the child as an adolescent whose development was for the
defense and rescue of the nation to defeat the “Chinese communist rebel-
lion.” The principles of development and growth of the adolescent were
bound through the working of systems theory as a taxonomical com-
parative anatomy that generated inscribed double gestures in utopic nar-
ratives of belonging to the nation.
The clusters of data in the sciences created new visualization practices
for differentiating, distinguishing, and comparing. New visual idioms
were expressed through tables, charts and ranking, historical tracks, and
photographic images in which numbers and magnitudes rendered phe-
nomena as commensurable or equivalent. These equivalences provided a
strategy to differentiate people along continua of value. Saari’s chapter
explores, for example, the notion of feedback that connected systems
theory to behavioral psychology in Finland. Related to the introduction
of the learning machine developed by Skinner in the United States, the
notion of feedback understood schools, classrooms, and children as being
part of an experimental laboratory to study learning.
Saari views feedback as a visual diagram that governed ways of seeing
and organizing symbols and matter into a dynamic, concerted whole. The
diagram of feedback ordered the observing and speaking of the subjects,
objects, and spaces of what counts as “Finnish” students, classrooms,
and an education system that was relatively independent of coordinates
external to the self-referentiality of the systems themselves. The internal
connections appear as general rules or a blueprint for organizing human
behavior in a special temporality and multiplicity that had no strict
boundaries or obstacles for its operation in research, teacher education,
and training teachers. The classification and distinctions were fashioned
through systems theory about “usability” and “effectiveness” in a plane
of comparison in making pupils, classrooms, and the national education
system more amenable to control.
Propagated were imaginaries of the necessary functioning of the
social system that would be supported through engineering social real-
ity and the human beings who lived in it (Lemov, 2005). The classifi-
cations, social aggregates, and abstracted territories of belonging and
abjection expressed normative judgments as standards and norms of
abstracted “individuals” in development projects, educational reforms,
and learning in the monitoring and governing of populations. Something
as mundane as preferring simple or complex visual shapes drawn from
modern abstract expressionist art, which Martin’s chapter explores, were
transformed into distinctions codified into tests of perception. The tests
embodied distinctions about creativity and play that were standardized
and codified at the interstices of Western European and US psychologi-
cal sciences in the postwar years. The creative child became an object of
desire of the future citizen, “problem solver” and a comparative technol-
ogy to reason about a moral order.
The Locationless Logic That Has Desires

The “locationless logic” still had locations. Across Europe and North
America, the apparatus of mass observations, interviews, surveys, and
ethnographies generated principles concerned with constructing a mod-
ern, rational nation and people. The technologies of mass observation
were legitimized through words about national defense and security.
The reason of change in the sciences enacted, however, particular cul-
tural norms and values related to political theories (such as liberalism),
national exceptionalism, and redemptive practices as the object of col-
lective belonging and change (concerning the United States, see Popke-
witz, 2008; Cohen-Cole, 2014; Gilman, 2003; Heyck, 2015; Solovey &
Cravens, 2012, and for Europe, see Rogers, 2011). The ethnography of
local groups and social life in British postwar studies, for example, cre-
ated new distinctions of community that embodied particular political
visions of the mode of living of the middle classes that reconceptualized
rural landscapes of “elected” places in which choice, desires, hopes, and
escape were built on individual self-realizations. This psychometric sort-
ing of populations in postwar Sweden “de-traditionalized” place to talk
about identity and belonging in the statistical distinctions about a future
meritocratic educational system as a mobile society (see Wärvik et al.,
this volume).
The objects of empirical observations inscribed utopic possibilities as
the imagineering of science.7 The utopic qualities, as Huang argues in
this book, intersected with architecture, literature, and visual pedagogy.
The intersections visualized life as experiments in designing a universal,
desirable order of life that was fictively, empirically, and scientifically
neutral in configuring the humanitarian order. The imagineering is also
pedagogical: these traveling libraries and settlements, as Dussel’s and
Saari’s chapters argue, provide ways to think of theory and the methods
of science as inscriptions in particular grids of practices that function to
order, classify, and act on things in the world. The inscriptions of systems
language of process, feedback, and flows are simultaneously organizing
principles about how to gain access and a determinant in what is impor-
tant to access.
The sciences were to tame the irrational elements and normlessness of
social life and to be models of rationality in everyday life in governing
the self. Research in the United States on “decision-making,” for example,
created indicators for managing the “irrational human being,” character-
istics of an imagined democratic citizen who rejected authoritarian per-
sonality associated with now-defeated fascism (see Solovey & Cravens,
2012). Individual self-realization and choice inscribed as principles of
decision gave a rational order to managing the inner self and to experi-
ments for micro-engineering human emotions, mental statuses, and
behaviors. At the same time, the society as an experimental and labora-
tory site provided the possibilities of eliminating deviances and social
pathologies. Crime, delinquency, abnormal sexual behaviors, and dys-
functional family life and the breakup of nuclear family were objects of
research and development and designs in urban planning for changing of
environmental and social situations (Lemov, 2005). The images of social
differences were imagineered as those of cultural diversity in specific
national trajectories of legislative, scientific, and programmatic practices,
expressed as the epochal moments of the US war on poverty, and the
Great Society, and the European welfare states, with different distinctions
in the societies in Eastern Europe, the USSR, and China.
The Comparativeness of Science: Producing Differences

The traveling and assembly of the different technologies of science were
comparative. The notion of comparativeness is not what is usually institu-
tionally reserved to the postwar fields of comparative studies that related
the ideas of globalization, decolonialization, and national development.
These comparative studies focused on political culture that differenti-
ated children’s attitudes and childrearing characteristics, for example, as
a continuum of authoritarian and democratic personalities (see Popke-
witz, this volume). The formation of national research and development
centers in the US in the 1960s examines the school as the site for the tech-
nologies of mass observations and as an experimental laboratory work to
imagineer the possibilities of the future. The objects of comparison were
universalized as philosophical ideals that provided normative standards
from which the development of nations, institutions (the school), and
populations were in continua of political culture or economic practices
described historically as the “ranking” of nations, economies, and popu-
lations (see, e.g., Gilman, 2003).
This comparativeness that differentiates through normative standards
entails particular notions of reason and rationality and has a relation to
the European and North American Enlightenment’s cosmopolitanism. It
was given expression in debates about differences articulated in what is
customarily labeled “the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns.” This
“quarrel” was a historical debate about the nature of people and dif-
ferences in who could be civilized. The 15th-century and 16th-century
European Renaissance, and 18th-century England and France, saw the
rediscovery of ancient texts that invoked arguments about whether “the
modern” spaces of Western Europe superseded the ancient Greeks in art,
oratory, poetry, and science. The literary and artistic debates in the Aca-
démie Française, for example, differentiated “the modern” and civilized
person through distinctions and rules of politeness, refinement, manners,
and decencies between people as a degree of being “civilized” (Passavant,
2000). The comparative reasoning stabilized the representations of popu-
lations and identities that embodied differentiations between civilizations
in continua of value.
Important to the comparative reasoning was the creation of time that
inscribed a human nature as the object of the telling of history, differ-
ences of people, and change. Differences between the past, the present,
and the future could be arranged as an arrow of time in relation to sta-
bilized spaces expressed, for example, as populations and people. Before
the French Revolution in 1789, for example, few looked forward to “the
nature” of the succeeding epoch to pronounce the present as a site of dif-
ference, crisis, and danger. Life was bound to traditions as the past was
inscribed within the boundaries of the present. The incessant notion of
change in the Enlightenment, in contrast, formed as a way to reason about
life as a continuum of movement that differentiated and, at the same time,
created regular and irreversible lines of past, present, and future, expressed
for example in “the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns.”
The variable of time articulated the present as superseding the past but
added the historical novelty embodying desires of the potentialities of
humanity that became open to intervention, management, and differen-
tiation (see, e.g., Koselleck, 1979/1985). The ideas of progress brought
this new sense of temporarily into the cosmopolitan reason and ratio-
nalities. The self-accelerating temporality, instead of tradition, combined
politics and prophecy with rational prediction and salvational expecta-
tions as the potentialities of humankind that progress is to realize. As dis-
cussed in Popkewitz’s chapter, the faith in science activated salvation and
redemption themes as desires in research as spaces of becoming, belong-
ing, and differences.
Philosophy and social theories made the arbitrariness of difference nec-
essary and inevitable (Rancière, 2004). The categorical imperative in the
ethics of 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, founder of
critical philosophy, functionally became the commandment of the clas-
sifications and objectifications of reason as the imperative for action and
rehabilitation of those who did not have the required qualities and char-
acteristics. Differences in the state of rehabilitation cast some people as
outside of normalcy, as “incapable of ever acquiring a taste for the phi-
losophers’ goods—and even of understanding the language in which their
enjoyment is expounded” (Rancière, 1983/2004, p. 204).
Comparing the inner qualities and manners of people replaced
the earlier logic of comparison defined as classifications of doctrinal
opponents in a religious war (Boon, 1985) against the Enlightenment’s
themes of progress that expressed fears of decay and degeneration. Com-
parative qualities were also embedded in legal codes that mirrored cus-
toms and practices to differentiate people while creating a nationally
inclusive community (Scott, 1998). The treatises of the Enlightenment
were combined with the positivist science of Auguste Comte and with
new sociologies to give a necessary order through which differences in
people were defined. Degeneracy was solely projected onto the lower cat-
egories of the taxonomies of humankind. The ethos of workers, arti-
sans, and racial groups were differentiated from the inscribed norms of
civility and made abject. Finer distinctions were generated in Europe and
the United States at the turn of the 20th century to classify the poor,
workers, and employees as populations outside of the spaces of inclusion,
but they had political rights as of the early 20th century (Nowotny, 1991).
If we think of this logic of comparison as an indigenous foreigner, the
objectifications of populations came with principles of difference among
people as the rational vision and as a distancing mechanism that pro-
jected desires about the self and as a mirror of the self—differentiated
from those treated as abject in “the colonial machinery of dominance”
(Casid, 2015, p. 122). In Brazil, for example, Godinho Lima (this book)
argues that society and populations were experimental laboratories of
Brazilian teaching programs in training children to become skilled labor-
ers, to promote the economic development that was shaped through a
recapitulation theory. Child development was postulated as differentiat-
ing resemblances between different children’s behaviors and that of ani-
mals and “primitive” people.
The “locationless logic” of the new technologies of mass observations
entailed new patterns of ordering, differentiating, and creating continua
between normalcy and pathology that were fashioned through systems
theories and cybernetics. Postwar urban planning, for example, used bio-
logical analogies of the city as a system given to observe, compare, and
map the fabric of urban health and decay (Haffner, 2013). Aerial photog-
raphy, developed by the French in World War One, became a technology
for a comparative reasoning that created spatial distinctions in the 1950s
to compare the “artificial” organization of French urban space with the
precondition for “natural spatial organization in rural villages” in north-
ern Cameroon. That comparative reasoning was made acceptability to
missionaries’ proposals for the villagers’ religious conversions in the pro-
cess of modernization (Haffner, 2013, p. 72).
The analysis in the various chapters locate the comparative reason-
ing in the mundane events of teacher effectiveness. The visualization of
feedback and comparative reasoning in teacher education ordered the
teacher’s observational practices about children’s learning (see Lee, this
book). Observations of teaching and children’s communication processes
were used to visualize the objects of pedagogical knowledge as a systems
process–oriented approach. The processes of teaching emphasized learn-
ing the knowledge and skills of observing the communicative processes of
teaching as a scientific experiment of managing information in feedback
loops through, for example, observing, diagnosing, and acting. The obser-
vational schemes were both an experiment and a laboratory for actual-
izing future kinds of teachers and children through the psychologies of
learning. The focus on process seemingly removed the teacher as an onto-
logical object, with time as a process to identify effective teaching; yet the
notion of process assumes a desired representation of the teacher that is
talked about as an autonomous actor who engages in “self-insight.”
Different chapters explore comparativeness by looking at science as
the inscriptions of sets of relations formed through different historical
lines that connect as a grid of events to order what is seen, thought, and
acted on. This acting brings an agential quality to science by making par-
ticular kinds of phenomena visible and actionable as experience.
The chapters engage with the emergence of the comparative reasoning
as articulated and given specificity in the different mobilizations of sci-
ence in the postwar years. The arguments explore how particular notions
of “the nature” of the child and society are formed through traveling
libraries that focus on the relations of events historically. Martins’s chap-
ter on the notion of creativity, for example, explores the particular his-
torical lines assembled in making creativity possible as a description of
a particular kind of person who is different from others (also see Dussel,
this volume). Wärvik and colleagues (this volume) focus on relation as
the coevolution of policies and signs and on their dependency and inter-
actions as they connect with techniques for differentiation in Swedish
measures for talent and social mobility.
The relational analysis entails different historical approaches across
the book. Huang’s chapter focuses on how scientific reasoning became
inscribed and generated in the relations of pedagogies of visual cultures
and desire. The Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath in the 1920s, the
English writer H. G. Wells in the 1940s, and US-American architect/
systems theorist Buckminster Fuller in the 1950s are viewed as concep-
tual personae; writers in different times and spaces connect as folds in the
postwar US sciences. The writers are spoken about in a notion of arc that
addresses the nonlinear ordering in generating utopic images in scientific
reasoning, making perceivable what otherwise would have seemed to be
disparate objects in different spaces. Complex and multiple layers that
connect the visual and the desired as activated principles organize utopic
reasoning to connect the universalizing schema of welfare and societies
of control through educational learning psychology.
We can read the two logics of comparativeness as intertwined in con-
temporary discussions of the rationalities of science and the problem of
change in social, psychological, and educational sciences. Contemporary
applied, practically oriented research maintains similarities yet differences
in assuming that the objectifications that represent social life are the ori-
gin of research. Our attempt in this book is to provide a different rela-
tional historical mode for thinking of a science of the self and others.
Comparing Through Numbers as Representing Differences

One central and important practice of comparing is that of statistical
analyses and numbers. They are integral to the apparatus of postwar sci-
ences at work in the mobilizations of the governing in welfare states.
While statistics and numbers are treated historically as technologies of
science, they are practices in the forming of a modern, rational “mind”
and the collective belonging of the nation (see, e.g., Porter, 1986; Des-
rosières, 1998). Statistics provided explanatory patterns and laws given
a material form first in early-19th-century Germany through a conver-
gence between empirical natural history (paleontology and botany),
bureaucratic statistics (cameralism), and contemporary historiography
(Sepkoski, 2018). The calculations of mathematical relations in the tables
created a visual object that actualized the possibilities of seeing numbers
as representing the rational organization of people and nature.
Statistics is a way of converting hardened facts into data (Desrosières,
1998). The abstraction of individual events into data “points” repackaged
into aggregates of organisms and people in the time of history enabled
comparisons as taxonomic units. The data were visualized as regularities
of empirical laws in which finer distinctions were performed as a com-
parative logic about reaching some maximum point in relation to other
groups (Sepkoski, 2018).
Historically, statistics provided a way that moved judgments in rela-
tion to criteria of justice into criteria of data organized comparatively
about the norms of the distribution of goods (Thévenot, 2007). Statistics
enables clusters to be formed, rendering things that can be acted on, such
as social class, microbes, and nation. Probability theory provided a “rea-
sonable calculus” of holding things together, such as normal distributions
and correlations (Daston, 1995). Its algorithms are purely inductive in
building models of behaviors or patterns without considering the causes
or intentions of individual and collective perceptual apparatuses, cogni-
tive and evaluative conventions, or institutional tasks involving processes
of transcription or representation (Rouvroy, 2013).
The knowledge generated embodied a particular way of thinking about
people and change that was visible in the 1950s, what Igo (2007) talked
about as average populations. The social life was described as the interac-
tion between environment and organism (Lemov, 2005), and as macro-
aggregations of populations across generations that delineated groups to
be engineered through the relationships of “the good life.”
The discussion of numbers and statistics in this book can be thought of
as a historical point where numbers become a possible way of “seeing”
and comparing. The emergence of the idea of social life as an experi-
ment and laboratory when coupled with new technologies for collating
and algorithms that enable “big data” (cf. Williamson, 2017) alters the
modern rationality anchored in empirical experiment and deductive
logic. It becomes possible for algorithmic computations to act as pre-
emptive and precautionary structures that profile desires of what should
be individuals, what Rouvroy (2013) calls data behaviorism. The num-
bers embedded in the schema of mass observation were comparative;
differentiating to normalize and pathologize nations, people, and social
life as the reasoning of statistics becomes part of traveling libraries, mass
observations, systems and cybernetics, time, and the comparative order-
ing of people and events related to the imagineering of the social order.
Quantifications are not merely neutral translations but rather as
actors “fitting numbers” to the world and creating new descriptions in
which the world changes (Daston, 1995). The techniques of statistical
analyses and algorithms perform as categorical imperatives in this “fit-
ting.” The charts and graphs narrate a material, linear, universal notion
of change that imagines development or degeneration where there is
a falling from grace. Statistical comparisons enacted through systems
theories, for example, were spoken about as “feedback loops” for esti-
mating human happiness and educability to distinguish the potentialities
of the younger generation as the desires of the future of the Swedish
welfare state (Wärvik et al., this volume). The young were the “reserve
of ability” released by education, finding individuals’ talents. The social
norm of talent was as a psychological category of the individuality of the
child and intra-individual differences. The distinctions of talents were
scripted as competences that differentiated not only who children were
but also who they can be.
Even with the boundaries of statistical reasoning related to applied
sciences, there are differences in how descriptions are created as action-
able and comparative spaces for change. If two approaches can be used
when scientists turn data into knowledge and evidence into predictions,
the calculation of Bayesian statistics propels a different kind of scien-
tific reasoning than classical or frequentist statistics. Frequentist statistics
focuses on the probability that an observed phenomenon or one that
was more extreme could have occurred by chance. It uses probability
theory to think about results with sample sizes as central to what can be
answered. Bayesian statistics, in contrast but with homologous reason-
ing concerned with results and sample sizes, includes other information
that could affect those results. Thus, probability is not simply a matter of
results and sample sizes but must be interpreted in light of other infor-
mation that could affect those results. In that way, Bayesian statistics
tackles problems of formidable complexity in, for instance, astronomy by
factoring in data from a growing list of known planets to deduce prob-
able properties of new planets or the location of planets. It is also used to
locate people lost at sea by using sets of mathematical rules for using new
data to continuously update beliefs or existing knowledge. New com-
parative spaces for change are made possible today through Bayesian
statistics because of advanced computing power.
The comparative reasoning was performed through visual cultures of
numbers and the creation of statistical equivalences whose magnitudes
told the “truths” about people, nations, society, and change (Lindblad
et al., 2018). The cultural function of the lists, ranks, charts, and graphs
are more than mere tabulations of numbers. In the 1950s, for example,
demographic transition models about population, family planning, and
birth control differentiated nations on the basis of extrapolated devel-
opment in the temporal scale of future modernization. The temporality
was based on a comparative logic, projecting that if developing countries
did not control populational growth, they would not be able to achieve
economic and social prosperity. It prompted a speculative and preemp-
tive logic that targeted potential lives about population growth and birth
control that did not yet exist but that required interventions. Important
in this entering into not-yet-existing lives is the transition model that was
not a law of population but rather an abstract anticipatory instrument to
mobilize interventions (Murphy, 2017).
Concluding Thoughts
Systems theories, cybernetics, and the comparative reasoning are addressed
in this book to consider the traveling and activations of the possibilities
and limitations of science, which are not merely cognitive but also affec-
tive. The mobilizations of sciences as a technology of change entailed
generating desires, affiliations, belonging, and abjections in different cul-
tural and social spaces. The reasoning of science as managing change
also brings up other epistemic spaces that work against the inscriptions
of hierarchies of values (see, e.g., Popkewitz et al., 2014); yet in moving
in this direction, the problem of comparative studies cannot be avoided.
Our exploration is to push the limits of these rationalities by being sen-
sitive to different epistemological systems (Jullien, 2000/2007, 2004).
Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe (2000) partially engages with this
challenge when he argues that Western notions and categories are indis-
pensable but inherently insufficient to narrate the processes of change
inside and outside of the West.
This book intends to examine and thus understand the social and psy-
chological sciences as formed in the in-between spaces of different his-
torical lines that connect and assemble desires that sought utopias and
belonging in the governing of modernity. Further, this governing brings
into the mobilizations of science, discussed in the subsequent chapters
as a comparative system of reason that excludes people and makes
them abject in efforts to include. Our major interest is directed toward
how “systems thought,” cybernetics, and comparative reasoning were
inscribed in the social sciences after the war. In our process, we used in
this chapter the indigenous foreigners and traveling libraries as method-
ological devices to understand how kinds of reasoning traveled and came
to frame the possibilities, impossibilities, necessities, and contingencies in
how science was thought and enacted.
This book also provides a way to think about contemporary research his-
torically. The inscription of systems theory, cybernetics, and comparative
reasoning are in the present but have become so naturalized that they
need no naming or authors. They appear as what one does to compare
nations and, at the same time, as principles generating teacher effec-
tiveness, children’s learning, and questions about how to correct social
wrongs (Popkewitz, 2020b). The historical perspective to the present,
however, is not to understand the present as replicating the past. Rather,
it is an historical understanding of the conditions of the past that make
the present “thinkable” and its limits; what might be thought of as a his-
tory of the present.
The book is organized into three sections. The organizing is a way to
think about certain dimensions and layers in which the sciences operated.
The intellectual trajectories identified, however, are continually woven
across the book but occurring with different intensities and relations.
We also approach these organizational patterns conceptually, to think
about intellectual textures of the chapters rather than summarizing each
chapter. The summarizing is done through abstracts written to introduce
each chapter.
Section One: Mobilizations of Science and Desires

The chapters in this section explore the educational sciences as trans-
national and transdisciplinary movements in the postwar decades. The
visualizing of science and pedagogical technologies is explored at the
interstices of architecture, literature, art, philosophy, visual cultures, and
science, among others. The discussion explores the interconnection of
systems theory and cybernetics with cultural principles, creating new
models of sense, perception, and calculation in research and the design
of education. Science is explored as producing knowledge about change
reimagining/imagineering society and people as the objects of change.
The imagineering of the postwar sciences was enacted as desires epis-
temically ordered in projects of social and human development (research
and development, R&D). There desires were enacted as salvation and
redemption themes about the potentialities of people and belonging, often
associated with national identities. Society and populations were viewed
as experimental laboratories in which the R&D is explored as inscribing
utopic desires into systems theory and cybernetics. Society and schools
were laboratories for generating universal, desirable modes of living. The
empirical entities that function as the “data” to engage change were gen-
erated by the mass observation produced through interviews, surveys,
and observations. The inscriptions of theory and technologies for collect-
ing and interpreting data are explored as paradoxical: the optimism for
change in the sciences brings about differences and abjections.
Section Two: Locationless Logics, Conduct, and Differences

The movements of “ideas” are not about a pure logic or rationality. This
section explores how the locationless logic is not locationless but rather
embodied in territories as research travels internationally. The theories
and methods of the social sciences connect with particular cultural prin-
ciples about society, belonging, differences, and divisions. The chapters in
this section explore different technologies in the making of daily life as
experimental laboratories and social technologies that give coherence to
a collective identity that otherwise appears as threatened and fragmented.
The classifications, social aggregates, and mass observations create “data”
that direct attention to daily life as interpreted through abstracted territo-
ries for governing. The psychological practices, educational statistics, and
measurement technologies form as traveling libraries to produce different
settlements of science. Models of biology, US psychology of behaviorism
and cognitive psychology, and the Swiss Piaget’s genetic epistemology,
among others, are the indigenous foreigners that travel and work in cre-
ating ontologies about kinds of people, such as the “adolescent” and the
“creative child.” These representations perform as cultural norms about
what is “natural” about children’s learning and development and as the
desire of successful educational reforms and teacher education. Systems
theory and cybernetics connect with these cultural principles in the visu-
alizations of kinds of people and their differences.
The cultural distinctions and divisions explored in the chapters, how-
ever, are elided through the system’s languages of feedback, processes, and
communication practices. Ironically, the erasures reidentify the teacher
and child as ontological objects ordered through research concerned with
modes of living as autonomous individuals as “problem solvers.” The
settlements are explored as creating taxonomic divisions and compara-
tive technologies to reason about moral order in the mundane activities
of child and collective belonging. The traveling libraries are discussed in
this section, as in the other sections, as forming at the interstices of art
movements, film, and literature.
Section Three: Systems and Cybernetics: Imagineering

Belonging as Social Differentiation
Section three focuses on the particular inscription of systems and cyber-
netics as they act in the imagineering of social belonging and social
differentiation. The chapters explore how measurement devices “de-
traditionalize” identity and belonging and relocate individuality through
statistical distinctions. Social life and change are ordered through systems
theory and cybernetics that connect with particular distinctions of psy-
chologies and cultural principles to “see” schools, classrooms, and chil-
dren. These distinctions are examined as embodying different images of
a future meritocratic educational system of a mobile society. The educa-
tional statistics and measurements are explored as performing as experi-
mental logics in the ordering of data in a grid of national cultural and
social practices connected with systems theory and cybernetics. The clus-
ters of data create new visualization practices of rendering populations as
commensurable or equivalence to compare. The notion of feedback, for
example, becomes important in research when used as visual diagrams
to “see” and organize special temporalities and multiplicities that seem
to have no strict boundaries or obstacles for research, teacher education,
and training teachers and yet function in the remaking and differentia-
tion of identity and belonging.
Notes
1. See de Chadarevian and Porter (2018), editors of a special issue devoted to the
history of data.
2. Some of the literatures played with in this traveling library are Gilles Deleuze,
Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking, Ben Anderson, Karen Barad, Walter Benjamin,
Bruno Latour, and the history of science as represented in works associated
with Lorraine Daston and Theodore Porter, among others.
3. The movement of Dewey as an epistemic figure to China, for example, is discon-
nected from the Protestant Reformism and American Exceptionalism and reter-
ritorialized in the culturally historical principles of Confucianism and Taoism.
4. Savage’s historical discussion is about Britain in this postwar years, but the
apparatus spoken about is visible in different chapters, with different assump-
tions and principles generated.
5. Before the war, American funding and Swedish funding came primarily from
private philanthropies, corporations, and wealthy individuals.
6. Methods are not autonomous practices in research. The embodied histori-
cal principles operate as a determinant of what become “the facts” of sci-
ence (Popkewitz, 2020a). Things in the world do happen that science puts
under description. The theoretical models enact order and classify what that
“nature” of the world is like and what is desired. Mathematical algorithms, for
example, inscribe theoretical entities about kinds of people that perform as if
they do exist, to calculate so as to say something about a specific cultural and
social life.
7. Lei Zheng (2019, 2020) explores this through the creation of a global lan-
guage of the technosciences in the 1950s and 1960s.
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Part 1
Mobilizing Science and

Desires for Better Societies
2 Science as “the Beacon” for
Social Change
The Reason of Systems in
American Educational Research
and Development1
Thomas S. Popkewitz
Introduction
The history of the social and psychological sciences is interesting, not only
in the past but also in their intersections in the present. Given shape in the
cosmopolitanism of US and European Enlightenments, the objects of the
reasoning of science are refashioned in the 19th-century North American
and European social question. The sciences were comparative internally,
concerned with governing the urban poor and “deviant” populations in
industrialization, immigration, and unrestrained capitalism. They were
mobile as they traveled and were (re)visioned in a globalization of gov-
erning the care of people—today thought of as modern welfare state.
The chapter focuses on the infrastructures of US sciences related to
education that were mobilized in the post–World War Two decades. The
sciences were organized as “problem-solving.” Knowledge was to orga-
nize change to imagineer the potentialities of society and people.2 This
working on the present to enact futures was given institutionalized forms
in the phrase “R&D,” or research and development. University centers
were created to connect science to policy, social agendas, and everyday
experiences. The chapter, however, is less interested in the institutional
structures than with the systems of reason that organized research as “an
actor” in social life. This notion of actor directs attention to the principles
generated about the types of objects recognized, the classifications giv-
ing direction to explanations, the problems and evidence necessary for
managing and predicting, and the modalities on which change is calcu-
lated and administered. The argument explores the theories and methods
of the sciences as formed at the interstices of cultural and social prin-
ciples to produce a comparative style of reasoning that, paradoxically,
inscribes inequality as the method of producing equality. Central to the
sciences related to education were systems theory and cybernetics, which
connected with particular social and cultural principles about collective
belonging, nation, and individuality.
The first section examines the mobilizations of science after the war
as cultural practices linked to social change. It examines how different
28 Thomas S. Popkewitz
“data” technologies, theories, and social events were interwoven to cod-
ify and calculate experience as objects of change. The interstices of these
different historical lines made possible thinking of society and population
as sites of mass observations. Daily life was reterritorialized as “data”
points of social laboratories (R&D) for organizing the system by which
change operated. Systems theory and cybernetic were central to orga-
nizing the data of mass observations. The theories and methods of the
data that organize society and populations as data points created con-
ditions to arrange and manage observations that were abstracted from
experience but that produced new spaces for action. Interviews, sample
surveys, and ethnographies provided new strategies for linking research
and development in studies—for example, of classrooms, learning, fami-
lies, childhood, community, and “political cultures”—and for focusing
on inequality as expressed in the study of particular populations through
distinctions of “urban” and “inner city” life and education (e.g., Smith &
Geoffrey, 1968)
These historical lines of science were folds activated in The Wisconsin
Center for Research and Development for Learning and Reeducation,
one of the seven national research centers established in the 1960s.3 The
Center’s research is viewed as cultural artifacts to understand the con-
crete assemblages in which systems/cybernetic theories and mass obser-
vations connect with cultural and pedagogical practices to make the US
elementary school into an experimental laboratory for reform. Explored
are new institutional forms and the system of reason as double gestures
of hopes that simultaneously inscribe fears of dangerous populations.
Methodologically, the sciences of the postwar are viewed as cultural
artifacts to explore the principles generated to shape and fashion what
is “seen,” thought, experienced, and ordered as objects of change (Pop-
kewitz, 2020). The sciences are examined as “actors” in producing rules
and standards about what is sensible and actionable and comparative to
create a continuum from the normal to the pathological. This notion of
actor addresses a particular historical quality of the political in moder-
nity: power operates less through brute force and more through the con-
duct of conduct.
Science as “the Beacon” for Social Change: The American

Jeremiad (Re)visioned
Post–World War Two welfare states across the Atlantic and Pacific
mobilized science for problems of recovery, reconstruction, and the rei-
magining of societies and education (Popkewitz, 2020). The defeats of
fascism generated an optimism about the future, defining the United
States through narratives of national exceptionalism. The nation was
optimistically portrayed as a progressive society dedicated to ushering
in a new age in its own image of freedom and democracy (Fousek, 2000;
Science as “the Beacon” for Social Change 29
Hartman, 2008). Although continually put to the test by the Vietnam
War, the civil rights movement, and the “monster” of the state’s new
patronage systems (Dennis, 2015), popular and social science literature
asserted that there was a social consensus that made creating wise poli-
cies and good science the societal challenge to find solutions to social
problems. Change was portrayed as “the end of ideology”; that is, creat-
ing the expertise for finding the correct paths to enable its democratic
institutions to grow and the economy to prosper (Bell, 1962).4
The optimism was tied to science that had the aura of theology (Boyer,
1992). Faith in science had historical precedence in US progressivism
(Nye, 1999). Science was given the practical power to shape life and
bring order to things in the postwar period as it was assembled in a dif-
ferent grid of social practices and technologies of science (Gilman, 2003).
The atomic bomb and technologies of splitting the atom were given as
utopic promises in transportation, energy, and agriculture as the anodyne
to their destructive fears and as “a way of avoiding unsettling immediate
realities” (Boyer, 1985, p. 122). The mass social reforms in these years
placed the social and psychological sciences as having an essential role in
finding solutions to societal problems (Lasswell, 1951).5
Faith in science entailed different historical lines that continuously
got tangled up with religious notions in cultural and political principles
governing the US ideologies of pluralism and freedom (Rock-Singer,
2019). The global universalism given to US democracy occurred at the
interstices of science and a “way of life and thought based on religious
faith in human dignity and immortality” (cited in Rock-Singer, 2019,
p. 189). During and after the war, debates about fascism abroad and
religious intolerance at home engaged in prophetic visions about the
heritage of the Enlightenment and the Reformation in the governing of
the nation from major Christians and Jewish clergy, and scientists. The
different debates connected notions of scientific management with a uni-
fying philosophy of an inclusive moral pluralism supported by a stable
democratic society.
Faith in science activated salvation and redemption themes for orga-
nizing the spaces or territories of becoming and belonging that traveled
in research (see, e.g., Popkewitz, 2008, 2020). The salvation themes were
offered as the means of perfecting individual and social life. In US pro-
gressivism and again in the postwar research, the salvation and redemp-
tive themes were spoken about in relation to the exceptionalism of the
nation and its population. The object of change was the moral order and
problem-solving was a method of “revelation” that activated the redemp-
tive themes during the 1950s and 1960s. The salvation and redemption
themes embodied desires that had dual inscriptions. The salvation themes
inscribed norms of collective belonging and “home” in theories of the
family and child while simultaneously generating principles about the
rescue and redemption of those excluded and abjected.
Mobilizing the Expertise of Science
The post-war social narratives and social science analyses paid attention
to desires about the potentialities of society and populations as salvation
themes to manage irrationality and fallibility and to prevent authoritarian-
ism. In sociology, anthropology and psychology, the belief that humans were
naturally “rational” was no longer sustainable after the rise of fascism and
the Holocaust. The theories of the human sciences would prevent authori-
tarianism by regulating the processes that managed people’s “irrationality”
(Heyck, 2012). Studies about family and personality, for example, delin-
eated the rationality of decision-making and the process of problem-solving
in a liberal-to-authoritarian hierarchy of political attitudes, norms of family
participation and interactions, and children’s development. Research was
to detect and change those qualities that were antithetical to a democratic
kind of person—defined as marginalized, closed-minded, rigid, conformist,
intolerant, ideological, and prejudiced. Social anthropologists focused on
the fears and anxieties about authoritarianism and adults’ uncontrollable,
emotional, and childish personalities. The new cognitive psychology was
a pastoral practice to create the liberal, “open-minded,” creative, autono-
mous, tolerant, flexible, unprejudiced democratic mind capable of using
“reason” (Cohen-Cole, 2014). The New Curriculum Movement between
1965 and 1975 performed through the cognitive psychologies translated
the complex edifices of the cultural norms of disciplinary fields into models
for the curriculum (see, e.g., Cohen-Cole, 2014).
Research was central to governmental and foundations policies. Fed-
eral research and development (R&D) expenditures increased from $1
million in 1940 to the federal contribution to almost $1.9 billion a dozen
years later (Solovey, 2013, p. 56). The institutionalization of reform-
oriented research was formed through federal legislation, such as the War
on Poverty, and the authority of social, economic, and military programs
expanded with the 1957 National Defense Act’s Cooperative Research
Program. Four federal agencies supporting research were created in the
1950s and 1960s: the U.S. Office of Education (USOE), the National Sci-
ence Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH),
and the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO).
The legislative agenda to mobilize research focused on expanding “a
well-developed, university-based social science system that was already
distinctly empirical and applied in orientation” (Wagner et al., 1991,
p. 10). The legislation authorized the USOE “to enter into a coopera-
tive arrangement with universities, colleges, and state education agencies
to conduct educational research, surveys, and demonstrations” (Klaus-
meier & Wisconsin Associates, 1990, p. xiii; Dershimer, 1976, p. 47). The
research was on “problem-solving.” Educational research was to generate
“theoretical and empirical knowledge to assist governmental policies that
were seen as lacking” at the time (Dershimer, 1976, p. 38).
The university as a mobilization of the expertise through grant pro-
cesses changed its political economy and structure. The president of the
University of Wisconsin–Madison, Fred Harvey, asserted that the uni-
versity obligation is to respond to “the urgent national needs and the
public interest” that could “help solve pressing problems and improve
the quality of life in the United States and abroad” (Harrington, 1990,
pp. ix–x). The view of the university drew on the progressivism at the
turn of 20th century, called The Wisconsin Idea (McCarthy, 1912). It
expressed the obligation of the university to extend their expertise to
civil society for improving people’s lives “in service of the democratic
ideal.” The Wisconsin Idea came from the university’s sponsorship of
science as the regeneration of a long-standing tradition of “the union of
basic and applied research” of American Land Grant universities (Har-
rington, 1990, pp. ix–x).
Educational research was given specific authorization in The Con-
gressional Cooperative Research Act (1954). It called for new national
centers for educational R&D to be placed in universities. Between
1964 and 1965, congressional legislation created five national educa-
tional R&D centers, enlarged to ten after a decade. The hope was that
research would transform the education system by “bringing order out
of educational chaos” that took the findings of research to produce
the “institutional character as a new kind of schooling” (Chase, 1977,
p. xiii).6 The research was defined as “problem-solving,” directly link-
ing research epistemically to a practical knowledge that has a functional
purpose to policy. Discussed later, the epistemic link was to systems and
cybernetics.
The educational R&D centers were to mobilize the expert knowledge
of science itself. It was asserted that there was an “acute shortage” of
researchers for directing large-scale programmatic research (National
Center for Educational Research and Development, 1969). The Wiscon-
sin R&D Center, for example, had researchers from a dozen faculties on
the campus. More than 500 PhD students were trained in the research
projects during the ten-year period (1965–1975).
The scope of the expansion of scientific expertise can be seen nationally
as well. The American Educational Research Association (AERA), ini-
tially a department within the National Educational Association (NEA)
from 1909 to 1964, became an independent organization and reflected
the growing cadre of research expertise. AERA grew from 3156 members
in 1964 to 12,000 members by 1974. The scope of the AERA Annual
Meetings expanded from 43 papers read and 105 people participating in
the 1956 Annual Meeting to 240 papers and 542 participants in 1966.7
The expansion of scientific expertise entailed new technologies of sci-
ence that enabled new kinds of questions and methods to linking research
to policy questions about reform and social change. This chapter now
focuses on such changes.
Changing Technologies of Science
The mobilization of research entailed “the creeping rise of the social sci-
ence apparatus” (Savage (2010). The legislation for research and develop-
ment in the postwar years was possible and coincided with the emergence of
techniques of mass observations that created new data as objects that rep-
resented the standardizing and codifying of the experiences of daily life dis-
cussed in the introductory chapter. The research efforts drew on the military
war efforts and on earlier research (see, e.g., Bruner, 1983). For example,
mass surveys and interviews techniques established in Columbia Universi-
ty’s Bureau of Applied Social Research’s quantitative analyses—directed by
Paul Lazerfeld, an Austrian émigré in the 1930s (Sterne, 2005)—were con-
nected to a US philosophical tradition of pragmatism as processual theories
of symbolic interaction in the interwar Chicago School of Sociology (Fine,
1995).8 Sometimes called “field studies,” the new apparatus of research in
sociology and anthropology and methodological reflections was connected
with educational research (see, e.g., Popkewitz & Tabachnick, 1981; Camp-
bell & Stanley, 1963; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Homans, 1950).
Large-scale data became more commonplace to arrange phenomena
for their typicality or generality (Isaac, 2009). Society and populations
were thought about as “a natural experiment” and the experiences of
daily life as a laboratory to imagineer ongoing interactions and commu-
nications. The research designs of “qualitative naturalistic observations”
emphasized participation observations and ethnography that worked
with positivist, anthropological, and communication studies of class-
rooms principles (Smith, 1981; Becker et al., 1961; Bellack et al., 1966).
The inscription of algorithms and technologies of statistical analysis
made it technically possible to study large populations, such as assess-
ments that compared educational systems and student achievement.
Human subjects were rendered anonymous actors whose thoughts and
behaviors could be represented as numeric systems that gave coherence
to the social order that otherwise seemed fragmented (Morawski, 2007).
The “subjectless representation” enabled the invention of what Igo (2007)
explored as a kind of person called “the average American.” The creation
and expansion of measurement bases were collected in federal publica-
tions to invent ways to see and compare “the conditions of education”
within and across nations as indicators of modernization. The measures
entailed creating statistical equivalences from differences across nations
and then using the macro-statistic as models of comparisons between, for
example, achievement and resources (see, e.g., Normand, 2016).
The research was problem-solving that constructed a particular func-
tion for research to serve R&D: the development of programs, students’
achievement, teacher preparation, and so on. The outcomes of research
had its own language of “knowledge utilization”: a seeming technical
phrase whose normative principles were understood as practical and use-
ful knowledge for organizing change.
Systems Analysis and Cybernetics as Potentialities
Phrases such as problem-solving, development, and knowledge utiliza-
tion actualized epistemic principles about what was seen and acted on
as the objects of change. The principles that organized the social and
psychological sciences were of systems theories and cybernetics.
During the 1950s and 1960s, systems theory was thought of as an
“unprecedented synthesis” for organizing the sciences (see, e.g., Easton,
1965; Simon, 1969; see also Halpern, 2014). It provided theoretical
approaches found in organizational and institutional theories, Saussurian
linguistics, and Levi-Strauss’s anthropology, which were important in US
social sciences.9 Imprints of cybernetics worked their way into teacher
“action research” (see Ivens, 2018; Lee, 2019) and curriculum models
associated with the Tyler rationale (Tyler, 1949; Ivens, 2018) and the
“New Curriculum” programs.10
Systems theory is a symbolic model for organizing the problem of
change with the biological metaphors of an organism to think about how
human organizations grow, develop, and change (see, e.g., Easton, 1965;
Simon, 1969). Change was organizing and monitoring the processes and
communication expressed as inputs and outputs, networks, flows, and
circuits. These processes and communication networks contained the
triggers for system growth and development.
The biological thinking of life as an organism was, in one sense, not
new. The notion of the organism was used in the 19th-century theo-
ries of biological communities, such as in the work of Mobius (Nyhart,
2009). What was different from the 19th century was combining the
biological analogy of system with cybernetics. Cybernetics enabled the-
ory to work through the analogy of the relation between the mind and
the machine for the study of social affairs—the machine as the computer
and its analogy to the mind as artificial intelligence (Halpern, 2014).11
Change entailed the link between human behaviors with machines (e.g.,
computers, photocells, and radar) as directed by processes and commu-
nication networks for achieving a system’s goals.
The optimal relation of the systems components was in harmony and
consensus. This state was theoretically the point at which the system was
in equilibrium. In practical terms of the research, “benchmarks” were the
desired optimal point of the system’s performance. Knowledge utilization
was how to orchestrate change to maximize the efficiency of social pro-
cesses. A Wisconsin Research and Development Center program, discussed
later, organized the psychology of children’s learning through systems the-
ories. The experimental research aimed to identify the most efficient strat-
egies for learning that enabled the system’s harmony: “to provide frames
of reference for reconciling the claims of the learner, the society, the disci-
plines, and scientific modes of inquiry” (Chase, 1977, p. xiii).
The system’s harmony and stability (its equilibrium) presuppose its
disequilibrium—that is, factors that diminish, hinder, or prevent the
optimization of goals. Research is directed to what hinders functionally
achieving the benchmarks and development, eliminating the factors that
produce the disequilibrium in the system so as to allow harmony and con-
sensus. Change identifies disturbances to the system’s consensus and har-
mony between the system’s external components (populational differences)
and internal components (differences in children’s school achievement).
As systems theory and cybernetics entered into social and educational
research, the theoretical principles draw on social and cultural categories
of differences that are no longer purely theoretical propositions. They are
folds in the social and cultural principles assembled in the problem-solving
of the social and psychological sciences. The abstraction of hypothesized
set of relations appears as if it has no historical location in its descriptions
of how social life and people work. The new mathematics curriculum of
the 1960s, for example, focused on the processes and communication
patterns that could be “theorized and its components identified through
a particular set of behaviors and traits thought to make up that kind of
person (and thereby a rational and democratic collective)” (Diaz, 2017,
p. 31). The particular cultural theses about the normality (those compo-
nents identified as the system’s equilibrium) also projected pathologies—
the latter about differences in family and community experiences as well
as the personality traits of lacking motivation and engagement.
Wisconsin R&D: Systems at Work as School Reform

The Wisconsin R&D Center imagineered the school as an abstraction
that connected systems theory and cybernetics with organizational theo-
ries and learning psychologies to structure school reform and change.12
Reform was expressed in psychological distinctions embedded with prin-
ciples of system’s theory—to identify the proper processes and instruc-
tional strategies for the optimal level of learning. The research was to
provide “theory and practical help on what to do and how to do it” (Gage,
1976, p. ix; see also Berliner & Gage, 1976, p. 4). The Center strove to
achieve the system’s processes and feedback mechanisms expressed as
synthesizing, developing, and demonstrating paths for school improve-
ment through the following:
• Conducting and synthesizing research to clarify the processes of

school-age children’s learning and development
• Conducting and synthesizing research to clarify effective approaches
to teaching student’s basic skills and concepts
• Developing and demonstrating improved instructional strategies, pro-
cesses, and materials for students, teachers, and school administrators
• Aiding educators, which helps transfer the outcomes of research and
development to improved practice in local schools and teacher edu-
cation institutions.
(Klausmeier et al., October 1973, n.p.)
Systems analysis gave form to the R&D tasks. Romberg (1968), a national
leader in the mathematics education reform movements,13 articulated
the importance of systems for instructional improvement.14 In the con-
text of the R&D Center, he argued that “the word ‘system’ . . . refers to a
man-made controlled functional structure” (Romberg, 1968, p. 15). The
humanmade control function involved “the interdependent components
which can be changed or manipulated”; controlled through “the feedback
or monitoring procedure”; and used to manage the system as a functional
means to orient the processes toward the goals of the system. The system
had four components: “input, mechanism, feedback and output” (Rom-
berg, 1968, p. 15).
The focus on systems was embodied in organization of research grants,
such as a proposal for elementary school teacher education called Cyber-
netics Model for Teacher Education. The abstraction of systems embodied
categories of an intra-system of feedback for the assessment and evaluation
of operations—with input components (e.g., admissions), the teaching-
learning components (e.g., professional foundations and classroom labo-
ratory experiences), output components (e.g., clinical experiences), and
elementary school components (e.g., the placement for experience). The
principles of cybernetics ordered the model of change as a “rational loop
of synthesizing research designed around behavioral objectives” as “a set
of standards.” The clinical experiences of teacher education, for example,
were structured “in a continuous assessment and evaluation procedures to
fulfill the feedback requirements of the system” (DeVault et al., 1967, p. 1).
The school was the site of experimentation and a human laboratory.
The object of the R&D was “to expedite educational improvement”
(Kreitlow & MacNeil, 1969, p. 1). The Center’s curriculum research
on reading, writing, and mathematics or school administration, for
example, were, “in one form or another, the social machinery necessary
for institutional adjustment.” The adjustments were “within the system
which translates purposes, problems, and needs into solutions and action,
and that it is possible for ideas to be stalled or permanently lost in the
system” (Kreitlow, February 1972, p. 1). Processes and communication
in research enabled the “meaningful individualization of instruction via
media-oriented and computer-facilitated technology.”
The research and development of the Center were organized into an
elementary school program: individually guided education (IGE) (Popke-
witz et al., 1982). The program was used in 2000 schools by the middle of
the 1970s, expressed as a system for the “meaningful individualization of
instruction” (Kreitlow, February, 1972, p. 1). The program entailed seven
major components and their interrelations to identify “the desirable con-
ditions” for attaining “quality education” generated through the Wiscon-
sin’s R&D program center (Kreitlow, February 1972, n.p.). School was
an experimental site conceptualized as a social system of “clearly defined
roles and responsibilities, shared decision making, continuous pupil
progress, personalized instruction, active learning, evaluation related to
instructional objectives, involvement of parents and support from the
community, and support by responsible education agencies” (Klausmeier,
1977b, p. 6).15 The internal school systems linked instructional plan-
ning and school leadership with district policies, school architecture, and
home–school–community relations into a feedback mechanism that was
to achieve optimal outputs (see Figure 2.1).
The Working of an Abstraction: The System, Mastery Learning,

and Behavioral Objectives
The IGE was as an ordered system whose processes embodied means–
ends sequences that could be imagineered (Popkewitz et al., 1982). The
school as a system was both as the object of research and as participants’
Figure 2.1 Major components of individually guided education.

Source: Reprinted from Individually Guided Elementary Education: Concepts and Practices
(Klausmeier, 1977b, p. 11)
“seeing” the particular relation of instruction, psychology, curriculum,
and school leadership as interrelated components. Classroom instruction
organized students into units that conformed with notions of the school
as an experiment and classes as laboratories for development. The unit
as an organization of the school was to provide for the flexible grouping
of students.
The notion of instructional unit, however, did not initially emerge as
a pedagogical idea. It was related to psychological criteria of sampling
norms of the school as an experimental laboratory as part of the Center’s
R&D. The unit provides rules for sampling norms of the randomization
of the methods of educational psychology to ensure reliable research fnd-
ings. The instructional fexibility was for rigorous sampling procedure
in developing psychological knowledge about learning in the different
subject areas (e.g., music versus mathematics) and to measure learning
progressions through the standardization of the curriculum and instruc-
tional research. The organization of the students and teachers’ planning
and assessments were functionally linked to the other components of the
school “system.”
The units were not only for research to operate with the coordinates
of the hypothesized system. The units in teaching were called I&R—
instruction and research: “Each I&R Unit carries out [its] functions in
accordance with school and school district policies” as related to school
“instructional improvement committee and the System-Wide Program
Committee” (Klausmeier, 1977b, p. 13).
The I&R units were organized by principles of cognitive psychology.
The Center’s director argued that cognitive psychology replaced earlier
Figure 2.2 Multiunit organization of an IGE school of 400–600 students.

studies of school learning organized through classical and operant condi-
tioning, following B. F. Skinner, with an empirically substantiated and sci-
entific approach to change (Klausmeier & Wisconsin Associates, 1990).
Cognitive psychology was itself influenced by systems thought and cyber-
netics that connected the structuralism of the Swiss psychology of Jean
Piaget and the processual and functionalism of the Russian Lev Vygotsky
(see, e.g., Bruner, 1983).
The instructional psychology was called mastery learning, creating a
hybrid psychology that included behaviorism. The operation and feed-
back mechanisms and research were directed by the psychology of mas-
tery learning. Mastery and its hierarchy of scales and performance levels
anticipated the potentialities to be actualized. The objectives of mastery
learning were desires, which were directed in the psychological language
of mathematics as an anticipated mode of living to be “used, or may
profitably be used, in the lives of children and of adults alike” (National
Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1945, p. 202).
Children’s cognitive development and learning, as the school itself, was
located in a cybernetic system. Instruction was ordered as the interrela-
tion of “environmental” conditions of the classroom with the operant
conditioning principles of behaviorism. Mastery learning entailed break-
ing down and sequencing specified outcomes of knowledge and skills
into hierarchies of learning outcomes. That latter was talked about as
“behavioral objectives” and “the specific teacher skills, knowledge and
attitudes” developed through “developing a systems model of essential
components and their interrelations” (DeVault et al., 1967, p. 1).
Behavioral objectives were related to a more general movement in
instruction connected to Bloom’s taxonomies of learning hierarchies
(Bloom, 1968).16 The behavioral objectives enabled a standardization
and codification of “outcomes” that could be universalized and repli-
cated across different schools. Learning objectives were subdivided
into discrete categories, such as learning to ask appropriate questions
related to problem-solving versus other skills and generating solutions
to problems (see Figure 2.3). Instruction involved designing processes
and communication practices, expressed as “an environment in which
individual students learn at rates appropriate to each student and in a
manner suitable to each student’s learning style and other and personal
characteristics” (Klausmeier, 1977a, p. 7).
The objectives were standards that established both the optimal learn-
ing and a “screening mechanism for admission, a diagnosis of students’
needs, and a predictor of performances” in a continuous feedback loop
(DeVault et al., 1967, p. 1). The creativity and problem-solving skills of
the child, for example, were treated as independent of any specifc subject
matter, linked to characteristics of the child, such as intelligence and gen-
der, and to accomplishing broader performance measures of “productive
thinking” and intelligence (Wardrop et al., 1969, p. 67; see also Martins,
Figure 2.3 Instructional programming model in IGE.

this volume). The subtasks of learning mathematics, reading, and preread-

ing skills, for example, were divided into subunits that could be codifed,
standardized, and ordered into a sequence of behavioral objectives (Rom-
berg, 1977; Otto, 1977; Venezky, & Pittelman, 1977). The attainment
of reading skills was considered invariant, “passing through the same
sequence of units and attain[ing] the same objects to the same criterion
of full mastery” (Klausmeier, 1977a, p. 63).
The model of learning combined the organic (mind) and machine in
the open system that simultaneously entailed the principles of certainty
and uncertainty. Certainty entered through the ontological givenness of
the world. The Developmental Mathematics Program incorporated into
IGE, for example, focused on pedagogical knowledge as the “functions
and relations which reflect[ed] underlying properties as the unifying
theme” in mathematical knowledge (Romberg, 1976, p. 6).17 The ontolo-
gies given as mathematics were stabilized entities, with learning as “heav-
ily dependent on the acquisition of specific concepts and skills, because in
using any process efficiently children must acquire concepts and skills,”
such as learning common names for geometric figures and how to add
three-digit numbers (ibid., p. 6).
The uncertainty was expressed in The Developmental Mathematics
Program. It stressed children’s “openness” in discovering mathematical
ideas, “rather than simply assimilating the record of other people’s activi-
ties” (Romberg, 1977, p. 80). Instruction assumed that the mathematical
modeling was for children to perform to be rational in daily life: “math-
ematical terms, sentences, and phrases as ‘models of situations’ that can
then be used in construction activities that children like to do and can
perform” (Romberg, 1976, p. 6).
The Working of an Abstraction: The Phantasma of Research and

Empirical Evidence as the Historical Agent
The R&D knowledge was directed toward “output optimizing,” improv-
ing of policy delivery, and advocating the expansion of policy measures
over time (Haveman, 1987). The emphasis was on the particular empiri-
cal needs for data linking the discrete components that produced the abil-
ity to read. The research, for example, assessed the “effects of pictures on
the reading comprehension” of elementary and secondary school pupils
(Koneke, 1968, p. 1). Students were asked, for example, to state the main
idea in the three paragraphs or the accompanied photos to assess effec-
tive reading strategies.
The statistics and survey research of the Wisconsin Center for R&D
entailed experimental designs. Differences were identified as variations
correlated with the physical and mental achievement of “children of
low, average, and high intelligence.” Statistically, the research exam-
ined, for example, the effects of a content-relevant picture on the com-
prehension of the main idea of a paragraph (Koneke, 1968) or the
development of lesson plans, tests of knowledge, comprehension, and
their applications related to instruction in the physical concept of force
for second to sixth graders (Helgeson, 1968). The methodological
references for obtaining “robust” data for educational improvement
brought into play notions of equilibrium and disequilibrium (Kreitlow &
MacNeil, 1969).
The empirical evidence standardized and calculated the theoretical
entities of mastery learning and the school system as though it existed.
The nature of the child in master learning entailed a priori assumptions
about the moral order that are reterritorized by psychological and social-
psychological distinctions tied to systems theory. The empirical evidence
became the historical agent to bring about the abstraction into action-
able “data” points as variables and patterns modeled to actualize the
phantasma of the school and its kinds of people embodied in the cyber-
netic system. The Wisconsin Design of Reading, a reading acquisition
program in the IGE schools, was defined as the “framework for organizing
skill instruction that has components of a system: management, assess-
ment, instruction, skills and objectives, with the circle feed by evalua-
tion” (Otto & Askov, 1974, p. 4). Systems theory emphasized ongoing
instructional processes and communication practice that omitted any
reference to ontological objects on which the processes of communica-
tion and programming models worked.18 Of course, these objects were
silently present in the objectifications of childhood and ability to define
what was (im)possible for the child and teacher.
Science as a Redemptive Theme Against Dangers and

Dangerous Populations
The salvation and redemption desires of research were given as instru-
mental projects of the systematic improvements of learning and effec-
tive teaching. The initial research reports of the Wisconsin Center for
R&D had no differentiations for social populations. The comparative
qualities of the research were often registered to the criteria embodied
in the concept of learning. In one study, differences were defined as the
effects of three kinds of information conceptualized as facilitating the
acquisition and retention of mathematics content being studied (Rom-
berg & Wilson, 1973). The research sought to understand how earlier
information influenced children’s learning of the curriculum content. The
research operationally defined the earlier information as advanced orga-
nizers: the information given to students before instruction, the cogni-
tive set as the information to inform students of anticipated associations
expected for them to acquire during instruction, and advanced organizers
that brought past learning to help understand the content to be learned.
The results were statistically analyzed in a 2 × 2 × 2 fixed effect analysis
of variance on learning and retention tests (Romberg & Wilson, 1973).
The differences were described in the R&D Center’s reports as the
natural aptitudes of children, classifications that separated the normal
from the pathological, the latter differentiated as “the reluctant learner,”
“mentally retarded,” and the disabilities that better teaching and reme-
diation will help (Ringness et al., 1959; Klausmeier et al., 1959). The psy-
chological distinctions and differences were spoken about as individual
capacities related to learning, motivation, sensation and perception,
thinking and communication, emotions, and intelligence. Gender differ-
ences were expressed as sex discrimination that had to do with X and Y
chromosomes. Referencing the relation of psychology to the particular
aptitudes in music, for example, differences were defined as the abilities
to discriminate pitch, loudness, rhythm, time, timbre, and tonal memory.
The characteristics of music ability drew on the revisions of the tests that
historically lost its construction as covering populational differences and
eugenics in music ability produced in the 1920s.
The comparative reasoning research articulated redemptive themes
about individual development and addressed social divisions concerning
inequalities. As social distinctions, the comparative reasoning was ori-
ented through federal definitions of poverty to standardize and calculate
poverty (Cruikshank, 1999),19 such as those in the classifications of The
US Title I of Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, directed
to rectify the conditions for the poor and “others” classified as socially
and economically marginalized populations (Haveman, 1987).
The statistical narratives expressed the hopes and fears that research
addressed. The Wisconsin Center for R&D’s reports, for example,
expressed an optimism toward undoing social wrongs, statistically as the
effect that research and development had already increased high school
graduation numbers, in which 75 percent of pupils entering the fifth
grade in the fall of 1964 graduated from high school in 1972 and 23
percent of the high school graduates were expected to complete college
(Klausmeier, 1977a). Along with this hope was the fear that “one out of
four students has a significant reading deficiency, half of our unemployed
youth are functionally illiterate, and approximately 2.5% of our nation’s
youth drop out” (Klausmeier, 1977a, pp. 3–4).
Research brings into existence the double qualities of desires about
potentialities that research actualizes: potentialities to-be and the poten-
tialities not-to-be. The potentiality to be was conceptualized as acquiring
higher-level conceptualization skills and other abilities linked to the idea
that children “should have developed healthy self-concepts” (Klausmeier,
1977a, p. 7). Health was a cultural quality but expressed as principles
of the system’s functions, structures, and developmental processes. The
potentialities not-to-be were embodied in the categories of the socially
disadvantaged—for example, children of the poor and racial populations
that “lacked” efficacy and self-esteem, “at-risk” children, and at one
point “reluctant learner[s].” These categories given as related to learning
differentiated middle-class youth, who were “self-directed,” “adaptive,”
and having traits of intelligence, from the adolescents of poorer families,
who were more likely to be “submissive,” “defiant,” “unadjusted,” and
academic “failures” (Hartman, 2008, p. 66).
The problem-solving research located points for the planned interven-
tions to change those elements that disturbed the system’s equilibrium,
whether they were organizations related to teacher training or psycho-
logical categories about children’s motivation and family structures.
The ordering and classifying generated a comparative system of rea-
son articulated in programs of remediation that would reduce social
and psychological pathologies. The teacher was the agent of change to
understand “the culturally disadvantaged child and his background,
but they [teachers] must also believe that he is teachable” (Otto, 1969,
p. vii). The problem of change was in the processes that enabled opti-
mizing cultural norms expressed as learning. Learning was narrated as
instrumental, the early remediation and the enrichment of a language-
experience approach for reading and the provision of effective and
varied materials.
Research as Materializing Potentialities in the Present

The mobilizations of R&D created “abstract spaces” of the school system
to demarcate the child’s success and failures through particular epistemo-
logical principles for defining differences and fabricating human kinds.
The US’s national exceptionalism, the double qualities of the Jeremiad,
and the science of making certain kinds of people and differences were
the objects of change. The rationality and “democratic” dispositions
desired, however, were rendered in a constellation of reflexivity ordered
through systems theory and cybernetics to authenticate and generate the
potentialities as the problem-solving of research.
The temporality was operating as anticipatory of the future, but with-
out necessarily defined end points or contexts. Directed to actualize
potentialities, R&D was utopic. Of course, the utopic qualities are not
spoken of as such. They are embedded in how things are ordered as learn-
ing or teacher professionalism in a manner that orients thoughts and
actions as desires about what should be.
If I return to the concern with science as an actor, the notions of the
actor and agency were enunciated in the research as correlated with the
mechanisms at work in the systems and cybernetics theories to design
change. Agency in R&D was bound to the epistemic ordering of problem-
solving, actualized through the self-authorizing qualities of the school
“system.” The teacher as agent of change and the child as master of learn-
ing provided the coordinates for determining the reason of action itself.
It is important to return to the abstraction of the school systems as not
empirically deduced but rather a priori, self-referential, and self-authorizing.
The idea of a system as an organism to replace earlier mechanical notions
with more seemingly dynamic models of change did not make the determin-
ism of the machine disappear. The school conceptualized as a social organ-
ism that has stages of growth and processes of development that change
over time congealed with the determinism that circulated in the ontological
objects given in the curriculum and the modeling as learning. Learning
was organized for the child to access “reality” embedded in inscriptions
of codifications and standardizations.
The world made into an experimental/laboratory way discussed earlier
assumes an importance in broader social and political spaces in which
science “acts.” While not the intent of this chapter, the changes in the
criteria of how science tells the truth become significant in contempo-
rary research—folds in the coordinates that intersect with the epistemic
and ontological changes discussed so far. The systems and cybernetics
erasures of the ontological objects that focused on process and commu-
nications today are naturalized, spoken with authorship. International
assessments of student performances and studies of school effectiveness
and teacher education bring systems and cybernetics models as inscrip-
tions of desires for the potentialities of the nation; assembled as a mode
of how truth is told through its visual culture (Popkewitz, 2020; Lind-
blad et al., 2018). International assessments that today perform as sci-
ences that tell the truth about nations and populations through numbers,
graphs, and charts have partial bearing to the research discussed in this
chapter. That bearing is neither evolutionary nor causal, but the epistemic
distinctions of cybernetics about social relation and human experience as
networks, flows, and feedback loops transform “epistemology from the
search for truths in an external world, to the search for self-referential
measures emanating from within our networks that underpin contem-
porary concerns about data visualization, ubiquitous computing, and
‘smart’ networks” (Halpern, 2016, p. 442). Science no longer exists as a
Bergsonian time of a reality inaccessible to science but as a time emanat-
ing from inside the networks and design of research (Halpern, 2016).
The researchers’ intent was to create a more enlightened, equitable, and
just world. The epistemic principles that emphasized processes and commu-
nication elided the objectifications of social life in schooling in the classifica-
tions and desires that they generated. The problem-solving of the system’s
research engendered the desires that research was to produce. These desires
were embedded in R&D as strategies for social and educational improve-
ment. The notion of the system links theories about the child as a universal
claim about producing rational processes of representations that “described
what could be as if this potential was simply waiting to materialize” (Poovey,
1998, p. 248). The inscriptions of systems were acted on as techniques of
social life to be “utilized as the basis of organization architecture and divi-
sions of managerial responsibility, and utilized as a grid to realize the real in
the form in which it may be thought” (Rose, 1999, p. 213).
Notes
1. The discussion draws partially from discussions in The Impracticality of
Practical Research: A History of Contemporary Sciences of Change that
Conserve (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020).
2. I draw “imagineer” from the work of Weinberger (2017) to talk about how
the present is organized as a site of intervention that entails utopic images
and narratives of what should be as organized through the rationalities of
science.
3. The Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) at the University of
Pittsburgh, one of the first two centers funded in 1964, focused on research
and producing evaluation. In 1964, three more centers were created: The
Center for Advanced Study of Educational Administration at the University
of Oregon at Eugene; the Center for Research and Development for Learning
and Reeducation at the University of Wisconsin at Madison; and the Center
for Research and Development on Educational Differences at Harvard Uni-
versity. A sum of $500,000 each was committed to these institutions annu-
ally through a five-year cost reimbursement contract. Eventually, a total of
ten R&D centers were established (Saettler, 1990).
4. This end of ideology assumption was in public conflict with the Cold War
rhetoric but in fact was reconciled pragmatically through the internal US
approaches to research that assumed a consensus and instrumentalism.
5. For instance, in the 1960s, the University of Wisconsin–Madison formed the
Institute for Research on Poverty, a number of urban and international units,
the Institute for Environmental Studies, and the Center for Research and
Development for Learning and Reeducation to conduct large-scale studies.
Today, on its recent version sits the 13-story building called Educational Sci-
ences. It houses The Wisconsin Center for Educational Research, the latest
reincarnation of the original research and development center in 1965. The
center today generates over $60 million in research grants and assessment
services and employs over 500 people, including 100 graduate students.
6. The educational research and development centers operationally expressed
faith in science. Grants were lump sums of money, internally allocated for
individual projects related to the centers’ plans.
7. Today the American Educational Research Association has over 25,000
members in fields such as curriculum studies, educational leadership, policy
studies, teacher education, sociology, and history. Over 14,000 participants
attend its annual meeting.
8. British social sciences, in contrast, were characterized by strong moral and
sociophilosophical commitments, not theoretically oriented and empiricist
in research design (Wagner et al., 1991, p. 15). French social science, while
initially adopting forms of empiricism related to US research, soon aban-
doned its instrumentalism and moved back to more universalist, philosophi-
cally and historically based approaches. These differences in Europe and the
United States were also embodied in the study of educational psychology
(Depaepe, 1987).
9. It had, oddly, a short life in many of the sciences, such as computer science.
10. The National Science Foundation–funded social studies curriculum “Man: A
Course of Study” was organized by systems theory (Ivens, 2013). The Tyler
rational was translated into seven languages and is still used today.
11. Cybernetics ordered models of planning that sought a unified and globalized
model for educating people in science, technology, engineering, and math-
ematics in UNESCO and The Club of Rome as well as in US policy thinking
issues of control and communicate patterns (Zheng, 2019, 2020).
12. The Center was renamed in the early 1970s as the Wisconsin Research and
Development Center for Cognitive Learning.
13. Romberg later chaired the important committee for developing the first
national mathematics standards for the National Council for Mathematics
Teachers in the 1980s.
14. Romberg PhD program at Stanford was with people who had returned from
the war and brought systems analysis into the study of education. Personal
communication.
15. The emergence of IGE as a research-centered reform about schooling, chil-
dren, and teachers as kinds of people developed in a nonlinear fashion.
16. Bloom’s taxonomies of educational objectives were influential internation-
ally in the 1960 and 1970s.
17. The principles that organized the mathematics curriculum became impor-
tant to the development of the national standards of mathematics education
developed in the late 1980s, with its director, Thomas Romberg, heading the
commission to develop the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
committee.
18. An icon of what was called the New Curriculum reforms focused on the psy-
chological distinctions to organize reform and the processes of education—
the name of the book itself (see, e.g., Bruner, 1960).
19. A great number of social programs were invented to address the issues of pov-
erty and inequality: Head Start, Upward Bound, Follow Through, the Federal
Teacher Corps program. Early childhood programs such as Head Start were
designed to remake the poor (provide “efficacy” and “self-esteem”) through
the inscription of competitive, entrepreneurial, and participatory norms.
The interventions were often related to questions of structural changes but
morphed into administrative and social-psychological questions about the
qualities and characteristics of the subjectivity of the poor (see, e.g., Popke-
witz, 1976).
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Crutchfield, R. S., & Ronda, T. (1969). The development of productive thinking
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Pentagon agency that changed the world. New York: Vintage.
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constitution of crisis sensibility and systems analysis around 1970. Discourse:
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6.2019.1637332.
3 Tactile Pedagogies in the
Postwar
Cybernetics, Art, and the
Production of a New
Educational Rationale
Inés Dussel1
Introduction
The years after the Second World War are usually perceived to be those
of the “second machine age” (Goodyear, 2004), when electronic tech-
nology started to reign over social life and when systems theory and
cybernetics became dominant frameworks within which to see the world
and the self. Yet this period was also one in which play and creativity
became entrenched in Western societies (Ogata, 2013; Colomina, 2014).
While both movements tend to be thought as separate forces, one leading
toward automation and the other one toward a boundless humanism, in
this chapter, I trace the history of their interconnectedness following the
thread of design education in the postwar era in order to analyze how
it contributed to producing a new sensorium that was to be central to
educational research.
More broadly, my argument is that the interconnections of both move-
ments provide a different entry point to understanding how science–
society relations were reframed in educational research after the Second
World War. I am interested in looking at how disciplines and traditions
seemingly peripheral to the mainstream of educational research, such
as artistic and design education, were central to the emergence of “new
models of sense, measure and calculation” (Halpern, 2014, p. 29). These
new models of sense turned sensual operations and feelings into data that
had to be brought into information flows and had to produce feedback
loops to improve teaching and research; it also made classrooms into
research laboratories and workshops where new ways of being in the
world and languages to talk about experience were produced, ways that
were epitomized in the notion of the creative self (see Martins, this vol-
ume) and that constituted a new kind of governmentality.
In this chapter, which is part of a larger project on the genealogy of
digital media pedagogies, I trace the confluence of cybernetics and cre-
ativity through some developments in design education that put tactile
pedagogies in the center of their epistemic and political strategies. While
tactilism as a way of knowing had been important in previous centuries,
52 Inés Dussel
it was decisively propelled by the early-20th-century avant-garde move-
ments, most notably from the Italian futurists and the Bauhaus (Çelik
Alexander, 2017). Yet it is in the postwar when these movements took
hold in their alliance with cybernetics and computational science. Today’s
touchscreen devices would not be possible had there not been these
experiences in the 1950s and 1960s that changed how knowledge and
pedagogy were thought and practiced, ways that centered interactivity,
exploration, and research.
To study tactile pedagogies, I focus on some case studies that, although
they condensed different traditions, crossed paths at some point or
another. Their trajectories allow me to draw a relational arc as a space of
action for tactility in educational research (see Huang, this volume). The
first case is the Bauhaus, the seminal institution for design and the arts
in Weimar Germany; the second are the Bauhaus emigrés in Chicago and
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); the third and fourth
are Konrad Wachsman and his cybernetic pedagogy and Bruno Munari
and his tactile workshops.
I study these cases not as a way to reinstate the figure of individual
geniuses that produced breakthroughs in the history of educational
research or to reassert an author function that finds transcendental
meaning in a proper name or biography (Foucault, 1984). Instead, I aim
to contribute to “a history of knowledge as circulating practices” (Secord,
2004, p. 667) that traces how ideas and educational devices took place,
were moved and transformed by different actors in other settings, and
configured new rationalities for educational research. Writing this history
invites a transnational and transdisciplinary approach, as design educa-
tors moved—were mostly forced—from Europe to the United States and
elsewhere and produced traveling libraries (Popkewitz, this volume) that
shaped the movements of educational research in the second half of the
twentieth century.
However, there is a case to be made for studying singular institutions or
educators. The “anonymous history”2 of the spread of pedagogical con-
cepts and strategies in educational research is entangled with biographi-
cal trajectories and teaching technologies that can and need to be singled
out, as a way to see how they materialized and how the “locationless
logic” was indeed situated in particular contexts that were also politico-
epistemic networks (see Popkewitz, this volume). I seek to trace the devel-
opment of tactile pedagogies in the second half of the twentieth century
through the movements between mundane places such as university semi-
nars and laboratories and artistic workshops for children, through travels
between institutions, artifacts, and continents, and through the biograph-
ical trajectories of design educators who had a powerful sway on what
would later be configured as digital media pedagogies.
The chapter is structured as follows. In the first section, I briefly pres-
ent some ideas about tactility as a pedagogical strategy in the first half
Tactile Pedagogies in the Postwar 53
of the 20th century, particularly in the Bauhaus school (1919–1933).
Through an analysis of the methodology of the preliminary course, I
investigate the conceptualization of the tactile as a way of knowing and
its relationships to political and social debates of that time. In the second
section, I introduce the shifts that some of these ideas went through when
they became part of US institutions in the 1940s and 1950s. In the third
section, I discuss both Konrad Wachsmann’s pedagogy and his experience
of algorithmic pedagogy in classrooms from the 1950s through the 1970s
and Bruno Munari’s tactile workshops as a playful alternative that still
shares the tenets of the production of a new sensorium for a new kind of
governmentality. In the concluding remarks, I reflect on what the history
of design education as a seemingly marginal field might say about educa-
tional research and its silences and blind spots.
Tactile Pedagogies in Art and Design Education:

Bauhaus and Beyond
Tactility as part of pedagogical practices can be traced a long way back in
the history of education, from Rabelais to Rousseau, Johannes Pestalozzi,
and Friedrich Froebel and to object lessons and school museums (Carter,
2018). The early 20th century would see a more decisive turn toward a
reappraisal of the senses, mostly sight and aurality. The assumption was
similar to Pestalozzi’s: the senses are a superior way to access the world
and to surpass the limitations of scholarly knowledge. Otto Neurath, phi-
losopher of the Vienna Circle and creator of the ISOTYPE (International
System of Typographic Picture Education), thought that “just through its
neutrality, and its independence of separate languages, visual education
is superior to word education. Words divide, pictures unite” (quoted in
Galison, 1990, p. 723, my emphasis; see Huang, this volume). The idea
of the unity of knowledge through the senses was a central one (Galison,
1998), but it also pointed to an ideal of reconciliation after the lost war
and the experience of the 1918 failed revolutions (Stavranaki, 2010).
Even if less attended to, touch also became important as a way to sub-
vert traditional hierarchies of knowledge.3 Froebel’s gifts inspired many
educators and artists to experiment with forms and textures (Çelik Alex-
ander, 2017). Touch was turned into a signifier of handwork, crafts, and
industrialization, and there was a burgeoning of pedagogies that sought
to replace books and oral lessons with the study of forms, textures, and
materials.
This movement was nowhere more visible than in the pedagogies
developed at the Bauhaus school. The Bauhaus opened its doors in 1919
in Weimar, and as the new republic that had overthrown the Kaiser, it
was full of promises of revolution and novelty.4 Its pedagogical prin-
ciples were laid out in the 1919 Bauhaus Program, or manifesto, written
by its founder, Walter Gropius: “[a]voidance of all rigidity; priority of
54 Inés Dussel
creativity; freedom of individuality, but strict study discipline” (Gropius,
1994/1919, p. 436). The new democratic self was to be creative and free
but disciplined, autonomous, experimental, and willing to take risks.
The training at the Bauhaus wanted to break with the model of the
Beaux-Arts academy and the vocational school in many respects. On the
one hand, the emphasis was on a sensorial exploration and not only on
verbalization; former students said that “language played only a minor
role in class” (Çelik Alexander, 2017, p. 179). Along with this, the cur-
riculum was not keen on historical studies, which were thought to pre-
vent students from developing their own ideas and creations (Geiser,
2018). The idea was to find the original sources of creation, getting rid
of history’s weight on aesthetic subjects and invoking “the fundamental,
timeless principles of creation,” which might be related to the “crisis
of experience” after the First World War (Stavranaki, 2010, p. 95). It
defined itself as an “objective” method, in which the students had to
find their own vocabulary and creations and teachers had to abstain
from passing them on to students. Originality and creativity were highly
valued in this pedagogy (Gropius, 1963; Horowitz & Danilowitz, 2006).
The curriculum of the Bauhaus started with a preliminary course, or
Vorkurs, that acted as a propaedeutic unit for integral artistic training,
and it lasted six months and was later extended to a year; all students
had to do it, and then it was decided whether they could continue and in
which path. The Vorkurs was first taught by Johannes Itten between 1919
and 1923 and then by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers between
1923 and 1928, with Albers continuing in charge of the course until the
school’s closure by the Nazis in 1933. The curriculum included work-
shops on material properties (stone, wood, clay, glass, color, and textiles)
and form courses on the aesthetic and design potential of these materials.
Tactilism was a common concern for all the teachers of the preliminary
course.5 The first teacher, Johannes Itten (1888–1967), known by his the-
ory of colors, favored an exploration of materials through his theory of
contrasts and their visualizing through drawing:
Metal, paper, textile and natural materials were combined in two- or

three-dimensional material studies and touched with the eyes blind-
folded in order to train the hand’s sensitivity to the material, as well
as copied in drawings to grasp their structure and textures.
(Holländer & Wiedemeyer, 2019, p. 58)
Materials were scarce, and Gropius asked Weimar neighbors for dona-
tions; students fetched their families’ drawers to fnd resources. Touch
was perceived as a feeling that was accompanied by visual or verbal rep-
resentations or that was produced by carving out wood in order to make
textured boards (Itten, 1975).6
The second teacher of the Vorkurs, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895–
1946), was more decidedly focused on tactility. Moholy, a Hungarian
artist who had been part of the constructivist movement and had close
ties with Dada Berlin and Soviet constructivism, was more interested in
mechanical arts such as photography, film, and typography. In his book
Von Material zu Architekture, Moholy-Nagy claimed that “[i]t is surely
the sense of touch, more than any other, that may be divided up into
a greater number of separate qualities of sensations” (Moholy-Nagy,
1938, p. 37). Moholy-Nagy referred to the tactile through the notions
of textur and faktur. Texture condensed his “interests in the intersec-
tion of technological and biological experience” (Avilés, 2020, p. 64);
following the avant-gardes of the early 20th century, he saw texture as
the proper substitute for ornament and style (Schuldenfrei, 2016). But
the tactile came also through faktur, a neologism that came from the
Soviet constructivists and that emphasized the material production of
modern art forms.
Faktura became a concept to debunk easel painting in favor of mod-

ern art forms that could stage the socioeconomic changes prompted
by industrial production. Eventually, [for the Soviets] Faktura also
became a political concept that referred to the social organization of
labor within a communist state.
(Avilés, 2020, p. 67)
It was a heavily charged concept that emphasized the social produc-

tion and the value of work; recognizing faktur through tactile exercises
implied a way of being in the world that made visible the material condi-
tions of existence.
One of the first exercises that he proposed was the study of materi-
als and the production of a tactile board, which was likely taken from
Filippo Marinetti’s tactilism manifesto.7 Marinetti presented tactilism as
a revolutionary means of expression, in what would today be called a
performance to an audience in Paris. Marinetti brought a tavola tattili
that he called Sudan-Paris, which was passed around to the public and
which showed different types of touch. The idea was that the object could
be “read” by touching it. Tactility had different values, among others:
1. Confident touch—cold and abstract, silver paper

2. Touch without heat—persuasive and reasoning (silk)
3. Exciting touch—lukewarm and nostalgic, wool or velvet
4. An almost irritating touch—hot, granular, spongy cloth
5. Hot touch—soft and human, suede
6. Hot, sensual, spirited, and affectionate touch—plush, bird down, soft
brush.8
56 Inés Dussel
The materials were given affections and created a certain sensual envi-
ronment that, while appealing to primitivism, imbued the senses with a
new rational vocabulary (Verbeek, 2012).
Besides the tactile boards, Moholy also proposed that the students
construct touch diagrams that would chart the feelings aroused by the
textures and act as a sort of “check of individual perceptions” to control
the “purely subjectively” records of the boards (in Holländer & Wiede-
meyer, 2019, p. 86). Moholy said in a lecture at the Bauhaus in 1923 that
his art was “‘one in the spirit’ with science, social system and architec-
ture” (Stelzer, 1967, p. 147). The tactile diagram shows the connections
of the Bauhaus teacher to particular notions of scientific research and
the demand to surpass the subjective register, something that became
more pronounced in the US experience of the Bauhaus in the 1940s. The
tactile had complex relationships with the optical in Moholy’s peda-
gogy, who was always insisting on visual forms and documenting his
students’ practices through photography, his preferred medium (Tsai,
2018; Smith, 2006).
The combination of vision and tactility was also clear in Josef
Albers’s exercises. Albers (1888–1976) was less keen on technologi-
cal media and used paper, corrugated board, metal, and glass as basic
materials. “There was no ‘right’ answer except to learn by doing.
Rather than drilling them in classical design principles, he wanted his
students to establish their own principles through the manipulation of
their materials” (Holländer & Wiedemeyer, 2019, p. 120). Besides the
work with materials to reach “their essence,” Albers proposed several
exercises with folding and cutting papers, but mostly they involved
drawing: drawing lines and circles freehand, repeating forms identi-
cally, and drawing tangible reproduction of models, spatial situations,
or typographies.
According to the reconstructions of its pedagogy and daily life, the
atmosphere at the Bauhaus was of experimentation and playfulness. The
workshops were considered laboratories and the creation was equated
to open-ended research, in a movement that had some debts to Marxist
statements on material and intellectual production and also to German
Romanticism of Bildung as self-fashioning (Çelik Alexander, 2017). In
1923, Gropius proposed the initiation of a “Bauhaus Research Depart-
ment,” a “center for experimentation” in standardized building solutions
(Vallye, 2011, p. 78). This idea was not successful at that time, but years
later, Konrad Wachsmann would pick it up and develop it at the Univer-
sity of Southern California, at a more propitious techno-social moment
that turned research into the central node for making kinds of people and
disseminating technologies of mass observation (Hacking, 1995; Popke-
witz, this volume). It is thus time to consider what happened to this peda-
gogy after the closure of the school and the move of many of its teachers
to US institutions.9
Postwar as the Techno-Social Moment of Design Education:
The Americanization of Tactilism
The second thread that I follow is Moholy-Nagy’s and his experience
at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, as well as Gyorgy Kepes, also a fellow
Hungarian and one of his closest collaborators, who had a prominent
role in creating the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, to study
the transference of their tactile pedagogies.
During the first times of the New Bauhaus/School of Design, the struc-
ture of the school maintained the organization in workshops and courses,
but it became more encompassing and ambitious. “The preliminary
course would consist of a full year rather than one semester of ‘unifying
experiences’ with light, color, photography, tools, volume, space, tactile
constructions, and art history” (Allen, 1983, p. 66). The workshops cov-
ered materials, light, and color (taught by G. Kepes) and architecture and
weaving, with a children’s course on Saturday mornings (Powers, 2019,
p. 221). In February 22, 1939, Moholy-Nagy welcomed the new students
in terms that were dear to US pragmatism but that also introduced some
novelties:
This is not a school but a laboratory in which not the fact but the
process leading to the fact is considered important. . . . You as total
human beings are the measure of our educational approach, not you
as future furniture designers, draftsmen, photographers or instruc-
tors. Your brains as well as your hands, your emotions and your
health, all this is part of the process.
(quoted in Moholy-Nagy, S., 1950, p. 170)
While there is an echo of faktur in this statement (the process leading to

the fact), there are some displacements that are worth noting. First, the
appeal to the lab as an educational space instead of the school as work-
shop marked a shift toward the scientifc model and away from artisan-
ship.10 Second, in those years, both Moholy and Kepes claimed that the
goal of design education was not just to create the designer of an artistic
artifact but to mold the open-minded citizen, considered not as an isolated
intellect but as shaped by sensory felds (Vallye, 2011; Cohen-Cole, 2014).
Tactile pedagogies became imbued with a moral sense of integral educa-
tion, paving the way for embracing the notion of the creative self that was
to be central to mid-20th-century constructions of the self (Ogata, 2013;
Cohen-Cole, 2014; Martins, this volume). Finally, the German word fak-
tur was translated into English as “surface treatment,” an expression that
erased Moholy’s concern about the practice and the place of material pro-
duction (Avilés, 2020, p. 67). From faktur to surface treatment, the tactile
experience in the Americanization of the Bauhaus was transformed into
an individual’s sensorial experience of shaping the world.
58 Inés Dussel
During the first years of the New Bauhaus in Chicago, Moholy worked
closely with an associate and friend, Gyorgy Kepes (1906–2001), also a
Hungarian artist. Kepes taught the workshop on light and was involved
in the camouflage course that Moholy devised in 1942–1943 as part of
the school’s collaboration with the U.S. Department of Defense. Both
artists sought to adapt the principles of Mondrian, Malevich, and oth-
ers to the understanding of visual clues and strategic defensive planning,
learning to see their environment as possible targets (Galison, 2001).11
Historians of science and art have studied the effects of these collabora-
tions in the promotion of a new interdisciplinarity and the emergence
of a military-scientific complex that was to reorganize work toward “a
problem-solving and relevance seeking mentality” (Dutta, 2013, p. 6;
Cohen-Cole, 2014). A new kind of governmentality emerged, in which
the sensual experiences became central to define a relationship of under-
standing and mastering the world.
At that time, Kepes “wrote of an eye no longer moored in a single space
or time,” of a vision that had to be “trained to trust instrument panels
streaming data from radar and radio transmissions, to rely on the guid-
ance of machines and the recordings of surveillance teams” (Halpern,
2014, p. 79). This experience was central for both Moholy and Kepes,
who write about a “vision in motion” (Moholy’s posthumous book) or a
new “language of vision” (Kepes, 1944 publication) that conceived of it
as “mobile, relative, nomadic, and autonomous” (Halpern, 2014, p. 80).
Vision became interactive, and the eye had to be trained to recognize
patterns, deceptive signs, and future possibilities. The world started to
be seen as an interface; attention became “a material and scalable tech-
nology”; and learning was equated to scanning (Halpern, 2014, p. 85).
Everybody was enlisted in adopting the scientific-military view that was
“a form of moral-cartographic vision” and had to “draw localities into a
frame of mind” (Galison, 2001, p. 20).
Moholy and Kepes’s theory of art shifted toward “a theory of infor-
mation in art” (Stelzer, 1969, p. 146) that thought of artifacts as com-
munication machines, which produced information flows that were the
core of human experiences. Tactility, then, lost centrality as a pedagogical
strategy to directly access the world; touch, as much as vision, needed to
be codified as informational data, abstracted from its corporeal marks,
and included in a feedback loop that informed action. This codification
was already present in the exercise of the touch diagram at the Bauhaus
that sought to turn subjective feelings into objective records, but in the
1940s data were inscribed in the emerging language of cybernetics and
were put at the service of problem-solving. Unfortunately, Moholy died
in 1946, and it was up to Gyorgy Kepes to take this lead further.
Kepes moved to MIT in 1944 and worked there until his retirement.
MIT was at that moment a “new research-academic complex,” strongly
allied to military-scientific industry (Dutta, 2013) and thus was fertile
ground for Kepes’s interests in the interconnections between art, science,
and technology. Kepes was an active scholar; besides his teaching, he pro-
duced a series of seminars and books (inspired by the Bauhausbücher that
were edited by Moholy in Germany in the 1920s) that brought together
scientists, linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, historians, and artists,
In 1967 he created the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), where
many visiting scholars crossed paths. In 1956 he wrote a seminal text,
The New Landscape of Art and Science, which explored the shift from
the language of vision to a visual landscape:
[t]o convert this new environment into a human landscape, we need

more than a rational grasp of nature. We need to map the world’s new
configurations with our senses. . . . Reoriented, we shall then be in a
position to cope with the new world of forms.
(Kepes, 1956, p. 19)
Language shifted toward environment, and vision to processing data; the

verbs to talk about vision became orientation, sorting out, exploration,
and navigation. In Kepes’s visual pedagogy, the new reasoning of art +
science + technology became an actor that reinscribed sensual experi-
ences in the language of data processing, and it turned to see society as
an experimental laboratory on which technologies of mass observations
could be deployed.
In these pedagogies, it is possible to see how a particular vocabulary
for educating the senses became available for design education and also
for educational research. The new sensorium created a new perceptual
order—simultaneously sensorial, rational, and emotional—and incited a
particular performativity of the educational researcher that is to become
an analyst of never-ending flows of information (Halpern, 2014). The
researcher’s self was “radically individuated and simultaneously net-
worked” (p. 84): as Kepes said, “[o]nly the realization of a dynamic com-
plementarity of the personal and civic can offer the possibility of living
up to our immense potentialities” (Kepes, 1971, p. 73). Equipped with
the new sensorium, researchers could interact with the world as an inter-
face, seeing it as a flow of data, and turn society into an experimental
laboratory (see Popkewitz, this volume).
A Second Techno-Social Moment: Tactilities After Data,

Between Cybernetic Pedagogy and Playful Workshops
In this section, I briefly consider two alternatives that took hold between
the 1950s and the 1980s in the United States and Italy, ones that enable
me to follow the thread of tactility after the cybernetic turn. The first is
the diagrammatic pedagogy developed by Konrad Wachsmann (1901–
1980). Wachsmann was a German émigré architect, friend of Walter
60 Inés Dussel
Gropius, who was involved in the New Bauhaus in Chicago from 1949
to 1956; and later became the director of the Building Research Unit at
the University of Southern California. He is well known for his inno-
vative buildings, some of which have become iconic, and for being an
advocate of industrialized building and prefabricated houses–for which
he founded, with Gropius, the firm General Panel Corporation (Bittner,
2019). He was described as a visionary and a “steel carpenter” (Entenza,
1967, p. 7), in many respects comparable to Buckminster Fuller, with an
unabashed trust in the future and in the advantages of machines: “If we
have machines, why do handcraft?” (Miller, 1973, p. 54).
The German architect had not studied at the Bauhaus but was well
acquainted with Gropius’s thought and worked with Mies van der Rohe
in Chicago. He nonetheless had a critical appraisal of the school, which
he considered a noble search for unity but too focused on crafts and
preindustrial forms. In 1970, on occasion of an exhibit on the Bauhaus,
Wachsmann wrote that the Bauhaus was “BC—before computer”:
The Bauhaus was a remarkable happening in the fields of education,

art, design and architecture in the mystical Twenties, and its influ-
ence was strongly felt only long after the Bauhaus itself had ceased
to exist. . . . However . . . [this exhibit] will become part of the
archives of the years B.C.—before computer. This new time, most
meaningfully defined as A.C., or after computer, must write its own
book in answer to the formidable question of the science of the art
of technology.
(Wachsmann, 1970, AdK, KAW—2500)
Wachsmann had been a teacher since 1949, not only in the United States
but also in Europe and Asia, where he adopted an R&D approach, in
which the production of knowledge was based on “comprehensive, inter-
national information-retrieval” (Wachsmann, 1967, p. 30). He devel-
oped a diagrammatic teaching system, fully aligned with systems theory
and cybernetics, which “enacted a strict protocol for classroom activity
but which conspicuously did not defne content or curriculum” (Denny,
2019, p. 66).
The method consisted of a “mechanics of collaboration” that was
based on workgroups or “discussion cells” of three people, ideally no
more than seven groups in total. “The working rhythm is of considerable
importance”: each group is assigned a problem of equal importance and
has to discuss it and solve it in the same amount of time. “In this way
each group will influence the problem as a whole and this whole will
shape the evolution of the work done by the groups” (Wachsmann, 1960,
p. 390). The teacher or head of the team has to stay silent but care that all
participate and maintain a good working climate. In a true Bauhausian
spirit, Wachsmann thought that “[i]n no case must the team adapt itself
to the head. . . . [The teacher] must content [themselves] with giving a bet-
ter definition, a more exact interpretation; [they] may influence the work
process and, above all, intensify the spirit of self-criticism of the team’s
members” (p. 390). After each discussion cell works on all the problems,
there is a collective reassembling where results are shared, “discussed,
diagrammed and calculated”; only then can the head of the team criticize
the work. The class was conceived as a feedback loop, where all informa-
tion was recycled:
The various stages of the work must be “rethought” once more so as

to “relive” the paths which led to the solution. The sources of infor-
mation and what has emerged must be revised. . . . There is no such
thing as wasted matter in this way of working. No text, no sketch
may be destroyed while work is in progress. Each point of view may,
in fact, influence the final result. The work rooms of the teams do not
possess wastepaper baskets.
(Wachsmann, 1960, p. 391)
Some students recalled that in class not even erasers were permitted
(Pogacnik, 2018, p. 137), yet the fgure of the teacher was almost erased
and replaced by a system of distributed cognition. The spatial arrangement
was also that of an information circuit, with dispersed sites of production
into multiple peripheries (Galison & Jones, 1999, p. 519). He designed
chart fows for classrooms borrowed from cybernetics: teachers and stu-
dents were visualized as streams or fows whose interactions could be put
into diagrams (Isbilen, 2019). Groups could start anywhere: “communica-
tions can activate any point in their systems” (Wigley, 2001, p. 110).
Information was key in this circuit. Wachsmann was against a bookish
pedagogy; he thought books were not sufficient, because they didn’t have
“knowledge of the present—and of the future, perhaps” (Wachsmann,
1960, p. 391). He recommended the use of microfilm and punched cards12
to organize a “system of modular coordination classification,” which reg-
isters “no matter what datum—information, texts, designs, symbols and
others on microfilm” that are “punched on appropriate cards” and that
could be recombined as desired. “Moreover, it is possible to place the
punched card in a projector—this being combined with microfilm—so as
to study the figure shown on the film. It is possible, obviously, to photo-
copy this figure” (Wachsmann, 1960, p. 361). The range and up-to-date
quality of these technologies is remarkable.
Where is the tactile in this pedagogy? Wachsmann focused his teach-
ing on the study of materials and the process of building; in that respect,
there were several connections with Bauhasian traditions. However, as
with Kepes, the tactile is increasingly abstracted and turned into data.
Students were supposed to look at different materials (there is no refer-
ence to touch explorations) and to turn them into data that allowed them
62 Inés Dussel
to model buildings. Wachsmann’s publications were usually illustrated
with students’ works, most frequently in their finished form but some-
times as drafts. Wachsmann’s pedagogy relies heavily on the materializa-
tion of the process of work, yet the tactility and the texture are displaced
by the product. Mark Wigley has suggested that the structures designed
by Wachsmann could be read as “an attempt to make poetic images of
the invisible communication infrastructure whose influence had grown
throughout the century—a visible aesthetics for the invisible net” (Wig-
ley, 2001, p. 111); the same would apply to students’ works, whose
connectedness and light structure resemble the same quest to visibilize
a diagrammatic pedagogy that stressed the work team and the informa-
tional infinitude that Halpern (2014, p. 84) referred to.
The second alternative is the tactile workshops organized by Bruno
Munari (1907–1998), an Italian designer who promoted tactile work-
shops for children from the late 1940s to the 1980s. Munari is some-
how eccentric to the main flows that have been considered so far, yet
he was also influenced by Marinetti’s tactilism and created his own
series of tactile boards in the 1930s (Verbeek, 2012, p. 231; Munari,
1985). Although he did not like to talk about references or artistic
affiliations, Munari admired Klee and was interested in the princi-
ples of the Bauhaus and Gestalt psychology (Altomonte, 2014). In the
1940s and 1950s, he became interested in concrete art and comput-
ing and cocurated the famous exhibit Arte Programmata in Milano
in 1962 (Tanchis, 1986). He shared with Kepes and Wachsmann the
idea that the future was to happen in the intersection of technology,
design, and art.
Throughout all his life, Munari designed books and toys for children,
using textures and cutouts to educate children through sensorial expe-
riences with touch, movement, and color. He experimented with forms
and ideas, always playful; for example, in 1949, he designed a book
called Libri Illegibili [Unreadable Book] without words but with a visual
history made of lines (Antonello et al., 2017). He created a magnificent
ABC Dada in 1944, in which he played with typography, textures, and
poetry (Schnapp, 2012).
Munari was first and foremost an artist and designer, but he also taught
on several occasions, among which stands out the visiting professorship
he held at Harvard in the spring of 1967. At that time, Munari taught
two courses in visual studies at Harvard (VS 130 Introduction to Visual
Design and VS 150 Vision and Value: Advanced Explorations in Visual
Communication), which later became a world-famous book, Design and
Visual Communication (1976). This is an episode that deserves further
research, as it more closely connects Munari to the developments of digi-
tal media and media pedagogies.
Starting in 1949 and until 1988, Munari developed a series of tactile
workshops for children that aimed to promote a direct experimentation
with the techniques and rules of visual arts. He claimed that “[k]nowing
through experimentation will stimulate a creative projection completely
free” (Munari, 2008, p. 136). This design implied both a redefinition of
the ways of knowing—through tactilism, touching, and feeling—and the
space times of education that were, like for the Bauhaus and Wachsmann,
no longer classrooms but laboratories.
In a 1985 publication of this experience, Munari payed tribute to Mari-
netti and emphasized that touching gave forward access to the world and
was a “direct learning tool,” involving not only the hand but rather the
whole body. In Munari’s view, learning by touching enriched the child’s
personality and gave self-confidence; the gains were presented in psycho-
logical terms and were in line with the principles of the creative self for
whom free exploration is a mode of research (described by C. Martins,
this volume). One of the first exercises of the workshops was giving chil-
dren objects of the same shape but different to the touch, in ways that
challenged their visual knowledge (Munari, 1985, p. 6). Many of the
exercises were close to those of the Bauhaus: cutting or folding papers,
finding contrasts between materials, and building tactile structures.
However, Munari thought of this experience in ways that denote the
penetration of systems thinking and of data processing:
[C]hildren need to understand and to classify, to put in order what

they learn. It is important to them that each thing and each fact has
a name and that this information gives an order so that it can be
recovered when needed. This is how communication skills are built
up in language.
(Munari, 1985, p. 3)
The structure of information retrieval and the codifcation of impres-

sions as data resemble the one suggested by Wachsmann. Similarly, the
teacher or the adult would intervene only occasionally; the child had
to be self-suffcient in their learning, as much as it was possible. The
introduction of verbalizations that were prompted by questions such as
“what do you feel?” and “how does it feel?” operated as Moholy’s touch
diagram, through which a common language was produced, and feelings
were associated with sensual experiences and rational arguments. Touch
as a way of knowing implied an abstraction of sensations and of the
forms that sought to bind rationality to the sensorial.
There is, however, an important difference with Wachsmann, and it has
been named “lightness”: a certain easygoing playfulness in Munari (Alto-
monte, 2014; Antonello et al., 2017) that might show a different facet for
tactile pedagogies. Whereas touch was to be translated into information
data that would be verbalized, shared, and reused in the information
circuit, there was no hyper-confidence in cybernetics, and the workshops
seem to remain “before computer,” as Wachsmann called it. This is not
64 Inés Dussel
by chance: Munari produced books and artworks on useless machines,
detaching himself from an all-encompassing celebration of technology.
Munari’s book on the tactile workshop ended on an upbeat image:
after all the activities, “[t]he only problem was getting the children off
and sending them home” (Munari, 1985, p. 54), and this endlessness of
play makes room for a final comment. Munari might seem “BC,” but in
some respects, his tactility, relaxed and lighter, captured by the situation,
seems more aligned with the informational endless loop of the platform
society and the stickiness of immersive videogames than the diagram-
matic planning sketched by Wachsmann, which left almost no space for
recalculations. It also seems more tuned to contemporary subjectivities
that are framed by the pedagogies of desire and participation and not
those of efficiency (see Huang, this volume; Bishop, 2015). In that
respect, Munari’s tactilism makes it visible that “BC” or “AC” might be
less important than the kind of rationalities and modes of address that
the pedagogies subtend and to the concepts and knowing relations that
they offer for educational research.
Concluding Remarks
What, then, do this revision of the history of design education and its
tactile pedagogies say about educational research and social and psycho-
logical sciences in the postwar era? I highlight three possible contributions
of these developments in tactile pedagogies for rethinking science–society
relations in this period.
First, contemporary educational reform movements tend to emphasize
that the hyperrational and the cognitive emphasis in schooling has mar-
ginalized the senses. Yet, as these cases show, some sensual pedago-
gies have been quite central in redefining how the citizen and society
are thought, providing categories and actions for organizing social
behavior. In fact, what might need to be reviewed are the silences in
the histories of educational research, which have been limited mostly to
institutional definitions of the field, to national frames, and to “proper
names,” underestimating which politico-epistemic changes were grow-
ing in parallel or oblique movements. This points to the need for much
more transnational and transdisciplinary approaches to understand
these entanglements.
Second, these cases make it clear that touch is anything but direct or
intuitive; tactility has been abstracted from local conditions, translated
into particular languages and codes, and included in ways of reason-
ing and feeling the world. What we take today to be creative, sensual,
or free exploration has—for decades now—been charted with scientific
languages and with particular epistemic technologies that involve ways
of governing people through knowledge. In the postwar era, as design
education shifted from being concerned with the education of artists or
architects to that of citizens, these translations took particular forms that
made them better “travelers” across spaces and disciplines. Tactilities
were increasingly thought as “data inputs” to feed circuits or diagrams of
information, and in that sense, they contributed to producing the “loca-
tionless logic” of scientific research that this book describes. The meta-
phor of the learning lab was extended to society at large; citizens were
to be trained in new ways of looking and feeling the world in order to
become open-minded, creative selves.
Third, these shifts had multiple effects in the social and psychological
sciences—as Kepes’s efforts at CAVS show—and in educational research
in particular. The researcher had to be equipped with the new sensorium
in order to interact with the world as an interface; they had to see it as
a flow of data, manage information overflow, and turn society into an
experimental laboratory for trying out other ways of governing. Along
with the transnational and the transdisciplinary, histories of educational
research need to become trans-epistemic, paying more attention to the
redefinitions of the relationships between the cognitive and the sensual.
As these cases show, even cybernetic approaches are sensual and involve
ways of bodily involvement with particular experiences. There is no
such thing as research devoid of bodily and sensual dimensions, and the
regimes of the sensorial, or the sensorium, as I have been calling it, need
to be further problematized as part of our epistemic practices.
To conclude, the arc that I have tried to draw in this chapter is that of
the increasing abstraction of sensual experiences from particular loca-
tions, evacuated from their bodily marks and transferred to discourse
networks of research and science that constructed different hierarchies
of knowledge. If in the beginning these movements were welcome as part
of the reversal of the power of lettered elites as in the Bauhaus experi-
ment, their inscription in the 1950s and 1960s into the techno-social
moment of the military-scientific complex, which in many ways is pro-
longed today in the modes of address of digital media, does not seem to
fare much better in terms of power relations and of being less governed,
as Foucault said. These histories show the need to be wary of any claim to
return to pure, primitive senses or move beyond the senses to a cybernetic
self, and to remain alert to the politics of knowledge and research that
these claims contribute to.
Note: I thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, whose gener-

ous research award allowed me to make most of the archival work for
this chapter.
Archives
Akademie der Kunste, Berlin
Museum of Modern Art, New York
66 Inés Dussel
Notes
1. I thank Tom Popkewitz’s and Ethan Hunt’s generous and sharp comments on
an earlier version of this chapter, which helped me redefine some of my argu-
ments in (I hope) more poignant ways. Also, I thank the participants at the 2019
Uppsala seminar, whose questions and suggestions still resonate in me. Last but
not least, I recognize my ongoing conversations on the history of design edu-
cation with Sandra Valenzuela, whose doctoral research on Mathias Goeritz’s
visual pedagogy was an inspiration for this chapter (Valenzuela, 2020).
2. The concept of anonymous history was coined by art historian Heinrich
Wölfflin and picked up by Sigfried Giedion in his Mechanization Takes Com-
mand (2013, e.o.1948), which is a history of the mechanization of craftwork,
furniture, agricultural work, among others. Giedion, trained as a mechanical
engineer and art historian, tried to bring together the materiality of objects
with the feelings that they produced to conform a zeitgeist. This approach
was a critical step toward a materially oriented historiography of art and
architecture (see Geiser, 2018, particularly pp. 190ff.).
3. Can the tactile experience be distinguished from other sensorial experiences?
Tim Ingold says this is not possible and rather speaks of a multisensorial
immersion and comingling with the world (Ingold, 2007). Although I agree
with him, in this chapter, I am interested in looking at how touch as a dis-
cursive concept was used in pedagogies to overturn hierarchies of knowledge
and modes of address and that had practical effects in configuring people’s
actions and affects.
4. The Bauhaus history was not exempted from conflicts and tensions inside
and outside the school (Oswalt, 2009; Droste & Friedwald, 2019; Otto,
2019; Weizman, 2020). Many of the claims of novelty have been nuanced,
tracing the borrowings that the Bauhäuslers took from other institutions.
5. Bauhaus teachers built on past experiences and philosophies (Wick, 2000;
Smith, 2006; Çelik Alexander, 2017). Both Johannes Itten and Josef Albers,
who taught the preliminary course, had been primary school teachers
involved in pedagogical reform movements (Itten, 1975; Horowitz and
Danilowitz, 2006). In fact, the Bauhaus can be seen as a movement in which
progressive education principles such as creativity and exploration that were
tried out at primary schools were transferred to art education intended for
adults. Ironically, these days, digital media brings back some of these prin-
ciples into primary schools, claiming that they are new.
6. Itten’s method could be called today an expressive pedagogy that conflates
the self and the world:
[Itten’s] pedagogical methods, which advocated tactility and empathy,
suggested as their vocation filling the “gap inherent in representation
and abolishing the differential and external character of knowledge.
The projective posture of Itten’s body in front of works of art similarly
expressed his cognitive attitude: no gap was tolerated between the sub-
ject and the object, between the object and its sign.
(Stavranaki, 2010, p. 104)
7. Moholy recognized in Von Material zu Architektur the inspiration that he
had received from the Italian’s work:
F. T. Marinetti, the leader of the futurists, published in 1921 a manifesto
on “tactilism” (creation in tactile values). He came out as a passionate
advocate of a new kind of art, to be based on tactile sensations, and pro-
posed tactile ribbons, carpets, beds, rooms, stage-settings, etc.
(Moholy-Nagy, 1938, p. 43)
8. This translation of textures, lines, and colors into emotional values was
noted by Rudolf Carnap in his 1929 visit to the Bauhaus, when Moholy had
already left the school, but the exercise was still ongoing. He perceived it as
a metaphysical deviation that caused rejection but was otherwise supportive,
as Otto was Neurath, of the Bauhaus’ efforts to reform education (Galison,
1990).
9. This was the history of the Bauhaus after the Nazis has been thoroughly
studied (see, among the latest, Goad et al., 2019; Weizman, 2020).
10. I must add in this statement that Moholy was making a wince at the experi-
ence of the University of Chicago’s Lab School. Charles Morris, who was
teaching at the University and the New Bauhaus, had introduced Moholy to
Dewey in 1938, and Art as Experience was compulsory reading in the School
of Design (Findeli, 1990, p. 14).
11. In the First World War, Moholy-Nagy had been a reconnaissance officer at
the Austro-Hungarian artillery, and several of his creations can be seen as
cites of the “lens of the machine” that focused on targets (Tsai, 2018). Tsai
emphasizes the humanistic reading of this experience (Moholy the educator
overcoming Moholy the military in subjecting the machine to human uses);
yet, as Galison (2001) and others show, the relationships between the mili-
tary gaze and the new rationalities that were being constructed were com-
plexly intertwined. Moholy, like many constructivists, seems to have been
more of a posthumanist.
12. A former student of Salzburg Summer Academy recalled that “In the very
first seminar [in 1957], he [Wachsmann] pulled a punch card out of his
pocket and said, ‘This is the future of architecture’” (Pogacnik, 2018, p. 134).
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4 Science as Utopia
Infrastructures, Pedagogies,
and the Prophecy of Design
Junzi Huang
In this chapter, utopia is understood as contours in which science takes up

particular forms of visualization and initiatives of design to confer on its
world citizen, its cybernetics individual, and its materiality of collective
being. Three designers and their respective utopia designs are investigated
here as conceptual personae organized into two arcs: First, Austrian phi-
losopher Otto Neurath, by designing world language ISOTYPE (Interna-
tional System of Typographic Picture Education), applies the “neutrality”
and “scientificity” of visual technology to pedagogy. Meanwhile, English
writer H. G. Wells envisages a desire-free world state built with scientific,
humanitarian order. US systems theorist and architect Buckminster Fuller,
taking on a passion for a utopian future as well, designs various housing
assemblage to transform warfare into welfare in the United States.
These transatlantic conceptual personae are intermediaries of visual-
ization and design that form relational rather than representational arcs
as spaces of action.1 In the spaces of action, science, and educational
research generates its knowledge with a gloss of humanity by incorporat-
ing initiatives of design working on how to “affect” the subjects immedi-
ately and repetitively. An affective order is imposed as utopia images of
humanitarian dwelling space and modes of existence. The utopian images
entangled with phantasies of universal democracy and welfare are dan-
gerous. The danger is embodied in the utopian designers’ phantasy of
an equal future “for all” by universalizing a better form of life that is
historically selective and particular. However, forms and signs created
by the visual pedagogy are in fact infrastructural, and they are becom-
ing the perceptual order of seeing, learning, and behaving in educational
research. Educational research is an assembly that forms within these
arcs, constellating the design to order the education of perception into
a particular style of planning curriculum and instruction in the postwar
United States.
Here I explore a way to “open up” education, which is being radi-
ated and dramatized by epistemological ordering and ontological gym-
nastics.2 I use the phrases “visual pedagogy” and “pedagogy of desire” to
make clear how contours in between the arcs have shaped a pedagogy
72 Junzi Huang
of perceptual experience—the senses and sensibilities of being a mod-
ern, global, cosmopolitan subject. The particular contours that have
constituted the historical becoming of our utopian, desirable schema of
“welfare” have re-emerged in the postwar years. The schema of universal
democracy and welfare moves into pedagogical conduct and educational
research, which further transform and connect sites of schooling with
control infrastructure for the securitization of life and the state.
Arc I. Visual Pedagogy: Design and Ordering

On one street of Amsterdam in the 1920s, information was cluttering in
an advertisement:
No automobiles allowed on more than two wheels, not equipped for

passenger transport if any goods are transported thereon. . . . Vehi-
cles not equipped for passenger transport are prohibited to drive in
or through, if any goods are transported thereon.
(Annink & Bruinsma, 2008, p. 49)
It is a sign that “begs to be visualized” (p. 49). This gesture of begging

seems to subjugate the words on the board to visual presentation. And
yet the words themselves are already in the process of becoming “visual.”
Less about the vision, the visual here refers to a particular force to have
made things visualized—more visualized. The particular force here is an
initiative of good design that will bring a kind of visual immediacy to the
surface.
Design is about the order of things that creates the image of order,
emerging at the horizon of collective aesthetics. Whereas writing is often
nostalgic about its mysterious rebellion against a unified body of expres-
sion, surface, the visual—photograph, graphic design, architecture, or
screen—desires to construct immediate, affective, and economic feedback
loops with the spectator. Weaves of images, signs, and representations
are possibility and potentiality waiting to be incorporated into polem-
ics and pedagogies. I am not interested to see how thoughts happen his-
torically about or around one singular image—this particular method is
what Galloway summarized as the “coherent aesthetics” of the interface
that directs the forces to central works of art (Galloway, 2012). I also try
to avoid ideological grouping of images. One might have witnessed how
photographs have gone through the process of visualizing and archiving
anthropological representations of the Others but are now lingering in
the mission of revealing truths of inequality. It is thus not surprising to
see that for Susan Sontag images are deployed as a method of colonial
representation and later ironically also a method of “democratization”
(Sontag, 2001). I instead dwell on the power relations circulating between
groups and populations of images where forces are being disseminated
Science as Utopia 73
and the ways of seeing are conducted rather than granted by the substan-
tial “aestheticity” of the image.
The practices of Otto Neurah show how the visual pedagogy is made
possible at the cutting edges of the science-pedagogy-society assembly.
The cutting edges are to be carefully done by a science of design which
is said to implement a utopian order of things that allows for equality
and freedom, whereas in the shadow, the excessive energy, strayed spirit,
and rebellious heterogeneity remain indiscernible and are doomed in the
battlefield of power.3
Infrastructure Between Signs and Forms

Around the 1920s and the 1930s, Otto Neurath broadcasted a call to the
“world”: “Words divide, images unite” (Neurath, 1973, p. 217). Neurath
engages his beautiful ambition in a series of projects named Education by
the Eye: a visual pedagogy with a distinctive design of systemic and visual
communication. The initiative of design converts two “professions”—
sciences and education—into producing materials and surfaces for the
visual pedagogy. At the cutting edges of sciences and aesthetics, educa-
tors, scientists, and artists collaborated to design and craft info-signs
for the visual pedagogy of Neurath and ISOTYPE (International System of
Typographic Picture Education). A collaborative science of design means
to make educational material affectively immediate, whereas any singu-
lar expert—scientist, artist, or pedagogue—is not supposed to take over
authority. Designers, using a few lines and reductionist patterns, reduce
common sense, gender, ethnicity, customs, traffic, streets, and so on into
simplistic forms of info-signs. Design enables the reductionist forms to
flash the information and meaning at the fleeting moment of “seeing.”
Becoming reflexive to the forms, our bodies stop upon seeing any sign of
alarm and cars drive following the weave of traffic signs.
Design, by repetitively experimenting lines and shapes, creates a system
of info-signs that has immediate and economic effects. The immediacy
seems to make the visual technology a magical ingredient facilitating
a successful pedagogy. Neurath’s Education by the Eye, however, aims
to take over the power of pedagogy with scientifically designed materi-
als, rather than being merely an “aid.” For Neurath, a pedagogue him-
self, teachers’ autonomy should be displaced out of pedagogy since the
strength of each teacher could be uneven and even ineligible. A good
teacher is able to keep out all unnecessary details in their teaching. The
possibility of shifting an autonomous teacher into a servant of teach-
ing materials constitutes a critical condition for building a democratized,
universal pedagogy, however counterintuitive the statement sounds. Less
teaching experience is necessary—and that makes possible a higher level
of education for a general public (Neurath, 1936, p. 29). How could one
argue against such a sweet dream of democratizing our education?
74 Junzi Huang
Neurath’s utopian image is important in that it takes part in a danger-
ous entanglement of democratizing and universalizing education. Neur-
ath’s experiments blend an initiative of design into making a utopian
apparatus for pedagogy. The pedagogy is utopian in that it is designed
to actualize democratized knowledge and universal civilization. Neur-
ath believes that with good design, educational materials should be able
to give an immediate “teaching effect” without needing to give a full
account of “facts.” The utopian pedagogy is thus to be deployed within
not only schools but also museums, factories, and other potential peda-
gogical spaces. This particular reductionist style of designing a universal
language that can also apply across borders of languages, cultures, and
nations.
With a rigorous science of design, even the less-educated mind can be
affected and conducted by ISOTYPE; the uniform, reductionist style of
ISOTYPE originally was designed to make education accessible to the
working class. The design of ISOTYPE intended to become a universal
language that can serve as a protocol for the working class to negotiate
for rights and, more importantly, a better form of life (Galison, 1990).
And yet the actual contours of history often betray the “origin.” In the
case of Neurath’s utopian experiment of ISOTYPE, the simplistic, univer-
sal, and accessible info-signs system is then appointed by the deepening
milieu of cosmopolitan landscapes. Embedded in processes of urbaniza-
tion and the securitization of life and the state, the utopian protocols for
the working class, ironically, in turn impose, as a control infrastructure,
on particular populations, such as workers, immigrants, and racialized
groups.4
The flat surfaces of design have been produced as folds to govern visu-
ality and configure a phantasma of a “shared material world” (Rancière,
2019) since the beginning of the 20th century. In the next section, I will
first address processes that subjectivize the teacher, the student, and the
cosmopolitan citizen: visual pedagogy’s conduct in “ways of seeing,”
on the one hand, has been ordering seeing, experience, and perception
and, on the other hand, aims at conducting flows of affects and desire.
I will argue that the info-signs system of Neurath and his ISOTYPE not
merely functions to order universal forms but also imposes a control
infrastructure.
The Visual and the Autopoietic: Perception Is the Battlefield

Pedagogy with visual “aids” is said to easily provoke the “full” sensory
and cognitive participation of the student. And yet the actual operation
of visual pedagogy is inhabited by a colonial relationship of learning
and teaching that has cognitive norms and psychological principles. The
immediacy of the sensory pedagogy, central to a utopian apparatus of
visual pedagogy, is a carefully designed and calculated cultural artifact
that does not “hold” attention but instead imposes a given order of learn-
ing imbued with processes that subjectivize “the child.” The visual peda-
gogy, with its sensory stimulus materials such as the colorfully appealing
ISOTYPE designed for pedagogues, imposes an order per se rather than
simply being an “aid” to pedagogy.
The coloniality of the learning and teaching relationship manifested
in some children’s picture books has been associated with a pedagogical
ideal for helping young children learn. The coloniality here is used to
make thinkable a way to subjugate “the child” into a learner differenti-
ated by a style of comparative reasoning. A learner is a field of learning
and teaching relations where the child’s “nature,” memory, experience,
and right to become, to play, and so forth are reproduced as potentiali-
ties of interventions for utopian future. Walter Benjamin once described
one such picture book: “In one of Andersen’s tales . . . everything was
alive. . . . the birds sang, and people came out of the book and spoke”
(Benjamin, 1996, p. 435). This invention, offering comprehensively affec-
tive encounters for the children, could have been the ultimate fantasy of
a children’s book. Yet something is not right. When children are reading,
says Benjamin (1996),
The objects do not come to meet the picturing child from the pages of
the books; instead, the gazing child enters into those pages, becom-
ing suffused, like a cloud, with the riotous colors of the worlds of
pictures.
(p. 435)
Benjamin’s poetic image of children’s reading challenges Anderson’s tale

in which the child learns passively under the direction of the perfect,
visually appealing book. In reading and play, it is not the phantasy of
pedagogues, through their requisites and instruments, that fnd its way to
children. Rather, “the world of things turns directly and solely to them”
(p. 450). The design of Anderson’s book refects its producer’s phantasy
about the nature of the child as a learner. How to direct the child’s gaze
sutures the dynamics of visual pedagogy to the Enlightenment project of
educating a sane, reasonable citizen. For Benjamin, the design of visual,
sensory features of “objects” for children—visual aids, illustrated books,
and toys—are “artifacts” of childhood education that have been “infatu-
ated” with psychology since Enlightenment. Pedagogy is not the applica-
tion of psychology, as Merleau-Ponty (2010) would have it; it is instead
entirely child psychology. The picture book assumes a kind of psychological-
cognitive quality universal to the mind encountering and interacting with
images, whereas the child’s own power of gazing into the material world
with their own “fairy tales” is not invited. The child’s dynamic cartogra-
phy of the world is eventually subjugated by the method of “mapping”
conferred on them by their parents and other adults (Deleuze, 1997). The
76 Junzi Huang
subjugation ripples across cultural spaces, assembling practices of science
for making home continents—home, parenting, family, and the State.
Pedagogy’s infatuation with psychology enables processes to subjectiv-
ize the child into a learner. Visual pedagogy acts on the child learner as a
field of intervention mediated by visual technologies. Montessori’s peda-
gogy traveling into the United States and China from the 1920s and to
the second half of 20th century, for example, produced a particular aes-
theticized order of “nature” into “natural materials” such as twigs, rocks,
flowers, paintings, and so forth on the desk of the child. These materials
are crystallized representations of nature. In the postwar years, another
important shift happened: Educational sciences further coded the Mon-
tessorian materials into abstract, cognitive programs to conduct teaching
and learning. The design of teaching materials in 1950s reproduced a
taxonomy of educational objectives coordinated by an educational-logical-
psychological classification system (Bloom, 1956). The classification sys-
tem, as Bloom insists, should be designed by a collaborating team of
educational sciences: educators, psychologists, scientists, and designers
(Bloom, 1956).
Visual technologies, materials, and programs such as children’s picture
books, toys, learning games, and so on are situated in an ongoing battle
of perception. Drawing on visual theorist Jonathan Crary to understand
how visual pedagogy work, we need to move away from our overexcite-
ment about “vision” and look at “perception” as a compound site where
discursive objects, material practices, representational artifacts, and so on
will be equally involved in the production of the effects of power (Crary,
2001). The order of perception captures behavior as a visible motor and
index of progress in teaching and learning. US educational psychology
from late 1940s to the 1960s, for example, shifted the interest from
understanding a general nature of learning to a pedagogy of emphasizing
students’ achieving desirable, intended behaviors (Gage, 1984). Behavior
becomes visual motor, and the index of an underlying structure of think-
able and desirable qualities, capacities, and skills are related (Bruner,
1960). The design of the visual aids for teaching, according to Bruner,
should avoid being a vicarious enrichment of the content which will pro-
duce only a passive spectatorship; rather, the design should produce a sub-
ject with motivated, self-controlled, and autonomous attention (Bruner,
1960). Bruner’s proposed learning programs perform as mind–machine
interaction loops to achieve a spiral seizure of the learner’s perception.
On the battlefield of machine and game learning, visual pedagogy pro-
duces learning games featured with vital yet authoritarian protocological
exchanges; the ludic capitalist romantic-cybernetic learning games call
for a poet designer rather than a teacher to forever coax new value out of
raw, systemic interactions (Galloway, Lovink, & Thacker, 2008, p. 108).
Halpern’s study shows more generally how particular pedagogical
experiments on Bloom’s design of autopoietic structures have mimed and
perhaps materialized the process of seeing and established “a new struc-
ture order” (Halpern, 2012). For example, Eames and Nelson in 1953
suggested creating a pedagogy of sense: correlating to Bloom’s proposal,
the design of affective material (the touchable, the feelable, and the see-
able) deployed in pedagogical spaces brings “the outer and inner world
in correspondence, implying a psychic space flattened into a perceptual
process that was also cognitive and structural, a ‘vision of felt order’”
(Halpern, 2012).
Arc II. Ordering Desire: Utopian Architecture

In the previous arc, the science of design turns the production of pedagog-
ical language and protocols into infrastructure of ordering and processes
of subjectivization. Science of design carries various forms of colonial-
izing daily life into a particular mode of existence. Infatuated with the
psychology of perception, the design of visual pedagogy imposes an order
of conduct on how a learner and a citizen should see, know, and behave.
Design is anything but apolitical. Design creates forms that become
infrastructural. In terms of designing a communal, material dwelling
space, says Rancière, the difference between the graphic language used
by a poet and an architect is in fact little (Rancière, 2019). Graphic
designer Otto Neurath is also an architect of a universal dwelling space
with info-signs: “Visual perception is visual thinking,” and visual theo-
rist Arnheim’s work, for example, also creates a communal space where
forms and signs collaborate via principles of psychology of perception
(Arnheim, 1997, p. 14).
World languages like ISOTYPE, traffic lights, architecture, and so on
mutually reinforce each other to perform as perception infrastructure.
The visual pedagogy repetitively and creatively trains, adapts, and coaxes
our bodies and minds to follow the perceptual infrastructure’s conduct.
For phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, perception is a compound encoun-
ter of objects and the world. When encountering an Impressionist work,
objects do not pass before eyes in the guise of objects we “know well”
but, on the contrary, hold our gaze, ask questions of it, convey to it
in a bizarre fashion the very secret of their substance, the very mode
of their material existence and which, so to speak, stand “bleeding”
before us.
(Merleau-Ponty, 2004)
The visual pedagogy of perception, however, reverses the compound pro-

cesses of experience and encounter. The reductionist style of perception
infrastructure does not stand “bleeding” in front of us, but rather, it dis-
perses our gaze and destructs experience through a particular artisanship
of modes of expression—the modern cosmopolitan citizen is constantly
78 Junzi Huang
“distracted.”5 Strangely, however, the cosmopolitan subject is distracted
yet perpetually being “guided,” “pulled,” and “levered” by the kingdom
of signs and forms. It is a technological “separation” by which the infra-
structural spectacle becomes the diffuse mechanisms of power, reducing
the subject to docile “dividuality” and political force (Crary, 2001).
The quality of the expressive conduct of perception infrastructure re-
emerged in the postwar years, and it has profoundly shaped protocols of
town planning, such as the massive application of the figure-ground map.
The figure-ground map adopts a distinctive reductionist design to repre-
sent the mass and voids of the city so as to visualize the past, the pres-
ent, and even the future of the city. The design purports to predict and
solve future urban problems. The reductionist protocol of town planning
shares a strange background with gestalt psychology, the experiments
of which made possible technical images that offer “visual deadlock” to
avoid illusions and to proliferate points of attention and a flow of desires
(Hebbert, 2016, p. 707). The deployment of infrastructural spectacle
demands a pedagogy of perception so as to create a cosmopolitan sub-
ject who “follows” contours of modern life: street signs, advertisements,
security checkpoints, parks, public hygienic, and so on. Historically, the
sartorial, superficial surfaces of contact are becoming our new material-
ity (Bruno, 2014).
The Wellsian Utopia: Designing a Benign Order of Control

Keen on designing a benign, universal order for a utopian society as well,
H. G. Wells envisages a desire-free society with humanitarian order and
control on the absolute surface of the city. Wells’s project of building world
state control is based on the faith in constructing an informative utopia
on a depoliticized superficial surface so as to allow for individualities and
differences. The Wellsian style of building utopian apparatus by “hiding”
the order on the surface is embodied in Buckminster Fuller’s mission of
designing an assemblage of housing infrastructure—the dome—as one of
the most important sites to establish a universal humanitarian order and
hence to actualize control over US daily life. These infrastructural archi-
tectures are political beings. For Georges Bataille, they are the expression
of every society’s very “authoritarian being and image of social order”
(Hollier, 1989). Surface is not at all apolitical. Being inscribed with archi-
tectonic language of signs, forms, architecture, streets, city hall, monu-
ments, parks, and so on, surfaces flash meaning to strike at the subject
with its symbolic and representational order and conduct.
Images, architecture, streets, subways, and elevators make the city a
dispositif or a group of dispositifs for which the mechanisms are think-
able only with subjectivization—ways of continuously capturing and
taking hold of beings (Agamben, 2006). The goal of a Wellsian utopia
is to be implemented by making a world state citizen. The world state
citizen goes beyond having a vague membership as a state citizenship and
is equipped with adequate, precise, and healthy facts—a scientist. The
utopian individual will be, on one hand, equipped with scientific mind
and facts and, on the other hand, educated by a “database” of “indexing
humanity”:
I am proposing in fact a review of the informative side of education,

wholly and solely informative in relation to the needs of modern life.
(Wells, 1938, p. 67)
For both Neurath and Wells, the informative content of pedagogy does
not need to be “deep”: a world encyclopedia united with good will and
design will lead to the most immediate and benign effects for making a
utopian world citizen. The utopia should build up a state inventory of
humanity to keep track of streams of critical information:
of births, of deaths, of arrivals at inns, of applications to post-offices

for litters, of tickets taken for long journeys, of criminal convictions,
marriages . . . so the inventory of the State would watch its every
man and the wide world write its history as the fabric of its destiny
flowed on.
(Wells, 1938, pp. 164–165)
A record, Wells suggests, must be created so that every person in the world
can promptly and certainly be recognized. Each human being would be
given a distinct formula, a number, or a “scientifc name,” under which
they could be docketed—in effect like an insect in the Natural History
Museum. The sweet dream is of having every detail institutionalized and
recorded in a Wellsian utopia, and with this dream, Wells introduces the
desire-control apparatus into the emerging shadow of societies of con-
trol. The Wellsian utopia of an informative society is an episode feeting
away from the Leviathan passions and toward the regime of desire—
desire as what divides us, as Wells once complained—and thus advocat-
ing for the only legitimate desire of a benign, secure, universal order for
us, the utopian residents.
The harmless utopia, however, needs to confront the fear or boredom
of homogeneity—namely tensions among individualities, order, and free-
dom. But what can we say about the individual, the one thing that haunts
the hope and fear of every Westerner? What can we say about the emerg-
ing differences on the construction sites of race, ethnicity, and languages?
The database of humanity serving for the Wellsian utopia can find itself in
every kind of difference: “the strictest parallelism.” The strict parallelism
embodies the comparative inscription of “differences” and “sameness.”
Under this parallelism, the world state citizen dialectically inflates dif-
ference and sameness: a cosmopolitan subject who would have different
80 Junzi Huang
habits, traditions, knowledge, ideas, and clothing and yet ultimately who
is the same person.
Moreover, the order of the Wellsian world state claims to be estab-
lished only on the surface rather than also on the “free individual”: A
utopia that deals only with appliances and arrangements is a dream of
“superficialities” (Wells, 1905). The dream of order has found its utopian
construction sites not at the complexities of experiences, phenomena, and
things but on the surfaces—the absolute superficialities of things. Wells’
utopian formation on the absolute surface of things, in fact, is to create
a “non-polemic” space—as Rancière (2013) has phrased. In the fictional
but empirical utopia, the utopian apparatus decides how to distribute the
sensible, traverse the anonymous body, and turn the targeted population
into a non-polemic space where they are defined by their appearances
and subjugated to a non-negotiable adherence with their conditions. In
the non-polemic space: “Being, indeed!—there is no being, but a univer-
sal becoming of individualities” (Wells, 1905, p. 21).
From Weaponry to Livingry: Fuller’s Game of Design

Wells’s de-politicalization of “the order,” by merely hiding in plain sight—
the surface—found its various practices in the postwar United States. A
pedagogy of desire to build an inhabitable, functional, and universally
good order of life became a major site for the welfare state. One of US
system theorist and architect Buckminster Fuller’s missions is to “design”
a low-cost, massively producible good life for people in the United States.
This system theorist transforms his world imaginary into practices of
space folding planetarily. Fuller’s proposal of transforming warfare to
welfare demands a social initiative of the “comprehensive design,” tar-
geted at incorporating all of the present scientific potentials into daily
life. Fuller’s earlier dymaxion and later geodesic experiments—a series
of experiments, drafts, and imaginaries and the construction of motor
vehicles, furniture, dwelling units, and architecture—aimed to provide
low-cost, sufficient, mass-produced infrastructure for the military and
then after WWII mainly for domestic life. The experiments create various
lines and potentialities of gridding space economically and aesthetically.
Dome, an architecture conception of Fuller’s utopian project, mani-
fests a distinct passion at the edges of the Cold War and the revisioning
of the welfare state. Fuller complains about the US government’s obses-
sion with empire building and its slow pace of turning “warfaring” into
“welfaring”—of converting world weaponry to livingry. He repeatedly
insists that blindly following the competition with the Communist bloc
countries resulted in the “relinquishment of the everyday environment
controlling tasks to the residually ignorant expediencies” (Fuller, 1963,
p. 164). Why housing? Housing comes at the top of the humanitarian
order. The value of family needs to be settled by people being “housed”
properly, and by doing so, they will become happy, comfy, and docile
(Fuller, 1963). Fuller writes, “so important have domes been through-
out [humankind]’s total experience that the roots of the word for God,
home and dome are the same—domus, domicile, and dome. . . . the dome
conception gave root to the words dominate and domination” (Fuller,
1963, p. 148). It is not surprising to see that around the same time, the
postwar housing program in California, which aimed to design better
living conditions for US families, asked people about how they wanted
to be housed in their postwar lives, a question that resonates to this day.
The system of thoughts and practices in designing a domestic, docile,
happy US life constitutes a tangent plane intersecting with the historical
becoming of US modernist faces. Although many of Fuller’s experiments
fail to reach the “masses,” his design of space folding offers a futuristic
image of equal access to “humanity” that has become part of an authori-
tarian, generalized imagination of what a democratized world should be.
Fuller “was lighting a bonfire in the collective imagination of the world,”
with his “grand perspective, bold synthesis of technology and human val-
ues, and his integration of these into a tool for humanity to use in solving
its planetary problems” (Gabel, 1999). The three-quarter geodesic dome
as the pavilion of the United States in 1967’s Montreal World Expo, with
Buckminster’s design taking part in, is a grand artifact of “dream” man-
ifesting the continuity between domestic life and an imaginary of the
State-Space. Fuller was espousing a modernist rhetoric on not only the
international style of architecture but also the US hegemony of architec-
ture: “the United States, using Fuller’s geodesic dome, is capable of land-
ing anywhere on Earth, thus being symbolic of American hegemony over
the world” (Dalvesco, 2017).
Parks Over Slaughterhouses: Security, Desire, and

Societies of Control
A fearful world metaphor arises as design is able to erect numerous con-
struction sites of standardizing urban landscape and modes of life. From
Neurath, Wells and to Fuller—our world utopia architects and designers
share a taste for simplicity that makes possible the universality of their
utopias. The universality is able to define and trim off the “redundancy”
in the details of life. On the slippery surface of daily life, the design-
ers claim to install their apolitical gridding of the lines—only the lines.
Design, less being the servant or mechanisms for “improving life quality,”
has become the order itself.
Design functions to form a schema of the desirable that moves across
time and space: public conduct and hygienic control in urban space, infra-
structure derived from the “legacy” of the New Deal, today’s excellent
workplaces for Google employees, effective kitchens for housewives—the
list can go on and on. Building welfare over warfare and building parks
82 Junzi Huang
over slaughterhouses, the utopian agenda gestures to an assemblage of
practices. For instance, the erection of La Villette park over the ruins of
a slaughterhouse in Paris was seen as a triumph—of gentrifying urban
spaces into a desirable order of hygiene, values, morality, and security
(Bataille, 1986; Hollier, 1989). The utopian apparatus of desire needs
to address the anonymous, strayed, excessive energy or the indiscernible
desire. It requires networks of observation, confession, and representa-
tion to impose the desire onto an economy of security.
This chapter will think about science not as science per se but in how
it is mobilized as a desiring machine6 being plugged into a prophecy of
design. Science, achieving a gloss of humanity by incorporating initiatives
of design, manifests itself as various utopian projects of designing and
governing visuality and libido-infrastructure. Libido-infrastructure is a
protocol of analysis to prevent treating desire with a psychoanalytical
essence. For libido-infrastructure, or infrastructure-libido—the hyphens
gesture to a different way of thinking about desire—there is no such thing
as desire but only a desiring machine in which images, forms, architec-
tures, apparatuses, and so on are perpetually mobilized and coupled to
control where desire should flow.
The whole question (of desire) brings up another about dynamics
between desire and the state apparatus. Wells’s desire-free utopia designs
a state apparatus that could induce desires and liberate space between
lines for differences and individuality. But that is bizarre, says Deleuze
and Guatarri, because, if “desire constitutes the very texture of society in
its totality,” a movement of “liberation” can “crystallize” in that society
(Deleuze, 2004). Deleuze’s question on our action asks “why not?”—
not why people strike but why the starved are not stealing and why the
repressed are not constantly going on strike. The question posing on the
arcs of utopia is about ethics: How do we gradually desire to be sepa-
rated from power, from our capacity to act? I use the question of ethics
to challenge the arcs that these utopian projects induce us to desire. The
challenge gestures to Deleuze’s conceptualization of societies of control
where people are made into dividuals, particles and data, where they
actually desire their servitude by the control apparatus, “as if it were their
salvation” (Deleuze, 1992, 1995).
Michel Foucault’s inquiries into the emergence of biopolitics opens
another possibility to make thinkable the networking of control mecha-
nisms in the postwar years. The mechanisms are imbued with a new tech-
nology of power—biopower—that Foucault states was “something new”
emerging in the second half of the 18th century. What distinguishes the
working of the new biopolitical technology from disciplinary power7 is
the extent to which a multiplicity of human beings forms a global mass
that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, pro-
duction, illness, and so on, transforming human-as-body into human-as-
species. Biopower aims at random events, a living mass, but indifferent to
the specific body. The regulatory mechanisms do not “see” the body, the
individual, but regulate an overall equilibrium that protects the security
of the whole from internal dangers. The biopolitical mechanisms achieve
a homeostasis, an equilibrium, which could be seen as a working symbol
of systems reasoning. This transition manifests in “the famous gradual
disqualification of death” (Foucault, 2003, p. 247), which, in an oppo-
sitional way, states the absolute priority of the intervention and control
of life and to “make live.” When the rituals of death and sacrifice disap-
peared, death became a vacuum space escaping the ubiquitous securitiza-
tion deployed by biopolitics.8
This escape is important because it points to a possible non-place
or lacuna in the control of biopower; meanwhile, it reveals exactly the
site where biopolitical apparatuses operate: the field of life. The famous
gradual disqualification of death mirrors the dominating power of secu-
ritization particularly by the science and art of government. As we have
discussed, the science of design has worked with a utopian state appa-
ratus under the prophecy of bringing a better form of life. It takes gen-
erations of having been poisoned by security that the resistance against
“security” becomes unthinkable, as Baudrillard complains; it is unthink-
able now that many people would rather die than sacrifice some particu-
lar freedom or control over their own death (Baudrillard, 2016).
However, pedagogies, coupled with the state apparatus of control,
have been reinforcing the desire for security. From a certain point, one
finds oneself sharing with others a quality, a virtue of “homelessness,”
with which they are becoming a world citizen, a trained consumer, and
a harmless resident whose values are adapted and secured by the order
of things. One of the most daunting things in the forming of societies of
control, as Deleuze says, is the dismantling of schools as closed sites in
the name of school reforms, with the eager drive to turn education into
part of the perpetual training that produces its new educational subjects:
the “worker-schoolkids” and “bureaucracy students” (Deleuze, 1995). If
we use Flusser’s dystopian metaphor, schools are not isolated gardens
preventing the corruption from happening to the children; rather, schools
work as amphitheaters of massive consensus-based, networked, and
spectacular shows of educating the child, with a gaze from everywhere—
teachers, family, surveillance cameras, and workplaces (Flusser, 2015).
The forces that are radiating from workplaces, societies, and the state
apparatus and traversing spaces of schooling demand further attention
and examination.
Concluding Thoughts: Against Utopia and Against the Beautiful,

Sterile Dreamscape
What gives the science of design its utopian prophecy? What legitimizes a
pedagogy of desire? The utopian apparatus, for Deleuze and Guattari, work
84 Junzi Huang
as a state apparatus targeting desire, which does not have an essence but
rather is mobilized as a desiring machine. The desiring machine is a perpet-
ual process of making, designing, and coupling forms, practices, and poten-
tiality into libido-infrastructure (Deleuze, 2004). In this chapter, science
and design are desiring machines of utopia being plugged into a particular
rationality of science in the postwar years. By coupling with the desiring
machines and even becoming one, educational research, as we discuss ear-
lier, reinforces a perceptual hierarchy by programming learning and teach-
ing and thus defines what constitutes changes for improving conditions of
humanity. And yet the technical utopia works as fully automated systems, as
Flusser says, and this postindustrial, cybernetic society is in fact our hell on
earth (Flusser, 2015). One anti-utopian concept architecture developed by
Flusser is a “Vampyroteuthian” society: a society of artifices, lies, and sur-
faces, a society in which culture becomes the result of automated functions
(Flusser, 2015). Flusser’s rebellion against cybernetic apparatuses and their
fearful world turns the creepy organism of utopia—culture, society, welfare
state, and so on—into an absolute cyborg to destroy any possible eulogy.
What makes a Wellsian utopia, a Neurathian city, and a Fullerian
household desirable? And who really wants to live in a Wellsian utopia
(Orwell, 2008)—a world in which one is to wake up in a “hygienic gar-
den suburb,” a world where the inhabitants live “uneventful, subdued,
‘reasonable’ lives” on eugenic principles and avoid excesses of affection, a
world that allows only a “tepid sort of existence” (Orwell, 1941, 2008)?
Coen brothers’ films ask a daunting question and feature unsolvable
storytelling about this tepid existence: in between the postwar Ameri-
can urban infrastructure—the grey, functionally gridding blocks, house,
lawns, parking lots, malls, gas stations, and highways—nothing but banal
desires are induced and made possible. This hedonistic society, the goody-
goody utopia with watery melancholy and permanent low spirits mirrors
exactly its inability to suggest happiness.
Fuller’s systems theory infused in design practices of a docile, happy
domestic life constitutes a plateau within the historical becoming of
American postwar welfare. Nonetheless, what is abjected by the systems
theory is not “individualism,” the grand pronoun of American democ-
racy: the differences within “individualism” are already individualized
fields gridded and inscribed by the comparative reasoning. Rather, the
nomadic differences, the indiscernible desire, the strayed energy, the irra-
tional ways of being and becoming, to name a few, are inscribed as luring
risk awaiting to be securitized. Wells’ utopia of a desire-free yet humani-
tarian order embodies exactly the comparative inscription of “differ-
ences” and “sameness.” The political challenge for Orwell is to not to live
in a world like that. Then why does this fear and disgust of a “tepid exis-
tence” for Orwell at the approaching end of WWII become unthinkable
in the postwar era? Or, maybe the “existentialist crisis” has already risen
but our education has yet to address the pressing boredom and challenge.
I use the question of ethics to challenge the arcs of which the utopian
projects of science, design, and educational research that differentiate us
in their comparative logics and induce us to desire. I hope to call for alter-
native assemblages of strategies and potentialities against a pedagogy of
desire that seems to multiply desires, comforts, pleasures, and life standards
by design and yet eventually makes “security” the only thinkable order
and desirable mode of existence. The question is thus about “ethics” in a
Deleuzean sense, and it is quite simple: How has particular order of things
imposed a structure of commands on us, and why has it become a desirable
utopia even though it represses us so profoundly? I conclude with a line
between utopia and dystopia: In civilizations without boats, dreams dry
up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place
of pirates.9
Notes
1. I draw on my conversations with Thomas Popkewitz about the idea of “spaces
of action” and his work on how educational research performs the practi-
cality of “change” by creating spaces of action. See Popkewitz, T. S. (2020).
The impracticality of practical research: A history of contemporary sciences of
change that conserve (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).
2. Gymnastics here gesture to particular conduct, such as disciplinary repetition,
that exercises not only the muscles but also habits, energy, rhythm, and spirits
of the body.
3. Popkewitz conceptualizes the paradox as “double gestures.” The cosmopoli-
tanism of Enlightenment provokes the double gestures that convey the hope
for a desirable future and not incorporating the fear for the comparatively
deviant, ineligible Other (Popkewitz, 2012).
4. Meanwhile, the much more well-known artist in the Vienna Circle, Fritz Kahn,
published numerous works of design, posters, and pedagogical materials, hav-
ing visualized the mental activities and the organic body of a human being
into meticulously working machines. Even though Kahn’s work had almost
dominated the imagination and simulation of the mind-body machine through
1940s, his meticulous style of portraying the human machine did not stay,
marking a shift in the sciences of cognitivism and urbanism emerging in the
postwar years.
5. Walter Benjamin once wrote about the destruction of experience after World
War One as also gesturing to an era of imagined community yet with radical
separation between particles and elements of “life.”
6. Educational research networks with the desiring machines of science and secu-
ritization of life and the State, inscribe the production of desire in pedagogical
technology, infrastructure and conducts.
7. Mass surveillance, as a body of techniques of surveilling the labor had been
profoundly deployed in 17th and 18th centuries as part of the emerging tech-
niques of the body. These techniques and mechanisms of forming a whole
field of visibility and a technology of the bodies—ensuring, rationalizing, and
economizing the spatial distribution of individual bodies—are featured in sov-
ereign and discipline regimes.
8. Foucault has controversially spoken of suicide as one kind of simple happiness
and as possibly a counter-conduct against biopolitics.
9. See Foucault, M., & Miskowiec, J. (1986). Of other spaces. Diacritics 16(1), p. 27.
86 Junzi Huang
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Part 2
Locationless Logics and

Fabricating Differences
5 Post–World War Two
Psychology, Education, and the
Creative Child
Fabricating Differences
Catarina Silva Martins
Introduction
Creativity and playfulness seem to be “natural” classifications to think
and talk about what childhood is about and what a child is and should
be. The making of this articulation goes back, at least, to the end of the
17th century. Names such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann
Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, Maria Montessori, and John Dewey circu-
lated internationally and were assimilated at local levels as indigenous
foreigners and traveling libraries (Popkewitz, 2000), contributing to the
Western notion of the child and childhood as a time of play and imagi-
nation. It means that knowledge about the child traveled and formed
grids that ordered the scientific rationality of childhood and adapted and
transformed it in each place to give rise to local specificities. The chapter
will not contextualize different positioning about what the creative child
“is” in the post–World War Two years or how that notion developed
throughout history. Rather, the focus is on the conditions of possibility
for considering the child as naturally creative kind of person. As argued
in the introduction of the book, the two notions of indigenous foreigner
and traveling libraries allow to perceive how, in this case, the creative
child was an assemblage of historical cultural patterns that generated
principles about what was being seen, thought, and acted on as the ideal
citizen of the future.
Imbedded in this way of thinking about the child were comparative
ways of reasoning. The imaginative child of the 18th and 19th centuries,
for instance, was mainly white and male, and the quality of imagina-
tion was constructed side by side with the construction of the “Other”:
the “non-European,” the “primitive,” the “non-white,” the “artist,” or the
“insane.” In 1744, the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico argued that
“the first men, the children as it were of the human race, not being able
to form intelligible class-concepts of things, has a natural need to cre-
ate poetic characters, that is, imaginative class-concepts or universals”
(Vico, 1948, p. 66). This argument led him to conclude that “in children
memory is most vigorous, and imagination is therefore excessively vivid”
92 Catarina Silva Martins
(Vico, 1948, p. 67). The comparison established here was based on a new
notion of history, in which evolution was key to think about progress.
However, the connection of the child, the primitive, and imagination was
there as a way of talking about a “Western self” that was close to and
simultaneously distant from a “premodern” world.
In the project of modernity, the imaginative child of the Western part
of the world would be “civilized.” By the end of the 19th century, for
instance, the child’s development was one of the new inventions of the
pedagogical and psychological sciences that was naturalized in the civiliz-
ing project of modernity, and that has to be considered a cultural practice
within the practices of state governmentality and the fabrication of the
modern citizen (Martins, 2017). By the beginning of the 20th century, the
notion of imagination was progressively used, and sometimes replaced,
by the notion of creativity. In this chapter, I focus on showing how the
post–World War Two boom in creativity research and usage was pro-
duced through the naturalization of earlier constructions about the child
(as naturally creative and playful or closer to creativity’s “origin”) and
new ways of thinking about the human that included creativity as a qual-
ity and field of investment that differentiated kinds of people. The invest-
ment in creativity research and the raising of a creative child was part of
the post–World War Two horizon of the reconstruction of society.
The study of the “creative” mind, of behavioral and personality
traits, and of ways of measuring and increasing creativity emerged as
the right mixture of nature and science. The child became a focus for
creativity investment, because what was in question, particularly in the
United States, was the promotion of the open-minded citizen in opposi-
tion to the authoritarian one. At the same time, creativity turned into a
“commodity” that was presented to educators and parents as absolutely
necessary. Post–World War Two creativity turned into a programmable
quality that should be encouraged through certain practices, objects, and
environments.
In this chapter, I first situate creativity research from the 1950s onwards
in the field of psychology. For psychologists such as J. P. Guilford and
Frank Barron, it was important to find the traits that allowed for identi-
fying the creative person and enhancing strategies to improve creativity,
or, better, a certain kind of creativity that was not politically, militarily,
socially, or educationally neutral. And so, even if they approached cre-
ativity in a more instrumentalist way or in a more humanist way (Bycroft,
2012), it was the bright side of creativity that flourished.
In the second section, I focus on how these practices in psychology—
and particularly through the figure of the test—were making a certain
kind of person (cf. Hacking, 2006). The creative as a particular kind of
person was promoted against the authoritarian personality. The creative
person was believed to be close to the notions of democracy, freedom,
open-mindedness, flexibility, diversity, and tolerance (Adorno, Brunswik,
Psychology, Education, the Creative Child 93
Levinson, & Sanford, 1950). Artistic practices, particularly in abstract
expressionism, were used as grids to think about the characteristics of
the creative citizen.
Creativity was understood as an object of research that had strong
social purposes, and soon it became a hot topic in several fields and one
of the preoccupations in children’s education and childrearing. Post–
World War Two science was conceived through a tight articulation with
the possibility of change, in terms of acting in daily life and the making of
the nation and its citizens. In the third section, I observe how the ordering
of knowledge about creativity was not a representation of the creative
person; it was the fabrication of that person as a certain kind of human
(Hacking, 2006; Popkewitz, 2018) that governed the ways of seeing, say-
ing, and acting on the child. At the same time, the ways of thinking about
the child as a creative being inscribed a comparative gaze, producing dif-
ferences in terms of who did not fit into this discursive figure for an
imagined future and nation.
Hopes and fears are present in the making of the European child and
the US child as a creative being. Earlier notions of the “nature” of the
child were naturalized and taken in the deepening of the field of play as a
field of the government of children’s creativity and who was the creative
child. The taking of the field of children’s play and artistic expression
as an arena for the study, government, and making of the creative child
inscribes the possibilities of a knowledge that had as its primary goal the
transformation of the child.
The final part stresses that the “design culture” (Highmore, 2014) and
the abstract expressionist ideals, which configured the artist as a cre-
ative being, also promoted and fabricated the creative child. It took shape
through a series of objects and practices that materialized the psychologi-
cal concerns on childhood creativity. These ideas governed, until today,
the practices of childrearing in the home and the school, in the choices of
children’s toys or play activities and time spaces for the making up of the
creative child in arts education (Nelson, 2014; Ogata, 2013).
Hopes and Fears About the Future: The Boom of Creativity

Studies in the Space Age
In 1967, Guilford, one of the most prominent names in the study of cre-
ativity during and after the Second World War, opening the pages of the
new Journal of Creative Behavior, stated that, by the end of the war, a
number of forces were at work. The war
had called forth great efforts toward innovation in research and

development, culminating in the atomic bomb. . . . We were on the
eve of the space age, and rockets were already taking trial flights,
stirring our imaginations of things to come. The stage was well set,
then, ready for the psychologist to play his proper role in trying to
fathom the creative person and his creative processes.
(Guilford, 1967, p. 6)
In Guilford’s words, on the one hand, is the idea of change toward an

unknown and, on the other hand, is the explosion of a concern in science
for investigating creative processes and detecting creative traits, to better
master the production of what was yet to come and of a specifc kind of
“creative human.” This human was driven by moral principles, not only
in terms of the government of society and the nation’s exceptionalism but
also through the ways of reasoning from psychologists themselves and
the tools available and chosen to produce the knowledge that counted
about this creative human.
Desires for the future presented themselves side by side with the fear
of what was not controlled, and the sciences were projected through the
epistemological desire to control the domain of change and the future.
As argued by Cohen-Cole (2009), post–World War Two science provided
tools both to understand the kind of person who threatened a social
order through authoritarian traits, but also the exemplary autonomous,
rational, tolerant and open-minded citizen. This was the creative per-
son. Creativity, meaning, in this context, new inventions made possible
through freedom and democratic character, was a positive feature but it
did evolve within certain contradictions.
If the question, particularly in the United States—where the creativity
research movement started—was Guilford’s “Why do we not produce a
larger number of creative geniuses than we do?” (Guilford, 1950, p. 444),
it did not develop without some tensions. Norbert Wiener, in 1947, pub-
lished an open letter in which he confronted invention with ethics:
I do not desire to participate in the bombing or poisoning of defense-

less peoples. . . . I must take a serious responsibility as to those to
whom I disclose my scientific ideas. . . . I do not expect to publish
any future work of mine which may do damage in the hands of irre-
sponsible militarists.
(Wiener, 1947/1989, p. xxvii)
The rationality of post–World War Two science was part of a way of

reasoning through a theory of systems, in which a cause produces an
effect that must be known in advance and not left to human reason alone.
There was a side of creativity that laid between the two poles of “reason”
and “rationality.” What was specifc of postwar science’s rationality “was
the expansion of the domain of rationality at the expense of that of rea-
son” (Erickson et al., 2013, p. 2). Creativity was thus conceived as part
of human reasoning that was tamed through science in order to become
more “rational.”
The economic and social anxieties felt after the war led to a particular
rationality that required specific knowledge of the human mind. Science
was envisioned as the possibility of solving all kinds of problems, those
detected within the social body but also those that originated in human
behavior. And if creativity had a dark side, in terms of its effects and
prediction, it was especially its brightest face that was promoted. Think-
ing machines and artificial intelligence, for instance, started to be devel-
oped with war purposes, but what was highlighted was the making of
an imaginary future distant from horrific values. It is not rare, in the key
literature about creativity, to start with the social purpose of investigating
the creative human. In military environments, it was necessary to detect
and stimulate creativity, not only for survival reasons in extreme condi-
tions but also for “thinking the unthinkable,” in the words of the military
strategist Herman Kahn, the model for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove
(Eekelen, 2017, p. 98). For industries, the recognition of inventive poten-
tialities was a concern.
For marketing and advertising, the focus was to generate novel ideas.
For psychology, it was a mission that was based on a conviction: “all
individuals possess to some degree all abilities” and “creative acts can
therefore be expected, no matter how feeble or how infrequent, of almost
all individuals” (Guilford, 1950, p. 446). So the conclusion appeared as
transparent as water:
Once the factors have been established as describing the domain of

creativity, we have a basis for the means of selecting the individuals
with creative potentialities. We also should know enough about the
properties of the primary abilities to do something in the way of edu-
cation to improve them and to increase their utilization.
(Guilford, 1950, p. 454)
The study of creativity and the creative mind were areas of investment
that crossed the feld of psychology with social, political, military, indus-
trial, management, educational, design, and advertising concerns. After
World War Two, creativity studies constituted a movement that pene-
trated public life. The studies around creativity were developed at the
expense of their utility and problem-solving.
From the 1950s onwards, the concept of creativity and its naturaliza-
tion as an object of research fostered itself as a style of reasoning about
humans. It was not anymore only an adjective to talk about the early
ages of childhood, or a property of genius, but it grew up as a classifica-
tion that could be applied to all. As Hacking (2002) demonstrates, it is
not “naming” alone that creates new objects. Naming occurs in sites,
particular places, particular times, and practices, and it needs to be used
in institutions that legitimize its existence as a “natural” entity. Even if
the idea of creativity had a past and associated meanings, it had been
largely developed and sponsored in the United States since the 1940s, and
if today the concept of creativity has become naturalized and part of the
common language in several fields at the international level, it was only
in the late 1960s that creativity research reached countries like Portugal
or Spain. Today, creativity is one of the buzzwords of OECD agendas
and a technology of government that, through a positive notion of prog-
ress and self-development, meets and manages the unpredictability of the
future, by governing the present (Martins, 2014).
Creativity as the Fabrication of a Human Kind

Neither the topic of creativity nor the techniques to its detection were
invented after or because of the war, but the naturalization of creativity
as a specific human characteristic that should be scientifically studied
and supported proliferated by then. Guilford’s inaugural address at the
58th Congress of the American Psychological Association is commonly
pointed to as the voice shouting about the urgency of the topic, until then
neglected by psychologists. To obtain a more precise portrait, Guilford
gave his audience the evidence in numbers. In the 23 years before 1950,
only 186 titles in the Index of Psychological Abstracts were related to
creativity, and these did not refer exactly to the word “creativity” but
rather topics like imagination, originality, and creative thinking (Guil-
ford, 1950). In the 19th and early 20th centuries, creativity in itself was
not yet considered a remarkable feature to be achieved, even if imagina-
tion, play, and curiosity were already part of the construct of Western
childhood.
In the beginning of the 20th century, Theódule Ribot published The
Essay on Creative Imagination, and in the book’s preface, an argument
similar to Guilford’s was used:
The study of the creative or constructive imagination, on the other

hand, has been almost entirely neglected. It would be easy to show
that the best, most complete, and most recent treatises on psychol-
ogy devote to it scarcely a page or two; often, indeed, do not even
mention it.
(Ribot, 1906, p. vii)
If, to Guilford and other psychologists at the middle of the 20th cen-
tury, the creative personality was studied on the basis of certain behavior
or personality traits, in the beginning of the century, creativity, as it got
naturalized, was not yet important as a specifc trait of human behavior.
It was studied more as the result of certain factors, such as emotion, than
as a human property, and authors such as Ribot were more concerned
about differentiating the reproductive from the productive imagina-
tion than about investigating the traits contributing to its detection and
development. In 1919, The Trait Book published by the Eugenics Record
Offce did not list “creativity” among the characteristics inherited by a
person, being closer to the traits of curiosity and imagination. If creativ-
ity became a trait of personality by the 1950s, it never became a question
of inheritance.
Contrary to the 19th century’s notion of genius as an organic property,
creativity was theorized as a property that could be learned and fueled to
make the creative person. The creative person was designed as the model
to be promoted and followed, and it corresponded to a certain way of
being. Ian Hacking’s notion of “making up people” is useful to consider
the creative person as a specific and constructed kind of human. Creativ-
ity as a scientific object of inquiry brought into being a new kind of per-
son, one that was conceived and experienced as a way of being a person
(Hacking, 2006). After the Second World War, the search for creative
traits in mind became a matter of faith in a rational knowledge.
A field of tension was opened up in the study of creativity. If creativ-
ity, the fruit of human reason, should be encouraged, it was necessary
to discipline this field of human action. The brain was the new field of
research in cybernetics, and it was being conceived of as a performative
organ of thinking but particularly an acting organ. The new notions of
systems and cybernetics brought new ways of thinking about creativity
as an effect and response to several inputs surrounding the subject. A
subject that was seen as complex and was transformed into sequential
and simple steps to show that the complexity of the human mind and
its nature should be put at the service of a rationality that brought into
action the notions of systems, environments, and feedback. If creativity
was related to the imagination of what was yet to come, this was not
different from the capacity of reacting and surviving in situations and
environments that had never encountered before (cf. Pickering, 2010).
The creative person was emerging through this new notion of a brain
that could be analyzed into parts, whose actions were arranged through
steps and whose function was performative and adaptative in relation to
the environment.
In the field of arts, it is interesting to observe how the new kind of
creative human was being imagined as one element in a broader envi-
ronmental system. In 1968, Play Orbit, was organized as an exhibition
of toys, games, and playable artifacts made by artists. The space and the
design of the exhibition was disruptive in terms of how an art exhibition
was organized at the time. More than the gallery room, the materiality of
the space and the objects were “cybernetic,” in relation to the notion of
play participation and looping feedbacks between the nonhuman actors
and the human actors. Conceived as “Black Boxes,” most of the objects
designed for the exhibition could “behave” in unpredictable ways and
asked from the visitor its participation to make creative work happen
(Stott, 2018).
Play Orbit can be seen as the materiality of the creative dispositive
that was being developed after World War Two. Creativity became
programmed and predictable because it was conceived of as a field of
behavior. The government of creativity as a field of behavior implied the
prescription of the “good” and the “bad” traits to be developed in the
name of the future. Artists and scientists began to be studied but also
the child, naturally seen as creative, “naturally” appeared as an object of
study and site of intervention.
Torrance adapted some of Guilford’s tests to what was judged as more
appropriate to the nature of the child. Specific play materials, such as
“nurse’s kits, fire trucks, and dogs” were introduced to the child, and the
child was asked to “think of the most interesting, unusual, and exciting
ideas” to change the toys (Torrance, 1975, p. 174). The scores produced
“an extremely interesting set of growth curves” (Torrance, 1975, p. 176).
The curves distinguished between more-creative and less-creative kids,
but gender issues were also traced, boys being represented as performing
increasingly superior to girls. In the making of a certain kind of creative
human, there was a comparative style of reasoning. This style of reason-
ing operated through the separation of types of people, creating zones of
inclusion, exclusion, and progression in a hierarchy. The hope of creativ-
ity was accompanied by the fear of its death or disappearance. The short-
age of creative talent was directly linked with poor educational systems.
In 1950, Guilford formulated two questions that seemed to control the
direction of creativity research: “How can we discover creative promise
in our children and our youth? How can we promote the development of
creative personalities?” (Guilford, 1950, p. 445)
If education had been linked to the development and testing of intel-
ligence, it was time for the creative turn:
We frequently hear the charge that under present day mass-education

methods, the development of creative personality is seriously discour-
aged. . . . Our methods are shotgun methods, just as our intelligence
tests have been shot gun tests. It is time that we discard shotguns in
favor of rifles.
(Guilford, 1950, p. 448)
Psychological tests of creativity, like IQ tests, allowed for the ranking of

different kinds of people (Cohen-Cole, 2009). The traits to be analyzed
were based on hypotheses “concerning the nature of creative thinking
[that] have been derived with certain types of creative people in mind”
(Guilford, 1950, p. 451). The psychologist had to construct a test “which
he thinks will measure individual differences in the kind of ability, or other
quality, he thinks the factor to be” (Guilford, 1950, p. 449). This com-
parative way of reasoning about individuals was making the creative per-
son and crystalizing its characteristics through certain kinds of expected
behaviors that produced differences among different kinds of people.
Creative people, for instance, were more likely to enjoy modern art,
particularly abstract expressionism. The artists, the psychologist Frank
Barron explained, “liked figures free-hand rather than ruled, and rather
restless and moving in the general effect” (Barron, 1953, p. 164). The
figures enjoyed by the non-artists were classified by the creatives as
“static,” “dull,” and “uninteresting.” Barron was reporting the results of
the Barron-Welsh Art Scale, a figure preference test that aimed to search
for measures of the ability to discriminate “good from the poor in artistic
productions” (Barron, 1953, p. 164). The test was composed of an adjec-
tive checklist, from which the participant had to select those adjectives
which they thought described themselves, and of 105 postcard-size repro-
ductions in color of European artworks. On the basis of the obtained
results, two kinds of people emerged: the simple and the complex. This
was due to, Barron explained, a level of complexity, flexibility, and open-
ness to the new that only creatives possessed:
The preference for Complexity is clearly associated with originality,

artistic-expression, and excellence of aesthetic judgement. . . . The
Complex person is seen as more original. . . . Complexity is also
related to Basic Good Taste as measured by a test which presents
various alternative arrangements of formal design elements. . . . What
can be said is that originality and artistic creativeness and discrimina-
tion are related to the preference for complexity.
(Barron, 1953, pp. 166–167)
Geographically situated in the United States, in Barron’s study, two brains

were in dispute: the authoritarian brain was representational and the cre-
ative brain was performative and adaptive to unexpected situations and it
was at least said to be open to diversity. Abstract expressionism, as it sup-
pressed representation, was the representation of freedom of expression
in an open society. Simultaneously, this was the kind of art that was pro-
hibited by the “Hitlers” and “Stalins” (Cockroft, 1974). Creativity was
thus fabricated, having specifc kinds of people in its agenda, and worked
as a classifcation that was based on individual capacities that marked the
line between inclusion and exclusion. These capacities were, in Guilford’s
(1950) factor analysis, for instance, originality, fuency, uncommonness
of responses, and cleverness. The procedures to identify the creative per-
son relied on testing, and individuals were scored according to their per-
formance on answering and then were inserted into tables that were open
to comparison and intervention or were represented through creativity
developmental curves. The psychologists Drevdahl and Catrell argued
that “The differences and similarities in personality profles” would pro-
vide subgroups of creative people to be compared to “standardization
population” (Drevdahl & Cattell, 1958, p. 107).
If, according to Bycroft (2012), in the North American creative move-
ment one can distinguish two kinds of approaches to creativity research,
an instrumentalist and a humanist approach, they started to overlap, and
the creative person was conceptualized not only as a more effective and
productive citizen but also as a happier and freer subject. One can say
that creativity became a norm in terms of the conduction of the con-
duct. The understanding of the creative mind enhanced the possibility of
regulating the irregular (Bycroft, 2012). The models of “good” and “bad”
selves provided public life “with techniques of self-inspection, tools for
self-management, and benchmarks to which they could aspire” (Cohen-
Cole, 2009, p. 222). The creative human was constructed against the fear
of the authoritarian human, and it served to rank different kinds of peo-
ple. It led to the construction of a desirable way of reasoning, of thinking,
and of acting that also produced its opposite. The fears and anxieties that
surrounded the non-creative person were a threat to the natural develop-
ment and progress of humanity and of the exceptionality of the nation.
This was the climate in which the creative child as a focus of political,
scientific, economic, and educational concerns emerged.
Developing Children’s Creativity

The study of children’s creativity was pursued through research on chil-
dren’s development, school, and play activities. If creativity, argued the
psychologist Harold Anderson, “was in each of us as a small child,” the
question was,“what was happened to this enormous and universal human
resource?” (Anderson, 1959, p. xii). The study of creativity became one
of the hot spots in post–World War Two educational and psychological
research. In the 1970s, opening a volume of selected writings on creativ-
ity, Vernon looked retrospectively to creativity research to underline the
need for early recognition of children with unusual ideas and talents,
on tolerating and encouraging independent thinking and creative
activities instead of repressing them because they upset the teach-
er’s routine, on the possibilities of training students and industrial
employees to develop their potential creative powers, and on the
selection of research workers for creativity rather than for conver-
gent types of achievement.
(Vernon, 1982, p. 11)
It was important to understand creativity in its “origins” and to stimulate

the creative potential of each child as an application of the knowledge
produced. For Sidney Parnes, the cofounder of the International Center
for Studies in Creativity, research was demonstrating “that a considerable
part of creative behavior is learned” (Parnes, 1982, p. 343), and thus,
“the gap between an individual’s innate creative talent and his lesser cre-
ative output can be narrowed by deliberate education in creative think-
ing” (Parnes, 1982, p. 352).
With the investment in creativity research by psychology laboratories
grew a popular usage of the term in public life. Creativity was a hot topic
and was used by psychologists, designers, toy makers, educators, and par-
ents, with a growing wave of publications with practical suggestions on
how to creatively educate children throughout the stages of their devel-
opment. In the making of the creative child, it was the preoccupation of
constructing, also, valuable human capital. The anticipatory gesture of
education governed the practices of the present according to an imagined
future. In 1946, the art educator Viktor Lowenfeld argued that “to teach
toward creativity is to teach toward the future of society” (Lowenfeld,
1966, p. 7). And if he believed that no child should be thought of as being
“uncreative,” the fact was that the creative potential of the child should
be “helped” by the teacher or educator.
Post–World War Two science was permeating the ways that daily
life was being constructed, including how to educate and rear the child
through play and creativity. In 1955, a book published by Arnold Arnold
had the title How to Play with Your Child, and it promised hundreds
of practical suggestions for getting more fun and creative benefit out of
toys and play. The topics covered were, among others, the explanation of
what is play, the forms and typologies of play, the connections of learning
and play, and the materials of educational and creative toys, as opposed
to those objects that would limit the child’s imagination.
The child was entangled in a web of educational practices, of specific
materiality, and of objects and spaces that, according to Margaret Mead
(1962), made them a person and not just a citizen. A Creative Life for
Your Child was a publication issued by the U.S. Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare, and in it, Margaret Mead highlighted the new
consciousness of US-Americans:
each age has its own distinctive character by all the things that are
fitted to the child’s size, not only the crib and the cradle gym and the
bathinette, but the small chair and table, too, and the special bowl
and cup and spoon which together make a child-size world out of a
corner of the room.
(Mead, 1962, p. 1)
The creative child became the image desired by the parents, and the natu-
ralization of the modern/colonial childhood-purity-innocence-creativity
equivalence was rehabilitated. The art educator Herbert Read, author
of Education through Art, argued that the creative impulses found in
children were the same as those found “in primitive tribes,” and “some
of these impulses seem to be constant throughout human history” (Read,
1943, p. 2). In the West, the search for a progressive society and nation
and the idea of developing children’s creativity through art and play
became matters of fabricating the right citizen of the future. If “we do not
live spontaneously, that is to say, freely exteriorizing our mental activities,
then something much worse than a state of mental tension or accumula-
tion arises, namely, a neurosis” (Read, 1943, p. 111). Promoted as an
extremely fertile period of the citizen of the future’s life, childhood cre-
ativity should be not only preserved but, above all, nurtured. The playful
adult was seen by those defending creativity not as regressive but rather
as productive (Ogata, 2013).
Play or Art: Governing Children’s Creativity

In the chapter “Play or Art?” in Education through Art, Herbert Read
wrote that “play is the most obvious form of free expression in children”
(Read, 1943, p. 109). Paul Torrance, the US psychologist, in his book
Guiding Creative Talent, first published in 1962, argued that “the highly
creative children are learning and thinking when they appear to be ‘play-
ing around’” (Torrance, 1982, p. 359). Jean Piaget at UNESCO’s 1951
Conference Education and Art argued that “the young child spontane-
ously externalizes his personality” through activities such as “drawing,
modelling, symbolic games, singing, theatrical representation” but, he
adverted, “without an appropriate art education . . . the actions of adults
and the restraints of school and family life have the effect in most cases of
checking or thwarting such tendencies instead of enriching them” (Piaget,
1954, p. 22). It was precisely based on this assumption that creativity
found the terrain for its inscription in the children, parents, and educa-
tors. Children’s play and their creativity were being biologized as proper
of childhood: both were developed through a specific rationality that
configured what play was and should be and what the creative child had
to be. Again, creativity was in the middle of reason and rationality; being
undoubtfully an ordinary expectation of childhood, it had, however, to
be rationalized. If creativity was the new motto to be pursued, then it
had to be accompanied not only by specific practices but also by objects
and definitions that would govern that stage of life so that no deviation
would occur in the fabrication of the creative child.
The appropriate child’s environment and toys therefore took central
places in the concerns of manufacturers, parents, and educators and in the
daily lives of children. The “design culture” (Highmore, 2014)—thought
in terms of the relations that humans establish with objects but also how
these objects are themselves the meeting point of several discourses and
practices (and how the objects are actors in that relation)—is useful for
understanding how the materiality surrounding white middle-class US-
American and European children was simultaneously a product and a
producer of the creative child. The objects assumed the classification of
creativity and sometimes education, and they sought to materially rep-
resent the openness and freedom that the child’s spirit was expected to
develop (Fanning, 2018).
The idea that objects have a role in educating the child is part of the
modern Western construction of childhood. Until the 17th century, how-
ever, toys, even if they existed, were not considered as crucial in the explo-
ration of that period of a child’s life. By the end of the 17th century, John
Locke created alphabet blocks that helped children to read, but these also
had a moral purpose. As Birgitta Almqvist (1994) argues, it made middle-
class children stay indoors instead of running out in the streets. Friedrich
Froebel constructed his system of educating children through graduated
objects, which he called gifts. Maria Montessori, for instance, also based
her ideal of educating children on teaching with toys. Ellen Key—opening
the 20th century, the century of the child, as she called it—wrote about
the school of the future as the place where “children may have the same
freedom as cats or dogs, to play by themselves, and for themselves” (Key,
1909, p. 237).
It became evident that the connection between the child and play was
mediated by the object, be it a toy or simply pencils, clay, or waste mate-
rial, and that parents and educators should observe but not directly inter-
fere with children’s creative activities. What became specific in the years
after the Second World War was the framing of each toy as an object that,
to correspond and convey the novelties that came out of the laboratories
of psychology, must incorporate the creative dimension and rule out the
possibility of undesirable behaviors or ways of being. Not only was the
toy perceived to teach and improve the child’s capacity to learn, but it
should also be “without a fixed purpose, or else children’s fantasy will be
too directed” (Almqvist, 1994, p. 49).
In the book How to Play with Your child by Arnold, the definition
of what meant a good toy and what meant a bad toy was given to the
reader:
A toy is uncreative and uneducational if it attempts to “make easy,”

to limit inventiveness, or if it predetermines the result. For example,
a painting-kit which the picture is printed in outline, with each area
numbered to be filled in with correspondingly numbered colors, is
uncreative because the result is predetermined. Finger paints or any
other art materials without such limitations are creative because
the result depends entirely on the child. Pail and shovel are creative
because they can put to infinite use in the forming of things that are
the child’s inventions.
(Arnold, 1955, p. 54)
Children’s play was thus marked out by formal and discursive police,
which determined the educational and creative degree of a toy or play
material by a comparative gaze with what was meant to be an uncreative
or “uneducational” one. Similar to what creativity tests were demonstrat-
ing, a toy that enhanced creativity should have fat shapes, textures, and
color; be suitable for girls and boys; have more than a single way of
using it; be low realist; and be fexible and open in order to make up the
creative child. A certain nostalgia was also visible in the creative toys,
one that was akin to the romantic notion of a childhood as innocent and
without time but governed by time. Good toys were, not rarely, made of
wood, imagining the time of childhood and creativity as universals that
are now being produced by companies such as Playthings (Ogata, 2013).
From the 1950s onward, it was also usual to have artists and designers
being hired by these companies for designing toys. In brief, the toy had
to breathe the contemporaneity of “good” abstract expressionist art and
design.
Creativity, play, and art were connected in the ways of imagining the
open-minded, flexible, and democratic citizen of the future. In 1955, the
Museum of Modern Art in New York organized, under the direction of
Victor D’Amico, an exhibition titled Developing Creativeness in Chil-
dren. The exhibition fought against what was considered a bad influence
on the child’s development, and it contrasted creative and authoritarian
personalities. Photo panels of children copying art were juxtaposed with
those of marching Hitler youths. The viewer had to draw their own con-
clusions, but these were visually evident. The words of D’Amico were
printed on the brochure accompanying the exhibition. The creative devel-
opment of children was, he said,
the concern of the parent as well as the art teacher. . . . It is especially

important today that parents understand what creative teaching
really is because with the invasion of the home by television, maga-
zines, and comic strips which appeal directly to the child, the efforts
of the school can be hindered or completely undermined by formal
and imitative practices.
(MoMA, 1955)
Portrayed as in need of protection and guidance, both children and their

educators had to be directed toward a moral creativity. The humanist and
the instrumentalist approach regarding creativity were not completely
apart in terms of the making of the creative child as a future citizen, and
within arts education discourse, for example, the value of creativity for
individuals was part of answering and solving the more general problems
of the age.
In arts education, the ideal type of person was the artist, but
every man is a special kind of artist, and in his originating activity,

his play or work (and in a natural society. . . . there should be no dis-
tinction between the psychology of work and play), he is doing more
than express himself, he is manifesting the form which our common
life should take, in its unfolding.
(Read, 1943, p. 308)
The governing of the child through creative play was one of the most
powerful educational techniques to enhance practices and technologies
for self-government (Kozlovsky, 2007). In these practices lay a certain
image of who was the creative child and who was not, who should and
should not be the citizen of the future. Different kinds of kids were in
the making, and the parents and educators were the ones responsible for
providing the infants with the right environment and objects that could
transform them into a democratic, healthy, fexible, playful adult, in sum,
a future complex person—or, better, a creative person. As Viktor Lowen-
feld stated,
when your child’s art is frustrated, all of the qualities which may later
make him an Edison or Marconi or Einstein may become inhibited.
In other words, his chances for becoming a really outstanding and
imaginative scientist, engineer, mathematician or anything else are
lessened whenever his creativeness is thwarted.
(Lowenfeld, 1962, pp. 11–12)
Final Considerations
Today, the child of the future is talked of as having to be creative, flex-
ible, entrepreneurial, critical, and resilient by international organizations
such as the OECD. However, if creativity seems today to be natural and
part of the international educational jargon, used as an instrument in the
ranking of nations, in the differentiations made among kinds of people,
two of the important things in the history of creativity are that creativity
has a history and that that history is recent (Reckwitz, 2017). Creativity
as part of a human potential was not ever important or considered. Even
the possibility of testing creativity was not always familiar. Guilford,
who in the 1950s discussed the possibility of creativity tests, years before
stated that
The act of inventing something of consequence is so rare and so hard

to control that it cannot well be studied experimentally. You cannot
place an ordinary individual in a chair in the laboratory and simply
tell him, “Now create,” and expect to get results.
(Guilford, 1939, p. 474)
But as creativity became a topic of research in psychology, it turned into

an ingredient to be potentiated in the education of the child, pursued by
parents and exploited by an entire industry that goes from the literature
of self-realization and growth to toys advertising. Creativity became a
traveling library and an indigenous foreigner that is rhetorically assumed,
mobilized, and transformed in several felds today. This chapter argued
that there is no natural, creative, or evolutionary child, but the opposite
is also true: there is a natural, creative, and evolutionary child, but this
is the child that historically exists and travels within certain discourses
and power relations that make that child not only an object of research
but also a site of intervention (Hultqvist & Dahlberg, 2001). Power is
exercised through historical practices, informed by a certain knowledge
about what the child should and should not be, that structure the feld of
possible actions and thoughts.
Creativity was not only a way of describing or representing a child but
also and foremost a form of power that produced the child as a creative
being, a set of practices to develop a creative behavior, and ways of see-
ing and saying that identified the creative and the uncreative as desirable
or undesirable, qualified or unqualified, as the citizens of the future. The
creative person, as a particular type of person, appeared, through psycho-
logical investigation, as a person who should be pursued as a model, in
contrast and in comparison to other types, such as the authoritarian. In
the minds of educators, parents, politicians, and toy manufacturers, the
creative child was the new focus of intervention for the construction of
the future and for the government of the present.
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6 Objectification of Human
Nature
“Adolescent” as a Taxonomy
of Postwar Taiwan Actors
Kai-Jung Hsiao
Introduction: “Adolescent” as a Historical Event

We used to have vague understanding about the age ranges for “shaonian”
[youths]. . . . In Confucian thoughts, life is composed of youth, mid-life,
and elder. However, since “Juvenile Proceeding Act” issued in 1962, ado-
lescent has been used to refer to any individual between ages 12 and 18.
(Lin, 1968, p. 3, emphasis added)
Ideas of “adolescent” are globally characterized and categorized, at the

level of “human nature,” as individuals who have distinct traits. This
chapter challenges this universalized concept of “adolescent” by histo-
ricizing it as an emerging concept of social scientific research that, as
indicated in the epigraph, has been salient since the aftermath of Chinese
Civil War.1 The chapter focuses on conditions of how “adolescent” was
registered as an educational discourse to give expression to ideas of cer-
tainty and individuality, in which its historicity was introduced in the
postwar social scientific studies, and carried on ever since, to embody
ideas of modernity and restoration.
The approach is of discourse analysis (Foucault, 1979) and its grid
of intelligibility (Foucault, 1990, p. 93), which posit “adolescent” as an
emerging convergence of heterogeneous discourse, in a given time and
space, bounded up through principles of objectification and “otheriza-
tion” that order and arrange the production of the “adolescent” as “kinds
of people” (Hacking, 2007). This shift in theoretical attention, from the
naturalist to the historical construction of a “perilous other,” unpacks the
historical, cultural, and political conditions of the emergence of “ado-
lescent” that provide new techniques of seeing/reasoning/regulating the
living (youths), eventually fostering “adolescent” as a subject of morality
to ensure change and certainty in life and society. “Adolescent,” as dis-
cursive practice, is thus theorized as what orders and arranges and sets in
motion a set of regulatory and moral principles around the human condi-
tion that renders youths governable in the production of “adolescent.”
110 Kai-Jung Hsiao
Discursive materials concerning “adolescent,” in areas of government
documents; social scientific, systems theoretical, and psychological stud-
ies; and school textbooks and handbooks, are discursively historicized
in two major sections. The first section focuses on emerging ways of
reasoning that precede “adolescent” and supply it with particular ideas
of “human nature” and human progress to transform the nationalist
ideals into a universal concern about humankind, and that Sinicize the
governance into a modern nation-state. The second section focuses on
three impulses, principles, and techniques that form a grid of intelligibil-
ity of “adolescent”: the rationalities of science that serve as a technology
for defense and rescue to occur, the nationalist ideals given scientific
and systems theoretical characteristics, and the psychopathologizing
of “adolescent” as a positivity of knowledge. The impulses historically
order and establish human distinction and taxonomies to enable a dis-
ciplinary technique of the human actor that gives “adolescent” charac-
teristics of individuality: a “self” individualized as a subject of morality
in the form of scientific and systematic knowledge. These two sections
historicize conditions of continuity/discontinuity that foster and order
“adolescent” as a self-rectified human actor moralized to serve as imma-
nent principles of social change and national restoration in the name of
progress in postwar Taiwan.
From “Zhishi Qingnian” to “Adolescent”

To unpack how a non-physical idea of “adolescent” emerges as charac-
terizations of youths in Taiwan in the 1960s, I focus on its antecedent—
Confucian/nationalist reasoning about “zhishi qingnian” [the insightful
and knowledgeable youth] as a genealogical condition of possibilities—
a condition of historical continuity/discontinuity that assembles in the
emerging grid of intelligibility of “kinds of people” in postwar Taiwan.
“Zhishi qingnian” is historicized as sets of ordering principles—systems
of identity and order of difference—that herald the later emergence of
“adolescent” as inscriptions of science to move the nation toward mod-
ernization and stability. “Zhishi qingnian,” though it comes chronologi-
cally before “adolescent,” is not excluded from what is said about it, but
what is not said makes “adolescent” intelligible as universal, modernist,
and naturalist, as opposed to cultural, historical, and political.
Confucian and Nationalist Reasoning About “Zhishi Qingnian”

“Zhishi qingnian” was introduced in the army recruiting command in
1944 by the then president Kai-Shek Chiang to embody Sinicized nation-
ality and Confucian ethics and morality in relocating youth soldiers of
the Chinese Civil War to build Taiwan as a stronghold against what was
called communist rebellions and for reunification with mainland China.
Objectification of Human Nature 111
“Zhishi qingnian” was a nationalist and cultural embodiment of the suf-
fering and hardship of the Republic of China (ROC) and was called “the
inheritor and the destiny of ROC” and “descendants of Confucian legacy”
(Chiang, 1977, p. 25): its aims were to bring about the Sinicized culture,
in alignment with sanmin zhuyi [Three People’s Principles],2 accomplish
combat missions, and end anti-communism (Chiang, 1977, p. 25).
“Zhishi qingnian” was made a Sinicized exemplar in contrast to
“dongya bingfu”3 [sick man of East Asia] to legitimize the nationalist
government and to appease the cultural scorn from Western modernities.
In an attempt to ease doubts of Western sciences about the sustainability
of Taiwan’s recovery toward modernization, an erudite manner of a noble
person praised in Chinese classics was then debased as zhongwen qingwu
[valuing erudition and despising military] and haoyi wulao [indulging in
idleness and hating labor] that resulted in wunruo tueimi [the frailty and
decadence of the nation] (Chiang, 1944a/1984, p. 91).
One of the ways that Western modernities traveled and wove into
Confucian/nationalist construction of “zhishi qingnian” was through the
foregoing style of juxtapositions and differentiation that sets apart “zhi-
shi qingnian” as a moral improvement and ideal to defeat the decay of
cultural traditions (East Asian cultural illness) and to embody “nation-
alist honor and status” so as to gain diplomatic recognition (e.g., Chi-
ang, 1944a/1984, p. 91). Not only was “zhishi quingnian” invoked as an
embodiment of Confucian and Sinicized nationalism to defeat communist
rebellions, but it was also reified in emulation of Western modernities.
For example, “zhishi quingnian” emulates the United States’ Tennes-
see Valley Authority Act to give prominence to installations of modern
equipment and adaptations of modern ideas so as to satisfy the needs
of the nation’s economy; articulations of “zhishi quingnian” fostered
sentiments of social progression and hatred toward “communist evil”
against the progressive transition from a traditional society to a modern
society (e.g., Chiang, 1946b/1984). Also, in emulation of Jesus Christ’s
revolutionary sacrificial virtue that created a world of peace and free-
dom for human survival, “zhishi qingnian” was made analogous to an
act of justice in Sinicized nationalism (see, e.g., Chiang, 1944b/1984;
Chiang, 1952b/1984; Chiang, 1963a/1984). The principles of emulating
that absorb “zhishi quingnian” into contrasts and reassemblages enable
it to connect the world at a distance. “Zhishi quingnian” was able to tri-
umph over time and space, transforming the Sinicized nationalist defeat
against communist rebellions into a universal and modern concern about
humankind; and the historical Confucian ethics and morality into mod-
ern governance.
Another example was that a classical idea of “benwei” [originally, a
person’s or god’s original official position] was adopted and translated
into new semantic annotations—“core” or “center”—through principles
of emulating to forge proximity that overcame universe and history. Said
112 Kai-Jung Hsiao
to be “[i]n contrast to the way that gave grounds for white people to be
the center of British Empire” (Sun, 1924, n.p.), “benwei” was invoked
as “a culturally and historically appropriate idea” (ibid., n.p.) for uni-
fying different Chinese ethnic cultures and peoples into one culture/
people - ROC- to reify and solidify the cultural/historical/political origin
of Kuomintang as the “core” and “center” of a new form of governance.
Ideas of “benwei” were espoused with modernist ideas about human
progress, together embodying “zhishi qingnian” as “the foundation of
this era that . . . ought to make history and bring prospects” (e.g., Chi-
ang, 1951b/1984, p. 197). In minzu benwei jiaoyu [Chinese heritage-
centered or Chinese people-centered education], for example, “zhishi
qingnian” was registered as the “objective” and “center” of the education
to strive for progress in society and in human history. “Zhishi qingnian”
was espoused with ideas of human reason to awaken humankind’s col-
lective conscience and willingness in making a sacrifice for the benefit
of Sinicized nationalism, the people, and the human world. The human
reason and human progress invoked here, however, were not of Euro-
pean Enlightenment; but rather, they registered with an idea of “tiansia
weigong” [the sky and the land are for everyone] in which human rea-
son resided in Confucian ethics and the people’s virtue, rather than in
“human nature”; and the human progress resided in the establishment
and accomplishment of ROC (e.g., Chiang, 1951b/1984).
“Zhishi qingnian” was thus said to embody the care of the Sinicized
nationalism that put its people’s betterment above all, which succeeded in
distinguishing itself from the communist treatments of youths as “means”
or “tools” of the party (e.g., Chiang, 1951a/1984, p. 202). “Zhishi qin-
gnian” was characterized by its advanced “discernment about loyalty/
disloyalty and prosperity/suffering, as well as sentiments of life, death,
honor, and shame” that enabled righteous resistance to communist deceits
and to human degeneration (Chiang, 1950a/1984, p. 409).
Western sciences, though in this time period served as an insight into
areas of a national defense system and socioeconomic growth were never-
theless considered partial or restricted in casting out humanmade calami-
ties. Western civilization was said to be in decline as scientific progress
failed to serve human prosperity (e.g., Chiang, 1950b/1984). “Zhishi qin-
gnian,” on the other hand, was raised to embody “an awakening and con-
tinuity of tainxing [inherent destiny] and renxing [inherent disposition]”
(e.g., Chiang, 1950b/1984, p. 202). “Zhishi qingnian” was characterized
by ideas of tainxing and renxing as alternative and advanced with regard
to human reason in defeating human coercion, human evil, and the subju-
gation of humans; sciences could achieve human progress if subject to the
guidance of Confucian morality and nationalist ethos (ibid.).
Carried along with this style of “scientization” were also senses of exi-
gency and rescue, which became inscribed in the Confucian and nation-
alist production of “zhishi qingnian” as “warriors” against communism
and for modernization in the name of human survival and progression
(e.g., Chiang, 1963c/1984). “Zhishi qingnian” thus reified a sense of life-
line or lifeblood in which a moral virtue and obligation of no-self became
indispensable to the exigency and rescue of not merely the nation but also
the “human world.” The national exigency obligated the emergence of a
kind of human agency—to attain and affirm “modernization,” “human
stability and safety,” and “scientific progress”—for the rescue of ROC to
take place (e.g., Chiang, 1963c/1984, p. 139–140).
A Grid of Intelligibility of “Adolescent”

This section focuses on various ideas of “adolescent,” operating as a sys-
tem of identity and order of difference that created “kinds of people”
since the 1960s. The analyses focus on the styles of reasoning termed
“rationalities of sciences,” “scientization and systemization” of national-
ist ideals, and on psychological sciences, together forming a “scientized
and systematized knowledge” to give intelligibility to “adolescent” as a
“human actor” (e.g., Chiang, 1962/1984).
“Zhishi qingnian” acted as the morality of Confucian/Sinicized nation-
alism that its virtue and morality was said to have ingrained in the
people of ROC; education was to retain that cultural virtue and moral-
ity (Chiang, 1946a/1984). “Adolescent,” on the other hand, acts as a
kind of human whose problematic nature requires remedy and adapt-
ability through the double characteristics of scientific rationality; the
principle of education is said to “develop individual potentials and to
refine individual morality to be formed into citizens of modern char-
acteristics” (Chiang, 1968/1984, p. 223) and of “independence and
self-governance” (Chiang, 1966a/1984, p. 554). The human character-
istics of “adolescent” became popularized when the main principles of
national education shifted from anti-communism to securing and stabi-
lizing Taiwan as an exemplar of ROC’s modern form of governance—a
modern, democratic nation-state—through scientizing and systemizing
to provide nationalist ideals and governance; the Three People’s Princi-
ples; and modern, scientific, and systematic characteristics (e.g., Chiang,
1963c/1984, pp. 139–140).
The rationality of science acts to absorb the “individuality of adoles-
cent” as its reflection to form and govern the potentialities and morality
of humans that assemble yet contrast with Confucian/Sinicized “zhishi
qingnian”; it acts also as a social technology to design and rationalize that
“individuality” through its theories and methods. Double characteristics
of scientific rationality not only come into historical play in Taiwan’s
policy and research as inscriptions of modernity to form and govern the
progression of the government and its political system but also produce
its reason through psychological sciences to order “kinds of people” in
the form of “self-governance”—a rationality of self for the human actor
114 Kai-Jung Hsiao
that embodies modernity, universality, and progress in the restoration of
the human world and nature.
Rationalities of Sciences as a Defense and Rescue Technology

The Chinese Civil War that relocated ROC’s government to Taiwan also
forged different political relations and governing principles to attain and
secure change. Two of the historical events discussed here as styles of rea-
soning that embody rationalities of sciences as a defense and rescue tech-
nology are the relations with USAID and institutionalization of military
sciences. The technology emerges and becomes inscribed in the nation’s
commitment to the establishment of scientific research that orders “kinds
of people” for this defense and rescue to take place. Survey research, for
example, was sponsored and demanded by USAID as one of the United
States’ strategic layouts to extract “data” about Taiwan in building Tai-
wan as a line of defense against communist expansion and infiltration
(Tang, 2008).
Scientific methods and styles of reasoning that serve as a technology
for defense and rescue to take place in; for example, a 15-year science
education plan lunched by USAID in 1951, later urging the establish-
ment of the National Guidelines for the Long-range Development of
Science in 1959, were translated into the national science education cur-
riculum and continued until 1976 (Fu, 2006; Qiu & Liu, 2011). In the
guidelines, “military sciences” were advocated not only to solidify the
national infrastructure protection but more importantly to instrumen-
talize “adolescent” into a vehicle to ensure national rescue and defense;
“adolescent” is known and seen as “kinds of human” (e.g., Qiu & Liu,
2011).
Military science was understood as
a series of systemized studies on military targets and objects, com-

posed of techniques of observations, experiments, and analyses to
give insights into the causal production of the objects, the laws and
patterns of their exercise, the interrelation of their composition and
compatibility. These techniques are to achieve rational, economi-
cal, effective, and progressive methods to meet certain purposes and
demands.
(Chiang, 1962/1984, p. 10, emphasis added)
As discussed in the following section, such ideas, or styles of reason-

ing, of “objectifying modes of being” (exercise, composition and
compatibility)—causalities, laws, and interrelations, among other things—
became inscribed in the techniques of objectifcation said to enlighten,
defeat, and rescue the modern government of ROC. The techniques of
objectifcation that took interest in modes of being were shortly deemed
relevant and useful in completing and enhancing the earlier Confucian/
nationalist work on “zhishi qingnian.” The techniques become concerned
about and obsessed with “human nature” as a “mode of being,” in oppo-
sition to all that existed before, which is “inherent destiny” and “inherent
disposition.”
Ideas about military sciences were couched in the Confucian ideas of
“de” [virtuous and moral deeds] and “gewu” [seeking knowledge], to
make “wanren” [complete humans]. Gewu refers to reflecting one’s inher-
ent disposition on a thorough search for truth—the virtues and morals
of “fucih zih siao jyunren chenjhong” [father’s kindness, son’s filial piety,
emperor’s benevolence, subject’s loyalty] to cultivate one’s morality (Chi-
ang, 1963b/1984). As the equivalent of seeking knowledge, gewu, how-
ever, does not concern the use of scientific inquires and experiments to
obtain empirical evidence.
Ideas about military sciences were also couched in, and posited as anal-
ogous to, ancient Chinese military philosophy in The Art of War (e.g.,
Chiang, 1953/1984). Wars of military sciences were given artistic, noble
values to embody an advanced means of defending communist rebel-
lions (e.g., Chiang, 1963c/1984). An idea of “public era of science” that
emerged around the 1940s and referred to using scientific technologies
in unifying and strengthening armed forces (e.g., Chiang, 1939/1984,
p. 198), for example, was also further articulated in ideas of scientific
rationality to compare side by side ROC as the enlightened and PRC as
the ignorant. The styles of taxonomy invoked “adolescent” to compare
and contrast “slavery versus freedom” and “light versus darkness” in the
political warfare against communism (e.g., Chiang, 1966b/1984, p. 558).
Emphases on the “art” of military science included highly collabora-
tive and organizational conduct, academic perfections, the implementa-
tion of scientific research and development, the removal of anti-science
in the past military education, and promoting scientific and organiza-
tional methods and spirit (Chiang, 1953/1984). Military sciences posited
as means of cultivating outstanding talents manifested themselves in
the performance of nationalist loyalty; one’s dispositions that embody
the art of military science were invoked as a citizen’s loyalty to serve the
nation. Wanren bonded by these ideas embodied scientific and artistic
introspections that allowed truth to be known and one’s perfection of
civic duty and morality to take place. Wanren gave rise to an idea of
“humanness,”—its perfection, along with its naturalist problems and
moral illness—as opposed to the Confucian idea of humankind as ren
[noble rites], to embody itself as a solution to the irrationality of human-
ity manifest in human wars.
Rationalities of science that serve as a defense and rescue technology
do not create only positivist knowledge about “adolescent” to embody
a subject of science proper; it also fosters ideas of psychopathology that
contrast the constructive and the detrimental into each other in rendering
116 Kai-Jung Hsiao
“adolescent” thinkable and governable as an object of psychopathologi-
cal knowledge and treatment in the name of political stability and soci-
etal progress. Scientific rationality brings about an emerging reasoning of
comparative anatomy that shifts Confucian political concerns about cul-
tural rites to biological functions of a human body. In a traditional sense,
Confucian political philosophy manifests itself as governance of ethics
and morality, in which the ethics of ren (noble rites) embody a moral and
ethical principle in all forms of governance. An anatomical taxonomy
emerged and drew relations between new modes of governance and the
human body to posit scientific rationality as what increased government
efficiency and a sense of civic duty. The new mode of governance is that
each division’s spirit and goal is inseparable from one another, inte-
grated as a whole analogous to a human’s body. Analogous to human
organs, hands, feet, ears, and eyes, as well as nerve, respiratory and
digestive systems that each has its own functions and effects, each
division is indispensable, governed by the same commands to pro-
ducer simultaneous functions and effects.
(Chiang, 1969/1984, pp. 441–442, emphasis added)
Orchestrating and setting this systematic style of governance in motion as

an organism is, nevertheless, the Confucian idea of “ziqiang buxi” [a noble
and virtuous man exerts himself constantly as he emulates the world’s
ceaseless motion]. This style of governance embodies an organism with
ceaseless cultural renewals, scientifc innovations, and political refnements
to endorse the people’s virtuous life and welfare, as well as humanist values
and functions (e.g., Chiang, 1950c/1984). Political ideals and virtues, for
example, were systemically divided into “tasks” and “behaviors” to be ana-
lyzed and standardized through scientifc methods and theories to “obtain
the shared ideas, experiences and methods, establish standard and harmo-
nious development” (Chiang, 1950c/1984, p. 163). The scientization and
systemization were to cultivate humankind’s “persistence, ceaseless efforts,
reliability, agility, serving skills, and responsibility” (ibid.).
Scientization and Systems Theorization of the Three

People’s Principles
This section discusses historical transformations in scientific and systems
theoretical styles of reasoning about nationalist ideals—the Three Peo-
ple’s Principles. A series on the Movement of Scientization and Systemiza-
tion of the Three People’s Principle was advocated by the government and
national research institutes to historically create and strengthen relations
between the modes of nationalist governance and the research of human
sciences since the 1960s (Chen, 2015; Huang, 1984). The movement
has undergone different historical transformations, couched in various
scientific theories, to ingrain into the Principles scientific, rational, and
systematic reasoning to embody rationalities of science and political mor-
als, rendering the Principles adaptive to change, ensuring social stability
and progress, and legitimatizing and strengthening the nationalist politi-
cal system.
In a way, if the 1940s could be said to have seen the culturalization
and nationalization of the Principles, then the 1960s saw the (re)designa-
tion of the Principles, as discussed in this section, in the “systemization
of Yat-Sen Sun’s individual or personal ideology”; the historical scattered
ideas of nationalist philosophies were arranged on the basis of scien-
tific theories into an organized system to give characteristics of reasons
and immorality to the Principles, transformed into embodying both the
individuality of the “founding father” and the origin of the nationalist
political regime (see also Chen, 1997, p. 265). The 1970s saw another
transformation, called the academicization of the Three People’s Prin-
ciples, in drawing on scientific methods and theories into making the
Principles a subject of academic study to “discover” the modern values
and morals of the Principles and to give them characteristics of “positivist
knowledge” in accomplishing the nation’s transition toward a “modern”
society (see also Chen, 2015). The 1980s saw the Principles get a systems
theoretical characteristic as a “project of making humans.”
In the 1950s, an idea of the nature of the Three People’s Principles
was advocated by Chiang to promote sciences as “accurate and effective
methods” of studying the “nature” of the Principles to “disclose com-
munist exploitation of science and democracy in doing evil” (Chiang,
1952a/1968, p. 156). The urge to combat communism demanded that
humanities and social sciences later embark on a movement around the
“scientific rationalization of the Three People’s Principles”—drawing on
methods of human sciences in studying the Principles to embody ratio-
nalities of science—beginning in the 1960s, aiming to establish Taiwan as
a modern representative of China and Kuomintang as a constitutional-
ized regime (Chen, 2015, p. 12).
The Three People’s Principles were in 1964 renamed Thoughts of National
Father and formalized as one of the school subjects, taught through scien-
tific methods and given scientific characteristics as “human behavior sci-
ences,” to embody a universalized political principle against the communist
world (Huang, 1984). The gesture of (re)designation of the Principles was
around the institutionalization and systemization of Sun’s political philoso-
phy that “drew on scientific methods to systematically transform and con-
vert Sun’s broad ideological thoughts into the blueprints of the modern and
constitutional design of the nation” (Chen, 1997, p. 265).
Rationalities of science were said to “solidify our national spirit and
enhance our fighting force . . . and to systematically transfer Sun’s politi-
cal philosophy to the next stage in making contribution to the world”
(Academia Sinica, 1975, n.p.). They were also said to dispel ignorance
118 Kai-Jung Hsiao
about the evolution of human and life toward humanity, peace, prosper-
ity, and science (Cui, 1975).
The scientific theories and methods that individualize Sun as the found-
ing father of ROC to naturalize the origin of Kuomintang’s governance
in Taiwan are, however, in opposition to the Confucian idea of jun [an
emperor] or jun zi [a noble person]; jun zi is not to be understood as an
individual or as a human but rather as a duty, virtue, or destiny that car-
ries out the nobility of Confucian orthodoxies. Couched in jun zi, ideas
of human agency to rescue and defend instantiated in the Thoughts of
National Father as an organized system embody nationalist morality. The
human capacity to act against a given circumstance, rather than being
deterministic, gives expression to an emerging concept of “kinds of peo-
ple”—an object of scientific construction that embodies rationalities of
sciences as a nationalist moral, manifest in one’s responsibility and “poten-
tial” for making Taiwan a modern nation-state (e.g., Chiang, 1968/1984).
Couched in the two ideas in the 1960s, the Principles have undergone
prominent transformations in its object of interest in discovering the law
of human naturality and sociality. One idea is of the military sciences as
a series of systemized studies on military targets and objects to discover
the laws and patterns of their exercise; the other is of the analogous rela-
tion between human body and the nationalist political system against
communism as “inseparable, integrated whole as systems analogous to
human body” (Chiang, 1969/1984, p. 441).
One transformation can be seen in the demand for developing “new
pedagogies of Thoughts of National Father,” aiming to integrate politi-
cal governance, academic research, and education theories and practices
into human actions (Cui, 1975, pp. 3–4). These pedagogies were termed
“new” in styles of scientific observation, survey research, and statistic
reasoning, to embrace the universalization and modification of human
naturality and sociality and to allow for the psychological construction
and governance of “individual behaviors” and “personalities” in deci-
phering social predicaments and thus carrying forward nationalist ideals
(Cui, 1975, p. 36).
Also, rationalities of science in the 1970s took interest in “individualities
of kinds of people.” The principle of rationalities of science is that human
nature has positivist characteristics and can be discovered for national
defense and rescue to take place. Rationalities of science are transformed
into embodying a systemic, analytical investigation into humans as
actors, giving human actions and thoughts universal characteristics and
instantiating themselves as governing principles of human actions toward
the nation’s political moral ideals (e.g., Academia Sinica, 2008). “Life of
an individual” was termed to embody nationalist morals and has since
become possible to imagine, under the spell of scientific rationality in the
rigor of behavioral formulations and observation.
Another transformation in the style of reasoning about the Principles
occurred at the beginning of 1980s, when systems theory as having a
systematic presence of which a person or thing consists and can be ana-
lyzed was introduced as the “advanced,” “leading” pedagogical princi-
ples of Thoughts of National Father. The Three People’s Principles that
originated as political philosophies are given systems theoretical char-
acteristics to further embody the “engineering science project of making
humans” (Jiang, 1981, p. 25, emphasis added), in which “adolescent”
becomes the “object of engineering project” (Jiang, 1981, p. 6, empha-
sis added). The principle of the project is to “discover social problems,
examine social reality, evaluate social progress, and achieve social ide-
als” (Jiang, 1981, p. 3) through not only arrangement and modifica-
tion but also fabrication of human nature. The systems approach to
Thoughts of National Father is said to embody a “medical remedy” or
a treatment for social diseases and a solution to attain change in indi-
vidual and society (ibid.). The system is embodied in an “instructional
technology” of “five systematic characteristics” that arranges a relation
among the history of modernization, analyses of communist situations,
anti-communist theories, and science-based studies of the Principles,
which are said to make youths know about national exigencies and
predicaments in order to encournate and stimulate responsibility (Jiang,
1981, p. 1).
Embodied as a “medical remedy” is that systems theory, together
with the rationalities of sciences as technology of rescue and defense,
forms and regulates “a governing system of self-rectification and self-
modification” between “human nature” and “modes of governance.”
The object of a system that activates it(self) is the “systemized human-
kind with three functions (organs)” (i.e., input sensorium as affects,
central information processing system as cognition, and output action
as psychomotor) with a feedback loop that takes and reinforces correc-
tive action to ensure change (Jiang, 1981, pp. 6–7). The “individuali-
ties” of human nature are taxonomized into abstracts of, for example,
“middle-class adolescents of conceptual styles” and “low-class adoles-
cent of motorial styles” (e.g., Jiang, 1981, p. 36); “adolescents’ individ-
ual developmental needs” are said to dispel the youth’s confusion and
suspicion about those nationalist ideals that are against communism
(Jiang, 1981, p. 144).
Systems theory adds a complementary frame termed “evaluation pro-
cedure” to the earlier Principles: the new space of identity and order of
difference created and reserved to monitor and cure its object to ensure
nationalist rescue and defense. The “evaluation of procedure” is char-
acterized by five integrated subsystems: environment, openness, stabil-
ity and progress, adaptability and contingency, and feedback (Jiang,
1981, pp. 177–193). “Disorder” or “aberration” (i.e., “individual chaotic
120 Kai-Jung Hsiao
behaviors”) detected by the feedback system (re)activates the whole sys-
tem, looping “failures” and “problems” (i.e., “individual chaotic behav-
iors” [Jiang, 1981, p. 3]) back into the curing mechanism governed by
“behavior sciences” as “individualized modes of governance,” such
as “behavior change models,” “self-supervised study,” and “response
mechanism” (e.g., Jiang, 1981, p. 151). These subsystems are set up to
establish a comprehensive system of self-inspection and self-rectification,
functioning to systematically analyze the growth and decline of society
and human nature. The principle of evaluation procedure is to secure
the system’s “stability,” “validity,” “reliability,” “objectivity,” and “prac-
ticability” (Jiang, 1981, p. 193) by confining and regulating adolescent
disorder and aberration within “individualized” modes of governance.
Systems theory embodies not only a way of “seeing” but also a way of
“creating human.” Systems theory sees a human being no longer as earlier
having a noble virtue or an inherent destiny but as a “medical patient”
(e.g., Jiang, 1981, p. 89)—an object of change composed of abstracts to
embody human nature only to subjugate it into the modes of governance
of the system. The systems approach to “creating humans” acts through
fabrications of human nature, and through human faith and strength, to
allow for self-adjusting and self-reification into self-creation—the new
space of identity and order of difference to reify change and certainty;
the systems approach to the Principles is said to “arise human faith and
strength” in “rescuing ROC from world communism” (Jiang, 1981, p. 19;
see also Huang, 1984, p. 171).
The system operates as a mode of governance by which human nature
and nationalist ideals are arranged to create not only societies but
also “human life” objectified and governed as abstracts. The system is
embodied as a self-organizing life-form created and maintained by itself;
the order of life—human faith and strength—is generated from “meeting
of the minds and consciousness in taking unified action” as reflections of
the stability, reliability, and objectivity of the system (Jiang, 1981, p. 83).
The system is appended to the organism such that it creates, maintains,
and natures itself in human life and society. Such an apparatus upon
which its object is exercised and able to accommodate itself to “new life”
and to all possible orders has become the necessity for human survival.
Psychopathologizing “Adolescent” as a Positivity of Knowledge

This section focuses on the governing principles of the termed “Adoles-
cent Studies” invoked in the 1960s that objectified and otherized “ado-
lescent” as a “human actor.” Adolescent Studies were invoked as one of
the sub-subjects of social scientific studies and of instructional princi-
ples under studies of nationalism and studies of National Father’s ide-
ologies (Academia Sinica, 2008). They are discussed here to historicize
how ideas of human actor are embodied through a “psychopathology
of adolescence” as a positivity of knowledge for the actions of rescue to
occur and national exigency to be alleviated and mollified.
Although it was as early as in the 1920s when national schooling
adopted IQ assessment,4 psychological visions of youth that concerned
the problematic human as an object of modification and regulation had
not become salient until the 1960s. It was not until the term “adolescent”
was coupled with “problems” that qingshaonian wenti [adolescent prob-
lems or juvenile delinquency] became regulated in national educational
discourses that gave characteristics of the problem to the youth. For
example, the Research Center for Adolescent Problems [qingshaonian
wenti yanjiu zhongxin] and Chinese Adolescent Counseling Foundation
[zhongguo qingshaonian fudao jijinhui], were established and organized
by qingnian jiuguotuan [Chinese youth anti-communist nation-saving
corps], known as China Youth Corps,5 which focused on psychological
analyses and treatments of youth in the name of social welfare.
“Problematic adolescent” was historically termed buliang saonian
[not-good youth], articulated with ideas of “evil spirit obsession” or
“ancestral immorality.” Adolescent Studies often, on the other hand,
attributes, for example, failure in war, cultural disorder, decay of
family or national doctrine, and ethical disintegration to the causative
properties of “problematic adolescent” (e.g., Tong, 1963; Wei, 1966;
Chen, 1968; Lin, 1968). Adolescent Studies psychologize “social con-
text” as causative notions to give rise to, or reflection of, symptoms
of a social disease; the youth’s inability to adapt to social changes, for
example, is reasoned as “psychologically pathological”; “adolescent” is
given symptomatic characteristics and properties as failed, disordered,
decayed, and disintegrated (Chen, 1968). What was termed “not-good
youth” got recapitulated with psychological ideas of human nature,
actions, and behaviors in the production of “problematic adolescents”
(e.g., Tong, 1963; Wei, 1966; Chen, 1968; Lin, 1968). The life of “ado-
lescent” recapitulates the nationalist evolution from “old habits” to
“modernization” (ibid.).
The psychopathological reasoning in Adolescent Studies assembles and
organizes a series of historical, cultural, and sociopolitical notions as cau-
salities in the production of a psychopathology of adolescent that serves
as a system of identity and order of difference. The articulations termed
“social context” in the studies are translated into distinct properties
and normative judgments of the object they represent and inscribe that
“adolescent” embodies distinct and normative natural characteristics of
“kinds of human.”
Psychopathology gives prominence to, and makes provision for,
“problematic adolescent” to be articulated into a human actor and for
itself to embody an objective form of knowledge to inspect humanity.
The positivism of “problematic adolescent” is made possible through
notions of cultural disorder, war failure, ethical disintegration, and the
122 Kai-Jung Hsiao
national exigency of unification and international relations. Psycho-
pathology emplaces itself as an elucidation of social disturbance in
human nature, giving naturalist characteristics of the problematic to
adolescent.
Social sciences were invoked even more urgently to serve and func-
tion as what was regarded as a positivist, comprehensive, universalized,
and systemized structure of knowledge that embodied a remedy for a
problematic adolescent; a demand for modeling theories emerged later,
in the late 1970s, around the time when the United States ended official
relations with Nationalist China in 1978, which exacerbated the national
exigency of international relations (Wang, 1980). Couched in systems
theory, modeling theory is invoked to act as a technology to care and
cure. The remedy—deciphering “problematic adolescent” and elucidating
underneath rules of a generalized nomination from psychopathological
positivism—is said to operate through “ways of psychological inspection
and investigation” and to “model” and “modify” a problematic adoles-
cent into a “useful pillar of the society” (Wang, 1980, p. 1).
In one of the studies published by the Central Research Institute, for
example, social-psychological theories were discussed to create “qing-
shaonian fanzui yinguo de zonghe moshi” [an integrated model for the
cause–effect patterns of adolescent crimes], said to prevent youth espio-
nage and form youth’s moral self so as to establish a “peaceful nation”
(Wang, 1980, p. 16). In the model, an emerging idea of favorable self-
concept, in opposition to the Confucian self as no form and unified with
the world, was posited as a theory of control to prevent problematic
adolescents through the containment of one’s inner self, as opposed to
relying on external social factors.
This moral agent is created through styles of objectification and “oth-
erization” at the intersection of at least two axes. One proceeds from
the psychopathology that summons the agent toward self-knowledge
and brings it under self-rectification. The other proceeds from the mod-
eling approach that isolates, yet propagates, its perilous otherness to be
ordered and governed—an object confined by itself in order to be cured
and transformed into a subject of morality. Psychopathology acts as an
access mode toward the moral agent that it creates yet subjugates—the
precise details of the life, health, and mental condition of a problematic
adolescent are caught and reported back to itself.
A problematic adolescent is given characterizations of an organ-
ism by the social scientific reasoning that interiorized epistemologi-
cal and semantic understandings of the problematic adolescent within
human agency; a moral self is modeled to put theory of control into
effect over human degeneracy. This move from semantics to its self—an
enunciation that breathes life and nature into the organism it creates—
simultaneously creates “human actors” as an object of taxonomy and a
subject of morality.
Conclusion: “Adolescent” as a Gesture of Change?
A grid of intelligibility is assembled as social science functions as a tech-
nology of self-governance in the making of the adolescent in postwar
Taiwan. The grid fosters different social, cultural, and political relations
and principles to occur and forges youth as a particular human actor into
psychopathological systems of treatment and rectification. The Confu-
cian characterization of humankind as having noble rites is objectified
into organismic functions by science proper and positivism such that it
assigns properties of individual entity and life and renders humanity ana-
lyzable and governable as an object of taxonomy.
Woven into the Confucian and nationalist reasoning about “zhishi qin-
gnian,” “adolescent” embodies not merely an object of an organismic tax-
onomy but also a systems technology of self-governance—self-recitifcation
and self-control—as acts of morality that ensure social change; the past
is brought as a fold in the actualization of a utopic vision of human life
and society. “Adolescent” is taken up by a set of heterogeneous discourses
that embodies social scientific, nationalist, and modernist impulses.
Adolescence is a determinant category that posits disorders as imma-
nent to human nature, wherein the impulse to change society acts as a
self-operating system that lies not externally but inside human life and
nature—a scientifically rationalized and systems theorized organism that
renders human nature adaptable and governable and that permits the his-
torical construction of the problematic adolescent. The problematic ado-
lescent embodies a means of transformation and points of applications
that allow scientific and systems rationality to understand cultural decay
and sociopolitical turmoil as the illness and morbidity of human nature;
youths’ everyday lives are thus scrutinized yet vindicated in the name of
change and progress. “Adolescent,” which was once undefined and face-
less, has now embarked on an irreversible journey of the other—the objec-
tification and otherization of “adolescent” as a kind of human suggested
a space of otherness that social scientific and systems theoretical ideas of
human nature have already embodied.
Notes
1. The Chinese Civil War (1927–1949) was between the government the Repub-
lic of China (ROC) led by the Nationalist Party of China (or Kuomintang)
and the Communist Party of China (PRC), on the present-day territories of
mainland China. The war resulted in Kuomintang’s relocation to Taiwan and
the continuity of its totalitarian regime as ROC.
2. Three People’s Principles are a political philosophy developed by Yat-Sen Sun,
who was the first president of ROC and the first leader of the Kuomintang,
known for his instrumental role in overthrowing the Qing dynasty during
the Xinhai Revolution in China in 1911. When first proposed, the Principles
aimed to make China a civilized and powerful nation. Later, they were suc-
cessfully carried out by Kuomintang’s governance in Taiwan, such that they
124 Kai-Jung Hsiao
became the cornerstone of the ROC in Taiwan and permeate in every aspect of
the people’s life.
3. The belittling term was adopted and created, from “sick man of Asia” used
in Westerners’ descriptions of Qing China and by Chinese intellectuals who
humiliated themselves at the end of the Qing dynasty to inspire Chinese
nationalist sentiment.
4. The IQ test was implemented mainly to assess the literacy of “zhishi qingnian”
(“zhishi” [knowing words]).
5. The China Youth Corps (CYC) was a youth organization established in 1952
to provide basic military training for youth soldiers. As CYC edited national
high-school textbooks, memories and sufferings from communist disloyalty in
the Chinese Civil War were salient in the production of National High-school
Military Education until 1990s.
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7 The Development of the Child
and National Progress
Behaviorism and Cultural
Deprivation in Brazil1
Ana Laura Godinho Lima
Introduction
Research, and potential applications from the research, were seen as criti-
cal in the rise of industry, the growth of liberal and social democratic
forms of capitalism, and the development of safe and good lives for citi-
zens. The social and educational sciences (anthropology, psychology, soci-
ology and new fields of child development and educational psychology)
that began to emerge in the late nineteenth century, appropriated ideas
from natural science and assumed that reason, rationality, and the growth
of information and truth would guide rational “development” (economic
and human) within individuals and individual countries, as well as in
nations our regions considered colonies.
(Bloch et al., 2003, p. 17)
Through the 20th century, investments in a nation’s population came

to be considered a condition for a nation’s progress. The government
oriented toward the future, and modernity demanded the production of
scientific knowledge about the nature of the governed. The education of
children, the citizens of the future, should be based on objective knowl-
edge of psychology about their development.
Psychology initially took from biology the models of scientific knowl-
edge production to investigate the nature and behavior of children and
the transformations they went through during their growth. Its knowl-
edge was mobilized in Brazil in proposals for pedagogical renewal that
aimed simultaneously to favor “natural” development and to form the
behaviors and dispositions required of the individual to participate in
social progress. Later, from the 1960s and 1970s, the perspectives of
behaviorism spread in the country in order to enable teachers to promote
changes in their students in a scientifically controlled manner. Besides, the
theory of cultural deprivation oriented the investigations to the relations
among the learning difficulties of poor children and what was called
cultural deprivation. Both theories considered that the influence of the
environment was preponderant to the heredity in the development of
Developing the Child and National Progress 129
the individual. The perspectives of systems theory and cybernetics were
disseminated in the discourse of psychology in Brazil, especially from
the 1980s, when they began to coexist with Jean Piaget’s genetic episte-
mology, which remains an important reference to Brazilian educational
psychology.
The child’s development was associated with social progress in educa-
tional discourses and became a central theme for psychology. The promo-
tion of human development has become almost the very raison d’être of
schools and psychology the scientific foundation for contributing to the
progress of society. Observations of students’ psychological development
processes, year by year, grade by grade, have thus become a core assign-
ment of teachers.
This chapter analyses the discourses of educational psychology on
human development conveyed in psychology textbooks destined for
teacher training. The analysis focuses on books written by authors who
taught psychology in normal schools and universities in Brazil during the
20th century and articles published in the journal Pedagogical Studies
Brazilian Review from the year 1944 up to the 1980s. Theoretically, the
chapter draws mainly on the writings of Michel Foucault on discourse
analysis and on the writings of Thomas Popkewitz and other contempo-
rary authors on educational sciences and their effects on the fabrication
of kinds of people.
As Foucault proposes in The Archeology of Knowledge, I argue that
there is no hidden truth waiting to be found beyond what has been
uttered. The statements will be examined in their own terms, as pre-
sented in the texts analyzed, which means that no attempt will be made
to evaluate their degree of correctness and accuracy or, on the contrary,
degree of simplification and distortion in relation to the original theories
or in relation to reality itself. Besides, the analysis rejects the progressive
assumption that the most recent perspective corresponds to the evolution
of the previous ones or their replacement by a more appropriate view of
the objects and phenomena (Foucault, 2004; Rose, 1998). In this chapter,
the knowledge disseminated in psychology of which Brazilian educators
are required to know in order to teach better—evolutionism, theory of
cultural deficiency, and theory of systems—is given attention to its differ-
ent theoretical assumptions about the truths of psychology that, however,
change over time and correspond to different historical configurations.
Instead of a study on how the knowledge of psychology on the child’s
development evolved, the aim is to characterize how different configura-
tions of knowledge involved different ways of seeing children and pro-
posing changes in educational practices (Popkewitz, this book).
Already in the early decades of the 20th century, psychology was con-
sidered necessary to guide teachers for understanding children and their
needs. From the 1930s, when the diffusion of the principles of the New
School movement intensified, psychology became even more valued as a
130 Ana Laura Godinho Lima
scientific foundation of school practices. This is the first configuration
of knowledge that will be examined in this chapter, which associated
the education of the developing child with social progress. The following
section explores other psychological theories disseminated throughout
the Brazilian educational field beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, among
which are the North American ones on cultural deprivation, behaviorism,
and cognitive theories, especially related to information processing. Those
theories are not considered to have been simply imported and reproduced
on Brazilian soil, but, on the basis of the concepts of “indigenous for-
eigner” and “traveling libraries,” as ideas that were associated in specific
ways with the discourses and values of Brazilian culture, producing new
configurations of knowledge and articulations between theory and prac-
tice (Popkewitz, 2005). In Brazil, these locally embedded theories justified
the need to institute different educational pathways for the most favored
groups, destined to higher education and for the children of the work-
ing class, who supposedly had no conditions or interest in prolonged
schooling and for whom it was proposed as a school oriented toward
professionalization.
Psychology as the Scientific Foundation of Pedagogy

In the schools, which spread internationally from the 19th to the 20th cen-
turies, simultaneous teaching was practiced, in which a teacher should
teach a group of children of the same age at the same time according to
a previously established official curriculum. Under these circumstances,
students who for some reason were unable to learn at the expected pace
or whose behavior was deviant from the class, disrupting school routine,
became a source of concern for teachers and school administration—a
problem for which solutions were required. Knowledge of psychology
was considered indispensable for addressing these issues and for orga-
nizing the proper management of individual differences within the inte-
rior of the school. Psychology was expected to provide educators with
resources to identify individual differences of capability so that it would
be possible to put the right student in the right place. Additionally, in the
early decades of the 20th century, the application of intelligence testing
to classify students became advocated in the discourse as an important
measure. Those who were considered intellectually challenged, on the
basis of these tests, were prevented from attending regular classes and
instead referred to some special education modality.
Already at the beginning of the 20th century, several Brazilian teachers
conducted studies abroad to broaden and deepen their knowledge in the
area, as is the case of Manoel Bomfim, who went to Paris in 1902 and
became a disciple of Alfred Binet, with whom he planned the creation of
the first psychology laboratory in Brazil, installed in the city of Rio de
Janeiro in 1906. Lourenço Filho, a prestigious Brazilian educator who
contributed significantly to the development of psychology in the coun-
try, traveled to Argentina, Italy, and the United States, where also Noemy
Silveira Rudolfer went in 1927 to take courses at Teachers College at
Columbia University. There she came into contact with the works of John
Dewey, William H. Kilpatrick, Edward L. Thorndike, and Arthur I. Gates,
whose ideas she helped to disseminate in Brazil (Baptista, 2001).
The Evolutionary Perspective in Educational Psychology

In the 1930s, the New Education movement inspired educational reforms
in several countries, which took on their own principles and forms,
according to local practices and traditions. In Brazil, the group of repre-
sentatives of this movement opposed Catholic educators and started to
advocate that the school should be public, secular, free, and common for
boys and girls. With the creation of the Ministry of Education and Health,
in 1930, there was an effort to institute a national education policy with
the objective of preparing the population for the modernization of soci-
ety. In 1932, a group of prestigious intellectuals drafted the Manifesto of
the Pioneers of the New Education, which was a watershed in Brazilian
educational discourse. The Manifesto presented a diagnosis of the state
of teaching in the country and a program for the renewal of the educa-
tional system, to track the scientific and technical progress of civilization.
It was said that the renovation of the school should take place in light
of the new knowledge of psychology about the child’s development. By
appropriating evolutionary theory, developmental psychology acquired
scientific legitimacy, giving intelligibility to the observed changes in child
behavior, organized in a linear sequence that corresponded to both bio-
logical evolution and the history of humankind.
In the first half of the 20th century, in the discourses of educational
psychology, there were recurrent variations of the statement, according
to which “ontogenesis reproduces phylogenesis” that occupies the cen-
ter of recapitulation theory and its relationship to the student’s develop-
ment and progress in the graded school. According to the recapitulation
theory, elaborated at the end of the 19th century by the physician Ernst
Haeckel in the field of embryology, each individual, when developing,
goes through several stages, corresponding to the adult form of their
ancestors in the evolutionary sequence (Gouvêa & Gerken, 2010).
Sampaio Dória (1883–1964), Lourenço Filho (1897–1970), and Noemy
da Silveira Rudolfer (1902–1988) were, in sequence, the first teachers of
psychology; additionally, they were signers of the Manifesto of the Pio-
neers of the New Education of 1932 at the São Paulo Normal School and
endorsers of the main hypothesis of recapitulation theory.
An expressive part of Principles of Pedagogy (1914), by Sampaio Dória,
is devoted to the exposition of this theory and its educational implica-
tions. The author explains that human development was determined by
two orders of factors: the social and the individual ones. The social
factors were explained in light of recapitulation theory. He stated that
“in the almost unanimous opinion of the pedagogists, worthy of this
name, the child develops as the species has developed” (Sampaio Dória,
1914, p. 13). In Introduction to the Study of the New School (1930),
Lourenço Filho, who replaced Sampaio Dória in teaching the sub-
ject at the same institution, considered that studies on childhood had
reached the threshold of scientificity thanks to evolutionary theory. Since
then, the child has no longer been systematically compared to the civi-
lized adult but has instead come to be understood from the resemblance
between their behavior and that of animals and primitive peoples. Fol-
lowing Sampaio Dória, Lourenço Filho also affirmed that the evolution-
ary perspective provided the model for understanding the social bases of
human behavior.
Noemy da Silveira Rudolfer was the assistant to Lourenço Filho
and later his substitute. In her Introduction to Educational Psychology
(1936), she devoted a chapter titled “Child Psychology and Its Contribu-
tions to Educational Psychology,” in which she divided studies on child
development into three distinctive phases: the philosophical period, the
prescientific period, and the scientific period. Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and
Froebel were representatives of the first period. Although they already
expressed an interest in the child and defended the adaptation of edu-
cation to their characteristics and needs, they knew the child through
“occasional experiences, apriorisms and philosophical inferences”
(Rudolfer, 1936, p. 136). The second period, the prescientific, was pre-
sented as the one in which reports based on the observation of children
were produced in the form of diaries, but without the concern of col-
lecting information about a large number of individuals or controlling
the conditions of observation. The author here referred to Darwin, who
wrote Biographical Sketch of an Infant, as the principal representative
of this phase. Rudolfer claimed that child psychology had attained the
status of scientific knowledge with the US-American scholar Stanley Hall,
who instead of relying solely on child behavior observation records also
used questionnaires in his investigations. Nevertheless, she criticized his
procedures, since she understood that the psychologist “used crude quan-
titative methods” when interpreting the data of his questionnaires, the
construction of which, moreover, was distant from the “modern tech-
nique” (Rudolfer, 1936, p. 137). In a later edition of her book, from
1961, at the end of this specific chapter discussed earlier, she stated that
recapitulation theory was no longer accepted to explain the evolution of
instincts and interests in the child. She claimed that “modern educational
psychology does not believe, however, that the evolution of instinctive
tendencies obeys phylogenesis: the role of the environment is preponder-
ant in determining the object upon which the instincts and interests will
be exercised” (Rudolfer, 1961, p. 153).
Rudolfer stated that a theory about the evolution of interests that
enjoyed a good reputation was that of the French scholar Édouard
Claparède, whose theory established three stages. The first was charac-
terized by acquisition and experimentation and extended from birth to
age 12. The second was oriented toward organization and evaluation and
lasted from age 12 up to age 18. The last was dedicated to production
in adulthood. The final chapter of Rudolfer’s book is titled “New Devel-
opments in Theories on Learning” and is dedicated to the presentation
of five theories considered “extremely important,” all of them initially
formulated in the United States. Two are presented as neo-behaviorism:
Edwin Guthrie’s theory of stimuli from movement and Clark Hull’s
systematic conditioning theory. The other three were presented as neo-
gestaltism: Kurt Lewin’s field theory, William Morton Wheeler’s organis-
mic theory, and Edward Tolman’s finalist theory (Rudolfer, 1961).
In the Compendium of Psychology by Onofre de Arruda Penteado
Junior (1949), indirect references to the theory of recapitulation are made
in several passages of the book, whose fundamental references are the
works of Piaget (The Language and Thought of the Child and The Moral
Judgment of the Child) and those of Claparède (Psychology of the Child
and The Functional Education). In all cases, it was a question of evidenc-
ing the similarities between the thought and the behavior of the child and
that of “primitive” humans.
The statements on the recapitulation theory were the law of the child
development, represented in all the literature cited earlier, which was
associated with the problem of the inadequacy of teaching programs. All
the authors in some way or another argued that in the traditional school,
the programs were elaborated following the logic of the adults and did
not fully respect the law of the natural development of children.
Psychology, Education, and Development in the Post–World

War Two Period
During World War Two, Brazil lived under an authoritarian government
regime, which had an ideological affinity with fascism. Initially, Presi-
dent Vargas maintained a position of neutrality, entering into trade agree-
ments with Germany while seeking the support of President Roosevelt to
promote the country’s industrialization. It was only after 1942, after the
attack on Pearl Harbor, that Brazil entered the war on the side of the allied
countries. A US aircraft base was created in the northeast of the country,
and the partnership between the Brazilian government and the Roosevelt
administration was established, effectively starting the project to imple-
ment the base industry in Brazil (Schwarcz & Starling, 2015).
In the social context of the post–World War Two period, especially in
the transition from the 1950s to the 1960s, Brazil underwent an accelera-
tion of industrialization and urbanization processes. The demographic
census of 1970 recorded for the first time that the majority of the coun-
try’s population lived in urban areas (Durhan, 1973). Under these condi-
tions, the development of children and adolescents through education
was associated mainly with the training of skilled labor in order to pro-
mote the economic development of the country. In the education reform
instituted in 1971, this association was manifested in the demand that
the skills of elementary school students should be identified through the
instruments and techniques of psychology and that the secondary school
students should be qualified for work. The pedagogical tendency desig-
nated by the term “curriculum as technology”—or technicism, as it was
better known—sought to serve this purpose and was based on the trans-
formations in teaching practices that occurred in the United States from
systems analysis techniques, mostly referring to the works of Frederick
Skinner, Benjamin Bloom, and Ralph Tyler, among others. Other research
groups were especially devoted to studying Piaget’s work and its implica-
tions for education. Since then, debates about the relationship between
culture and psychological development have intensified, and the subject
of school failure has become one of the main themes of research.
From the 1940s to the 1960s, the study of psychology expanded within
the first Brazilian universities and was institutionalized through the cre-
ation of the first associations and publications dedicated to its study and
dissemination. The Society of Psychology of São Paulo was founded in
1945 and created its Psychology Bulletin in September 1949. The Insti-
tute of Selection and Career Guidance was created in 1947 and, as an
offshoot of its activities, gave rise to the Brazilian Association of Psy-
chotechnics, inaugurated in 1949, which occurred at the same time as
its journal, the Brazilian Archives of Psychotechnics. These first associa-
tions were followed by the creation of the first psychology undergraduate
courses and the training of the first psychologists and after that by the
movement for the regulation of the profession and the course of psychol-
ogy in the universities (Jacó-Vilela, 2012).
At the University of São Paulo (USP), the first to create a faculty of
philosophy, sciences, and letters, the professor who was responsible for
the chair of psychology was Annita Cabral, who had done her masters
studies in the United States under the guidance of Max Wertheimer, pio-
neer in the field of gestalt psychology. She invited Otto Klineberg, from
Columbia University, to teach the discipline at her side, whose perspec-
tive approached the “culturalist perspective of social psychology and
American anthropology” (Campos et al., 2004).
In the same period, the teaching of psychology was also held at the
Institute of Psychology associated with the Faculty of Philosophy of the
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, under the responsibility of Antonio
Gomes Penna, who was dedicated mainly to the dissemination of Jean
Piaget’s work in Brazil. At the same time, at the Institute for Professional
Guidance and Selection, established in 1947, Italian researcher Franco
Lo Presti Seminério conducted research into the field of applied cognitive
psychology. One student of this institute who stood out for her research
in the field of school psychology was Maria Helena Novaes, who “later
studied at the University of Geneva and the University of Paris V, where
she was in contact with Piaget, André Rey, Inhelder and Zazzo” (Campos
et al., 2004, p. 182).
In 1962, the profession of psychologist and higher education courses in
psychology were regulated in the country by law no. 4119, which regu-
lated the profession of psychologist and determined the minimum cur-
riculum for their training. In these courses, the teaching was conducted
by professionals who were dedicated to the study of the subject from the
1940s to the 1960s and privileged the topics of interest: social and cul-
tural psychology, individual differences, and developmental psychology
that had as its main reference Jean Piaget’s genetic epistemology, given
that several Brazilian teachers traveled to Geneva to study with the psy-
chologist. Several research groups and postgraduate courses in psychol-
ogy created in the 1960s to 1980s were devoted especially to Piaget’s
work, and some of them sought to integrate into social psychology, as
occurred at USP. Another area that developed a great deal during the
period was the experimental psychology oriented toward the study of
learning and behavior modeling.
In the 1960s, the US professor Fred Keller of Columbia University,
New York, arrived in Brazil and, as a hired visitor, at first at the Univer-
sity of São Paulo and later at Brasilia, began behaviorist experimental
psychology activities with the collaboration of young Brazilian psycholo-
gists who had taken courses at US universities in this area. (Angelini,
2006, p. 27)
Parallel to the institutionalization of psychology in Brazil, the first insti-
tutions dedicated to the production of research on the problems of educa-
tion in the country were structured. The National Institute of Pedagogical
Studies (INEP) was created in 1937 with the aim of conducting original
studies and disseminating research results on education conducted in
other educational institutions that could subsidize the administration of
education and contribute to its advancement (Faria Filho & Vidal, 2000).
With the intensification of the urbanization and industrialization pro-
cesses in the country since the 1950s, the need to optimize investments
in education aiming at qualifying for work had become an important
element of the developmental model of the economy. Again, psychology
was valued as a discipline that would contribute to the rationalization of
teaching and work.
In the first decades of the 20th century, psychology had been taught
mainly in medical and law schools and in normal schools for teacher
training. In the 1940s, when Brazilian universities were still in the pro-
cess of being implemented, INEP already occupied a central position
in the production and dissemination of specialized knowledge about
education and educational psychology in the country by offering
internships and courses for psychology teachers, school authorities,
and professionals who worked in applied psychology services and edu-
cational measures, and they administered the scientific publication of
the Brazilian Journal of Pedagogical Studies, from 1944 (e.g., Antunes,
2012; see Gil, this book). Other important institutions for the develop-
ment of psychology in Brazil created at that time were the Institute for
Selection and Professional Guidance, which developed research and
contributed to the training of psychologists specialized in the organi-
zation of work, aiming to train technicians for the industry and com-
merce as well as Child Guidance Services created in Rio de Janeiro
and São Paulo to assist children considered to be problems at school
(Antunes, 2012).
There was, at that time, a rapid development of psychology, related,
above all, to the demands arising from a society that was transform-
ing itself toward industrialization and whose contradictions demanded
actions that could have in psychological science a powerful substrate
of scientific and technical nature (represented especially psychological
measurement instruments). Thus, psychology develops, strengthens,
and consolidates itself as a science and profession, to the extent of its
capacity to respond to the needs generated by a political, economic, and
social project directed by the new dominant class, the emerging indus-
trial bourgeoisie, which has in modernization the basis for its achieve-
ments in the field of ideas, business and social management (Antunes,
2012, p. 58)
Despite the importance of the creation of institutions focused on the
study of psychology and education in the country, these initiatives did
not have as an immediate consequence the expansion and dissemination
of a large volume of research on the problems of Brazilian education.
In an investigation into the presence of the theme of school failure in
the Brazilian Journal of Pedagogical Studies, from INEP, from 1945 to
1984, Maria Helena Souza Patto (2015) found that, despite the magazine
being the main source of dissemination of Brazilian educational research,
the largest sum of the content it published was not the result of studies
conducted in the country but mainly articles by authors associated with
the Escola Nova movement (earlier referred to as the New School move-
ment), which spread throughout the country between the 1920s up into
the 1960s. There was a concern to defend and reform the Brazilian public
school, and successful experiences carried out abroad were considered
as guidance to the reformulation of Brazilian schools. In the 1960s, the
magazine published texts on emerging themes in the international litera-
ture on education, especially in the United States, such as the theory of
cultural deprivation and preschool education as a form of compensatory
education, educational technologies, teaching to develop creativity, edu-
cation of the gifted, and so on.
Research and the Dissemination of Educational
Psychology Knowledge
When examining educational psychology manuals intended for teacher
education and the articles published in the Brazilian Journal of Peda-
gogical Studies published until the 1960s, there is still a predominance of
the New School discourse associated with the concept of child develop-
ment approximated to biology. The renewal of teaching was advocated
through the study of child psychology and the adaptation of teaching
programs to the stages of child development and to the interests of each
age group, considered from the evolutionary perspective. Notions of Psy-
chology Applied to Education by José de Almeida (1947) still resorted to
the theory of recapitulation to differentiate the civilized and the savage:
Early and second childhood extend into man much longer than in
other beings. Even in the human species there is a certain difference,
being longer in civilized, cultured races, and more abbreviated in
wild, uncultured races.
(Almeida, 1947, p. 93)
The conception of intelligence remained evolutionary and functional. In

the book Problems of Educational Psychology (Penteado Junior, 1949),
the author referred to Claparède to explain that the function of intelli-
gence was to make the individual overcome a mismatch toward adapta-
tion, and Dewey’s How We Think was mentioned to describe intelligent
action in three stages: the fnding of the problem or diffculty, the investi-
gation and formulation of the hypothesis, and the subsequent control or
verifcation (Penteado Junior, 1949). It was considered necessary to take
into account not only the general intelligence in the individual’s educa-
tion but also their natural capabilities, which should be identifed with
the help of psychology (see, e.g., Casassanta, 1955).
The theme of the relative weight of nature versus nurture in the devel-
opment of intelligence was recurrent in the discourses of the time and in
several books of this period, as in Theobaldo Miranda Santos’ Notions
of Educational Psychology, which explained it as based on the theory
from Piaget:
Piaget’s point is that while the boundary between what comes from
structural maturation and what emanates from the child’s experi-
ence and the action of the physical and social environment cannot
be precisely defined, it is permissible that the two factors intervene
without ceasing and that development results from this continuous
interaction. Regarding education, this means, on the one hand, that
it is necessary to recognize the existence of a mental evolution, that
all intellectual food is not good for all ages, that one must take into
account the needs and interests of each period; On the other hand,
it also represents that the environment can play a decisive role in
mental development, that the evolution of the stadiums is not so rigid
and fatal and that well-oriented methods can increase students” per-
formance and even accelerate their intellectual development without
prejudice to the balance and the vigor of the spirit.
(Santos, 1955, p. 113)
In the post–World War Two period, the environment came to be regarded

as a more relevant factor than heredity in human development and
became the subject of many considerations. The discourses of educational
psychology focused mainly on the family as the closest environment to
the child and expressed a set of concerns related to the conditions expe-
rienced by poor families, considered unable to provide adequate condi-
tions for the child’s development. Educational Psychology, by Afro do
Amaral Fontoura, which reached its 11th edition in 1966, referred to the
works of Thorndike from the early 20th century and A. I. Gates in his
chapter on the laws and principles of learning. In that book, the author
attached great importance to imitation and distinguished the appropriate
and inadequate family environment in the formation of children’s knowl-
edge, attitudes, language, and feelings:
The conclusion is that children with good social background have

numerous occasions to imitate and therefore to learn good things,
progressing much more mentally and socially. Conversely, children
living in socially backward areas, such as slums and rural areas, etc.
have no opportunity to imitate, nor, therefore, to learn good attitudes
and good knowledge.
(Fontoura, 1966, p. 78)
Several aspects of the environment in which children lived became com-

parative principles that served to distinguish normal children belong-
ing to normal families, who lived in conditions considered favorable to
their development and learning—a supposedly universal model, whose
characteristics did not need to be described—and children who lived in
conditions in which, according to the discourses, they could not develop
normally. In addition to factors related to material conditions and home
hygiene, family morality, forms of protection, and the quality of language
and communication that parents established with their children were
considered different between groups and became principles of differen-
tiation, as will be seen later on regarding the dissemination of the theory
of cultural deprivation in the country. In Brazil, being black and/or liv-
ing in rural areas was associated with poverty and generally unfavorable
conditions for the child’s cognitive development, intensifying the disad-
vantage of these groups. When considering the theme of inequalities of
intelligence, the author stated that the social environment seemed to be
a more relevant factor than the racial one in explaining the inferiority of
black people in relation to white people in Brazilian society. In his words,
“blacks are to this day inferior not because they are black but because
of their social and economic conditions, since until recently they were
slaves” (Fontoura, 1966, p. 248).
These considerations about the importance of the quality of the social
environment and especially of the family’s living conditions on the child’s
development would soon be examined in the light of the theory of cul-
tural deprivation of North American origin, which spread throughout
the 1970s. In the analysis of research on school failure published in the
Brazilian Journal of Pedagogical Studies from the 1950s through the
1980s, Maria Helena Souza Patto noted that surveys that evidenced
“a high positive correlation between social class and education level”
became commonplace in the 1950s and 1960s” (Patto, 2015, p. 133). In
an article written by the US educator Isaac Leon Kandel, originally for
the International Review of Education and later translated and published
in the Brazilian Journal of Pedagogical Studies, in 1957, the author distin-
guished political equality and equal educational opportunities, referring
to the psychological science:
you cannot confuse equality at the ballot box with equality in

education,” as there are individual differences in ability and aptitude.
In his view, the emphasis on these differences was the most important
contribution of modern educational psychology, but “the intrusion
of sociopolitical ideology has led to a tendency to ignore such dis-
tinctions or to lower curricula standards in order to adjust it to all
capacities.
(Kandel in Patto, 2015, p. 127)
Thus, Kandel vehemently advocated for diversifed curricula and methods

that would enable the policy of the right education for the right students.
In 1960, the Brazilian Journal of Pedagogical Studies published an
appreciation of the Brazilian primary education system by the US educa-
tor Solon Toothaker Kimball, for whom the causes of high dropout rates
in the first year of primary education were insufficient teacher education,
the lack of interest of the rural population in school, the lack of support
for studies in the poor families, the excessive emphasis on literacy, the
predominance of women in teaching, and the unpreparedness of middle-
class teachers to educate poor children. Kimball argued, as recommended
by his compatriot, that the education offered to poor children should be
vocationally oriented, since the popular classes in Brazil had no high pre-
tensions in education and no economic conditions to continue studying
beyond primary school (Patto, 2015). As it was incorporated in Brazil,
the theory of cultural deprivation reinforced the prejudice that the poor
has no vocation for study. It served to justify the offer of two different
educational paths, according to the supposed interests and motivations
of different social groups. Thus, it was used to scientifically legitimize the
inequality of opportunities in Brazilian society.
In the 1970s, an entire issue of the journal analyzed by Patto (2015)
was devoted to the theory of cultural deprivation, imported from the
United States. For Patto, the dissemination and wide acceptance of the
theory of cultural deprivation in the journal’s discourse was associated
with the theory of human capital and the “developmental mystique,” as
well as with the assumption that the technological organization of teach-
ing was necessary to advance in schooling and for the progress of the
country (Patto, 2015, p. 118). The theory of cultural deprivation contin-
ued to produce its effects in the 1980s, when research on learning was
also carried out in light of systems theory and cybernetics, which com-
pared the way the mind works in processing information to a machine
and thought of the classroom as a system, in which one of the fundamen-
tal elements was the flow of information.
Educational Psychology: Contributions and Challenges (Witter, 1980)
features a chapter titled “Cultural Marginalization and Verbal Behavior.”
According to its author, the social, political, and educational concern
about marginalized people led to the production of a series of research
in several countries, including the United States and the United King-
dom. Such research sought to take into account the various aspects of the
problem, paying particular attention to the “verbal behavior of the cul-
turally underprivileged” (Witter, 1980, p. 303). The author mentions sev-
eral studies conducted in Brazil about this, including a well-disseminated
study conducted in the city of São Paulo:
Poppovic et al. (1975) conducted a research in the city of São Paulo

through which they sought to characterize cultural underprivileged
children of 4, 5 and 6 years old. Each group consisted of 30 children,
15 of each sex, who were compared with middle class children. This
research focused on various aspects of the development of these chil-
dren, such as: formation of concepts, knowledge and skills indispens-
able for the child who enters school, survey of the living conditions
of these children and their families, behaviors and attitudes capable
of altering their ability to learn.
(Witter, 1980, p. 312)
Confrming expectations, the study concluded that there were “signif-

cant differences between children of both socioeconomic levels,” with
disadvantages for “culturally disadvantaged” children (Witter, 1980,
p. 313).
Another theoretical perspective of North American origin that had spread
into Brazilian educational psychology since the 1960s was behaviorism,
especially in the investigation of learning processes. The book Science,
Teaching and Learning (Witter, 1975) expresses enthusiasm for the scientific
study of teaching practices and what was going on in the classroom, aiming
to understanding the environmental factors that interfered with learning.
The classroom was conceived as a laboratory, the student as the subject of
an experiment, and the teacher as a scientist dedicated to promoting the
modification of student behavior, using techniques based on the principles
of operant behavior.
In short, precise teaching is basically a new way of focusing on what

happens in the classroom, based on a framework of knowledge devel-
oped by science. It is expected that the professor acts as a research
scientist, taking care to record the data and taking much more into
account the data obtained than his personal impressions. It provides
a better environment for testing the efficiency of teaching techniques
and modifying human behavior. In addition, it allows self-regulation
and system evaluation.
(Witter, 1975, p. 23)
According to Witter (1975), behaviorism proposed an understanding of

the causes associated with school failure that prioritized environmental
factors over individual characteristics related to interest or supposed
emotional problems: “an increasing number of psychologists are opposed
to using labels to designate students who have learning disabilities, and
most of the responsibility for student failure has shifted into the environ-
ment” (Witter, 1975, pp. 22–23).
Educational Psychology: Contributions and Challenges (Marques,
1980) is a collection of articles that presents an introduction to the most
widespread theoretical perspectives in the country in this discipline.
These are texts produced by authors from different research groups
and various parts of the country, devoted to different theories: human-
istic psychology, phenomenological psychology, behaviorism, cognitive
psychology, and the theory of cultural marginalization. In the chapter
“Principles of Behavior Analysis Applied to Education,” author Harmut
Günther states that in the educational domain, behavior modification
was employed mainly to promote the adaptation of students to school,
reducing behavioral problems. In the chapter “Cognitive Psychology in
Brazil: The Proposal of Cognitive Study Groups,” by Durlei Cavicchia,
the interdisciplinary perspective of the research work developed by Piaget
is recorded:
In narrating the lived experience, which gave him confirmation of

the possibility of constituting a Genetic Epistemology along the lines
in which he conceived such a discipline, Piaget indicated the need to
be not only a psychologist, philosopher and biologist, but even more
so logical, physical, cyber and historian of sciences, to speak only of
the essentials.
(Cavicchia, 1980, p. 181)
This chapter reports that the frst Group of Studies and Research in Cog-
nitive Psychology (GREC) appeared in the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences
and Letters of the Araraquara campus of the Paulista State University
(Universidade Estadual Paulista; UNESP). This frst initiative was fol-
lowed by the creation of three other GRECs in the states of Rio Grande
do Sul and Paraná and another in São Paulo, at USP Ribeirão Preto. Based
on Jean Piaget’s research, these groups sought to orient their studies in an
original way, conducting experiments outside the laboratory, being inter-
ested in the way individuals, especially children, perceived and operated
outdoors. Studies of cognitive development psychology from Piaget’s per-
spective are presented in the text as a change of orientation in relation to
the previous trend, since, according to the author, “themes such as child
and adolescent development, perception, learning” until now were being
“treated almost exclusively from the behaviorist perspective,” although,
as has been said, the genetic epistemology was well disseminated in the
Brazilian educational feld (Cavicchia, 1980, p. 185).
In Developmental Psychology (Biaggio, 1975), which reached its fifth
edition in 1980, Angela Biaggio presented three main theories: Piaget’s the-
ory of intellectual development, psychoanalytic theory, and social learn-
ing theory. The chapter dedicated to Piaget begins by comparing Piaget’s
appropriation in Brazil with his appropriation in the United States:
Piaget is undoubtedly one of the biggest names in current develop-

mental psychology, not only in Europe and countries where psy-
chology is most influenced by European orientation, but also in the
United States, where, albeit a little later, Piaget’s contribution for the
study of the intellectual development of the child has been highly
valued. Although Piaget began writing from the 1920s onwards, it
can be said that its work was only valued in the United States from
1960 onwards, while in Brazil it was already known to psychologists
and educators at least two decades earlier. There are two reasons why
Piaget were neglected by American psychologists: a) the isolation of
American psychology (more positivist, naturalistic and experimen-
talist) from European psychology (more philosophical, humanist and
clinical); b) the lack of methodological rigor inherent in the clinical
method used by Piaget. Recognizing, however, the value of Piaget’s
ideas, American experimental psychologists have lately experimented
with research, where a scientific methodology was employed as rig-
orously as possible, and Piaget’s intuitions or hypotheses were exper-
imentally tested.
(Biaggio, 1980, p. 41)
In the chapter devoted to social learning, the author refers especially to
the work done by Neal Elgar Miller and John Dollard, which they inte-
grated into other work, by researchers from Yale. Biaggio explains that
in the book Social Learning and Imitation (1941), these authors propose
a complex understanding of human behavior, integrating Clark Hull’s
theory of learning into aspects of cultural anthropology and sociology. In
Personality and Psychoterapy (1950), also by Miller and Dollard, Hull’s
theory and cultural anthropology were related to psychoanalytic theory,
which was thus brought into the realm of scientifc psychology. The con-
cepts formulated in the feld of psychoanalysis, when related to Hull’s
theory of learning, came to be recognized especially by “academic psy-
chologists” (Biaggio, 1980, p. 102). According to Biaggio, social learning
has become an important aspect of psychology aimed at solving behav-
ioral problems at school, visualized in the following way:
Without resorting to internal forces and unobservable unconscious

dynamics of which manifest behaviors would be mere derivatives,
social learning theory considers maladjustment as inappropriate
behaviors that have been learned through positive reinforcement and
imitation, or the absence of adapted behaviors that are non-existent
or they have a very low frequency of occurrence in the subjects” rep-
ertoire of behavior because they have not been positively reinforced
in the past or because they have been punished. Thus, the problem
of therapy comes down to learning new appropriate behaviors and
unlearning inappropriate behaviors.
(Biaggio, 1980, p. 115)
In the set of books examined, the most recent is Psychology of Learning

and Teaching, by Samuel Pfromm Netto (1987), a professor at the Insti-
tute of Psychology at the University of São Paulo. In the chapter “Learn-
ing as Information Processing,” the author states that from the second
half of the 20th century, cognitive psychology developed, which moved
away from behaviorism by proposing a more complex understanding of
learning processes:
This shift of emphasis in psychology, from overt behavior, and simple

stimulus-response mechanisms to cognition, with its rather complex
processes and structures, was largely due to dissatisfaction and disil-
lusionment with ambitious past models that, in practice, have pro-
vided to be less effective and comprehensive than their proponents
had assumed, and, on the other, to various recent scientific and tech-
nological developments in computing, mathematical learning theory,
neuroscience, linguistics, human thought models and artificial intel-
ligence and cybernetics.
(Pfromm Netto, 1987, pp. 86–87)
During this period, the problem-solving process was investigated through
the information processing model, using new methodologies, new lan-
guage, and a new frame of references. According to Pfromm Netto
(1987), this development began in the context of business administration,
with contributions from researchers such as Allen Newell, John Clifford
Shaw, and Herbert A. Simon, who received the Nobel Prize in economics
in 1978 for the economic applications of his studies. Simon innovated
by applying psychology, the theory of communication, computing, and
cybernetics to the study of organizations, in addition to having contrib-
uted to the development of artifcial intelligence in the 1950s and 1960s.
He formulated a new conception of rationality, which intended to over-
come what he considered an “acute schizophrenia” in the social sciences
of his time, which considered the subject either as an omniscient rational
actor or as a “stupid beast” guided by the Oedipus complex and the
pleasure principles. He believed that cybernetics would make it possible
to reconcile these alternatives, and he conceived of the subject as having
a cognitive ability to make choices on the basis of pre-established rules,
although he was not rational and reasonable in the Enlightenment sense
to be endowed with an outside perspective (Halpern, 2014). Instead,
Simon imagined a subject incapable of objectivity. “We must,” he

wrote, be prepared to accept the possibility that what we call “the
environment” may lie, in part within the skin of the biological organ-
ism.” Organisms, he argued, are bounded by virtue of their physi-
ology, biology, computational capacities, and access to information.
That said, organisms are still often “rational” in the sense of being
capable of making systematic, discrete decisions, in logical order, with
set endpoints. Even nonreasonable subjects can act algorithmically,
often because they lack an outside perspective on their situation.
(Halpern, 2014, p. 176)
According to the Brazilian psychology professor Samuel Pfromm Netto,
Simon, Newell and collaborators have shown that concept formation,

verbal behavior, understanding and problem-solving and decision-
making can be best explained in terms of information processing and
converted into computer programs. Much of the most remarkable
progress of cognitive psychology in this second half of the twenti-
eth century is based directly or indirectly on the line of theorizing
and research that Simon and his colleagues have developed since the
1950s.
(Pfromm Netto, 1987, p. 104)
Endorsing Simon’s theory of the subject, the Pfromm Netto explained

that the information processing theory related the individual possibilities
of achieving professional success and a good standard of living in rela-
tion to two interrelated aspects: the information repertoire and one’s
computer competence. Transported to society, the theory established that
the backwardness of less-developed societies was a consequence of their
traditionalism, which made diffcult or even prevented the distribution of
information, as well as the lack of investments in the development of the
computer skills of children and other young people.
In societies that are too backward, only a small proportion of citi-

zens have access to the vast array of information of all kinds, unlike
in the most advanced societies. The explosion of knowledge, which
began in the mid-twentieth century, has considerably exacerbated
this state of affairs, and is likely to worsen it even more over the com-
ing decades in emerging or less developed nations that adopt hostile
policies to the spread of large- scale information and do not engage
in development of computer skills in children and young people.
(Pfromm Netto, 1987, p. 82)
Conclusion
Throughout the 20th century, the discourse of psychology related indi-
vidual development and social progress, both conceived from a con-
tinuous and evolutionary conception of time, represented by the arrow
of time (Popkewitz, this book). Evolutionism, more precisely the the-
ory of recapitulation, was used to establish a correspondence between
the characteristics of the thinking of children and peoples considered
primitive, and the presupposed rationality in the civilized adults of
industrialized urban societies was set as a goal of development. It was
in this frame of reference that Piaget, who was a biologist, devoted
himself not only to the study of the development of intelligence in
children but also to the history of the sciences. In Brazil, the evolu-
tionary perspective in developmental psychology became central to the
foundation of the school renovation proposal from the 1930s and the
following decades.
In the second half of the 20th century, psychology was consolidated as
an academic discipline and as a profession in Brazil. Professional associa-
tions of psychologists, periodicals dedicated to their dissemination, and
the first higher education courses in psychology and, within universities,
research groups and postgraduate courses dedicated to studies on child
development and the schooling of Brazilian children, among other topics,
were created. From the 1960s, several theories began to be disseminated
in the educational field, with the main objective of elucidating the prob-
lem of school failure and suggesting measures to improve the functioning
of the education system.
The theory of cultural deprivation imported from the United States
was intended to explain the recurring learning difficulties among poor
children, the language deficiencies in their social environment, and the
lack of encouragement to study given by their families. It was suggested
that distinct school pathways were to be set up appropriate for individual
skills. From the late 1970s, this theory began to be challenged by Brazilian
researchers on the basis of a Marxist theoretical framework. At the same
time, behaviorist theory gained ground in the faculties of psychology by
conducting research that considered the classroom environment a labora-
tory for the transformation of human behavior and sought answers to the
question of how to make teaching accurate and efficient. Also, during this
period, the first groups dedicated to cognitive psychology emerged in the
country, based mainly on Piaget’s theory and dedicated to studying psy-
chological development as a complex process and from an interdisciplin-
ary perspective. The theory of information processing, dedicated to the
study of the computer competence of individuals, was also disseminated
in the country but did not reach as far as Piaget’s genetic epistemology in
the educational field, whose influence continues to this day.
Psychology established itself as a core discipline in teacher education
curriculum because it was associated with the production of knowledge
about child development and individual skills, which were considered
essential to the adaptation of teaching to the needs of each student. At
various times, this concern has led to the suggestion that unequal teach-
ing should be offered to children from different social groups as a neces-
sary measure to foster both the individual development of students and
the social and economic progress of the country.
Note
1. The chapter presents partial results of the research project The imperative of
development in education: an analysis of the psychology discourses addressed
to teachers (FAPESP).
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8 The Embrace of Systems in
Post-World War Two Teacher
Education Research
Sun Young Lee
Introduction
In the United States, researching teacher education as social science has
built on the long-held proposition that the scientific study of education
could advance the professionalization of schooling (Mershon & Schloss-
man, 2008). The ideas and practices of researching education were shap-
ing and shaped by emerging social sciences in the late 19th and early
20th centuries (Beadie, 2016); however, education researchers’ concerns
over teacher education were mostly on training teachers as a profession
by reorganizing teacher education of that time curriculum into more sci-
entifically oriented, for example, to prepare teachers with psychologi-
cal knowledge on child development (Fendler, 2012). The professional
agenda in teacher education research never disappears but rather changes
throughout history with the changing notion of science. This chapter
aims to explore that change, focusing on teacher education research in
the post–World War Two period.
In this chapter, I discuss how education researchers’ interests in US
teacher education as a field of research have embraced and used the sys-
tems approach as a new form of scientific study in the post-WWII period.
The ideas of system and its related attributes, such as feedback, process,
and model, are now commonly used and integrated into the reforms and
research of teacher education, which become almost unintelligible to
think of them as distinct notions that play, perform, and act on generat-
ing the objects of research and even the ways of thinking about how to
make changes. However, as this chapter will articulate, the embracing
of the systems approach into teacher education research and reforms,
as well as its particular knowledge making, was incorporated into the
state making and governance in the post-WWII period, which originated
from the fears against and hopes for the future of the nation. To explain
this, the chapter makes intelligible the comparative reasoning (Popke-
witz, 2008) of the systems approach to teacher education research that
directed teacher education researchers to differentiate the present in its
relation to the desired future. The chapter discusses three questions:
First, what were the fears and hopes that enabled education researchers
150 Sun Young Lee
to embrace the systems approach into teacher education research in the
post-WWII period? Second, what were the rationalities that the systems
approach provided for teacher education research? Third, what par-
ticular notions of “social” and “science” were assumed in the systems
approach to teacher education research, and how were they related to
making teacher a new profession?
The Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) is examined as an event (Fou-
cault, 1991) that exemplifies the production of teacher education as a
field of research in the post-WWII period. Serving as a flagship journal of
the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE), the
JTE was launched in 1950 as a platform for teacher education research.
In the inaugural editorial, founding editor McGeorge highlighted that
the JTE was intended to reflect and stimulate the best practices in the
education of teachers in the United States (McGeorge, 1950). Gradually
aiming at synthesizing the academic and professional agenda in teacher
education, the JTE illustrates how the research acted on generating the
objects of understanding teaching and teacher education and how a par-
ticular notion of change was inscribed in teacher education research. This
chapter analyzes the selected articles that were published from 1950 to
1970 and adopted the related ideas of the systems approach in its study.
The chapter begins with a brief description of the historical contexts
in the 1950s that viewed teacher education as a solution to the problems
of a world in crisis. Then, it makes intelligible how the systems approach
provided teacher education researchers with new rationalities to under-
stand teacher education. The chapter further explains the meanings of
“social” and “science” in teacher education research and how it produced
effective teachers as a new profession. Through this, the chapter artic-
ulates how systems approach provided new theories on the notions of
change in teacher education.
Fear and Hope of US Education and the Global Gaze: Science

as a New Drive for Change in Post-WWII Teacher Education
The education of teachers is the most important activity going on in the
United States today. . . . it does not arise simply from an enthusiasm
for the undertaking; it is confirmed by the daily evidence of a world in
crisis. . . . the answers to the problems of a tragic world can come only
through more effective education of people; the key to effective educa-
tion is an adequate corps of thoroughly qualified teachers; therefore, the
preparation of such teachers is the most important element in the effort
to build a society for justice, humanity, and peace.
(McGeorge, 1950, p. 2)
It is not uncommon that the teacher is referred to as an agency for change

of the nation. This statement, written in 1950 for the first volume of the
Embracing Systems in Teacher Education 151
JTE, emphasized teacher education as an “answer to the problems of
a tragic world” as well as “the most important element in the effort to
build a society for justice, humanity, and peace” (McGeorge, 1950, p. 2).
If we look at the types of research published in the JTE in the early to
mid 1950s, we can notice that the number one challenge that teacher
education had at this time period was the achievement of a national
accrediting process (McGeorge, 1952). That is, teacher education
researchers’ interests centered mostly on domestic issues, such as teacher
selection, the role of education leadership for the national accreditation
of teacher education, and student teaching experiences.
Teacher education researchers’ interests in the issues inside of the
country had changed with a global gaze on US teacher education, which
was sparked by what was called the Sputnik crisis. After the Soviet
Union launched the first artificial earth satellite in 1957, in the follow-
ing year, U.S. Congress passed federal legislation—the National Defense
Education Act (NDEA) of 1958—to “strengthen the national defense”
and to improve “educational programs to meet critical national needs”
(National Defense Education Act of. 1958, p. 1580). In its general pro-
vision, it clearly declared that “the security of the Nation requires the
fullest development of the mental resources and technical skills of its
young men and women” (ibid., p. 1581). This law enabled the federal
government to offer funding to ensure that the young population could
master modern techniques developed from complex scientific principles,
which embarked on a new education movement for science, math, and
technology education (Diaz, 2014), as well as a new teacher education
curriculum.
In response to the “threats” to national security—to be specific, the fears
to lag behind in science and technology—a global gaze was employed in
teacher education research to make future plans to save the nation. In
doing this, differences were the first to be observed. For example, teacher
education researchers began to look at the US teacher education cur-
riculum by comparing it with that of the Soviet Union. By visually and
numerically comparing the university-based teacher education curricula
with those of the USSR, researchers tried to find differences in the two
teacher education systems. In particular, Klein (1960) pointed out that
the accumulated clock hours of instruction in science was only 263 hours
in the United States, whereas the USSR had 659 hours. This type of com-
parison (see also Ross, 1960), which showed the limited number of total
hours in science instruction, supported the belief that if the United States
had more science in the school curriculum and teacher education curricu-
lum, it would be producing more engineers and scientists.
However, the USSR’s emphasis on science and technical fields was not
always positively viewed by US teacher education researchers. Hulicka
(1961), for example, looked at the Soviet Union’s education system
that aimed to create a “new man” for socialistic society beginning after
152 Sun Young Lee
1945–1948 with its prior education system. While the fostering of a
“Soviet man” through science and technology was possible on the basis
of particular cultural contexts in the USSR (see Mikhaylova & Petters-
son, this volume), the US education researchers’ interests in examining
the USSR’s teacher education curriculum were more about the changes
from the theoretically oriented education to polytechnical education with
heavy enrollment in technical fields of education, including women, and
the shift in emphasis of education from democratic ideology to Marxism–
Leninism. By pointing this out, Hulicka asserted that “independent think-
ing and research, especially in the social sciences, is hampered by the rigid
communist system which tolerates no opposition or deviation from its
dogma” (Hulicka, 1961, p. 301).
The “hope” for saving the nation through education was to use the
“process” as a new structure for effective teaching and learning, which
illuminates the systems thinking. In The Process of Education—one of the
key texts published in the US new math movement and other curriculum
reforms in the 1960s—Jerome Bruner (1960) suggested the “spiral curricu-
lum,” which provided teachers with the ideas that the same scientific con-
cept could be taught in the early years of the school while the basic ideas
(scientific concepts) were revisited throughout the school years. The famous
hypothetical statement that “any subject can be taught in some intellectu-
ally honest form to any child at any stage of development” (Bruner, 1960,
p. 33) became the curricular principle of the discipline-centered curricu-
lum, which redirected the child-centered and experience-centered cur-
riculum in the United States into the process-oriented curriculum.
The Process of Education was published as a result of the Woods Hole
Conference in 1959, which was made as a response to the Sputnik cri-
sis. Its goal was to create curriculum and improve the teaching of math
and science; however, it was agreed that “it would be unwise to limit
ourselves exclusively to the teaching of science” (Bruner, 1960, p. xx).
As seen in the funding agencies for the conference, such as the National
Academy of Sciences, the RAND Corporation, and the U.S. Air Force,
and in making cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner a leader of this con-
ference, the reforms for new school curriculum and teaching were geared
by the “experts” not only in education but also in learning science and
mathematics. Among the “experts” were no teacher education research-
ers or teacher educators attending this conference. No articles published
in the JTE from 1950 to 1970 dealt with the issues related to this confer-
ence. It indicates that by bringing in the “experts” outside of education to
work with educators, new theories for reforming school curriculum and
teacher education were adopted from expertise in science, which became
a new drive for change in education.
In this brief description of the education and teacher education in the
United States of the 1950s to the 1960s, I pointed out that the national
fears and hopes shadowed by the post-WWII period mobilized the science
as a new agency for change. Despite the historically persistent importance
of teacher education for change in the nation, teacher education in this
period was marginalized in the national conversation on securing the
future to restructure school curriculum and teaching; rather, teacher edu-
cation was regarded as something that could be changed accordingly
after the discipline-based school curriculum was restructured, as prod-
ucts of the scientific experts rather than of the educational experts. In
doing this, particular notions of science were used in reforming school
curriculum and teacher education. In the following section, I explain how
this new notion of science was assembled with the systems theory, with
an emphasis on how teacher education researches adopted and used the
idea of process in methodological terms to systematically understand
teacher–student interactions.
Process and Feedback as New Theories on Teacher

Education Research: Making Effective Teachers
through Systems Theory
Teacher education researchers—as social scientists—in the post-WWII
period adopted and used the systems theory in the study of effective
teaching. From the launching year of the JTE, researchers tried to find
the best practices and theories for effective teaching by adopting the
systems theory, which understands teaching as a structured system that
could be decomposable into subsystems whose component elements are
interdependent. Although several studies in the JTE explicitly addressed
the system as a focus of study (e.g. Giammatteo, 1969; Heger, 1969;
Waimon, 1961), most of the studies that focused on teacher behavior,
the effects of teacher behaviors, teacher–student interaction, teacher–
student communication, or teacher attitudes implicitly reflected the
systems theory in its study on effective teaching (e.g. Gage, 1964; Smith,
1963). Following historian of science, Hunter Heyck, the social scien-
tists’ adoption of the systems theory encouraged a “behavioral-functional
mode of analysis,” viewing an organism as its sets of behaviors and
studying the behaviors “only by their effects on the other elements of
the system to which the individual belonged” (Heyck, 2015, p. 35). In
teacher education, by identifying and analyzing teacher behaviors and
their effects through systems theory, the teacher education researchers
in the post-WWII periods were equipped with the new theories to see
and study the effective processes of teacher–student communication and
interaction in a systematic way.
Ned A. Flanders’ interaction analysis is a critical example that could
show how teacher education researchers adopted and used systems the-
ory without mentioning it as systems theory. Flanders, a professor of edu-
cation at the University of Michigan, expressed concerns about current
research’s “inability to describe teaching as a series of acts through time
and to establish models of behavior” that should be appropriate to dif-
ferent kinds of teaching situations (Flanders, 1963, p. 251). Aiming at
154 Sun Young Lee
analyzing the “process of teaching” (ibid., p. 260) as a new direction of
teacher education research, what Flanders provided was ten categories
of teacher talk and student talk as techniques of interaction analysis (see
Table 8.1), which he explained as “nothing more and nothing less than
an observation technique” (ibid., p. 253).
The goal of the interaction analysis was to develop an observation
system to obtain a “fairly reliable record of spontaneous verbal state-
ments” (Flanders, 1963, p. 253). Using ten categories of teacher talk and
student talk, the trained observer was expected to observe and analyze
teacher behavior and its effects on student behavior by analyzing teacher–
student interactions, focusing on verbal communication. To be specifc,
the observer assessed communication at a rate of 20 to 25 observations
per minute, “keeping his tempo as steady as possible” (ibid., p. 254). In
the given example of teacher–student interaction (in the following dia-
logue), the observer records the series of teacher behaviors as “10, 6, 10,
7, 5, 1, 4, 8, 4, and 10” since the lesson starts and ends in silence.
TEACHER: “Class! The bell has rung. May I have your attention please!” [6]
During the next three seconds talking and noise diminish. [10]
TEACHER: “Jimmy, we are all waiting for you.” [7] Pause.
TEACHER: “Now today we are going to have a very pleasant surprise, [5]
and I think you will find it very exciting and interesting. [1] Have any
of you heard anything about what we are going to do?” [4]
PUPIL: “I think we are going on a trip in the bus that’s our in front.” [8]
TEACHER: “Oh! You’ve found out! How did you learn about our trip?” [4]
Once the observer had obtained the sequences of the teaching process—
which was recommended having at least 400 tallies covering about 20
minutes of teaching—the observer would pair the sequences (i.e. 10–6,
6–10, 10–7, 7–5, 5–1, 1–4, 4–8, 8–4, 4–10) to put the observed teaching
into the 10 × 10 matrix for analysis (see Figure 8.1). Once the observa-
tion results had been systematically transported into the 10 × 10 matrix,
the particular teaching observed was analyzed to determine how effective
Table 8.1 Categories of Flanders’ systems of interaction analysis1

Teacher talk Indirect 1. Teacher accepts students’ feelings
2. Teacher praises student
3. Teacher accepts or uses students’ ideas
4. Teacher asks questions
Direct 5. Teacher lectures
6. Teacher gives direction
7. Teacher criticizes
Student talk 8. Predictable student response to teacher question
9. Student-initiated response
10. Silence or confusion
Figure 8.1 Flanders’ interaction analysis: Observation results in the 10 × 10

matrix.
Source: (Flanders, 1963, p. 256)
the teaching was, in terms of the frequencies of teacher’s direct or indirect

talk and students’ talk.
Although I briefly described Flanders’ interaction analysis as an exem-
plar that shows how teacher education researchers studied teaching pro-
cess by focusing on teacher behaviors and its effects on students, it was not
an exclusive case of the development and use of systems theory in teacher
education research. By the end of the 1960s, as Campbell and Barnes
(1969)—who were associated with the Interaction Analysis Research
Group in New York University—indicated, researchers had developed
approximately 26 observational systems, allowing them to isolate about
600 micro-elements of human interactions on the cognitive, psychologi-
cal, and social levels. From a present perspective, it sounds natural, or
156 Sun Young Lee
even essential, to analyze teaching through systems theory in the sense
that we use certain systems or tools to observe, assess, or measure effective
teaching and its components. However, as I will show in what follows, sys-
tems theory in teacher education research entails certain epistemological
assumptions and principles that enabled researchers to (re)define teaching
in terms of process and feedback in behavioral-functional terms.
At the center of systems theory in teacher education research were
the technologies of visualization and quantification to make intelligible
previously unintelligible human interactions. Flanders declared that
“teaching will remain an art, but it will be studied scientifically” (Flan-
ders, 1963, p. 260). When suggesting the interaction analysis as an obser-
vation technique, the “scientific” study on teaching was based on the
systems approach to observation that required observers to “enumerate”
(ibid., p. 255) the teaching practices from 1 to 10 (see Table 8.1), which
was to designate and classify particular kinds of communication patterns
between teachers and students. Using the predetermined categories to see
and think about teacher–student communication and interaction—as an
analytical focus on teaching, the effectiveness of teaching is made visible
and intelligible in terms of the frequencies of teacher talk or student talk.
When educational research analyzes teaching primarily as a basis for
the systems approach to observation, it entails several assumptions about
teaching, as Strasser (1967) specified:
1. What the teacher does is a critical factor in determining what the

pupil learns.
2. Children can set goals in the instructional situation; teacher behavior
determines whether they will.
3. Children can engage in productive thinking in the instructional situ-
ation; teacher behavior determines whether they will.
4. Some aspects of learner behavior in an instructional situation may be
directly related to specific units of teacher behavior; that is, learner
behavior is influenced by the behavior of the teacher.
5. Some aspects of teacher behavior in an instructional situation may
be related directly to learner behavior; that is, teacher behavior is
influenced by the behavior of the learners.
6. Other factors being equal, certain units of teacher behavior (tactics)
generally elicit learner behavior within a given range.
It is noticeable that teaching is described in terms of what Heyck (2015)

termed a behavioral-functional mode of analysis, which understands
the interaction between teacher behavior and student behavior through
bidirectional relations. Although the interaction is described in terms of
teacher behavior and learner behavior, the behavioral-functional mode
is a different form of analysis from the behaviorist approach to teach-
ing and learning that understood learning from the unilateral direction
through stimuli and response.
What makes the behavioral-functional mode of analysis in teaching
different from the behaviorist approach is the idea of feedback and feed-
forward, which enabled teacher education researchers to understand
teacher behavior in relation to student behavior toward the future. This
idea about feedback, for example, “teacher not only influences student
behavior, but that he [sic.] is also influenced by student behavior” (Smith,
1963, p. 296), which has now been taken for granted, was an innova-
tive idea at that time, one that enabled teacher education researchers to
emphasize the role of systematic observation. The systematic observa-
tion was emphasized not only for the research purpose but more for the
pedagogical purpose to develop teachers’ “self-insight” (Flanders, 1963,
p. 253). The belief of researchers was as follows: if the teacher is con-
stantly observing the student and modifying his own behavior in terms
of his observations, it influences both teacher and students, which makes
teaching fluid and open rather than closed off (Smith, 1963). The sug-
gested loop of a chain among observing, diagnosing, and acting under-
scores “information to act on in the future and possibly the basis of
planning for a future lesson” (Strasser, 1967, p. 68; emphasis original).
The information on teacher behavior gained from the systematic observa-
tion functioned not only as feedback but also as feedforward to the future.
This idea of feedback and feedforward in the systematic observation on
teaching entails a particular scientific rationality, which directed teachers
to think about teaching both as “inquiry” and “experimenting.” Strasser
(1967) explained the planning process as generating a hypothesis to think
about the relationship between teachers’ potential behavior and its effects
on the students—for example, in the form of “If I . . . then the leaners
will.” Generating a hypothesis was not only for a scientific experiment,
but it was also to turn teaching into an inquiry, in that the teacher, like
scientists, changes the planned hypothesis throughout the teaching pro-
cess. In doing this, the teacher uses observation and interpretation, and
observation is meant not only to obtain information on student behaviors
made in response to teacher behavior but also to be interpreted in terms
of the hypothesis made in the first place. This connection between obser-
vation and interpretation—in the process of teaching—makes teaching
both an experiment and an inquiry. This is because the teacher interprets
their observations in terms of its relevancy to the preset hypothesis of
teaching, which enables the teacher to discontinue, modify, or discard the
hypothesis in favor of new ones.
If the teacher follows this behavioral-functional description of teaching,
they will be paradoxically positioned both as behaving and as inquiring;
that is, the teacher continues to teach while encountering some points to
stop teaching to examine the planned hypothesis in relation to the observed
student behaviors. As described so far, the studies on teaching do not doubt
that teacher behavior influences student behavior throughout the teach-
ing process. At the same time, the studies that embraced systems theory
highlight that while the teacher behaves, the teacher should also inquire
158 Sun Young Lee
about teaching by experimenting with the hypothesis, observing and inter-
preting the student behaviors as a response to teacher behaviors. In this
sense, the behaving and inquiring teacher may encounter the moment that
the inquiry makes the teaching behavior stop.
It was recommended that the effective teacher not “stop the lesson
to attempt to correct his misconception”; instead, the teacher should
make “a mental note of the response” that would be used as the “basis
of planning for a future lesson” (Strasser, 1967, p. 67). At this particular
moment (i.e. the teacher as a behaving subject conflicts with the teacher
as an inquiring subject), the teacher behavior should not influence stu-
dent behavior (in the sense that the teacher makes an invisible mental
note rather than behaving differently), but rather, this particular moment
should enable the teacher to gather information to be used in the future.
Teacher education researchers made clear that teaching is “a system
of actions” (Smith, 1963; as cited in Strasser, 1967, p. 64) involving an
agent, an end in view, and a situation that the agent can modify (e.g.
ways of asking questions, ways of structuring information or ideas).
By understanding teaching experiences through systems theory, to be
specific, by defining the teaching as behavioral act and structure of
the teaching-learning situation, what teacher education researchers
expected was to develop teachers’ behavior to manage effective class-
room learning—that is, teachers’ autonomous decision-making skills
as part of making effective teachers. Systems concepts help teachers
not only to “understand the constraints of the real world” but also to
“systematically overcome them” (Giammatteo, 1969, p. 295), which
would lead teachers to make effective decisions. As discussed with the
example of interaction analysis, once teachers have been equipped with
the languages and theories to understand and explain the teacher–
student interaction, it was agreed that teachers can have more author-
ity to make decisions and make changes in the practices of teaching
and learning.
While the systems approach to teacher education research provided
effective ways to understand, explain, and change the teaching-learning
process, the “social” dimension of the systems approach has largely dis-
appeared in its behavioral-functional mode of analysis. In the follow-
ing section, I discuss how systems theory, which was provoked by the
national fears and hopes to the future, silenced the social, cultural, and
historical dimensions particularly in the study of teacher education.
From Effective Teacher to Effective Teaching: Researching

Teacher Education as a New Social Science in the
Post-WWII Periods
The systems approach to teacher education research coagulated the notions
of communication, interaction, decision-making, and systems, as discussed
in the previous section. Teaching was understood as a system of actions
that highlighted the relations—rather than the elements—of verbal
behaviors between teacher and students; and communication, feedback,
and control processes were assumed to be the fundamentally relational
mechanisms. If we follow only this, it seems that the social dimension of
teacher education research as social science had disappeared by embrac-
ing the systems approach in behavioral-functional terms. This sec-
tion explains that the teacher education researchers’ ambition to make
autonomous teachers by adopting systems theory entails particular social
desires. For this purpose, this section zooms out from the discussion on
the systems approach to teacher education research in the post-WWII
periods, which will allow us to see what particular notions of social and
therefore what particular theories of change are assumed in the post-
WWII teacher education research. In doing this, I try to turn inside out
the teacher education literature that could help make sense of the linkages
between teacher education research and larger social fears and hopes of
that time, informing comparative reasoning as a principle to order the
direction of change in teacher education.
The Process Rather Than the Person: Making Autonomous Teachers

for Change
There is a subtle, but significant, shift in the target of study in post-
WWII teacher education research: the systems approach to teacher
education research focused on effective teaching rather than on the
effective teacher. This new focus on teaching more highlighted the pro-
cess, rather than the person, directing the analysis to begin in the pres-
ent and look forward, not back to the individual’s past. To explain this,
it needs supports from historians of science. According to Erickson et al.
(2013), after observing the irrational behaviors of humans that resulted
in the disastrous events during World War Two, social scientists came to
doubt human reason. As an alternative, social scientists tried to recon-
ceptualize human reason as a Cold War rationality, which explained the
human’s reasonable mind in terms of making the most efficient deci-
sions. This new rationality was to be developed by following the rules
that could be applied mechanically. For example, the complex tasks that
humans encounter could be divided into simple but sequential steps,
which led social scientists to understand the processes of human minds
in forms of algorithms. As Heyck succinctly articulated, social scientists
of that time were “as optimistic about the power of organized reason
as they were pessimistic about the overall rationality of the individual
human” (Heyck, 2015, p. 138).
Teacher education researchers were part of those social scientists who
more trusted in the process than the person, with a strong belief that
effective teaching could be made by following rules or algorithms. As
160 Sun Young Lee
described in the previous section with the case of Flanders’ interaction
analysis, the researches of teaching suggested delineated and efficient
means to analyze the teaching process, which was to establish “models of
behavior” (Flanders, 1963, p. 251) in theorizing about effective teaching.
In doing this, teachers’ particular life history or other historical and cul-
tural peculiarities gave way to generalizations on how effective teaching
should be.
The kinds of the future were not decided in advance; however, the
paths to the future were something designable and plannable. Although
the agreed-upon definition of effective teaching was not made among
teacher education researchers (Saadeh, 1970), there was a commonly
shared particular notion of social change: change could be achieved by
making the teacher an autonomous agent, and this autonomous agency
could be made by following the rules, which is ironic.
This particular notion of change is ironic because teacher education
researches inscribed process-oriented rationality while arguing that it
intended to make the teacher autonomous. The initial studies on the
feedback and feedforward, which I discussed in the previous section,
emphasized the loop among teachers’ observing, diagnosing, and act-
ing and suggested that the goal of this automatic practice be to increase
teachers’ “self-insight” (Flanders, 1963)—that is, encouraging teachers to
autonomously use the information for planning the future lessons. Bondi
(1970), who modified Flanders’ interaction analysis for teacher train-
ing, also emphasized the “feedback mechanism” of observation system
in efforts to get a “fairly objective picture of the processes operating in
the classroom” (Bondi, 1970, pp. 192–193). In this revised version, which
required the observers and teachers to use the extended 13 categories and
an IBM 1410 computer to objectively analyze the teaching process, the
ultimate goal was to make the teacher even more autonomous, someone
who could change teaching by objectively and scientifically understand-
ing its process; however, this autonomous agency could be obtained by
using methodologically delineated processes and procedures.
This level of autonomy, which McPhie and Kinney (1959) called pri-
mary autonomy, was not the only notion. More emphasis was on sec-
ondary autonomy, which required teachers to interact with the teaching
profession and the public that they served. By representing the former
as an inner circle and the latter as an outer circle, McPhie and Kinney
highlighted that the professional autonomy of teachers always reflects
and relates the social aspects to the extent that it is willing to support.
This emphasis on teachers’ professional autonomy in relation to social
aspects was a unique “hallmark of American virtue,” borrowing the
term from historian of science Jeremy Cohen-Cole (2014). According to
Cohen-Cole, Cold War intellectuals and policymakers saw open-minded
autonomy as a US democratic solution to the threats to the community
system. This is because open-mindedness would offer social cohesion
while respecting “individuality, tolerance of difference, appreciation of
pluralism, and appreciation of freedom of thought, unlike the totalitarian
or authoritarian societies” (Cohen-Cole, 2014, p. 2). In teacher educa-
tion, the researches reflected this fear and hope at the same time: the fears
against the “rigid communist system which tolerates no opposition or
deviation from its dogma” (Hulicka, 1961, p. 301) and hopes for mak-
ing autonomous teachers who are also socially aspired to change society.
The systems approach to teacher education research appeared to
adopt mechanical and methodological rationalities; however, as this sec-
tion described, there were continued efforts toward a humanism that
embraced the technological procedures and rationalities. Particularly in
the field of teacher education, the very US notion of autonomy served
as a key rationality that put teachers in a continuously reflexive mode
of differentiating the present and the future for change, which I explain
in detail in the following section. Teachers as an autonomous agency
self-learn to see their teaching practice both as an object of observation
and as the target of change. In doing this, teachers see and think about
the change through comparative eyes because what is functioning in the
present is always made in its relation to what is not functioning and
how it should be in the future. While the social dimensions were not
explicitly stated in teacher education literature that adopted the systems
approach, the idea of teachers as autonomous agents represents how the
social dimensions were invisibly integrated into the technological pro-
cedures and rationalities, inscribed by process-oriented rationalities and
their comparative reasoning.
New Theory of Change for Future Making: The System

of Observation and its Comparative Reasoning
When teacher education researchers began to analyze teaching acts as
they occur in spontaneous classroom interactions, they were concerned
about the dichotomy between theory and practice aiming at reducing the
gap through the systems approach. The autonomous teacher was much
the same as the inquiring teacher who could use the processes of inquiry
for problem-solving, which would in effect produce “more independent,
self-directing teachers” (Flanders, 1963, p. 260). This entails a particular
notion of change to attribute the teacher to the agency for change. As
indicated at the beginning of this chapter, the idea of the teacher as an
agency for change seems to have continued and remained unchallenged
from the emergence of teaching as a profession in the late 19th century.
However, with the adoption of systems theory to teacher education
research, the teacher as an agent for change entails distinctive qualities.
Systems theory provided the original idea that the teacher becomes a
participant in the processes of change by employing the reflexive mode
for change. Reflection in teacher education, which oftentimes sought its
162 Sun Young Lee
origin in John Dewey’s work, has been understood as a scientific prac-
tice to convert impulsive and routine activity to intelligent action. In
How We Think, Dewey (1933) suggested five phases for reflection that
include mental elaboration and testing the hypothesis by imaginative
action, which was believed to lead to the individual’s intelligent action.
This notion of reflection highlights the individual’s autonomous mode of
change by their holding an increased power of control. However, Dewey’s
notion of reflection does not directly mention the relationship between
the part and the whole, such as how the individual’s action is related to
changes in the environment where the individual’s action is already part
of the change. In the study on interaction analysis, Flanders (1963) cites a
model of personal inquiry from Thelen (1960) that indicates the unique-
ness of the systems approach to reflection:
[personal inquiry] is a process of interaction between the student

[student teacher] and his natural and societal environment. In this
situation the student will be aware of the process of which he is a
part; during this process he will be aware of many choices among
ways he might behave; he will make decisions among these ways; he
will then act and see what happens; he will review the process and
study it with the help of books and other people; he will speculate
about it, and draw tentative conclusion from it.
(Thelen, 1960, p. 89)
The student teacher’s process of interaction was understood in its relat-

ing the individual with the natural and social environment, which fur-
ther shifts the practices of refection from the individual action to the
relational activities for both individual and environmental change where
the individual is already involved. In other words, the individual’s refec-
tive action for change is structurally coupled with environmental change,
which makes actions for individual change inseparable from those for
environmental change. The change is not for the general application, but
rather, the new emphasis for change is given to the particular contexts
where the teacher is located.
In this sense, what it means to create a model in Flanders’ interaction
analysis needs to be explained. With the 10 × 10 matrix, Flanders had
interests in determining “what are the fewest number of concepts” (Flan-
ders, 1963, p. 257; emphasis original) in conceptualizing effective inter-
actions between teacher and students. According to his explanation, the
model should have the fewest number of concepts because it needs to be
organized into locally related principles for the teacher to plan to use their
authority. It implies that teacher education researchers differentiated the
global principles to be applied from the local principles that teachers relate,
which attributed the teacher’s agential role to following the global prin-
ciples that are generalized but could be localized in particular contexts.
In doing this, teachers learned to see the differences between the pres-
ent and the future with the bounded possibility. Given the categories and
matrix to see the interaction and communication between the teacher
and students, the possibility of change was bounded with the descrip-
tors to think about the cause and effects of the teacher’s actions for
change. This bounded possibility for change enabled teachers to reflect
on and change the teaching only on the basis of the 10 × 10 matrix,
which provided the evidence of the present for future change. For exam-
ple, in interaction analysis, “excessively high frequencies in the 6–6 cell
(e.g. teacher gives directions) and 7–7 cell (e.g. teacher criticizes) alone
often indicates that the teacher is merely giving lengthy directions to
the class” (Flanders, 1963, p. 256). This report on teacher direct talk
not only meant to represent how the teaching is in the present but also
to intervene in how effective teaching should be, which was to inscribe
the desired future (e.g. more student talk) through the reflexive mode of
observation and change.
Visualization was a fundamental strategy to make the change. Visual-
ization, in this sense, means the creation of the knowledge system to see
and think about how effective teaching should be. Like the interaction
analysis had developed into the feedback mechanism by later scholars,
the practices of observation had systematized not only with the idea of
the present but more for bringing future change. With this visualization
strategy, the teacher’s reflection has been geared to link the present toward
the future rather than being retrospective toward change. This future-
oriented rationality was assembled with the idea of making the teacher the
autonomous participant in change, which illuminates the antecedent to
the teacher research movement in the late 1970s in US teacher education.
Concluding Thoughts
Instead of approaching the system as given, the chapter tried to under-
stand the system in teacher education as a historically contingent prod-
uct that reflects both the social hope and fear of the post-WWII period
in the United States. The chapter articulated how teacher education
research had reformulated the science and theories of change in terms of
systems theory, coming into asserting certainty in the system while pro-
jecting the future as uncertain. The certainty in the system had material-
ized in the systems of observation, which helped visualize the interaction
and communication process to be used as information for feedback for
teacher professional development. In this, the teacher’s new role as an
autonomous agent was emphasized and their observation, feedback,
and development were attributed to both individual and environmental
change, which I discussed as ironic in that autonomy could be obtained
by following the rules informed by systems theory. This US uniqueness
on teacher autonomy was to embrace the individual’s connection with
164 Sun Young Lee
society while respecting individuality, differences, pluralism, and freedom
of thought.
If we take a present vantage point, this study makes intelligible that the
apparently neutral notion of the systems approach to teacher education
entails historical and cultural particularities, which is now much forgot-
ten because of its usefulness for effecting change. The teacher research
movement and its associated terms, like “inquiry-oriented teacher educa-
tion” and “action research,” have become fashionable in the US teacher
education since the late 1970s with the emphasis on a humanistic and
social agenda rather than technical and mechanical qualities of teacher
development (see, e.g. Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Zeichner & Lis-
ton, 1990). However, as this chapter discussed, treating the teacher as an
autonomous agent—which became the foundational idea for the teacher
research movement in the United States—was made possible by integrat-
ing the technical and mechanical qualities of systems theory, in particular,
through methodological rules and orders for teachers to follow while
continuously emphasizing the humanistic-social responsibility as a teach-
ing profession.
The findings of this study help us re-evaluate theories of change and the
notion of teacher as an agent embedded in education practices, reforms,
and research. While teacher and teacher education have been the con-
cerns of government as a cornerstone of social change (Back et al., 2018),
the study articulated that the autonomous teacher is made in the effects
of a paradoxical theory of change, which thinks of the teacher both as the
problem of practice and as the agent of change. This finding also implies
the “risk of self-reflection” (Boler, 1999, p. 177) in that to consider the
problem of practice as an individual problem reduces historical complex-
ities and conditions that still operate on the current practice. In this vein,
the study suggests reconsidering autonomous agency as an embodiment
of historical and cultural terrains. The notion of the self and its related
practices in teacher education, such as self-study, self-insight, and self-
reflection, are based on the systems approach, which orders teachers to
see, inquire into, and experiment with change through process-oriented
rationality, not other ways.
The languages of systems theory to teacher education research are
now fed into the rationalities of making change, which made invisible the
mechanical, functional, and machinic aspects in the theory of change. Now
many of the discussions on change draw on assumptions from the (in)
justice system, which needs to be changed and which attributes the indi-
vidual’s agential role in relation to the system at many levels. This chap-
ter suggests that as a precondition to make the changes, we first need to
understand the principles that made possible the individual as an agent for
change located in the environment, which will help us defamiliarize the
taken-for-granted notion of agency and recognize the limits of the current
theory of change.
Note
1. Table 8.1 is a summarized version of Flanders’ (1963) categories for inter-
action analysis. Flanders emphasized that the numbers are classificatory and
designate a particular kind of communication event, which does not mean
that the values have been scaled. That is, “to write these numbers down during
observation is to enumerate, not to judge, a position on a scale” (p. 255).
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Part 3
Systems, Cybernetics
Imagineering Belonging as Social
Differentiation
9 Diagrams of Feedback
Behaviorism, Programmed
Instruction, and Cybernetic
Planning
Antti Saari
Introduction
It is not uncommon to see certain kinds of flowcharts displayed in con-
temporary pedagogical textbooks, academic articles, and policy papers.
They describe teaching and learning as a feedback system that entails
interaction between teacher and student. The feedback structure is often
visualized as a sequence of boxes indicating actors or functions, which
are linked with arrows describing the flow of information in a temporal
sequence so that each operation affects and provides information for the
next until it finally closes in on itself to form a loop. Such a chart can
also be used to visualize a systematic process of planning, implementing,
and evaluating a curriculum or delineating and governing an education
system. The appeal of this kind of visualization seems to be the way it
indicates knowability and systemic coherence and its responsiveness to
change: all of the actors, processes, and interrelations between can be
known and controlled. Despite changes in the environment, the system
maintains a certain coherence and will adjust itself in a calculable way.
Feedback as a conceptual and visual manner of organizing educational
phenomena has become normalized to such an extent that it may come as
some surprise to know that it has only a short history of being used in a
host of disciplines and theories since World War Two; these have ranged
from physics to cybernetics and educational psychology. A central rea-
son for its emergence was because there was a growing need to combine
ideas, theories, and findings from different fields—not only to produce
unified theories but also to aid in planning and designing self-sustained
systems that incorporated technological, organic, and human elements
(Kline, 2015).
Norbert Wiener, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and Claude Shannon are
three examples of authors who combined ideas from fields as diverse as
communications theory and thermodynamics to describe how humans,
animals, and technology may form a feedback system comprising sen-
sors, effectors, and conduits that are used to exchange information
(Kline, 2015). In education, these principles were put into effect in, for
170 Antti Saari
example, German cybernetic pedagogy [Kybernetische Pädagogik], which
characterized the interrelations between a pupil and teacher (or teaching
machine) as a feedback loop that is self-adjusting because of the constant
relay of information (see, e.g., Frank, 1973). Feedback was also used
to organize information in behaviorism. B. F. Skinner saw learning as a
series of exchanges and reactions between stimuli and organisms (not just
humans but also pigeons and cats) made in their attempt to adjust to the
environment. These principles were then applied to designing teaching
machines and theories of programmed instruction (Skinner, 1957).
However, feedback was not a concept with stable definitions and fields
of applicability. Nor was its interpretation strictly dictated by authori-
tative figures or theories, despite the influence of, for example, Wiener,
Shannon, and Skinner. Instead, feedback provides an index for organizing
a wide variety of other concepts (information, communication, behav-
ior, and organisms) and for visualizing space in a certain way. It is in
this respect that I will analyze feedback as a diagram—a blueprint for
controlling human behavior abstracted from any specific use, place, or
discourse. In this way, the feedback diagram is a “spatiotemporal multi-
plicity” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 30) that governs ways of seeing and organizes
vectors of symbols and matter into a dynamic yet concerted whole.
As a case example for flushing out the diagrammatic characteristics of
feedback in education, I will examine how such diagrams were adapted
and put to use in Finnish educational research during the 1960s and
1970s, to make pupils, classrooms, and the system of national education
(not to mention the interactions between these parties) more amenable to
comparison and control. In Finland, this is often dubbed the “Golden Era
of Educational Reform,” as the country implemented the Comprehensive
School Reform, the Teacher Education Reform, and the General Syllabus
and Degree Reforms in Higher Education (Simola, 2016). This era was
also marked by the strengthening and stabilization of education as an
academic discipline and field of research. After World War Two, Finnish
educational research turned not only toward anglophone discourses—
with regard to the psychology of learning and evaluation—but also
toward German (both East German and West German) and Scandinavian
discourses regarding cybernetics and rational planning. These were put
to use in systematic reforms based on scientific evidence, which aimed
to train Finnish teachers as scientifically trained professionals (see, e.g.,
Saari, 2011; Sitomaniemi-San, 2015).
Using feedback in this context formed part of a broader pattern for
problematizing change in Finnish society. Economic and sociological
discourses in the 1960s and 1970s depicted a Finnish society that was
rapidly urbanizing and in the midst of a swift transition from a largely
agrarian economy to one based on services and industry (Alasuutari,
2017). Problematizing this change required a set of calculated responses
in the form of “rational planning,” where “the state” was seen as the chief
actor in executing decisive reforms in “society” and its “systems.”
Diagrams of Feedback 171
The Diagram
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1980) writes about the emergence of
“panoptic machinery,” which he describes as a diagram for disciplining,
observing, and documenting individuals in institutions such as prisons
and schools. He goes on to explain that this diagram is a “mechanism
of power reduced to its ideal form,” which so that it can function in
a way that is truly “abstracted from any obstacle or friction . . . must
be detached from any specific use” Foucault, 1980, p. 205). This “gen-
eralizable model of functioning” (Foucault, 1980, p. 205) means that
diagrams can have common qualities but can also operate in disparate
ways. For instance, they may have varying respective contents (prison-
ers, patients, and pupils); uses (to punish, to heal, and to teach); and
discourses attached (criminology, medicine, and pedagogy).
In Gilles Deleuze’s work on Foucault, he sums this up by describing the
diagram as an “abstract machine . . . defined by its informal functions
and matter,” which “makes no distinction between content and expres-
sion, a discursive formation and a non-discursive formation” (Deleuze,
1988, p. 30; see also Deleuze & Guattari, 2004b). The machine-like qual-
ities here do not mean that a diagram is constant but instead mean that it
is evolving (Deleuze, 1988); it is the kind of machine that works by virtue
of breaking apart—detaching elements from itself and connecting to new
ones (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004a). This also means that a diagram is
not limited to any particular use but creates possibilities for a range of
imaginative variations (Hetherington, 2011). Furthermore, the diagram
is “a machine that is almost blind and mute, even though it makes oth-
ers see and speak” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 30). A diagram “never functions in
order to represent a persisting world but produces a new kind of reality, a
new model of truth” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 30). This means that the diagram
is both a system of light and language—in that it governs both visuality
and discourse, such as how to observe and talk about pupils in terms
of the “behavior” seen and how to interpret and act on the differences
encountered.
Consequently, the diagram is ideally suited for dealing with the con-
cept of feedback, as feedback is itself a blueprint for describing and gov-
erning flows of information, which is most definitely abstracted from
any specific use or obstacle. Cybernetic pioneers creatively used feedback
models in designing and studying devices and systems including at first
anti-aircraft gunnery and electronic musical and visual performances and
later organizing the bureaucracy of governments and then entire national
economies (Medina, 2011; Pickering, 2010). Even across these different
uses, it retains the common qualities of naming, visualizing, and organiz-
ing elements into a system in which the parts are differentiated and con-
nected via flows of information and spheres of mutual influence.
However, I am not interested in applying the diagram concept to
determine whether feedback discourses in education—especially in the
172 Antti Saari
Finnish context—“fit” into the concept. I will instead use Foucault’s and
Deleuze’s concepts as tools for teasing out three characteristics of feed-
back in education. First, using Finnish pedagogical textbooks as case
examples, I argue that feedback diagrams have a haunting quality, rep-
resenting as they do both presence and absence (on both symbolic and
visual levels). Second, focusing on the uses of teaching machines and pro-
grammed instruction, I describe how feedback diagrams govern ontologi-
cal distinctions and combinations. Third, and with particular reference to
Finnish discourses on “rational” and “cybernetic” planning, I argue that
feedback operates topologically by defining its own modes of parallelism,
distance, difference, and contexts in terms such as “pupils,”“classrooms,”
and “education system.”
Haunting: Behaviorist Teaching and Learning

A diagram is a “seeing-saying machine” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 34) that gov-
erns not only vision and speech but also the relations between these two
registers (Hetherington, 2011; Shapiro, 2003). Here the idea of a diagram
resonates with those critical histories of the social sciences that suggest that
central discourses in these fields stem from a vacillation between the visible
and the invisible. Central concepts in the social sciences, such as “soci-
ety” and “social structure,” indicate a unity that lends coherence to what
is empirically witnessed. They are “quasi-transcendentals” in the sense that
you cannot see them, but they make certain modes of vision possible. For
example, interaction between individuals can be understood with reference
to a social structure that will, in the process, make those individuals more
than just random visual data. And conversely, while you may never “see”
a social structure itself, you can nevertheless verify its existence through
empirical observations. These social phenomena are thus like ghosts—or
“phantasmagrams” (Murphy, 2017; Zheng, 2019)—that linger on the
threshold between existence and nonexistence. In the social sciences, these
phantasmagrams are etched in the broader Western political imagination
in that the government of a territory (realm or state) no longer bases its
legitimacy on a transcendent entity or divine decree. Instead, its legitimacy
comes from the immanent body politic—determined by the will of the
people and the organic development of society or healthy economy—all of
which can be empirically observed. Yet traces of transcendence have con-
tinued to “haunt” the seemingly immanent in societal discourses, as these
provide the conditions required for the visible to appear (Murphy, 2017;
see also Poovey, 1998).
The haunting presence of the transcendent-invisible behind the
immanent-visible as well as vacillating relations between the visible and
the articulable are also evident in feedback diagrams. Visualizations such
as Figure 9.1 began to appear in Finnish didactic texts in the 1960s (see,
e.g., Lahdes, 1969, 1977). These charts soon became so ubiquitous that
Stimulus Pupil Reaction Information of result
Enhancement
or inhibition Feedback
Figure 9.1 The teaching event.

Source: (Peltonen, 1969, p. 8)
they became associated primarily with the “basic model” of teaching,

indicating that it had become the blueprint for identifying agents, pro-
cesses, and interrelations in any given instructional situation (Simola,
2016). Its popularity no doubt lay in the fact that it convincingly illus-
trated the new “rational” and “scientific” way of thinking about teaching
and learning: portraying teachers as scientifically trained professionals
(Sitomaniemi-San, 2015; Saari, 2017). Textbooks for training teachers in
“didactic thinking” exhorted them to cultivate a certain kind of “gaze”—
to first systematically observe the visible behavior and interaction of stu-
dents in the classroom, then to make conjectures and hypotheses about
their own teaching and instructional interventions, and finally to adjust their
own behavior after receiving student feedback in accordance with that
“gaze” (Koskenniemi, 1980).
In textbooks on teaching, feedback clearly has certain onto-epistemic
qualities in common with phantasmagrams. After all, feedback is not
something you can actually see in a school classroom, yet this figure of
speech places observation at the nexus between the universal and the
particular in a way that “makes sense.” Rather than representing any
single place at a particular moment like a photo snap, it captures instead
any sequence of events as a cyclical process; and unlike any passive rep-
resentation, it is an agent that actively incites teachers to look at their
class and order their observations in a particular temporal sequence.
In this way, it also has proleptic qualities in that it delimits what to
expect when looking at a class and how to react to future events in the
classroom.
This way of seeing class interaction became associated with behavior-
ist accounts of learning, which were highly popular (though also heavily
contested) at the time. These discourses insisted on learning being a form
of “behavior” in which humans adapt to their environment that was
174 Antti Saari
fundamentally visible and controllable. For example, Peltonen (1969)
portrays instruction in his textbook on teaching methods as essentially a
series of stimuli and responses between teacher and student that, when
taken together, form a “feedback” loop (see also Renko & Piippo, 1974),
and feedback can also essentially be interpreted as the “autonomous
mechanism of a living being in which the individual receives information
about its own actions and uses this information to adjust them” (Hei-
nonen, 1971, pp. 208–209).
This combination of the visible and the articulable entails a vacillation
between that which already exists and that which is to come. As noted
earlier, the diagram dictates a way of seeing and speaking about what
teaching and learning are and what they should be as standardized stim-
uli, responses, and feedback in a carefully conditioned environment. In
other words, the diagram represents both the classroom, or terrain of
learning, and the process of intervening or “invading” it. The latter aspect
is especially clear in the way pedagogic textbooks instruct teachers and
student teachers to “apply” behaviorist theories and principles of learn-
ing in the form of feedback loops:
Instructional means are most efficient only when their construction

and use are informed by principles central to the psychology of learn-
ing. For example, the principle of feedback has become a key concept
in developing instructional technique. A teaching situation aims at
making a pupil react to every relevant stimulus or a series of stimuli.
Moreover, pupils must receive information about the quality of their
reaction as quickly as possible. Teacher must also have an immediate
overview of pupils’ reactions to her teaching. Only this will lead to
the flexible control of instruction.
(Heinonen, 1971, p. 240)
Governing the interaction between pupils and the teacher in this way
requires meticulous and detailed planning but allegedly rewards the
teacher by making instruction more “effcient” and “pleasurable” for
both parties by eliminating “negative” stimuli from the learning environ-
ment (Nurmi, 1967). Thus, feedback moves from simply representing the
way the classroom and instruction are seen and talked about to actually
controlling this space in a detailed manner. Ideally, this way of applying
the feedback model not only should apply to the way teachers see, speak
about, and control their class but also is instilled within pupils, as they
too should assume a refective feedback-oriented stance toward their own
behavior and adjust it accordingly:
1. Knowing that a certain task is followed by feedback, pupils will

strive towards observing their own reactions in a more detailed man-
ner than in situations where an evaluation of the task is not provided.
2. From the very beginning of every instructional situation, pupils must
be encouraged to observe their own behavior. . . .
3. Instructions to individual pupils should encourage them to especially
observe those signs that indicate mistakes and errors peculiar to
themselves.
(Heinonen, 1971, p. 209)
In sum, feedback has a spectral quality; it cannot be concretely observed

in the interaction of individuals, but it still has real effects in the way
teaching itself is seen, talked about, and organized. In addition to describ-
ing what learning and teaching always already is, it also prescribes how
to produce instruction and learning that do not yet exist, in the future.
In this latter respect, the feedback diagram is also therefore an actor pro-
ducing modes of seeing, speaking, and other behavior. On the one hand,
the feedback diagram produces sameness and belonging—in the form
of standardizing self-refective behavior among students (encouraging
them to be attuned to both themselves and others)—and on the other, it
produces difference—by individualizing instructions according to pupils’
various idiosyncratic responses to stimuli.
The feedback diagram is also an actor in the way it has simultaneously
invalidated earlier ways of seeing and speaking about the classroom. By
being connected to broader empirical discourses in education that insist
on discussing teaching and learning in terms of observable and measur-
able “behavior” (Saari, 2011), feedback excludes earlier pedagogic tradi-
tions that made national identity an important feature of the “Finnish”
classroom. In the 19th and early 20th century, the discourses surround-
ing German idealism and national romanticism sought pedagogies that
would instill a love of the country and the chance to identify with a
historically specific “Finnish” identity (Saari & Tervasmäki, in press). In
contrast, empirical discourses of education have insisted on speaking of
learning and instruction (and produce ways of seeing and speaking about
it) without referring to their historically contingent aspects, by claiming
to have finally found what learning and instruction have always been.
Ontological Variance: Teaching Machines and Programmed

Instruction
As noted earlier, a diagram is an abstraction with no single specific use,
meaning it does not draw strict boundaries between objects or pro-
cesses placed in different ontological categories; nor does it render them
obstacles for its operation. This is particularly prominent in the history
of cybernetics, where feedback as a conduit of information could be con-
sidered as linking together animals, humans, and technological devices.
Moreover, many cyberneticians, like Gordon Pask and Stafford Beer,
have not merely theorized about the principles governing such systems
176 Antti Saari
but also been actively constructing them so that they could either serve
as instruments for scientific investigation or be put to economic, educa-
tional, or military use (Pickering, 2002).
These qualities were also present in the invention and uses of teaching
machines by behaviorists. In B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism and its applica-
tions, feedback operates as a model for combining mechanical devices
and the behavior of animals or humans. In devising teaching machines,
Skinner and his colleagues elaborated on an earlier invention by Sidney
Pressey (1926) and on ideas from Skinner’s own laboratory devices used
to study the basic principles of learning. In such studies, a hungry animal
is placed inside a so-called Skinner box. After a while, the animal “learns”
that by pushing a lever in the box’s food-dispensing mechanism, it can
satisfy its hunger. According to Skinner, hunger here is the initial stimulus
that triggers behavior, and the box conditions it further by reinforcing
certain responses, thus completing a closed feedback mechanism (Skin-
ner, 1957).
Although Skinner experimented with his box on animals (e.g., pigeons,
rats, and cats), he claimed that the laws of learning thus revealed could
also be applied to humans. The ontological difference between humans
and other animals was thus a matter of degree rather than kind (Saari,
2019). In applying these principles to teaching machines, the differences
between animals and humans were less relevant than the general func-
tions of the box and the interrelations between them. What mattered
most was that the teaching machines had the same mechanical features
as the experimental setting did: they recognized standardized stimuli,
had a limited range of possible reactions to them, and had a mechanism
for providing immediate feedback (Skinner, 1957). These machines
were developed by Skinner and James G. Holland in universities (such
as Harvard) and in large companies (like IBM and Remington) and
were seen as a good way to meet the challenges of mass education by
helping to discover the best individualized child-centered methods of
teaching that were at the same time cost-efficient (Skinner, 1961; Stol-
urow, 1961).
However, the machines themselves were prohibitively expensive, espe-
cially in the context of 1960s and 1970s Finland, so they were instead
discussed in various academic publications and pedagogical textbooks
for teachers. A teaching machine had both human and technological ele-
ments, and one version presented to Finnish audiences in 1969 contained
a CPU of transistors and electrodes with a “cathode tube” reminiscent
of a TV screen that conveyed visual information (pictures, figures, and
words) to the pupil, who would answer via an “electronic typewriter”
or by pointing at the cathode tube with a “light pen” (Peltonen, 1969)
This is somewhat more technically advanced than Skinner’s first ver-
sions, which merely provided a simple mechanical device for presenting
questions (see Heinonen, 1971); yet both had elements familiar to a
Skinner box.
Discourses in Finnish academic journals and teacher-training text-
books placed teaching machines within a broader approach also seen
to be influenced by Skinnerian behaviorism, called programmed instruc-
tion, where pupils are presented with a sequence of tasks and questions,
to which they have only a limited number of possible answers to choose
from. These responses are then followed up by immediate response con-
firmation in the form of an evaluation or further tasks that address that
particular issue. The programs of instruction can be linear (Skinner-
ian) or can “branch” in several directions, depending on pupil answers
(Crowderian, after Norman Crowder, another pioneer of programmed
instruction). For instance, one Swedish program, called Individualized
Mathematics Instruction or IMU (Individualiserad Matematik Undervis-
ning), had 10 million possible permutations (Peltonen, 1969). For Sipinen
(1962), this testifies to the fact that a teaching machine is actually a good
teacher if it can cater to such a wide range of individualized instruction
(see also Heinonen, 1971).
Applying programmed instruction was not physically limited to teaching
machines alone; it was not so much the material substance of the machines
that was important as were the functions they produced (Stolurow, 1961).
Finnish researchers, for instance, pointed out that a mathematics or biol-
ogy textbook could also contain a linear program, in which pupils would
be given tasks and could then choose a multiple-choice answer from the
other page for immediate feedback (Heinonen, 1971). A branched pro-
gram could thus be embedded in a so-called scrambled book. Robert
Mager’s Preparing Instructional Objectives (1962), for instance, was used
widely for training “didactically thinking” teachers in Finland at this time
and used a similar method. It would first provide a text on the theory
of defining objectives and then present the reader with multiple-choice
answers to test their knowledge, and according to the answer, the book
would either guide the reader either to revise different parts of the book
or to jump ahead (see also Peltonen, 1969; Sipinen, 1962).
This meant that Finnish educators did not need to turn to expensive
foreign teaching machines for programmed instruction, because they
could instead create a version of them on paper. This blurring of con-
ventional ontological boundaries is also evident in the way. Peltonen
(1969) refers to N. L. Gage’s (1962) article in the influential Handbook
of Research on Teaching, which presented Lawrence Stolurow’s visual
model for programmed instruction. Figure 9.2 shows how the setup of
a teaching machine, with different parts and their named interrelations,
can be represented on paper. Citing Gage, Peltonen (1969) insists that the
“machine paradigm” can also help to pinpoint different functions in a
regular classroom teaching situation (see Figure 9.3).
178 Antti Saari
Figure 9.2 The adaptive teaching machine system.

Source: (Gage, 1962, p. 130)
Figure 9.3 The human equivalent of a teaching machine system.

Source: (Gage, 1962, p. 131)
Peltonen (1969) proceeds to use these visualizations to map precisely
how the actions, faculties, and even the various bodily organs of a teacher
and a pupil can correspond to a pupil–machine feedback system. In this
way, programmed instruction also vacillates between what instruction is
and what it should be: it visualizes both how teaching machines oper-
ate and how regular classroom instruction should be modeled to ft the
functions of a feedback system. In this respect, even the role of teacher is
subject to the functions of a machine-like operator.
Topology: Rational and Cybernetic Planning

Simola (2016) understands decontextualization as a key feature in peda-
gogical discourses surrounding education policy during the “Golden Era
of Education Reform” in Finland. Such discourses depicted “learning,”
“objectives,” and “evaluation” in abstract terms and via the aforemen-
tioned feedback models, as if school were a thoroughly controllable and
calculable system and not a complex social, political, and historically
contingent institution. Although this certainly contributed to an “amne-
siac” discourse of curriculum planning and educational reform (in that it
ignored the cultural and political conditions of schools), it also entailed
producing spaces and “contexts” of its own. This becomes apparent when
these discourses are examined, not in terms of how they succeed or fail in
the messy context of everyday school but in a topological sense—in terms
of how they produce their own ways of seeing, enacting, and talking
about that space (see also Law & Mol, 2004).
Lury et al. (2012) refer to cultures in modern society “becoming topo-
logical.” The term refers, among other things, to discourses surrounding
modes of governance and new transportation and communication tech-
nologies that aim to bring all that used to be distant, different, or discon-
tinuous into closer contact—all that was incompatible and heterogeneous
into a plane of comparison. Resonating with such developments, the
feedback diagram has a decidedly topological bent; rational and cyber-
netic manifestations of it have facilitated expert discourses surrounding
problem areas in education, including planning lessons and tests; defin-
ing carefully calibrated instructional objectives; and bringing different
spatial imaginings of the “classroom” onto the same plane of comparison
in the “Finnish education system.”
During the 1960s and 1970s, a prominent part of debates about man-
aging the public sector and economy in Finland focused on centralized
and objective “planning” (Alasuutari, 2017). This produced overarching
symbols of order for a “Finnish society,” which was seen to be in the
midst of profound “social” transition to an industrial and service-based
economy. In this context, (rational) “planning” implies a social ontology
in which the internal and external boundaries of “society” are conceived
as systems and subsystems with interlocking functions. At that time in
180 Antti Saari
Finland, these systems were governed mainly by state authorities rather
than by private companies or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
In this respect, “social” problems, such as poverty and alcoholism, were
seen as “systemic” problems governable by the state rather than those
of a particular individual’s life course. As a set of governmental meth-
ods, rational planning consists of initially setting specific aims with their
corresponding set of (preferably quantified) criteria. Governmental poli-
cies are then devised to meet those criteria, and their implementation is
carefully monitored. The results are then evaluated by comparing them
to the target criteria, and a feedback loop is created that connects these
evaluations to further adjustments of government policy.
Educational research and curriculum debates frequently typified the
development of the education system in Finland as transitioning from
“unsystematic” to “systematic planning” (Heinonen & Viljanen, 1980).
The main problem with planning in the past had been that different oper-
ations, both within and beyond the system (in terms of meeting the needs
of a technological society) did not necessarily correspond with each other
(Heinonen, 1971). The growing call for rational planning in education
meant extending the feedback diagram, not only in terms of seeing and
speaking about individuals or the classroom but with regard to the entire
education system and society as a whole. Again, this still involved the
ambiguity of portraying society as an ever-ready feedback system already
in existence while seeking to make it more “systematic.” According to the
text of a professor of education, Annika Takala, the phantasmagram is
again present:
Society is a complex social system that determines ends, selects means

for attaining them, and uses the process data as feedback. This data is
included in knowledge which determines new ends, and new means
are in turn selected. An essential trait in society is that it consists of
individuals, each determining their aims for their actions, selecting
their means and using certain data as feedback. People do not set
aims just for their own actions, but also for the whole of society.
Individuals may also adjust their actions so that the attainment of
shared ends becomes possible.
(Takala, 1972, p. 64)
Takala sees that society is, to some extent, always already a series of
rationally operating feedback mechanisms nestled in one another, all the
way from individual to whole nation. What rational planning can do is
to make society and its organizations more rational and effcient as a
series of systems (Saari, 2012). This is how it produces a certain “policy
prolepsis” (Webb & Gulson, 2012): regarding future problems as solv-
able through rational government planning despite perceived profound
changes. Here, it resonates with other academic discourses that depict
society as an organic whole, highlighting its self-organizing ability to cali-
brate its own means and ends within itself. It thus avoids questions about
existing hierarchies and centers of calculation and avoids expressing
irreconcilable differences between certain political or ethical standpoints
and their respective discourses.
Cybernetics became another way to “rationally” plan organizations
in Finland. Psychologist and social theorist Yrjö Ahmavaara (1976)
considered “social cybernetics” as a way of seeing the whole of soci-
ety as amenable to description and control in cybernetic terms. In the
educational context, Paavo Malinen (1972) wrote about the “cybernetic
planning” of school as a new paradigm in education policy in Finland.
Drawing on East and West German developments in “Kybernetische
Pädagogik,” he saw education as a host of open systems that input and
output information.
Consequently, rational and cybernetic planning in education both involve
what Nespor (2004) calls “scale work,” which deems educational spaces
to be measurable by the same standard and then draw distinctions and
links between them. According to Malinen (1972), every system, whether a
human individual or organization, must follow certain functions:
1. To receive and transmit information about an objective in the

environment
2. To control and compare information about the state of the system
for reaching said objective
3. To tune the changes that alter the state of the system
4. To create a feedback loop that will connect these functions.
The education system is one that has several interlocking parallel and
subsidiary systems with similar functions for receiving and comparing
information; for adjusting the system; and for linking them together via
feedback. A series of such systems reaches all the way from a national
level down to municipal, school, and classroom levels (Malinen, 1972;
Koskenniemi, 1980).
In the same way, rational planning extends from the “micro-planning”
of individual lessons through school-based curricula and to “macro-
planning” at the national governmental education level (see, e.g., Koort,
1973; Heinonen & Viljanen, 1980; Renko & Piippo, 1974). These plan-
ning processes are nestled within one another, and all follow a similar
temporal program that starts with setting goals and moves on to plan-
ning, implementing, and finally evaluating results. At every stage, these
parts are linked via conduits of feedback that enable a controlled and
informed development of the whole system. In the pages of Finnish cyber-
netic and rational planning policy papers and articles, visualizations of
these processes and systems of different scales are placed such that a
reader can survey and “see” the profound isomorphism in school classes,
182 Antti Saari
in curriculum planning, and in the operation of a national comprehensive
school system.
These ways of seeing and speaking encourage the reader to both
visualize and name the teachers, pupils, schools, and teaching materi-
als, primarily in terms of how they function in the system. Thus, this
topological proximity dispels the otherwise commonly held notions that
the grassroots level of the classroom is both spatially and temporally
far from the administrator’s planning table. Feedback charts, especially
during the 1960s and 1970s, might conjure up images of highly central-
ized planning, where the surveillance of the system’s functions is concen-
trated in a single center of calculation. Yet even here, vision cannot be
reduced to a single “panoptic” center. Instead, one can see it as a form
of “synopticism” (Elmer, 2003), where conduits of vision are multiplied
and dispersed among different topoi, and they standardize observation
from several angles—from the positions of pupils, teachers, administra-
tors, and researchers.
But as noted earlier, feedback has been about not only constructing a
visual-symbolic “map” of education but also constructing its actual prac-
tices and spaces. Ways of seeing and speaking are accompanied by ways
of standardizing and serializing these spaces to allow for the sustained
and continuous exchange of information and particular kinds of inter-
vention. Along with planning, implementing, and evaluating the compre-
hensive school reform, the National Board of Education and Educational
Research Institute (Kasvatustieteellinen Tutkimuslaitos, or KTL) devised
an “information system” for producing, storing, dispersing, and combin-
ing scientific information about the education system (Saari, 2012). These
“data infrastructures” (Sellar, 2015) connect a wide variety of subjects,
materials, and practices from different time spaces. For instance, a host
of schools from different parts of Finland were selected to experiment
with new curricula, materials, and forms of teaching, after which data
were gathered about the participating students’ health, attitudes, grades,
and dropout rates in a “data bank.” These data were then to be used for
the further development of teaching in the participating schools, for sub-
sequent research, and for planning the comprehensive school reform on
a national level (Saari, 2012). Thus, information was not simply put in
one container or conduit but “bundled” (Elmer, 2003, p. 237), produced,
gathered, compared, cross-referenced, and kept on the move. In this way,
it is constantly begetting new information and guiding adjustments to the
system. One result of this is a closed circuit that delimits what can be seen
and said, in terms of how problems are identified, addressed, and evalu-
ated. Another is that it creates a path dependency for future action: the
data define a phenomenon, suggest ways for further exploration, and may
again yield new problems to evaluate and address (see also Madaus &
Horn, 2000).
Conclusions
Finland in the 1960s and 1970s offers a highly compressed case of broad
educational policy trajectories based on expert knowledge. The diagram-
matic elements examined here were a global phenomenon during the
20th century, often traversing cultural and political boundaries on both
sides of the Iron Curtain (Boretska, 2019; Hof, 2018). Feedback became
a widespread way of imagining controlled spaces where information
could be systematically produced, distributed, and used.
In terms of understanding education and educational research, the
effectiveness of a diagrammatic reading lies not only in the way that
territories of power are imagined through knowledge but also in the
“logistics” (Mukerji, 2010) of the way the diagram enacts them, care-
fully sustaining the infrastructures that produce, convey, and make use of
information and that make the various time spaces of education isomor-
phic yet also syncopated.
A diagrammatic reading of feedback might also help us understand
the historical continuities between educational research, educational
policy, and classroom instruction from the 1960s and 1970s to the pres-
ent day, although it would go beyond the scope of this chapter. Common
historical narratives of educational research are often written in terms of
a succession of theories and paradigms. These may relegate earlier theo-
ries, such as rational planning, cybernetics, and behaviorism to the status
of pipe dreams as they ambitiously tried to explain all of society and
human behavior. Yet it is these same “unholy mixtures” (Maclure, 2013)
of scientific discourse, different forms of observation, and constructing
spatial configurations in a diagram that open up vistas of unity, of dif-
ference, and of continuity in the way that educational policy changes
across spaces, subjects, theories, and concepts. Thus, in addition to the
historical ruptures and discontinuities, there may be hidden diagram-
matic threads that extend from the cybernetic organization charts of the
1960s to present-day theories of evaluation and from Skinnerian teach-
ing machines to contemporary mobile learning apps.
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10 From “Threat” to “Treat”
Cybernetics in the Soviet Union1
Tatiana Mikhaylova & Daniel Pettersson
Introduction
Describing the history of Soviet cybernetics, Gerovitch (2002, p. 1) called
it “a history of rebellion and conformity, enchantment and disappoint-
ment” that shaped an entirely new way of thinking and a new language
for political and scientific reasoning (cf. Rindzeviciute, 2008; Levien &
Maron, 1964). However, cybernetics was not just an intellectual trend but
also a social movement for radical reforms (Gerovitch, 2002). As such,
cybernetics in the USSR was transformed from an alternative to the rul-
ing nomenclature into the establishment’s tool for solving problems. The
chapter covers this transformation of Soviet cybernetics from a “threat”—
that is, something that questions the “power” and ideological grounds of
Marxist-Leninism with a strong belief in dialectical materialism—into
a doctrine embraced by the same “power” as a “treat” for solving soci-
etal problems. In short, the chapter is a story of how cybernetics came
to influence educational science and how it was regarded as a specific
technique2 for steering education and thus became part of an educational
reasoning (cf. Hacking, 1990).
We approach the latter task in three ways. First, we trace the frequency
of the use of the term “cybernetics” in the Russian National Corpus
(RNC, 2019) and discuss how it was interpreted when it appeared in the
Soviet context. Second, we study scientific and popular science articles
concerning cybernetics in education written in the early 1960s, when
cybernetics became “domesticated.” Here, we historicize how cybernet-
ics was perceived and the kind of educational problems it was expected
to solve. In this way, we demonstrate how the technique of and the rea-
soning (cf. Hacking, 1990) about cybernetics evolved in response to the
changing ways of thinking about societal and scientific development.
Third, we conduct an analysis of (text)books that present the usability
and possibilities of cybernetics in education to a wider audience.
To elaborate on how cybernetics was thought of and disseminated,
we need to look at the context preceding the introduction of cybernet-
ics in the USSR after World War Two (WWII). In this, we focus on a
188 Tatiana Mikhaylova & Daniel Pettersson
gradual shift in how educational “numbers” (cf. Lindblad et al., 2018)
were created as the basis for selection and differentiation, thus providing
the grounds for controlling and steering the educational system, manag-
ing people, and developing society. By examining the prewar context, we
are able to show that cybernetics and systems thought (cf. Heyck, 2015)
were not new ways of thinking in the Soviet Union but were rather reju-
venations of an older narrative on the “numbering of education” and on
the use of mathematical language and statistical reasoning for avoiding
uncertainty (cf. Hacking, 1990).
An Educational Reasoning Based on Numbers: A Premise

for Cybernetic Education?
Since the emergence of the national system of education in the Russian
Empire, the government has sought methods that objectively assess students’
academic performances. In 1846, a new system based on numbers (a five-
point scale) rather than words was introduced to unify educational assess-
ment throughout the empire (Rozhdestvenskii, 1902). The need to introduce
the so-called number system (балловая система) was justified in terms of
This comprehensive and constant scale frees the teacher from the
one-sidedness that always stems from comparing pupils of the same
course with each other, it defines the rules for a unified judgment at
different times and in different places.
(Glinoyetskiy, 1832, p. 366)3
Hence, the main assumption underlying this assessment reform was the
perceived neutrality of the mathematical language that could protect
pupils from personal bias. The number system rapidly gained in pop-
ularity; grades were now given on a daily basis in order “to evaluate
students’ diligence in preparing lessons and doing homework, their atten-
tion in class and conduct” (Zhurnal MNP, 1873, pp. 36–37). Eventually,
educational merits grounded in measurements and assessments came to
function as a legitimate basis for social hierarchy and were regarded as
superior to non-educational factors. For instance, justifying the highly
hierarchical school system established in the 1870s, Dmitry Tolstoy, the
then minister of education, explained that selection to gymnasiums and
universities was not based on students’ religion or nationality. He proudly
proclaimed, “We make only one distinction among pupils—a distinction
on the basis of merit” (Zhurnal MNP, 1875, p. 132).
Hence, the imperial education and the organization of society as a
whole became part of the “avalanche of printed numbers” that, accord-
ing to Hacking (1990), was so typical of the development of modernity
during the 19th century in the West (cf. Desrosières, 1998; Porter, 1995).
Educational numbers as such became part of a process of “alchemy” (cf.
From “Threat” to “Treat”: Cybernetics 189
Popkewitz, 2015), meaning societal transformations in which society’s
aspirations and specific ways of thinking were embedded. The number
system intended for “objective” performance assessment came to operate
as a kind of a junior Table of Ranks4 in school (Alston, 1969). Stated dif-
ferently, numbers became a common way of creating different kinds of
people—not only in education but also in society at large.
The Evolution of a “Statistical Worldview”

The use of numbers for steering and controlling education in Russia as
well as elsewhere in the West (cf. Scott, 1998) can be traced back to the
19th century. It was also during this century that the government started
to collect statistical data of various kinds. The numbered data came to
function as one of the main tools for evaluating the past and creating
“imagined futures” (cf. Beckert, 2016). For instance, one of the annual
reports from the Ministry of Education states that
Just like a pulse, the numbers of this kind—no matter how silent they
might seem at first glance—allow to estimate the strengthening and the
weakening of the flow of school life. . . . The numbers allow to pass
judgements on both the need of reforms and the degree of their success.
(Zhurnal MNP, 1868, p. 123)
However, the ways that governmental bodies in Imperial Russia used and
analyzed statistical data were harshly criticized as unscientifc and lack-
ing credibility. In particular, in Vladimir Lenin’s early economic essays,
he blamed governmental statisticians for an “astounding lack of under-
standing” of the statistical data, which hindered them from drawing
“certain conclusions” (Lenin, 1898/1964). Accordingly, in many of his
prerevolutionary works, Lenin aspired to develop a theory and a meth-
odology of statistical research (Kotz & Seneta, 1990). He was convinced
that a “proper” use of statistics would help to solve social problems in the
interests of the working class (Lenin, 1913). In that way, statistics became
an important feature in the launching of the revolution and the establish-
ment of Marxist–Leninist rule.
The increased trust in numbered data is evident not only in the politi-
cal discourse of the time but also in the scientific discourse. This is,
for instance, evident in Ivan Pavlov’s reflex theory, the development of
which was based largely on precise quantitative measurements. In his
Nobel lecture, Pavlov claimed that the mechanisms of human psychical
constitution were still “wrapped in darkness,” although he added that
humankind “has still another powerful resource: natural science with its
strictly objective methods” (Pavlov, 1904, n.p.). Some years later, in 1909,
he gave another speech in which he defended and affirmed “the abso-
lute and unquestionable right of natural scientific thought everywhere”
(Pavlov, 1928, p. 129). He argued that the methods he used to explore the
higher nervous activity of animals were thoroughly applicable to study-
ing all living species, including humans:
As a part of nature every animal organism represents a very compli-

cated and closed system, the internal forces of which, at every given
moment, as long as it exists as such, are in equilibrium with the exter-
nal forces of its environment. The more complex the organism, the
more delicate and manifold are its elements of equilibration. . . . In
this way then is all life, from that of the simplest to the most complex
organism, including man, a long series of more and more compli-
cated equilibrations with the outer world. The time will come . . .
when mathematical analysis, based on natural science, will include in
majestic formula all these equilibrations and, finally, itself.
(Pavlov, 1928, p. 129)
In line with these arguments, Pavlov always strove to uncover precise quan-
titative laws governing physiological processes. One example of this is his
well-known comparison of the human nervous system with a central tele-
phone switchboard. Using a switchboard metaphor, Pavlov created a pow-
erful “system of thought” that could explain the reactions of organisms
to diverse stimuli. According to Gerovitch (2002), Pavlov’s refex theory
became an unquestionable physiological canon in the USSR, the science
per se, comfortably incorporated into Marxist–Leninist ideology. However,
as we will show in the coming sections, the introduction of cybernetics
after WWII was perceived as challenging the trust in Pavlovian thinking.
The boisterous discussions about the importance of precise data, math-
ematical models, and statistics for exploring human conduct appeared in
Vestnik Statistiki (Statistic Bulletin), the journal of the Central Statistical
Administration established by Lenin. One of the articles by Romanovsky
(1922), titled The Statistical Worldview, discusses how the methods and
concepts of exact sciences can be applied to studying social phenomena.
He argued that the elements of social relations could be compared with the
elements—molecules and atoms—of natural phenomena. Hence, by exam-
ining all the conceivable combinations of elements and their internal rela-
tions, it would be possible to construct the laws of the social system. Only
by establishing these laws would the social sciences be able to stand on solid
ground. In conclusion, he highlighted the value of the statistical worldview:
Statistical worldview provides one of the greatest synthesis of our

perceptions of the world, one of the deepest philosophies of the
world. If conducted consistently and properly, this philosophy might
give and will give the most general science of the universal phenom-
ena, the common phenomenology of the world. . . . And it seems to
me that it can be built strictly mathematically—modo geometrico.
(Romanovsky, 1922, p. 27)
Conclusively, the vision of the world based on numbers and systems that
was established during the imperial era was further developed after the
revolution and became the technique per se for creating the new society
and new kinds of people—the “Soviet man.”5 Moreover, this vision was
integrated into the offcial scientifc doctrine and, as demonstrated next,
became a guiding principle for organizing education.
A Magnetic Field of Cybernetics

We use the trope of a magnetic field to describe how cybernetics is per-
ceived in different contexts. Just like a magnetic field, cybernetics seems
to affect and incorporate different scientific and societal disciplines and
practices. Consequently, cybernetics cannot be easily described as a scien-
tific discipline, a specific engineering technique, or a philosophical doc-
trine. Rather, its “power” seems to reside in transcending the boundaries
of science, engineering, and philosophy (cf. Gerovitch, 2002).
When Norbert Wiener (1948) introduced cybernetics, he defined it as
an assortment of analogies between humans and self-regulating machines
(cf. Bateson, 2000). He compared human behavior to the operation of a
servomechanism, human communication to the transmission of signals
over telephone lines, the human brain to computer hardware, and the
human mind to software. According to him, order was identified with
life, certainty, and information and disorder with death, uncertainty, and
entropy. As cybernetics combines and unifies models, explanatory frame-
works, and appealing metaphors from various disciplines, it also shapes
a new language, which Gerovitch (2002, p. 2) calls cyberspeak. What
is said to be symptomatic of this kind of language is that it embraces
concepts from various disciplines: homeostasis and reflex from physi-
ology; behavior from psychology; control and feedback from control
engineering; and information, signal, noise, and thermodynamics from
communication engineering; and so on. It then generalizes each of them
as being equally applicable to living organisms, self-regulating machines,
and human society (Gerovitch, 2002).
As a conclusion, we can comment that soon after WWII, cybernetic
thinking influenced by mathematical logic (Wiener, 1948) became the
dominant “gaze” (cf. Rose, 1999) of observing the world and the main
way of making it intelligible.
Cybernetics Introduced in the Soviet Context

As already indicated, cybernetic reasoning was by no means unknown
to Soviet policymakers and scientists. Moreover, the Wienerian view of
cybernetics was deeply influenced by Russian thinkers and scholars (Wie-
ner, 1948). However, when Wiener’s book was introduced in the Soviet
Union in the midst of the Cold War, it was met with strong criticism.
Cybernetics was regarded as Western ideology that could strengthen the
power of capitalists. The articles published in the early 1950s in scien-
tific journals and popular magazines described cybernetics as “a science
of obscurantists” and “modern slaveholders” serving the interests of US
imperialism (e.g., Gladkov, 1952; Materialist, 1953; Yaroshevsky, 1952).
Cybernetics was rejected on ideological grounds not only as a threat
to Marxism–Leninism but also as something contrary to the philosophi-
cal principles of dialectical materialism that permeated Soviet science.
For instance, in one of the articles devoted to cybernetics, Gladkov, who
signed his text as “Stalin Prize laureate, engineer,” wrote that cyberneti-
cists compared a person with a complex machine and society with the
totality of these machines. Accordingly, he continued, they describe all
forms of physiological and spiritual life in terms of “feedback manifesta-
tion” (Gladkov, 1952, p. 38). Comparing cybernetics with other idealist
theories, Gladkov was especially critical of the claim that it was possible
to explain societal laws “with the language of mathematical equations”
(Gladkov, 1952, p. 35). Similarly, Yaroshevsky (1952), a Soviet psycholo-
gist and science historian, condemned the attempts of cyberneticists to
extend mathematical logic to social phenomena:
Starting with the assertion that the laws of an individual’s activity are
supposedly no different from the rules of a thermostat in a refrigera-
tor or a gyrocompass on a vessel, cybernetics then tries to interpret the
whole society as a set of automatic devices, for explaining the interac-
tion of which we can find the appropriate mathematical expression.
(Yaroshevsky, 1952, p. 4)
Thus, cybernetics was criticized for its overly mechanistic approach to

steering various systems without taking their complexity into account.
One of the most well-known articles condemning cybernetics was pub-
lished in the journal Voprosy filosofii (Philosophical Issues). The anony-
mous writer insisted that cybernetics “has nothing to do with science”
and its emergence in the West “only testifies to degeneration of modern
bourgeois science,” putting it 200 years back (Materialist, 1953, p. 210).
The author was particularly concerned with the “outdated” mechanical
notions of the human brain that ran counter to the “advanced” materi-
alistic theories of Pavlov and other Soviet scientists who had provided a
“truly scientific” and “objective” explanations of human mental activity.
Consequently, cybernetics that positioned itself as superior to materialis-
tic psychology was described as a “scientific phantasmagoria,” “falsifica-
tion,” and “perversion” of Pavlov’s teaching (ibid., p. 214).
Questioning the validity of cybernetics as a theory that claimed to
cut across a wide range of scientific disciplines, Materialist—as the
anonymous author called himself—pointed out that the principles of
modern computers cannot be extended to the diverse and qualitatively
different natural and social phenomena. Hence, one of the arguments
against cybernetics was that it could be used against the interests of the
proletariat:
One should not turn a blind eye to those deeply reactionary, anti-
human conclusions that cyberneticists make when trying to solve
social problems. Frightened by the labour movement, the imperial-
ists dream of a situation in which no one will threaten their rule.
Robots, only robots suit them; let the rest of humanity perish, if only
they and the machines serving them remain. The scientific nonsense
of cybernetics reflects this fear of the working masses.
(Materialist, 1953, p. 218)
In sum, in the offcial scientifc discourse, cybernetics was declared as

a “reactionary mechanistic theory” and “a pseudo-scientifc instrument
directed against dialectical materialism, historical materialism, Pavlovian
physiology” (Bykhovsky, 1953, p. 44). Unsurprisingly, the term “cyber-
netics” was banned from use. However, some of the ideas of cybernetics
were developed and promoted in the same journals, albeit under other
banners (electronic automation, electrical engineering, and computer
technology), and written in a markedly different tone. One of the articles
claims, for example, that the “automation of production processes facili-
tates human labor, contributes to a signifcant increase in productivity
and increase in output” (Sokolov, 1953, p. 17). The effect of this “nonex-
istence” of cybernetics was that even though Soviet and Western scholars
worked on similar matters, under the existing ideological circumstances,
a joint scientifc feld was hard to establish.
Ironically, several of the arguments against cybernetics had already
been used 30 years earlier in relation to tectology (from Greek, meaning
“the doctrine of construction/organization”), a general theory of sys-
tems developed by the Soviet philosopher Alexander Bogdanov between
1912 and 1928. In fact, this theory is often considered a precursor to
cybernetics and systems thought (see, e.g., Biggart et al., 1998). Bog-
danov (1913/1989a) defined tectology as a “universal organization
science” that sought to uncover organizational principles underlying
social, biological, and physical systems. He was convinced that every-
thing could be treated as systems consisting of elements connected
to each other in a certain way; by studying these elements and links
between them, it was possible to derive some general laws (Bogdanov,
1913/1989a).
Although tectology in several ways anticipated many theories devel-
oped during the 20th century, at that time, it was criticized for its ide-
alistic nature and for promoting “bourgeois and reactionary views”
under the guise of “proletarian culture” (Bogdanov, 1913/1989b, p. 19;
for a discussion of Bogdanov’s notion of proletariat culture (see, e.g.,
Soboleva, 2017).
Figure 10.1 Frequency of use of the word кибернетика [cybernetics] in written

Russian sources.
Source: Russian National Corpus (RNC, 2019) in May 2019
Despite obvious similarities between Bogdanov’s tectology and Wie-

ners’s cybernetics, there is no evidence that Wiener knew of tectology.6
Whatever the case, both theories developed inside as well as outside the
USSR were unacceptable within the Soviet discourse, because they were
initially interpreted as running against dialectical materialism.
However, after Stalin’s death, the official attitude toward cybernetics
underwent a rapid change. One evident shift in the political take on science
in the mid 1950s was that Soviet scientists were given permission to publish
in scientific journals abroad and to participate in international conferences.
Among the first to do so were computer specialists who previously had to
cut a fine line between the practical goal of developing modern sophisti-
cated weapons and an ideological mission to combat capitalism (Gerovitch,
2002). This meant that the division into a “socialist” and a “capitalist” sci-
ence no longer held. Hence, the criticism of cybernetics started to erode, and
the term was mentioned more often in the scientific discourse. One indica-
tor of the “normalization” of the term “cybernetics” can be seen in Figure
10.1, which shows the frequency of its use in written sources:
As shown in the graph, the use of the term “cybernetics” increased
signifcantly after Stalin’s death, in 1953. We next explore the reasons
for this and the meaning that cybernetics was given in the Soviet context.
The “Cybernization” of Soviet Science

The more the Soviet Union departed from Stalinism, the more radical the
cybernetic project became. This has been called a process of the “cyber-
nization” (Gerovitch, 2002, p. 199) of Soviet science. Along with the new
promises to make different scientific disciplines more “objective,” the
question emerged as to what cybernetics actually was. In an early article
devoted to cybernetics (Sobolev et al., 1955), it is defined as a combina-
tion of three major theories: information theory, the theory of computer
as self-organizing logical processes similar to human thinking, and the
theory of automatic control systems, in which studies of the nervous
system were included (initially, predominantly Pavlovian thinking). This
definition was later developed, contested, and challenged several times.
However, cybernetics gradually became associated with the concept of
scientific objectivity that was especially aligned with mathematics and
computing. Thus, the Soviet cybernetics movement came to formulate
a specific mission: to bring objectivity to the social sciences. One of the
important reasons why cybernetics was able to find its way into science
this time was that the philosophers who were loyal to cybernetics not
only managed to reconcile cybernetics with dialectical materialism but
also worked out strategic alliances between the two. In that way, cyber-
netics no longer posed a challenge to dialectical materialism but was
instead tamed and domesticated and turned into a respectable discipline
(Gerovitch, 2002).
The “cybernization” of Soviet science was rapid. At its beginning,
1958 went down in history as the year in which the technical journal
Problemy kibernetiki (Issues in Cybernetics), under the editorship of
Alexey Liapunov, made its appearance and the Scientific Council on
Cybernetics headed by Academician Aksel Berg was established. Both
Liapunov and Berg played important roles in transforming cybernetics
into a science aligned with the basic principles of Marxism–Leninism
(see, e.g., Boretska, 2019; Gerovitch, 2002). In particular, Berg’s article
Cybernetics—in the Service of Communism (Berg, 1961) outlines the
enormous potential of cybernetics in a wide range of fields. In another
article, he claimed that cybernetics could be seen as an heir apparent to
the ideas of Soviet scientists regarding the scientific organization of labor.
By using cybernetics for the building of communism, he continued, “we
are carrying out Lenin’s instructions in the sphere of scientific organiza-
tion of labour” (Berg, 1962, p. 4).
In the context of destalinization during what is known as the Khrush-
chev Thaw, the possibility of aligning cybernetics with Lenin’s ideas
about optimizing the process of government by using accurate statistical
data gave an important impetus to revising official attitudes. Suddenly,
cybernetics was seen as something that could facilitate the labor of the
Soviet people and solve the country’s societal and scientific problems. As
a result, at its 22nd congress, the Communist Party adopted a new pro-
gram, in which cybernetics was assigned a crucial role in the construction
of communist society:
In 20-years-time comprehensive automation will be carried out on a

mass scale, with increasing emphasis on fully automated shops and
factories, ensuring high technical and economic efficiency. Implemen-
tation of the latest systems of automated control will be speeded up.
Cybernetics, electronic computers and control systems will be widely
applied in production processes in industry, construction, and trans-
port, in scientific research, planning, designing, accounting, statistics,
and management.
(Program of the Communist Party, 1961, p. 71)
The new expectations attached to cybernetics resulted in new ways of por-

traying it. Gone were the descriptions of cybernetics as a threat to commu-
nist ideology and the opposite of dialectical materialism. Instead, Soviet
scientists did everything to domesticate cybernetics by putting it at the
heart of the building of communism and using it to address social issues.
This optimism is evident, for example, in an article in Vestnik Statistiki
devoted to the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birth. The author discusses
Lenin’s contribution to theory and the methodology of statistics and
especially his ideas about calculating “the best possible outcome.” The
author states enthusiastically that the combination of Lenin’s works and
the achievements of cybernetics, mathematics, and computer technolo-
gies would help to solve the complex task of scientific forecasting and
the optimization of industrial production (Kozlov, 1970). Consequently,
Lenin’s thinking was incorporated into the discussions about how to
avoid uncertainty (cf. Hacking, 1990) and achieve better forecasts (cf.
Goodman, 1983) in science and policymaking.
Cybernetics as a Means of Solving Educational Problems

Ultimately, the change in the state leaders’ attitudes toward cybernetics
did not go unnoticed. Between 1956 and 1962, no fewer than six gen-
eral bibliographies of Soviet publications on cybernetics were published
(see Comey, 1964). As mentioned earlier, after the adoption of the party
program in 1961, cybernetics rapidly gained importance in the Soviet sci-
entific discourse and increasingly penetrated the social sciences. Whereas
during the formative period (1956–1962) research on cybernetics was
primarily concerned with the problems of automation and engineering,
the early 1960s saw an increased interest in philosophical, psychophysi-
cal, and sociological issues. Judging by the bibliographies that were pub-
lished, it was also during the early 1960s that Soviet cybernetics entered
the field of education.
One way of understanding the research dealing with cybernetics in
education in the USSR is to look at the international discussions tak-
ing place in the 1960s about how to make education and educational
research more “scientific” (Boretska, 2019; cf. Lather, 2010). The “edu-
cationalization” of the world, which was especially evident after WWII,
meant that education was assigned increased responsibility for solving
social problems (cf. Smeyers & Depaepe, 2008; Tröhler, 2016). For this,
it was necessary to make the humanities and the social sciences more
“serious” (Boretska, 2019). It was hoped that the “mathematization” and
“cybernization” of educational research would help achieve the desired
“scientificity.” As will be shown later on, Soviet researchers of education
started to use the language of “preciseness” more extensively, thereby
promoting the methods of natural science that were seen as bringing
about objectivity, certainty, precision, or what Boretska (2019, p. 36)
calls “positivist truths” about education.
Further, cybernetics entered the Soviet academic discourse at a time
when there was a sharp dialogue between the orthodox followers of Pav-
lov’s physiological teaching and their opponents. In relation to the
Pavlovian stance, cybernetics opened new areas of thinking for physi-
ological research as it dealt with purposeful behavior, which to a large
extent was missing in the Pavlovian understanding of observed activity.
In this, an elaborated human–machine metaphor used by cyberneticists
provided a better way of discussing human behavior and conditionality
than did the metaphor of a switchboard suggested by Pavlov.
Next, we discuss some of the articles written in 1962, the “introduc-
tory year” for cybernetics in educational sciences in the USSR, which
demonstrate the enormous expectations that cybernetics would improve
school practices and develop the educational sciences.
Cybernetics Inscribed in Educational Research

As mentioned earlier, one of the main problems that cybernetics was
expected to solve was related to the scientific status of education. For
instance, in various articles, Landa (1962a, 1962b) argues for the need to
turn education into an “exact” science. He finds the prerequisites of such
“scientification” in a “radical revision” of the methods used in educa-
tional practice and research. Landa (1962a) criticizes the current state of
educational research for lacking “precise recommendations” for practice
and points to the need for accurate methods to calculate the best pos-
sible teaching methods. Defending this statement, Landa compares the
planning of the educational process with a bridge construction (cf. Bog-
danov’s [1913/1989a] notion of tectology), arguing that the constructors
would be in a deplorable situation if they had to build a bridge without
using theoretical calculations and models. Similarly, Landa points out
that to calculate the best learning methods, we need to develop a theory
of learning based on modern technologies and methods of logics, math-
ematical statistics, cybernetics, and other exact sciences (see also Landa,
1962b). According to Landa (1962a), these methods are necessary for
identifying and measuring the elements and algorithms of mental activity.
Tellingly, cognitive processes are thought of as consisting of elements.
Hence, for learning to take place, these elements have to be put together
198 Tatiana M ikhaylova & D aniel Pettersson
in the right way. Landa further develops this reasoning in another article,
in which he states that to be able to build thinking processes with the
elements— just like a house with bricks— the teacher needs cybernetics
machines that can assess, regulate, and correct the state of each student’s
cognitive activity (Landa, 1962c ). Accordingly, without knowing how
inform ation is processed in students’ m inds, the teacher cannot satisfac-
torily regulate the educational process (Landa, 1962a).
In turn, the identification o f learning algorithm s contributed to the
rationalization o f the educational process and the increased effectiveness
of teaching (Itelson, 1962; L an da, 1962a, 1962c; Artemov, 1962; R osen -
berg, 1962). This resolved yet another persistent scientific and practical
educational problem , which, according to Lan da (1962b), should be in
the interests of society as a whole. As R osenberg (1962) pointed out, this
w as especially valuable “ under the conditions of a socialist planning sys-
tem ,” because the application of m athem atical equations and probability
theory allow ed for the development o f that which w as “ optim al, m ost
beneficial for com m unist construction plans for the im plem entation of
general com pulsory education, placem ent of a school netw ork, preschool
and extra-curricular institutions” (Rosenberg, 1962, p. 74).
In the analyzed articles, the notion of effectiveness is tightly bound to a
higher degree of individualization that is enabled by the system of instant
feedback, which in turn is associated with hum an-m achine interactions.
Referring to Pavlov’s speech on natural science and the brain (referred
to earlier), R osenberg (1962) pointed out the im portance of feedback
in controlling and regulating both living and nonliving matter. Itelson
(1962) m ade a sim ilar point, arguing that feedback is a necessary con-
dition for any conscious, purposeful behavior. With references to both
Soviet and Western scholars and particularly to those working with infor-
m ation theory in psychology (e.g., Quastler, 1955), Iteleson stressed that
feedback analysis is necessary for adjustm ent, (self)regulation, and (self)
control, all of which should be seen as indispensable com ponents of all
learning activities. Being apparently convinced of the unlimited possibili-
ties of m athem atical language, Itelson (1962, p. 52) derives the following
form ula for estim ating the am ount o f inform ation that the human brain
can process (cf. Quastler, 1955) at the initial stage of learning:
i i i
C = V —log, — « 6 ,3 2 b it / sec
0,5 3 3
Itelson (1962, p. 50) believed that just like any other mental trait, stu-
dents’ capacity to “ process” inform ation (as in the form ula; 6,32 “ bits” of
inform ation every second) w as trainable and could be increased through
system atic exercises. In his opinion, form ulae of this kind could there-
fore be used for m easuring the adequacy of exercises for each individual
student and in the end for estimating the optimal duration of educational
programs. This consequently might help to overcome uncertainties and
to develop scientific-based curriculum constructed on objective, observ-
able facts.
Apart from individualization and the facilitation of learning, an equally
important outcome of the rationalization of educational process that was
expected from cybernetics was the improvement of teachers’ working
conditions. Artemov (1962) and Landa (1962c) insisted that transferring
technical aspects of teaching and learning to machines would eliminate
formalism and mechanical memorization allowing more time for creativ-
ity, which again would make education more effective.
Finally, the early articles on the benefits of cybernetics in education
both revived and moved the perennial discussion on educational assess-
ment to a new level. As demonstrated in our historical description, Rus-
sia long thought of itself as a society in which numbered merits were
important for “fairly” assigning individuals to different societal posi-
tions. This reasoning was further strengthened by Lenin’s thinking on
statistics and the use of statistical calculations for solving a broad range
of social problems. In other words, an accurate and unbiased way of
measuring students’ achievements was desired in order to develop society
in the preferred way. In this regard, cybernetics was seen as a possible
solution, since “machines” were regarded as objective and standardized
assessment tools that were capable of eliminating invariance and treating
individuals equally (Landa, 1962a; Rosenberg, 1962). Moreover, Rosen-
berg took a step further by arguing that cybernetic devices enabled the
collection of accurate assessment data from a large number of schools
and students, which could then be used to revise and adjust education on
a mass scale (cf. Zhurnal MNP, 1868).
In sum, when cybernetics entered the field of education, it came with
a promise of improving the effectiveness of teaching and learning and
turning education into an exact and “real” science based on “objective”
methods.
The Becoming of Cybernetic Education

In one of his early articles, Rosenberg (1962) insisted on the necessity of
taking into account the tasks set by the Communist Party and of intro-
ducing the youth to cybernetics. In this section, we show how cybernet-
ics was presented in textbooks and popular science books intended for
teachers, students, and a wider audience. More specifically, we analyze
the textbook What is Cybernetics?, by Victor Glushkov (1975), one of
the pioneers of Soviet cybernetics, who at the time of publication was
vice-president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. The second book,
Cybernetic is Knocking on School’s Door, was written in 1986 by Gen-
nady Vorobjev, a geologist and physicist whose books often aimed at
popularizing science. Both books were thus written by authors whose
primary expertise was in natural science and cybernetics rather than in
education.
When discussing the connection between cybernetics and education,
Glushkov (1975) mainly talks about the role of computers in the auto-
mation of the educational process. He describes teaching and learning
in terms of an effective “two-way communication” between the teacher
and the student that increases the productivity of their work. It is also
stated that programmed, step-by-step learning with continuous control
and timely feedback will eliminate “knowledge gaps,” as students will
be given an opportunity to go back and repeat each step. Glushkov fur-
ther notes that computers will not decrease the role of teachers but will
instead change the character of their work by putting more emphasis on
careful lesson planning rather than on teaching.
Notably, teaching and learning are described here in terms of com-
munication, control, feedback, and automation. Glushkov (1975) argued
that the desired automation of the educational process was made possible
through cybernetic devices and programmed textbooks. Such textbooks,
he continued, would not only solve learning problems but also attach
assessments to every step of learning. Stated differently, the cybernetic
way of assessment, aligned with the content, was expected to change
the entire examination procedure, as the grades would no longer depend
on “random” circumstances, such as teacher bias. Interestingly, Glush-
kov’s view of the use of cybernetics for educational assessment is linked
not only to the impartiality of cybernetic devices but also to their ability
to align content, process, and assessment and to assess student progress
on the basis of a large number of data collected over time. In that way,
the assessment procedure will be not only more objective but also more
individualized.
In turn, Vorobjev (1986) states that “cybernetic education”
(кибернетическая педагогика) is not limited to the use of cybernetic
devices or programmed instruction. Rather, he emphasizes a cybernetic
approach, which should be used for the “optimal” organization of the
entire educational process, including steering and controlling students’
attention, knowledge acquisition, emotions, and well-being. Vorobjev
argues, for instance, that “cybernetic education” starts by steering moti-
vation. In this case, optimal organization requires an understanding of
what pupils, parents, and society want and why and a unification of all
of that into “a single motivational fist” (Vorobjev, 1986, p. 22). In other
words, Vorobjev extends the applicability of cybernetics from steering
and controlling cognitive skills to the whole specter of human feelings and
emotions. Further, just like his predecessors, Vorobjev describes teaching
and learning as a system of directing, reversing, and correcting feedback.
Unlike the traditional and time-consuming forms of feedback, such as
tests and exams that are associated with randomness and subjectivity,
well-functioning cybernetic feedback makes the system of education self-
improving and self-learning. In other words, Vorobjev claims, it becomes
a cybernetic system that is able to create equal opportunities for the dis-
tribution of knowledge.
Concluding the book, Vorobjev further develops the argument about
the importance of freeing teachers and students from routine mechani-
cal work and saving time for creative thinking. In Vorobjev’s opinion,
the development of cybernetic education means that teachers will focus
more on teaching students to “think, reason, analyse, synthesize, and
invent” (Vorobjev, 1986, p. 119). This requires revising traditional forms
of teaching with a focus on memorizing. Rather, cybernetic education
should eliminate mechanical learning by activating students and thereby
facilitating the development of creative and critical thinking.
The “cybernization” of education was further developed during the
1970s and 1980s and became more explicitly linked to societal prob-
lems, particularly those relating to the equal treatment of individuals.
Consequently, it promised a solution to the “reproduction problem” (cf.
Durkheim, 2002), by preserving “the good” within society while correct-
ing “the wrongs.” Moreover, cybernetics was not only associated with
the use of computers and programmed learning. “Cybernetic education”
also embraced both the cognitive aspects and the emotional aspects of
the educational process. The “salvation” that was embedded in cyber-
netics became a promise of the future inhabited by a new “human”—a
“human” that was better equipped with the ability to “think” in order to
solve societal problems and create a better society.
Conclusion
In this chapter, we have demonstrated Soviet “exceptionalism” when it
comes to how the interpretation of cybernetics was transformed from
a “threat” in the 1950s into a vehicle of the post-Stalinist reforms in
science and, specifically, in education. We discussed the anti-cybernetics
campaign of the early 1950s and showed how, a decade later, cybernetics
became incorporated into the dominant reasoning of how to detect and
solve societal problems, how to avoid uncertainty, and how to make all
spheres of life, including education, more effective. In other words, we
showed how “imagined futures” (Beckert, 2016) could be dealt with in
the USSR.
The key to understanding this radical change lies in the ideological
struggles of superpowers in the postwar context. Initially declared a man-
ifestation of idealism hostile to dialectical materialism, cybernetics came
to be deeply connected to the fundamental principles of the latter dur-
ing the Khrushchev Thaw. The “discovered” compatibility of cybernetics
with Lenin’s ideas and the well-established Soviet scientific theories (first
of all, Pavlov) was an important prerequisite for the change in official
attitudes. This shift was evident in the Communist Party program that
was adapted in 1961, in which cybernetics was reframed as a possibility
for societal development. So conceived, cybernetics no longer caused fear
but instead became a universal tool for treating social and scientific ail-
ments of various kinds. In other words, it moved from being considered
a “threat” to society to being a “treat,” a remedy for the same problems.
There is a certain irony in the fact that Western cyberneticists who ini-
tially ridiculed claims for the universality of dialectic materialism replaced
it with an equally universal belief in cybernetics for finding answers to
societal questions (Gerovitch, 2002). Eventually, they created a language,
the application of which would transcend the traditional boundaries of
scientific disciplines. Cyberspeak, as Gerovitch (2002) labeled it, could be
used to describe the phenomena in both the natural and social sciences in
terms of system, control, feedback, and response. In other words, cyber-
netics appeared at a time when the world was in need of universal rather
than local explanations. A universal theory and a common language were
needed to deal with the dangers posed by the Cold War (cf. Heyck, 2015).
These universalities are evident in our examples collected from the Soviet
context. With the help of cybernetics, educational researchers and edu-
cational managers tried to find accurate and universal methods to solve
educational problems. They believed that cybernetics would finally help
to develop a comprehensive theory of learning and calculate the best pos-
sible teaching program, which would turn education into “real” science
and increase the effectiveness of the whole educational system.
However, in our description of the prewar context, we showed that the
ground was fertile for implementing cybernetics in education. In fact, the
numbered, systemic worldview had been embedded in Russian and Soviet
educational discourse for a long time. Hence, it was easy to adapt cyber-
netic techniques and thinking to educational science, policy, and practice
as soon as the ideological latching was gone. Consequently, cybernetics
soon became the dominant way of thinking about education as “subject
to the law” (cf. Wiener, 1948). The power of the cybernetic “gaze” lay in
projecting mathematical formulae as essential “truths” both inside and
outside of education. Put differently, by means of cybernetics, the math-
ematical descriptions that penetrated education in the 19th century were
able to fulfill their hegemonic function. Eventually, cybernetics helped to
expand the application of numbers and calculations from assessment to
the entire educational process, the ultimate goal of which was the creation
of a communist society and the fostering of a new kind of human—a
“Soviet man.”
Notes
1. We are most thankful to the staff of the National Library of the Republic of
Karelia (Petrozavodsk, Russia) for their assistance in providing us with copies
of the articles analyzed in this chapter.
2. When discussing cybernetics, we use the term “technique” instead of “tech-
nology.” While cybernetics certainly involves technology, it also—and more
importantly for the field of education—has a quality of a technique for achiev-
ing specific societal goals. For a discussion about the differences between tech-
nology and technique, see, e.g., Smil (2005).
3. Here and later on, all the translations from Russian are ours unless stated
otherwise.
4. The Table of Ranks was introduced by Peter the Great in 1722 and was a list
of 14 positions through which one could be promoted on the basis of govern-
ment service rather than family origin.
5. For the discussion of the concept of “Soviet man,” see, e.g., Gerovitch (2007),
Soboleva (2017).
6. It is not impossible that Wiener actually knew of Bogdanov’s work. In his book
Cybernetics, published in 1948, Wiener referred to books written in German,
and Bogdanov’s most important works on tectology were first translated into
German in 1926, with a second edition in 1928.
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11 School Differentiation and
Re-forming Human Kinds
in Swedish Welfare State
Education After the Second
World War
Gun-Britt Wärvik, Sverker Lindblad, Daniel
Pettersson, and Caroline Runesdotter
Introduction
In this chapter, we examine the making of kinds of people in scientific
analyses in school reformation policy discourses after World War Two,
conceived as part of the modernization of education and society. We
ask, how did such an interaction process work in the making of Swedish
comprehensive education? We focus on the development of educational
statistics and measurements in estimations of the educability of younger
generations, which was a vital aspect of policy discourses on educational
expansion and reformist ambitions to increase individual equality, ques-
tioned by conservative tendencies. Educational statistics and estimations
of educability were developed in tandem, and when combined, they
formed the foundation for the emerging systems reasoning in educational
policy that also opened up for comparisons. Thus, in this chapter, we view
the comparatist notion by exploring how educational differentiation was
dealt with and seen as something that could be altered. In our analyses,
we refer to Ian Hacking’s (1986) work on statistics in the making of
people and Theodore Porter’s (1986) studies on the history of statistics
(see also Popkewitz & Lindblad, 2001). This network of problems is a
matter of the modernization of social systems (c.f. Luhmann & Behnke,
1994) in terms of “cultural release,” or “de-traditionalization” (cf. Ziehe,
2000), of social positions and education expansion. In the context of sci-
ence and policymaking in interaction, this “de-traditionalization” had to
be handled by conservative and progressive forces. Furthermore, our case
involves a specific all-embracing reformist regime (Rip, 2002) in welfare
state policy, of which education reform is one part.
The Swedish nine-year compulsory comprehensive school (grunds-
kolan), implemented in 1962 to fully replace the former parallel school1
after decades of government commissions and extensive research pro-
grams, forms the foundation for the chapter. The formal decision was made
in 1950. The parallel school implied that children from more-privileged
208 Gun-Britt Wärvik et al.
homes mostly attended läroverket2 that could give them access to univer-
sity programs. Children who remained at folkskolan were excluded from
this access since the university accepted only students who had attended
läroverket. However, the question of how and when to differentiate stu-
dents was open—and heavily debated. Before 1962, the vast majority of
the population received only seven or eight years of education at folks-
kolan. Since the early 20th century, different ways for children to transfer
from folkskolan to läroverket had commenced, meaning children of the
same age received different kinds of education. Gender, place of residence,
and social class mainly decided which form of education was available.
The intention was to do better. From 1962, with the implementation of
grundskolan, all children would receive a common educational founda-
tion, independent of gender, place of residence, or social class.
Tage Erlander, the former prime minister and leader of the Social
Democratic Party, in his memoirs compared the parallel school sys-
tem with education at large in Europe. He claimed that the Swedish
school organization was obsolete, fragmented, difficult to grasp, and
linked to Swedish society’s social stratification of people (Erlander,
1973). The political debate on the socially uneven distribution of edu-
cational resources fit well with the new ideas on human talent and
development in psychometrics that had inspired Swedish educational
researchers (see, e.g., Husén & Härnqvist, 2000). Among others, dur-
ing the 1940s and 1950s, psychometricians Torsten Husén and Kjell
Härnqvist became involved in government commissions that finally
led to the creation of the comprehensive school as experts and advisers
and conducted studies on behalf of the commissions. These positions
as members of the commissions gave Husén and Härnqvist the label
“state intellectuals” (Hunter, 1994; Foss Lindblad & Lindblad, 2016;
Pettersson & Popkewitz, 2019). Husén described his own work during
this period of “research in education oriented towards the making of
educational policy” as a “liaison between research workers and policy
makers” (Husén, 1983, p. 81). According to Foss Lindblad and Lind-
blad (2016), educational research mattered for policymakers simply
because it was scientific:
Antagonists to the reform policy did not question the results and
conclusions based on educational research but put forwards more
demands for educational research in order to analyze the precondi-
tions and consequences of ongoing reforms.
(Foss Lindblad & Lindblad, 2016, pp. 70–71)
This was well in line with contemporary Swedish ideas of a social dem-
ocratic welfare state, including “social engineering,” demands for eff-
ciency, and rational planning (e.g., Myrdal, 1941), but it also embedded
in general thoughts on the making of futures (cf. Appadurai, 2013).
Differentiation and Re-forming Human Kinds 209
In this chapter, we argue that developments in psychometrics, which
embraced questions of educability, and developments in statistics for
sorting the population into different groups (cf. Porter, 1986) can be seen
as foundational for the making of an emerging idea of an educational
system, which also formed the foundation for comparison. This fit well
into a reformist regime where politics and science could mutually ben-
efit from each other’s efforts to expand their respective interests. Gradu-
ally, the question of educational justice between social groups in society
was turned into the question of the talented individual, meaning that
science became tied to ways of organizing education for the development
of competences. The debate on educational differentiation and human
talent as an outcome of this type of reformist regime as it played out in
post–World War Two Sweden is our main focus. Specifically, we discuss
how the coevolution (Rip, 2002) of educational policy and science also
paved the way for a kind of systems thinking based on ways of using a
recategorization of humans.
Of specific interest for this chapter is the right to classify and re-form
kinds of people and thus to distinguish between groups in society for the
making of differences of a new type. This re-forming of kinds of people,
we argue, was vital to the modernization of education and society. The
foundation for this was interactions between politics and science on what
we metaphorically label an education agora. The term “agora” originally
referred to a gathering place in ancient Greece and was used by Nowotny
et al. (2001; 2003) as a space, a marketplace for producing and trading
socially robust knowledge in the so-called Mode 2 society. In our case,
the education agora is an object of study to capture preconditions for the
politics of knowledge and the interplay between diverse actors involved
in reforming education.
Importantly, science and politics could mutually benefit from a kind of
coevolution of the education agora in this reformist regime. According to
Rip, coevolution can be seen as “the linked evolution of two (or more)
dynamics, each of which can be conceptualized in terms of variations and
selections (and retentions)” (Rip, 2002, p. 10). In this chapter, the coevo-
lution of policy and science refers to their interdependency and interac-
tions and figures as connected to techniques for differentiation. This does
not mean a search for a linear cause and effect or a search for a rational
planning regime. Instead, our point of departure is that these techniques
for the making of differences gradually came to be seen as a kind of
feedback system, which became relevant for policymakers and scientists
but from unique and different positions. Thus, the education agora in
a reformist regime constitutes an emerging sociotechnical landscape, or
an infrastructure, of evolving regulations and techniques for categorizing
humans and institutions and for making differences. This infrastructure
also set up rules and norms for possible interactions on the agora, includ-
ing rights to categorize and re-form kinds of people. For this kind of
mutual interdependency to be communicated well and to function well,
complexities had to be reduced. However, at the same time, policy and
science can improve and develop their own unique features, thus creating
independent dynamics for each of the actors involved.
Husén pointed out that research in connection with the 1957 gov-
ernment School Commission (SOU, 1961, p. 30) was important “when
the 1962 Education Bill introducing the common nine-year school all
over the country was drafted” (Husén, 1965, p. 216). In this chapter, we
focus on the contributions by Swedish psychometrist and educational-
ist Kjell Härnqvist. A task of the 1957 commission was to investigate
how students’ paths through comprehensive school should be designed.
Härnqvist was the research secretary of the commission and carried out
research on behalf of the commission that was presented in the report
Individual Differences and School Differentiation (Härnqvist, 1960).
The decision on the 1962 comprehensive school can be seen in light of
political consensus and as embedded in a new way of research to prove
trustworthiness in the political process at a time when the thinking on
education and its role in society was changing (Husén, 1986; cf. Smeyers &
Depaepe, 2008). However, there was no consensus regarding the orga-
nizing of educational differentiation, an issue that politically had been
a contested terrain, at least since the late 19th century (Isling, 1980).
For instance, the folkskola teachers early supported the idea of a com-
prehensive school, but the läroverk teachers did not. Several workers’
unions feared not only a “brain drain” but also the development of an
academic proletariat, meaning that the labor market would have no use
for so many well-educated people (Isling, 1980). Thus, the idea of a com-
prehensive school was questioned, even if implemented in consensus.
The outline of the chapter is as follows: To understand the novelty of
the reformist regime of the post–World War Two period, we first look at
the long history of robustness in the formation of social groups, the use
of statistics and questions about educability among different subgroups
of the population. We then examine researchers’ interest in psychometrics
and the formation of an “educational reserve” by testing abilities. This
lays out the foundation for making differences of another kind. Thereaf-
ter, we turn to Härnqvist’s (1960) research report, connected to the 1957
School Commission. Finally, we discuss the media debate that followed
the release of Härnqvist’s report (1960) and how research results were
cherry-picked for evidence that linked to political standpoints.
Making of Differences and a History of Statistics

In this section, we go back to the 19th century and the making of differ-
ences between social groups in society on the basis of medieval birthright
as connected to different forms for education and formal schooling. We
also point out how new kinds of social groups were later made up by
various statistical technologies (cf. Hacking, 1986) and eventually came
to replace the older narratives for how to define people. This was con-
nected to the gradual development and exploration of demographic data
in the 19th century and somewhat later, when statistics was developed
into a science in the service of the state (Porter, 1986).
An old Swedish categorization of social groups in society with premod-
ern roots, existing until 1866, was the Four Estates: “nobility,” “priests,”
“burghers,” and “farmers.”3 Each estate was closely connected to spe-
cific rules and traditions that regulated economic, juridical, and politi-
cal obligations, and that resulted in different societal living conditions.
The main divide was between the nobility, a category that was founded
on royal “divine” decision or birthright, and the other three estates. For
instance, until 1809, only the nobility had the right to hold higher official
positions. According to Johansson (2002), in the late 18th century, some
burghers started to claim power and privilege for themselves in relation
to school merit to replace “divine” right:
With slogans like To each and everyone according to his merit, they
attacked aristocratic supremacy. The path to the highest places in
society should in principle, it was understood, be open to everyone,
and those who reached the top should consequently be the most
competent. According to such a meritocratic ideology, those who
were privileged would have earned their privileges.
(Johansson, 2002, p. 95, italics in original)
Johansson argued that formal schooling became important for these

endeavors. However, during the early 19th century, läroverket was an
option only for a few. According to Richardsson (1977), the older, higher
formal education was mainly an issue for priests; the nobility was often
educated at home, as were farmers. Another main divide was between
farmers and the other three estates, and that clearly concerned access to
education. In 1842, the frst regulation for folkskolan was issued with the
intention that all children should receive some kind of formal schooling.
Some parishes had started schools before 1842, but in others, it was a
long time before a regular school was established. However, of course, at
this time, neither science nor statistics was thought of as a producer of
truth when it came to making educational opportunities and education as
a means for changing social relations between existing groups in society.
The standards regulating educational matters were still based on the rules
of the Four Estates in which royal “divine” power and the church were
positioned as a producer of what was the “truth,” also in educational
matters. Differences between the kinds of peoples were seen as given by
nature, and accordingly, comparisons were meaningless.
Almost 70 percent of children aged seven to 13 attended a school in the
year 1850 and 90 percent in 1900, but with immense variations between
different regions of the nation (Johansson, 1977). Thus, most likely the
regulation of 1842 initially made no major difference for the majority
of people. Perhaps this was not seen as a major problem, depending on
the longer Swedish history of Lutheranism. The Church Law of 1686
stipulated that the church should examine all household members so that
they could read from a book and that they had learned Luther’s Small
Catechism by heart (Johansson, 1977). Somewhat later, a royal decree of
1723 stated that parents were responsible for teaching their children how
to read. The home instruction responsibility embraced the household,
and the hymn book and the catechism were seen as the most important
sources for that education. Taken together, this implied that reading skills
were well developed among the population in the 18th century, as shown
by Johansson (1977) in his analysis of church examination registers.4
Consequently, teaching regarding religious issues was among the most
important features of folkskolan during the early years after this policy
change, not learning how to read, which to a large extent continued to
be a household responsibility during the 19th century or the academic
subjects needed for higher education.
In contrast to folkskolan, läroverket was based solely on academic pro-
grams, and it was intended to lead to university education for the most
talented. Formally, these schools were open to everyone, but in reality,
they were closed to the majority of the population. Women were seen as
too weak and were thus disqualified. According to Johansson, “a mod-
ern meritocratic discourse was thus established, but it was mixed with
pre-modern religious doctrines in order to legitimate the meritocracy as
a preserve for bourgeois men” (Johansson, 2002, p. 101). Later, special
schools for girls were established, which, in one way, enlarged the oppor-
tunities for education across gender barriers, but education continued to
be closed across class barriers.
Not only the children of burghers but also the children of workers had
proponents for more education for those with talent. In the mid 19th cen-
tury, Count Torsten Rudenschöld proposed a higher form of folkskola
for gifted children from the working class so that they could participate
in local affairs. However, he emphasized that they should not be lured
away from practical work and their usual way of life (Statistics Sweden,
1977). Notably, the proposal came from a representative of the nobility,
not from the subordinated group itself, which reflects that the option to
claim rights of access to education was not a concern for the individual
but instead a matter of belongingness to the highest social group. The
making of categories in relation to people’s education demands specific
information about the population of a nation (cf. Lindblad & Popkewitz,
2001; Hacking, 1986; Porter, 1986). However, educational levels did not
seem to be an important societal matter in the Swedish context during
this period. The class society was forcefully stabilized, even if it had its
meritocratic proponents.
With the intent to form a foundation for the church’s work, the church
had been obligated since 1686 to keep a record of all households and their
members. These data formed the foundation for Tabellverket, established
in 1749, at that time a world-leading institution for the compilation of
data in tables. However, censuses and population data were classified as
strictly secret, as an instrument for the state only (Höjer, 2001). A for-
mer employee at Statistics Sweden, Ulf Jorner (2008) discussed General
Jakob von Lantinghausen, who, influenced by a visit to France, wrote a
memorandum on improvements for making registration of the popula-
tion possible. The description of how the memorandum was presented to
the sekreta utskottet5 (a parliamentary committee) in 1747 is an illustra-
tion of the secret and contested nature of censuses at this time.
According to Jorner, the memorandum was
approved by the majority of the committee. A speaker even announces

he 18 years earlier had made a similar proposal to the council of the
nation, which however was rejected with reference to King David’s
census in the Bible.
(Jorner, 2008, p. 22, our translation)6
The reference to the biblical David is an illustration of hazardous conno-

tations attached to censuses and of a society seen as something given and
taken for granted. Each time has its own points of references for what
makes sense. Porter argued, “[t]he Old Regime saw not autonomous peo-
ple but members of estates” (Porter, 1986, p. 25) and “[t]he social world
was too intricately differentiated for a mere census to tell much about
what really mattered” (ibid., p. 25). They can also be seen as early inter-
actions between politics and science as a social technology in which the
church gradually became less infuential as a teller of the truth. Numbers
came to be trusted (Porter, 1986). The use of the data demanded not only
knowledge in statistical calculation but also a kind of thinking about
society as not divinely given but as important to know something about.
This was a period of the emerging development of agriculture, manufac-
turing, and trading and when the supremacy of the nobility had started
to be questioned. According to Höjer (2001), the population increasingly
became constituted as a political problem during the 18th century and as
an object for the state to govern. The main problem was the small num-
ber of people. Later, in the 19th century, statistics instead came to be seen
as a mirror of the nation for the promotion of change and progression
(Höjer, 2001).
In 1856, a new public authority that today is known as Statistics
Sweden was established. For the purpose of election statistics, Statis-
tics Sweden developed a well-recognized categorization in 1911, which
divided people into three social groups, on the basis of a hierarchical
order: “the upper class” (social group I), “the middle class” (social group
II), and “the working class” (social group III). Social group I referred to
leaders of larger businesses and senior officials or civil servants, mirror-
ing a type of society different from the previous Four Estates. Unlike the
Four Estates, the three 1911 categories were directly related not to politi-
cal power but to economic positions.
The first school regulation for folkskolan (1842) required local school
boards to report every third year to the church and some years later also
to the inspectors of folkskolan. These reports concerned mainly educa-
tional matters and school budgets but were rarely published (Statistics
Sweden, 1974). At this time, educational statistics was the responsibility
of the Ministry of Education and Ecclesiastical Affairs, and in 1921, the
responsibility was transferred to the newly established Public Authority
for Education. Many years later, in 1960, the responsibility for educa-
tional statistics was transferred to Statistics Sweden. Among other things,
the new government regulations for Statistics Sweden stated that the
question of individual statistics should be addressed for the description
of the students’ school transitions (Statistics Sweden, 1974). Thereafter,
educational statistics were developed and refined in collaboration with
Swedish educational researchers and used to form categories, analyses of
differentiation patterns, and comparisons.
Educational differentiation as a political problem was brought up in
1883 by Fridtjuv Berg from the Liberal Party, who later became the min-
ister of education and ecclesiastical affairs. He argued against catego-
rizing children on the basis of their parents’ circumstances in life and
suggested six-year comprehensive education for all children. This idea
was later also proposed by the School Commission of 1918 but did not
lead to a parliamentary decision. In the mid 1940s, 100 years after the
decision to establish folkskolan, this school had more or less become the
first educational step for all children. Folkskolan had also been adapted
for possible transition into läroverket, or schools designated for girls only.
However, as the possibilities for transition were many, the school system
was increasingly divided and fragmented. Two government commissions
regarding the school were appointed during World War Two. However,
the political problem of how to design for differentiating students seemed
to be difficult to solve and was debated without consensus (Isling, 1980).
In the following sections, we outline the argumentation for how science
and politics coevolved on the education agora. Thus, the foundation for
an emerging systems reasoning in educational policy was formed that
opened up interest in the making of differences and comparisons.
Talent and the Making of Differences

Our first line of argumentation on interactions between science and poli-
tics on the agora in a reformist regime is the idea that it was possible to
estimate the size of the so-called reserve of ability. According to Husén
(1975), US and European research during the 1940s and 1950s showed
low participation in academic secondary schools and university educa-
tion by students from less-privileged socioeconomic backgrounds that
could not be explained by talent. These observations were as follows:
supported by data available from testing programmes covering com-

plete age groups, such as military classification tests or scholastic
aptitude tests given, for instance, in connection with transfer from
elementary to secondary school in England, or in admitting students
to college in the United States.
(Husén, 1975, p. 73)
In the 1940s, military psychologist Torsten Husén had started to carry

out research on ability testing. In his memoirs, Husén wrote that he
anticipated being called up for military service in 1941 and that he then
got an idea: “Why not try to get such military service, where my edu-
cation in psychology, though academic, could prove useful?” (Husén,
1981, p. 124, our translation). He managed to convince the military,
he said, and was assigned the task of investigating how aptitude tests
could be used by the Swedish military. When he submitted his results
to the ministry, the idea of using aptitude tests was rejected, but later,
it was accepted when he resubmitted it with stronger arguments. The
idea was based on rationalization and a notion of “the right man in the
right place.” The challenge was how to select these individuals. Data
were generated that also were used to estimate “reserves” for junior and
upper secondary schools, referring to those who through testing had
proven to be talented but lacked suffcient education. Härnqvist also
started his career as a military psychologist and continued the work on
aptitude testing.
Husén and Härnqvist soon turned their research interest to the edu-
cational sector. The metaphor of the reserve of ability, later also labeled
the educational reserve or the reserve of talent, came to be the beacon of
the Swedish educational discourse in terms of trying to scientifically and
politically answer the question of how and when to differentiate cogni-
tively talented individuals from less-talented individuals (Skott et al., 2015).
The metaphor was used to illuminate students who had been tested, and
the tests “proved” that these students could well comprehend higher edu-
cation but were excluded for prevailing economic and societal reasons.
These students came to be attached to the idea that society needed all
its “talents” to develop into a modern and equitable society. Thus, the
reserve of ability became an important category for the future, and the
aim was to release these individuals’ talents. Therefore, a comparatist
notion of educational problems was set in motion.
According to Boalt and Husén (1964), these early studies on the reserve
of abilities heavily influenced policymaking. However, as pointed out by
Husén (1975), the studies were most often initiated by scientists with an
interest in methodological development, not by politicians. Apart from
that, the interests of politicians and scientists coincided. The question of
when and how to differentiate “the talented” from the rest gained high
priority in educational research and in politics. “Talent” in this discourse
was an objective and scientifically measurable asset for the making of dif-
ferences in a new way. The increasing methodological development and
interest in psychometrics also laid the foundation for large-scale survey
studies on educational abilities and achievements that began during this
period. Later, Torsten Husén became one of the founders of the Interna-
tional Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA;
Pettersson, 2014).
The government School Commission of 1957 (SOU, 1961, p. 30)
referred to the investigations of the reserve of abilities and argued that
they
illustrate an important problem in this large complex that is hid-

den behind the expression organizational differentiation, namely, the
price you have to pay when you comparatively early select a smaller
number of students and through gradual thinning lead them to one
for everyone fairly uniform goal. The earlier the selection and the
organizational differentiation take place, the greater the importance
of the social handicap. . . . A significant number of education reserves
have thereby arisen in the lower social groups.
(SOU, 1961, p. 30, p. 269, our translation)
This quote also illustrates that the commission considered the question of
differentiation to be important and had taken the idea of “talent” as one
point of departure for their work. However, even so, and even if the idea
of compulsory comprehensive school was not questioned, the problem of
how this school should be organized in terms of differentiation was not
solved. This task was given to various researchers, especially Härnqvist,
to sort out.
If Differentiation, How and When?

Our second line of argumentation on interactions between science and
politics on the agora in a reformist regime concerns the idea of using
large-scale assessments as evidence for how to best organize the differen-
tiation of students. The directives to the committee stated, among other
things, that it was expected that research should provide some support
concerning the extent to which educational differentiation was desir-
able and how to act regarding this issue (SOU, 1961, p. 30). Härnqvist’s
research report on the problem of differentiation (Härnqvist, 1960) con-
cerned the nature and the development of individual differences:
The forms and timing of differentiation must be considered on the
basis of many different viewpoints. These include the nature and
development of the individual differences—the complex of questions
to be addressed in this study.
(Härnqvist, 1960, p. 9, our translation)
Härnqvist was an experienced scientist and investigator when he carried

out this study. He was also internationally well established and had partici-
pated as an expert in several government commissions. The study’s main
focus was on interindividual and intraindividual differences in relation to
the selection in different educational pathways. Härnqvist’s mission now
was dual: to study psychological preconditions for differentiated education
and to design aptitude tests that could be used by the schools as a study
guide to facilitate the differentiation of students (Härnqvist, 1960). The
psychological conditions to be studied referred to talents and interests.
The study was based on aptitude testing of school children and on a
questionnaire about interests. The measurements pointed out that indi-
vidual aptitudes and interests did not necessarily come together, as had
almost been taken for granted previously:
the relationship between aptitudes and interests that is weakly devel-

oped in all the school years, nevertheless, to some extent grows in the
highest grades. Therefore, a differentiation based on interest grounds
should not take place until a late stage and only refer to broad sec-
tors of interests.
The main concern was the individuality of the child, which was labeled
intraindividual differences. However, according to Härnqvist, “the dif-
ferentiation issue . . . cannot be solved solely or even mainly based on
knowledge about the nature and development of individual differences”
(Härnqvist, 1960, p. 112, our translation). Instead, Härnqvist mainly
related the issue of differentiation to societal political goals and argued
that “[i]n addition, we would like to further emphasize that the goals of
the school play an important role for differentiation” (ibid., p. 112, our
translation). In a way, the results of the report perhaps were a political
disappointment because they could not explicitly point out a solution to
the issue of differentiation. However, the report also stated that “talent”
to a large extent was naturalized as a point of departure for the making of
differences—that is, the making of differences based on testing for talent:
As a starting point for the discussion, it can be concluded that at

the higher stage of the compulsory school there are big differences
between the students in terms of talent and school performance,
which should be taken into account when structuring the school
work. A common goal for all students regarding acquisition of
knowledge is unrealistic. Therefore, in a school for all students, at
one and the same age level there must be courses of different degrees
of difficulty and orientation, most likely also possibilities for varia-
tion of the set of subjects. In other words, there must be differentia-
tion in the broad sense.
Even so, the concluding comments in relation to the political issue were
quite humble:
Our task in this chapter will therefore not be to outline a model

of differentiation, but to draw attention to such circumstances, as
regards the development of the individual differences, which deserves
to be taken into account when considering the differentiation issue.
The idea of a testing instrument to be used by study counselors was

problematized in terms of risks for random infuences on the results and
because the tests concerned groups of students, not individuals. Thus,
even if the research was aligned with the political issue of solving the
problem of differentiation, the research report was concerned with the
development of measurement techniques.
In 1961, Härnqvist initiated the development of a longitudinal database
of follow-up data that includes choices, educational achievements, gender,
social background, and career paths that is still used by contemporary
educational researchers in Sweden (Evaluation through follow-up). Most
important for Härnqvist was the government instructions of 1960 (men-
tioned earlier) to the newly established Statistics Sweden regarding the
type of data to be collected (Härnqvist, 1998). This was an interaction
between politics and science that made it possible to create an open feed-
back system for reasoning on educational differentiation and comparisons.
Härnqvist’s study was not particularly explicit concerning the question
of when to differentiate. “Late” was the answer Härnqvist provided when
interviewed by newspaper journalists. Regardless, his “results” were used
for political purposes, as we illustrate in the next section.
The Media Response

For our third line of argumentation on interactions between science and
politics on the agora in a reformist regime, we turn to the reporting in the
media when Härnqvist’s (1960) research report was released. The report-
ing during this period was clearly much less extensive than, for instance,
the reporting on the PISA (Programme for International Student Assess-
ment) today.7 However, the media reporting illustrates how the use of
evidence by research was selective even during this period.
We analyzed newspaper articles and editorials from 1958 to 1979
retrieved from the National Library’s database of Swedish digitalized
newspapers.8 We received 26 articles, which must be seen as a mod-
est media response. Most of the articles appeared in 1960, just after the
research report was released. As a preview, an article on the topic was
published in 1958,9 when Härnqvist participated in a meeting at a school
for girls10 to discuss the study that had recently started. The article briefly
described the design but also the future mission of the study. With refer-
ence to Härnqvist, the article reported that the aptitude test to be devel-
oped was not meant to be selective but instead advisory and was to be
used by schools on a voluntary basis.11 As in the research report, the tone
was humble regarding what could be achieved in that sense and what
could be said about differentiation from the point of view of research.
However, it is interesting how the research results were used later,
when the report was released, and when the decision about the nine-year
compulsory and comprehensive school was a fait accompli. The notion of
comparing was present, and educational trajectories mattered and were
possible to alter. Especially the question of inter- or intraindividual dif-
ferences as an outcome of Härnqvist’s research had attracted attention,
which also turned the media reporting and the debate into a political
question of how to best organize the school. In the following quote, this
question was used to sort the research results:
Are the differences between the individuals’ small in relation to the

differences within individuals, the arguments for a general differen-
tiation that equally affects the courses in all or most of the school
subjects are to be considered. Some students can then read difficult
courses all along the line. On the other hand, if the differences within
the individuals are big in relation to those differences between the
individuals, this is talking favor of a differentiation related to certain
subjects. . . . A large part of the students can then take courses of
different degree of difficulty and orientation in different subjects.12
Generally, the news reporting referred strictly to the research results or dif-
ferent appearances in public of the researchers engaged in the question of
differentiation. After a day or two, however, polemical articles appeared.
They included columns, editorials, and letters to the press. The reporting,
although limited, now clearly twisted the research results into a political
issue on differentiation, toward the experimental school debate and away
from Härnqvist’s results. Children were considered different; therefore,
they needed to be differentiated systematically, in different course pro-
grams or subjects. But how and when? One newspaper argued that
According to our opinion the possibility to differentiate is the same

as the duty to differentiate—the duty to the differentiated material,
the human child.13
The outcome of Härnqvist’s research was used to claim political opinions,
in favor of early differentiation. One heading stated that “Comprehensive
teaching unrealistic. Investigator demands differentiation.”14 However, early
differentiation was also seen as a risk, for instance, by a liberal newspaper:
The earlier the differentiation is made and the more comprehensive

it is, the more favored will the children be from the most culturally
ambitious homes, who often belong to the higher social groups. It
is against this background the conservatives’ eagerness to divide the
children on separate track as early as possible should be understood.
A senior level [grades 7–9] of this model is nothing else than to pre-
serve the old parallel school.15
This article also argued for a specifc goal of the ongoing school reform:
the leveling out of social differences in society. A response from a con-
servative newspaper came the next day. Economic and social differences
should be leveled out, but
The school may not set aside its cultural tasks because of social pur-
poses. It must take care of the talented, so that the school tasks are
worth the time, also for the most capable. It must be able to offer
suitable tasks also for those who do not have the prerequisites for the
most demanding tasks.16
According to this newspaper article, Härnqvist’s research indirectly sup-

ported the claim of the liberal newspaper, but the conservative newspaper
stated, “this interpretation, earlier put forward by the social democratic
press, is untenable since professor Härnqvist himself has dissociated him-
self from it.” The tone was harsh when the argumentation continued:
“More astonishing than such unsatisfactory claims, that can be a result of
carelessness or ignorance”17 is that the newspaper does not seem to fol-
low its liberal principles. This statement also gives a hint of another type
of educational differentiation, one based on social class.
To sum up, the polemical articles provide an illustration of how the
research results were politicized by the media. The results were given a
strong bias toward the newspapers’ political standpoints. However, the
research results were not questioned.
Conclusion
In this chapter, we analyzed how educational statistics and estimations
of educability were developed by politics and science in tandem on an
educational agora during the post–World War Two period in Sweden. We
also turned back to the 19th century to show how forceful this interac-
tion became for the re-forming of kinds of people. The cultural heritage
dating from the medieval period on educational differentiation as some-
thing “divinely” given was abandoned for the reformation of the school
system. Instead, educational differentiation was seen as something that
could be altered by policymaking and follow-up by researchers. A feed-
back system for comparatist reasoning was created, based on the notion
of a “reserve of abilities,” combined with follow-up educational statistics
from Statistics Sweden. Comparisons in terms of more or less of a cer-
tain quality indicated that stable social groups could be altered. In other
words, the transition from an aristocratic order to a meritocracy was
based on a comparatist notion and systems reasoning.
The notion of a “reserve of abilities” and psychometric testing brought
up by educational researchers, and coupled with a strong societal faith in
the relevance of science, fit well into the reformist regime of post–World
War Two Sweden, centered on the idea that some people were educable
and others were not. Working-class children not only were working-class
children but also became recategorized as a potential “reserve of abilities.”
Most likely, it was difficult to resist this appeal to the “reserve of abili-
ties,” with its promise of the younger generation as more or less educable.
Importantly, not only the nine-year comprehensive school but also reforms
embracing upper secondary schools, adult education, vocational education,
and higher education were carried out, meaning a restructuring of the entire
educational sector during a short period with this thinking as a beacon.
Increasingly over the last century, traditional educational trajectories
formed only as a consequence of social background becoming obsolete
in a society of changing economic and social structures including fam-
ily patterns, urbanization, labor market demands, and expanding higher
education. Taken together, this can be seen as a kind of “cultural release,”
or a “de-traditionalizing” of the young generation in the making of a new
society (cf. Ziehe, 2000). This implies a process in which people became
mobile, but also were made mobile, by and through societal development
and ways to recategorize people (cf. Hacking, 1986). Thus, the “reserve
of abilities” and the comprehensive school of 1962 became answers in a
reformist regime to meet fears and hopes made visible by socioculturally
de-traditionalizing forces of this specific period after World War Two.
This included a new kind of society and new kinds of people, in which
individuals’ potential futures became visible, without taken-for-granted
bonds to inherited cultural traditions (but without any kind of guaran-
tee). This de-traditionalization was a cultural and historical position that
implied another kind of relation to the religion (religion became released
from power) and to cultural heritage. The meritocracy implied that you
were not given; instead, it was in your own hands who you will become.
A necessary condition for comparisons and systems reasoning in a
reformist regime is a visible population with measurable and moldable
features for the reduction of complexities. If there is no visible popu-
lation, then there is no reasoning on educational orders and kinds of
people. As the history of statistics has shown, the outcomes of the 18th-
century censuses were kept secret, seen as more or less a consequence
of a “divine order” inherited by birth and as a matter for the (political)
state only (Höjer, 2001; Porter, 1986). Not until later, in the early 19th
century, did empirical observations of populations increasingly come to
be reflected in a search for societal reforms and were they no longer seen
as something fatally given (Porter, 1986). This is a kind of a population
that can be differentiated intentionally, as was done in the early-20th-
century Sweden in terms of “social groups.” When the visible population
was combined with educational levels and later with psychometric test-
ing, it became possible to reason in a systemic way, meaning it became
possible for the development of the idea to systemically regulate the
dynamics of educational differentiation. The specific position given to
science during this period implied that the policymakers were paying
attention to the results of the research as part of the modernization of
the society.
Notes
1. The old parallel school was fully phased out in 1971.
2. Realskolan consisted of junior secondary school; Läroverket consisted of
upper secondary school.
3. However, the poorest groups in society were excluded.
4. According to Johansson (1977, p. 3),
The social pressure was enormous. Everybody in the household and in
the village gathered once a year to take part in examinations in reading
and knowledge of the Bible. The adult who failed these examinations
was excluded from both communion and marriage.
5. Constituted by people from “the Nobility,”“the Priests,” and “the Burghers,”
it was a kind of control committee responsible for policies regarding the
budget, foreign affairs, and war.
6. According to the Bible, King David was punished for his effort: “So the Lord
sent a plague on Israel from that morning until the end of the time desig-
nated, and seventy thousand of the people from Dan to Beersheba died” (2
Samuel 24:15–25 NIV).
7. PISA is a study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Devel-
opment (OECD). PISA measures 15-year-old school students’ performance
on mathematics, science, and reading.
8. The search terms were Härnqvist and skol* (school*). We also used “school
committee” and “differentiation” but got only a few hits.
9. Svenska Dagbladet, June 18, 1958, our translation.
10. An educational form that was part of the former parallel school.
12. Svenska Dagbladet, March 30, 1960, our translation.
13. Söderhamns newspaper, March 31, 1960, our translation.
14. Söderhamns newspaper, March 31, 1960, our translation.
15. Dagens Nyheter, June 29, 1960, our translation.
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12 Quantification of an Educational
System
Numbers in the Social Differentiation
of Brazil
Natália de Lacerda Gil
Introduction
From 1932, with the organization of educational statistics services on new
and promising basis, we began to know the reality of educational life. We
used to live in dependence on opinions, in which excessive enthusiasm or
pessimism were expressed, almost always moving us away from the path
that could solve the problem. There is no longer the influence of supposi-
tion; personal opinion received the combat of data objectively collected
and the collaboration of general tables of the surveys made substituted
the figures listed without foundation and to the taste of the interests.
(Editorial, 1946a, p. 4)
The belief in the potential of scientific knowledge for the proper con-
duct of educational processes and policies has been evident in the Brazil-
ian educational field since the 1920s. The bureaucratization of the state,
urbanization, and growing industrialization are some of the events that
accompany a number of changes in the way the school is organized, the
role of education in the country, and the administration of matters related
to public education. In this context, a decisive aspect was the creation of
the Ministry of Education, in 1931, and of specialized agencies linked to
it. In this writing, I focus the analysis on the role attributed to statistics
within one of these agencies, the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Edu-
cacionais (National Institute of Educational Research/INEP),1 a precur-
sor institution in the production of educational research in Brazil. I also
analyze the debate around the problem of school flow and the high rates
of disapproval of students in elementary school held in the main and
longest periodical published by INEP. The intention is to understand the
relationship of this institute and educational research, what functions it
assigned to the education sciences emerging on the national scene at that
time and how it proceeded to quantification as a basis for suggesting edu-
cation reforms. With the analyses carried out, I observed that the notion
of systems theory does not appear nominally in the analyzed documenta-
tion, although its central elements can be clearly identified. Thus, in the
226 Natália de Lacerda Gil
debates set up at INEP, for example, there are mentions of the theory
of modernization, the organicist metaphor, and theorization about the
differentiation of social roles in democratic societies through education
paths. The comparative reasoning also has a strong presence in the pub-
lications of that research agency, not only in comparisons between the
educational situation in Brazil and countries assumed as a model of good
school or between different regions of the country but also in the profu-
sion of statistics on which arguments for education reforms are largely
supported.
In the first section, I present the INEP in the context of its creation,
underlining the objectives assigned to the agency as they are mentioned
in its publications. I also indicate the characteristics of its two main direc-
tors between the years 1937, when the institute was created, and 1964,
the final time frame of the analyses presented here. The information com-
piled allows to see the central place that the institute occupied in the
production of educational research in Brazil in the period.
In the second section, I describe the presence of statistics in Revista
Brasileira de Estudos Pedagógicos, INEP’s periodical publication, created
in 1944. In the articles published in the journal, the belief in the objective
and neutral nature of the numbers prevails, and therefore, a fair distribu-
tion of the scarce resources should follow the prescription provided by
the statistics. I sought to emphasize in the analysis of the articles, however,
how the discursive movements resorted to the supposedly unequivocal
objectivity and neutrality of numbers and proceeded, finally, to eminently
political decisions that were presented as being only technical.
In the third section, I focused on presenting a specific theme that
stayed in the Revista Brasileira de Estudos Pedagógicos in that period
and for which the positivist scientific rationality was central, either by
evoking the contributions of the statistics or by using the studies of
psychology. The problem under scrutiny is the irregular flow of stu-
dents through elementary school grades. Already in the first decades of
implementation of the graduated school model in Brazil, the aspirations
for democratization of education have run into expressive indices of
disapproval among students. Near 50 percent of the students enrolled
in the first grade had flunked at the end of a school year; in the fol-
lowing grades, this index decreased—a result of the narrowing due to
some of the pupils dropping out—but remained significant. The dis-
semination of these aggregated “numbers” stimulated the educational
debate and political actions around the need to understand the reasons
of this phenomenon and define ways to solve the problem. The sciences
of education were then called to diagnose the situation, and the inter-
national dialogue opens space for proposing solutions experienced in
other countries. However, in this aspect, it can be observed that sugges-
tions provided by science have to be adapted to how Brazilian society
interprets itself.
Quantification of an Educational System 227
Education Sciences in Public Management Agencies
The Ministry of Education was created in Brazil in 1931, as part of a
macro-political renewal that, despite not changing the social structure of
the country, produced an exchange of the ruling elites, making room for
the establishment of a new political agenda (Fausto, 1989). One of the
central issues in this new power arrangement was to give greater rational-
ity to public management. The political crisis experienced in the previous
decade, among other consequences, made it necessary to give the insti-
tutional apparatus and its staff a more sophisticated profile as a way of
increasing the legitimacy of public administration. That is remarkable in
the space of making positions in the educational field,2 where the scien-
tific rationality arises as an important element.
In this framework, education underwent a wide reform, whose spec-
trum covers the organization of teaching, the training of teachers,
the adoption of school architecture aligned to the hygienist precepts,
investment in the construction of buildings for schools, the defense of
pedagogical methods and materials based on knowledge about the psy-
chology of development, and the explicit concern with the expansion
of enrollment in elementary education. The greatest efficiency of educa-
tion, without which it would not be possible to guarantee its democra-
tization, depended on the rationalization of processes and policies, and
to this end, the use of statistics and scientific knowledge was recurrent.
Thus, in 1937, under the newly created Ministry of Education, INEP
began to operate, whose tasks included activities that aimed at those
purposes. In the justification for the creation of INEP, Gustavo Capa-
nema, the then minister of education, highlighted the need for Brazil to
have a “central apparatus for surveys, studies, research and demonstra-
tions on the problems of teaching, in its different aspects” (as cited in
Lourenço Filho, 1964, p. 11). The minister stressed the importance of
a study center like this when mentioning that it was “evident the lack
of such an agency, devoted to carry out original works in the various
sectors of the educational problem, and at the same time, to collect,
systematize and disseminate the work done by the educational institu-
tions, public and private” (as cited in Lourenço Filho, 1964, p. 11).
Thus, among the tasks assigned to the institute were the organization
of documentation relating to the history of pedagogical ideas; the estab-
lishment of exchange between institutions of the country and of the
foreigner; the promotion of surveys and research; the conducting of
research on psychology applied to education; the provision of technical
assistance to federated states, municipalities, and private educational
establishments; and the coordination of issues related to professional
selection and vocational guidance.
It is remarkable that the function assigned to INEP was to produce
scientific knowledge that would serve as a safe basis for the conduct of
political and pedagogical actions and decisions in Brazil. Studies indicate
that in
the first years the INEP has certainly gathered all the elements neces-
sary for the Ministry’s action and has consolidated itself as an advi-
sory agency for decision-making and policy-making in the field, but
also provided educators with elements for their thinking and practice.
(Saavedra, 1988, p. 39)
In that period, the universities were beginning to be installed in the coun-

try, but they were not yet constituted in important spaces of scientifc pro-
duction. Thus, INEP was a central place for the production of research in
education until the end of the 1960s.3
In the first decades of INEP’s operation, the printed materials played
a strategic role not only to disseminate pedagogical precepts and admin-
istrative guidelines but also to shape the representations on school and
teaching quality (Dantas, 2001). The main purpose of the publications
was to disseminate the works produced by the institute itself and to
report on what was happening in the educational administrations in the
federated states. The variety of printed matter published by the agency
also represents its importance among the actions performed. The emer-
gence of the Revista Brasileira de Estudos Pedagógicos is part of an edito-
rial policy initiated since the creation of the institute, and the strategy of
this policy was to “use of information as an important tool in the con-
struction of a way of thinking and performing educational action, in its
administrative and pedagogical aspect” (Dantas, 2001, p. 89). The peri-
odical publications made it possible to make the educational discourse
reach even the most distant locations, contributing significantly to peda-
gogical standardization.
Among the INEP’s publications, the most important was certainly
the Revista Brasileira de Estudos Pedagógicos, created in 1944 and still
published today. Until academic journals linked to universities began to
consolidate themselves—from the years after 1980—this was a central
periodical in the circulation of educational debates in the country. The
journal was created during the management of Lourenço Filho, an edu-
cator highlighted in the Brazilian educational scenery, a disseminator of
the principles of the New Education movement, and an enthusiast of psy-
chology as an important science in the orientation of educational work.
He has also been at the forefront of public management in key places
and moments, especially between the 1920s and the 1950s. In its initial
period, INEP was dedicated to the production of information on national
education, compiling both quantitative and qualitative data. For Lou-
renço Filho, it was necessary that the conduct of decisions in education
was based on the criteria of being “technical,” no longer linked to the
wishes of managers or to the subjective impressions of those responsible.
In this sense, the organization of education statistics was of immense
importance among the actions of INEP. Lourenço Filho was in charge of
the journal only in its first year of operation; however, he still had great
influence in the periodical—as well as in INEP, of which he was direc-
tor between 1937 and 1945—with regard to the choice of themes and
approaches in the articles. Between 1945 and 1952, Murilo Braga took
over the direction of the journal, but he maintained the same line estab-
lished by his predecessor.
A second important defining moment of INEP’s operation corresponds
to the management of Anísio Teixeira (1952–1964). Anísio Teixeira was
one of the most active education intellectuals in the Brazilian public
space; he promoted the principles of the New Education movement and
emphatically defended democratic education and the expansion of edu-
cational opportunities and public school. Still in the period of his intel-
lectual training, in the 1920s, he was in the United States, where he was a
student of John Dewey and, in the following decades, held close interlo-
cution with US educational research. In the 1940s, he represented Brazil
at UNESCO and, from this interlocution, created during his manage-
ment at INEP five Centros Regionais de Pesquisa Educacional (Regional
Educational Research Centers, or CRPE) and the Centro Brasileiro de
Pesquisa Educacional (Brazilian Center for Educational Research, or
CBPE). The function of these agencies was to expand and consolidate
educational research in Brazil, reinforcing the sociological character that,
from Anísio Teixeira’s perspective, should prevail in education research,
by surveying the economic, social, political, and cultural conditions of
each region via applied social sciences that could be useful for teacher
training. This frequent dialogue resulted in the dissemination of Dewey’s
pragmatism via actions promoted by INEP, in numerous publications,
including for didactic use, in courses and conferences, and mainly for cre-
ating experimental schools (Mendonça & Xavier, 2006). Dewey’s ideas,
in that context, were largely appropriate “as a ‘scientific method,’ imply-
ing in a certain conception of science, particularly of social sciences, with
emphasis on the application of scientific knowledge in the solution of
practical problems” (Mendonça & Xavier, 2006, p. 99).
Since the 1950s, INEP has maintained close contact with the pro-
posed guidelines for education by international organizations, such as
the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), the Economic Commission for Latin America and Caribbean
(CEPAL), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Develop-
ment (OECD). Particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a broad
effort in Brazil to give educational policies a transnational and modern-
ization character (Daros, 2012). The constant exchange with these agen-
cies circulated in Brazil the theory of modernization, whose principles
seem to be articulated with the propositions of systems theory. According
to theory of modernization, there was a direct relationship between the
education offered to the population—understood as human capital—and
economic development:
Within the basic premise of social equilibrium, the theory of mod-

ernization set up a framework to define the imbalances arising from
industrialization and urbanization. It understands from this approach
that society in transition, or in development, would momentarily
unbalance itself until it reached equilibrium when it achieved the
modern stage, that means, industrialization.
(Daros, 2012, p. 191)
In this sense, what prevailed in the journal, especially in the 1950s, was
the conviction that the expansion of popular education would guar-
antee work, productivity, and income in an industrialized society. The
focus of educational policies aimed at promoting economic develop-
ment emerged as a new perspective at that time in the country, whereas
hitherto from the school it was expected mainly to guarantee the civili-
zation of the people and the progress of the nation. This would explain
the increasing demand of the population for schools and would jus-
tify the expansion of the public education offer based on the notion of
investment:
As the economy develops, the division of labor deepens, and services

of every nature, of a personal and social character gradually emerge.
For the mass that flows in search of these new genres of work, educa-
tion represents a factor of increase in productivity that can be trans-
lated into salary increase. Hence the huge growth in clientele for our
school system in recent times.
For the countries that are currently industrializing and using
improved machines, created by alien technology, primary education—
fundamental work tool—is the most important burden that weighs
on the educational system.
(Oliveira, 1954, p. 71)
This explains the importance given by the Brazilian government to edu-

cational planning, seeking in this way to expand elementary schools with
savings in fnancial resources:
In the sixties of the twentieth century, UNESCO signed with the Min-
istry of Education and Culture of Brazil—MEC—an agreement to
advise states on the organization of their education systems, putting
at the disposal their experts, to guide the practice of planning and the
organization of education. The MEC/UNESCO agreement resulted
in the assistance of foreign experts to several states of Brazil.
(Daros, 2012, p. 186)
Such political articulations are noticeable in the pages of the Revista
Brasileira de Estudos Pedagógicos. Between 1946 and 1962, many UNESCO
documents were published, including the recommendations of the Public
Instruction Conferences held in Geneva (Switzerland). In 1962, the Con-
ference on Education and Economic and Social Development in Latin
America was held in Santiago (Chile), whose documents were also pub-
lished in the journal.
The Revista Brasileira de Estudos Pedagógicos is, therefore, a privileged
locus for observing the transnational circulation of pedagogical ideas.
Besides the theory associated with the imperatives of economic develop-
ment, the centrality of the organicist metaphor prevails in the articles,
which makes it indeed possible to notice the circulation of system theory
ideas even though it was not nominally indicated as such. For the social
body to function properly, each citizen needed to occupy their position in
society in order to offer the maximum of their abilities, guaranteeing the
harmony of the whole:
It is through success in its formative mission that education is a sta-

bilizing force and the ability to encourage those who are most able
to continue their studies, a boundary of opportunities for individual
progress and social ascension and, as such, a force for renewal. The
two functions of the school—that of stability and of renewal—must
be fulfilled, but without harm. The balance between them is a condi-
tion of good social health.
(Teixeira, 1957, p. 13)
Education Statistics in the Revista Brasileira de Estudos

Pedagógicos
In Brazil, education statistics of national coverage began to be produced
in 1871, when the Diretoria Geral de Estatística (General Directorate of
Statistics) was created. The immediate function of this directorate was to
organize the first population census, which happened in 1872, but from
the beginning, its regulation counted teaching numbers. Benedict Ander-
son (2005) points out that statistics and censuses fulfill, among other
elements such as the national language and the emblems of the home-
land, an important role in the constitution of the national states. Popula-
tion statistics allow us to sketch an “image” of the nation in which all its
inhabitants can “imagine” themselves as part of a national community.
In this sense, it is important to underline that the education statistics
projected, at the same time, fulfil an analogous function, by allowing us
to “imagine” the school institution, which was still rare quantitatively
(Gil, 2019). It means that the school was “imagined” initially in num-
bers, which function as a system of reason. Thus, for example, in the
first decades of production of education statistics, alongside the number
of enrollments and teachers, tables are published with the synthesis of
the situation of national education, displaying columns, for example,
to include the number of school libraries and graduated classes. How-
ever, in many cases, filling in indicated in figures that such elements
did not exist in the existing schools. Thus, such tables served less to
show how schools were and more to outline how they should be; that
is, they should have libraries and classify students in grades. In Brazil,
this coincides with the period of graduate school model implementation,
proposed as a solution for increasing the population’s access to school
and for pedagogical modernization, with consequent improvement in
the quality of teaching.
Education statistics were published with irregularity until 1931, when
the federal government and the federated states signed a specific agree-
ment for the production of teaching numbers. In 1937, INEP took as one
of its tasks the analysis of the statistics that had been published regularly
in that decade. This explains in part the volume of official statistics pub-
lished in the Revista Brasileira de Estudos Pedagógicos. The most fre-
quent themes for which statistics are mobilized, between the years 1944
and 1964, are the high rates of illiteracy of the Brazilian population;
the Adult Education Campaign, held in 1946; the construction of school
buildings, especially in rural areas; the discussion on the need for more
schools for teacher training; the high rates of school dropout and dis-
approval; and the need to expand attendance at the secondary level of
education. In the first decades of the 20th century, these concerns were
part of the political project conducted by elites, which saw the education
of the people as the way to effect the moralization and hygiene of society.
The critical literature on quantification has emphasized that statistics
are not a simple description of reality, as is often assumed. On the con-
trary, they are the result of objectification processes conformed by cat-
egories, by choices of aspects accounted for, by the ways of observing (see
Hacking, 1990; Porter, 1995; Desrosières, 2000; among others). A critical
analysis of statistics has allowed us to understand that, as objectifica-
tion processes, numbers have symbolic power, and being produced and
used by and for people, such quantitative resources make themselves also
devices of subjectivation. Pierre Bourdieu points out that
the social order owes in part its permanence to the imposition of

classification schemes which, by adjusting to the objective classifi-
cations, they end up producing a form of recognition of this order
which implies precisely the ignorance of the arbitrariness of its
foundations: the correspondence between objective divisions and
the classification schemes, between objective structures and mental
structures, is at the root of a type of origin adherence to the estab-
lished order.
(Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 117–118)
Statistics produce what Bourdieu (1998) called the “effect of theory”—
that is, to the extent that they seek to provide forms of intelligibility of
the world, they collaborate in the construction of the conditions of exis-
tence of what they describe.
Considerations of this kind, however, were absent from the journal in
that period. What is found, on the contrary, is the belief that the statistics
would be able to compose a “portrait” of teaching in Brazil and that
would serve to guide in an objective and neutral way the most appro-
priate political and pedagogical actions to be carried out. The authors
repeatedly refer to statistics as resources able to “reveal” or “unveil” real-
ity. In 1946, for example, Teixeira de Freitas, one of the forerunners of
Brazilian statistics, states that “the revelation of the numbers is gloomy.
Let them see that this is not an aspect whose improvement demanded
an increase in the capacity of the school” (Freitas, 1946, p. 205, italics
added). Lourenço Filho also shares this relationship with statistics, as can
be seen in the following passage: “When presenting the previously tran-
scribed statistical data, we wish only to offer some elements for objective
study of certain fundamental problems of secondary education. . . . As
revealed by the statistical data” (Lourenço Filho, 1950, pp. 88 and 93,
italics added). It can also be seen in Joel Silveira’s statement that it “is the
government’s own statistic—that should be certain and unsuspected—
that reconstitutes for us what is now the Brazil” (Silveira, 1950, p. 193,
italics added).
In most articles that contain quantitative data, the figures are statistics
that refer to the total number of enrollments, approvals, schools, teach-
ers, and so on. Although the type of information suggests that they refer
to official data, the sources are not always mentioned. Such a procedure
contributes to “naturalizing” the statistics, since it omits the fact that
these have been produced under specific conditions, in the face of defined
needs and by determined institutions. They operate, thus, with the idea
that the numbers are objective, without room for discussion about the
circumstances of their production and the intentions that led to quantita-
tive surveys. They are very useful, thus, to the construction of laudatory
arguments of the actions of the federal government, often indicated as
“techniques,” because they are based on statistics and disregard its effec-
tively political character. This is what we can observe, for example, in the
editorial of the Revista Brasileira de Estudos Pedagógicos, in 1946. After
presenting the advances regarding educational care in the country, the
following terms are presented:
Our primary school network is not sufficiently developed and pre-

pared in almost all units to carry out the task of attracting, register
and retaining the entire school-age population. If we look closely at the
enrolling number movement in municipalities, we will see that the situ-
ation of primary education is really serious and difficult. About twenty
municipalities have “deficit” more than 90%: that is, more than 90%
of school-age children are not enrolled in the primary course.
(Editorial, 1946b, p. 419)
In this case, the federal government needs to take further action in the
poorest states. Thus, the presentation of the discrepant situation in the
percentage of enrollment between a federated state and another justifes,
in the editorial analyzed, the relevance of the National Fund of Primary
Education created in 1942 by the federal government:
The problem of primary education requires the federal government

to take a defined position and to cooperate financially with the states,
territories and the federal district in establishing effective measures,
with the aim of reducing the “deficit” school enrollment, which for
years has been challenging the action of administrators.
(Editorial, 1946b, p. 419)
Given the variation of population density in the country, it is not diffcult

to assume that there were states where the percentage taken as a basis was
lower, but the absolute number of children outside the school was much
higher. However, the way to construct the argument justifed the fnancial
aid of the federal government in the frst case—there would certainly be
other ways to analyze the fgures, whose conclusion of political action and
fnancing of education would be different. The way the fgures are mobi-
lized in the argumentation makes it appear that political decisions are only
“objective” conclusions of the analysis of statistics. As indicated in Nikolas
Rose’s study, statistics and politics are closely related. As the author states,
paradoxically, in the same process in which the numbers achieve a

privileged status in political decisions, they simultaneously promise
a “de-politicization” of politics, redrawing the boundaries between
politics and objectivity by purporting to act as automatic technical
mechanisms for making judgments, prioritizing problems and allo-
cating scarce resources.
(Rose, 1991, p. 674)
The comparison of school results—in terms of enrollment, frequency and

approvals, and percentage of the educated population—deserves special
attention. The journal had a section, called Vida Educacional, which
published news and presented the educational situation of the federated
states of Brazil. In this section, quantitative information and qualitative
information are common, thus seeking to provide an “image” of edu-
cation in the different regions of the country. Through these compari-
sons, Brazilian states’ educational performance rankings are established,
where the emphasis is mostly on the percentage of enrollment growth;
besides, through these comparisons eventually it appears the percentage
of enrollment by population or, still, scores of approvals. There are out
of those rankings, however, many categories that could qualify schools,
such as the number of pupils per teacher, the level of training teachers,
the length of lessons in hours, the availability of teaching materials and
conditions for school buildings, among others. This procedure is also
observable in the INEP publications that preceded the creation on the
journal where the analysis of the teaching situation in the states displays
the diffculties faced, indicating “which are the elements that would
allow the overcoming of these problems and even establish[ing] a hier-
archy, from the statistical analysis, of the education systems considered
modelling” (Dantas, 2001, p. 150).
Under the pretext of merely informing on the state of education
in different locations in the country, the presentation of the figures
makes up a comparative framework on the basis of the performances
of regional governments in educational management and measures
what is possible to express in quantities. Even with regard to the edu-
cational situation of other countries, this procedure can be observed.
In this case, most often, it is the translation of articles originally pub-
lished in foreign countries. Still, there are some that are the result of
direct observations made by Brazilian educators, especially on trips to
the United States. The predominance of news about countries in the
Americas and the significant majority of information about the United
States are related to the effort made at that time toward the establish-
ment of a Pan-American union.
There are also other uses of quantification in the journal, however. The
most significant refers to the presence of numbers in articles that display
research results, especially in the psychology of education. Many of the
reports transcribed in the Revista Brasileira de Estudos Pedagógicos are
from research developed by INEP itself, in which the authors are employees
of that institute. It is common to present tables, graphs, and listings; some-
times the statistical treatment used to process the information is also widely
described, explaining the standard deviation, the correlation coefficient, and
even the mathematical formulae used. In these articles, the numbers serve
to reinforce the scientific research, since they highlight the use of technical
procedures in fields whose scientific status was already consolidated. In the
history of psychology, the existence of the following is well known:
two sources in which behavioral psychology drank when defining its

object: on the one hand, the biology from which lends the concepts
of adaptation, organism, stimulus and environment; on the other
hand, the physical-mathematical sciences, which provide it with an
apparatus of observation and quantification that supposedly guaran-
tees its objectivity.
(Patto, 1984, p. 92)
One of the most frequently recurring questions in the articles reporting
research is intelligence testing. This is because experimental psychology
sought to know the individual’s mental functioning by observing and
measuring its external characteristics (Patto, 1984). The use of psychol-
ogy is also linked to the interest of the Brazilian educators in that period
in establishing objective criteria for the composition of homogeneous
classes, the basis of support of the graduated school model. As an edito-
rial from 1948 explains, in the old days,
there were no school seriation, programs or minima to achieve dur-

ing the school year. The student “changed the book,” “changed posi-
tion” in the classroom. . . . The progress was of the student, not of
the class. In the same room there were the most varied levels of edu-
cation. . . . now, the small class became a large center of education
and, as a result, simultaneous teaching required the organization of
groups of students with the same capacity, the same experience.
(Editorial, 1948, p. 3)
School Failure and Teaching Statistics: Between Diagnosing

and Solving a Problem
The implementation of graduated primary schools in Brazil took place
at the end of the 19th century in the state of São Paulo and, grad-
ually, was adopted in the other states of the country (Souza, 2006).
The arrangement of teaching in annual grade groups presupposed the
organization of homogeneous classes and rigorously defined the cur-
riculum to be fulfilled each year. Students who did not obtain the mini-
mum results established in the curriculum, in terms of learning, did not
obtain approval at the end of the year and were obliged to repeat the
previous grade in the following year. That is, the organization of teach-
ing that followed the graduated model created the possibility of repeti-
tion as a quantitatively expressive school phenomenon. However, this
does not mean to affirm, necessarily, that children used to learn more
and better, that the student’s learning abilities were limited, or that the
quality of teaching in the 20th century was bad. The conditions for the
possibility of apprehending flunking as a problem and the entry of this
issue in the political agenda are related to specific factors, such as the
establishment of the school year as a deadline for learning a specific
set of curriculum contents, the strengthening of the notion of the right
to education as an argument for the defense that all children complete
primary education, and the production of statistics that would allow
for quantifying these occurrences (Gil, 2018). This means to affirm that
the treatment of school failure as a problem to be identified, quantified,
and solved relates to the consolidation of a selective and exclusionary
rationality that has prevailed in the educational space, in the Brazilian
case, since the 1930s.
The discussion of this issue can be followed in the analysis of articles
published in the Revista Brasileira de Estudos Pedagógicos between 1944
and 1964. At the beginning of this period, the most recurrent worries
expressed in figures concerns the capacity of the school to receive the
entire population and the necessary expansion of school places. And the
first mentions of the issue of flunking appear linked to this. The interest
in knowing the failure indices stemmed from the desire to estimate the
need for new places each year:
We know, however, because the statistics tell us, that the school’s
income is far from 100%, and thus, every year, about 30% of the city’s
students and 40% of the farm’s students are flunked and they should
return to school to repeat the grade. To the necessary stocking already
determined by the population according to the duration of the course,
we must then add the seats for those who failed the previous year.
(Almeida, 1945, p. 369)
Knowledge about school incomes and the estimation of the number of

places needed each year, however, faced diffculties related to the pro-
cedures for recording information. There are complaints in the articles
because many schools registered students as “new,” although they had
already attended the grade the previous year. João Carlos de Almeida,
for example, mentions that, looking at the statistics, among the students
that failed in 1942, only 59 percent returned to enroll the following year.
However, according to the author, this was not entirely due to the occur-
rence of dropout. What happened was that the students were often re-
enrolled in the grades in which they had funked but were recorded in the
school documentation as “new” students:
there are teachers who will feel hurt in their self-esteem if it is found
that a large percentage of their approved students were repeating
students. His interest, very human, indeed, is to present good per-
formance with new students. Hence, well-known cases of repeating
students are omitted from the records.
(Almeida, 1945, p. 376)
The news about a circular distributed by the Statistical Service of the

Ministry of Education reiterates that the issue of student records such as
“new” or “repeaters” was considered a problem that merited the atten-
tion of managers:
Thus, it is that in the category of the “new pupils” of each grade

have been improperly computed students who are, in fact “repeats”
of the grades in which they enroll, resulting, that the data so far have
stayed, in this particular, affected by a large error.
(as cited in Almeida, 1945, p. 377)
In that period, it is possible to observe the understanding that school drop-
out was directly related to high failure rates, leading to the conclusion of
the need for consistent political action to solve the problem. Teixeira de
Freitas (1946) considered this situation a “public disaster.” According to
him, in 1943, every 1000 enrollments in the frst grade corresponded to
only 423 in the second grade and 275 in the third. In the following years,
the debate about that issue, within the journal, focused on the analysis of
the reasons that led to school failure and, in this sense, the emphasis of the
interpretations was on the guilt of the students (Patto, 1993). Interestingly,
there is a naturalization of low school performance, as if it were inevitable
that an expressive part of the students did not have approval at the end of
the school year. Teixeira de Freitas, for example, considers that the average
rate of approvals in primary school in 1943 was 47 percent was a prob-
lem, since, in his opinion, “‘normal,’ if it our school dynamics were regular,
would be 60%” (Freitas, 1946, p. 206): About 40 percent of students were
expected to fail each year. This allows us to understand why in the early
years, although the statistics recorded it and the percentages were high,
the failure of schools does not occupy much space in educational debates.
The first article, in the journal, to deal emphatically with the subject as
a problem was published in 1949. In this article, Ofélia Boisson Cardoso
analyzes statistics and discusses the reasons that led children to fail in
school activities. The author questions the relevance of occupying the
still-scarce places of primary school with the enrollment of repeating stu-
dents, instead of new ones:
the new student appears as an incognito; always offers scope for the
development of hopes: perhaps it is a source of work, an element that
fits well with the group, interested in school activities, compensating
for the efforts expended. The repeater is a looser—he was already
revealed, from him nothing is expected.
(Cardoso, 1949, p. 74)
In other words, in her interpretation, which is consistent with most of the

mentions in the journal, the innate characteristics of the child defned the
possibilities of success or failure in school, and therefore, the school’s task
was not so much teaching but rather identifying talents.
Following this inaugural article, it is possible to observe, during the
1950s, an important discussion in the pages of the journal about possible
solutions to the problem of school failure. Two perspectives for solving
the problem appear, with unequal emphasis (Gil & Rosa, 2017). In most
articles, the emphasis is on the maladjustment of children, due to the
insufficiency of their abilities. In some articles, however, the diagnosis
indicates the school’s maladjustment to adequately teach its children. As
the defense of school democratization was consolidated in terms of ideas
and in legislation, the authors could no longer remain indifferent to the
extremely selective character of the school. From that debate emerged
a suggestion from Brazilian schools to institute “automatic promotion.”
Almeida Junior, in 1957, presented UNESCO’s recommendations for
the system of promotions at the primary school to be reviewed in Latin
America. On that occasion, the author expressed concern that
the pure and simple announcement of automatic promotion, as prac-

ticed by England, would produce in Brazil more alarming than that
caused by the proclamation of the Republic. It was necessary to pre-
pare the spirit of our teachers and to obtain his adherence; even more
it was necessary to create in Brazilian schools the same conditions
that, already reached in that European country, allowed there, with-
out loss, the adoption of automatic promotion.
(Almeida Junior, 1957, pp. 3–4)
This argument shows the persistence of the notion of delay in Brazil and its
population, which had been the focus of the interpretation on Brazil since
the beginning of the 19th century. Although mentions were made of the
seriousness of the situation expressed by educational statistics, there was a
fear that the country would not yet be prepared for a more incisive politi-
cal measure. Thus, it can be hypothesized that there was a clash between,
on the one hand, a perspective that saw in scientifc knowledge and statis-
tics fundamental resources for the orientation of educational policies and,
on the another hand, a persistent perspective of evaluating the Brazilian
population as unprepared for progress and development—an interpreta-
tion of social Darwinism and racial theories that, during the 19th century,
had great centrality in the construction of national identity (Schwarcz,
1993). Effectively, the teaching grades organization and the school selec-
tivity would be maintained in the country in the following decades, with a
subtle reduction in the rates of funking out until the 1990s.
Conclusion
The analysis of the predominant characteristics in the Revista Brasileira
de Estudos Pedagógicos, published in Brazil since 1944 by the INEP, indi-
cates the importance given to scientific knowledge as conducting educa-
tional processes and policies. The presence of statistics strengthens the
comparative character of the discourses put into circulation, establishing
some ways of representing schools and the performance of students while
taking away other possibilities for society to understand and experience
that institution. Systems theory expression does not appear in the docu-
mentation examined; however, it was possible to note the presence of
debates on the theory of modernization, the organicist metaphor, and
theorization about the differentiation of social roles, and they allow us
to conclude that systems theory ideas circulated in Brazil in the analyzed
period. Although the sciences of education were convocated to diagnose
the school situation in Brazil, its uses were frequently adapted to suit
historically constituted cultural standards, particularly with regard to the
unequal, selective, and exclusionary character of Brazilian society.
Notes
1. Currently, the agency is named Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisas
Educacionais Anísio Teixeira and is responsible, among other activities, for
the annual realization of the School Census (Censo Escolar), which surveys
statistics on teaching in all schools in the country and carries out national eval-
uations to measure the quality of teaching, such as the Prova Brasil (applied
to students of the fifth and ninth years of elementary school to verify perfor-
mances in Portuguese language and mathematics) and ENEM, applied for stu-
dents of the last year of high school and serving as a selection tool for higher
education in various universities of the country.
2. Here I assume the concept of field as proposed by the sociologist Pierre Bour-
dieu. For him, the field is a space of social positions in which subjects and
institutions occupy different positions (more central and prestigious or more
peripheral and less relevant) and they fight symbolic battles for specific objects
of interest to the field.
3. In the following decade, the postgraduate programs are created in Brazilian
universities, and from that, the research gains a new pushing, but without
INEP, it has ceased to be an important interlocutor.
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Index
Page numbers in italic indicate figure, bold indicate table and numbers followed
by “n” indicate a note.
ability(ies): childhood and 41; alcoholism 180

children 42; cognitive 144; algorithmic pedagogy 53
educational 216; measures 99; Almqvist, Birgitta 103
music 42; reading 40; reserve of 16, American Association of Colleges of
215–216, 221; self-organizing 181; Teacher Education (AACTE) 150
to think 201 American Educational Research
abnormal sexual behaviors 11; Association (AERA) 31
see also behaviors/behaviorism American Land Grant universities 31
abstract expressionism 93, 99 American Psychological Association 96
abstraction of systems 35 American urban infrastructure 84
academic research 6, 118 ancestral immorality 121
Académie Française 12 Anderson, Benedict 231
achievement: educational abilities Anderson, Harold 100
216; modernization 136; national anonymous history 52, 66n2
accrediting process 151; physical anthropology 7–8, 30, 32–33, 143
and mental 40; resources 32; anti-utopian concept architecture 84
students 32, 199 anxieties 30, 95, 100
acute schizophrenia 144 aptitudes 41–42, 217
adaptive teaching machine system 178 architecture 72; anti-utopian concept
adjustments 35, 180, 182 84; hegemony 81; infrastructural
adolescent 8, 109–123, 134; 78; school 227; utopian 77–80
change 123; Confucian 110–113; Arnold, Arnold 101, 103
as gesture of change 123; art(s): creativity, play, and 104;
intelligibility 113–122; overview education 53–56; historians of
109–110; problematic 121–122; science and 58; visual 63
psychopathologizing 120–122; Artemov, V. A. 199
psychopathology of 121; Zhishi Arte Programmata (exhibition) 62
qingnian 110–113; see also child/ artificial intelligence 95
children/childhood artificial organization 13
Adult Education Campaign, Brazil assessments: educational systems 32;
232 international 44; large-scale 216;
aestheticity 73 learning 200; reform 188; students
affectionate touch 55 4, 32, 37, 44
agora 209, 214, 216, 218, 220 attitudes 6; behaviors and 140;
Ahmavaara, Yrjö 181 children 11; political 30; social 8;
Albers, Josef 54, 56, 66n5 state leaders 196; teachers 153
Index 243
authoritarian/authoritarianism: biopower 82–83
anxieties 30; brain 99; continuum Black Boxes 97
of 11; government 133; human Bloom, Benjamin 134
100; personality 11, 92, 104; Bloom’s taxonomies 38, 46n16
protocological exchanges 76; Boalt, G. 215
society 161; traits 94 Bogdanov, Alexander 193–194
autonomous teacher 73, 159–161, 164 Bomfim, Manoel 130
autonomy 73, 160, 163 Bondi, J. 160
avant-garde movements 5, 52 boundless humanism 51
Bourdieu, Pierre 232–233, 240n2
Barnes, C. 155 Braga, Murilo 229
Barron, Frank 92, 99 Brazilian Archives of Psychotechnics
Barron-Welsh Art Scale 99 134
Bataille, Georges 78 Brazilian Association of
Baudrillard, J. 83 Psychotechnics 134
Bauhaus 5, 52–58, 60, 62–63, 65, Brazilian Journal of Pedagogical
66n4–5, 67n8–9 Studies 136–137, 139
Bayesian statistics 16–17 Bruner, Jerome 4, 152
Beaux-Arts academy 54 bureaucracy students 83; see also
becoming topological 179 students
Beer, Stafford 175–176 bureaucratic statistics 15; see also
behaviors/behaviorism 141; statistics
abnormal sexual 11; children bureaucratization 225
13; cognitive psychology 19, Bureau of Applied Social Research 32
143; data 16; human 33; hybrid Bycroft, M. 99–100
psychology 38; mode of analysis
156–157; objectives 36–40; operant Cabral, Annita 134
conditioning principles of 38; Calvinism 3
psychology 5, 9, 19; Skinnerian Campbell, J. 155
177; teaching and learning Capanema, Gustavo 227
172–175, 173; traits 92; see also capitalism 1, 27, 194
child development and national Cardoso, Ofélia Boisson 238
progress; feedback Carnap, Rudolf 67n8
belief: cybernetics 202; dialectical Cattell, R. 99
materialism 187; humans as causalities 121
naturally rational 30; researchers Cavicchia, Durlei 141
157; scientific knowledge 225; Center for Advanced Visual Studies
statistics 233; updation 17 (CAVS) 59, 65
belonging: abjection 9; alienation and centralized planning 179
8; collective 10, 15, 19, 29; function Central Research Institute, China 122
as coordinates 7; identity and 10; Chakrabarty, D. 17
sameness 175; social differentiation challenges: adolescent 109; mass
19–20; social identification education 176; reading 75;
7; Soviet Leninism 3; utopic societal 29
narratives 9 change: adolescent 123; autonomous
Benjamin, Walter 75, 85n5 teachers 159–161; collective
Bensman, J. 7 belonging and 10; Enlightenment
Berg, Aksel 195 12; modalities 27; organizing
Berg, Fridtjuv 214 and monitoring 33; sciences 10,
Biaggio, Angela 142–143 32; scientific approach to 38;
Binet, Alfred 130 visualization 163
biological sciences 7; see also science(s) child/children/childhood 91; abilities
biopolitical technology 82; see also 42; ability and 41; aptitudes of 41;
technologies artistic workshops for 52; attitudes
244 Index
11; behaviors 13; characteristics 38; Communist Party of China (PRC)
cognitive development and learning 123n1, 195, 199, 202
38; creativity 100–105; culturally communist society 195–196
disadvantaged 140; development comparativeness of science 11–15
5, 13, 30, 92; education 75, 93; comparative reasoning 12, 75, 84, 91,
learning 13, 41; openness 40; 226; feedback and 13; intelligibility
personality 63; picture books 75; 149; mobilizations of science 14;
psychology 75; scientific rationality research 42; system of observation
of 91; teachers and 14; training 13; 161–163; visual cultures of
workshops for 62–63 numbers 14
child development and national complexity 16, 67, 97, 99, 192
progress 128–146; educational computational science 52
psychology 131–145; overview Comte, Auguste 13
128–130; psychology and education conceptualization 42, 53, 82
in the post–World War Two conceptual personae 4
133–136; psychology as scientific conduct of conduct 28
foundation of pedagogy 130–131 Conference Education and Art (1951),
childrearing 11, 93 UNESCO 102
China Youth Corps (CYC) 121, 124n5 confident touch 55; see also touch
Chinese Adolescent Counseling confluences 5
Foundation, Taiwan 121 Confucian/Confucianism 4, 110–113
Chinese Civil War (1927–1949) Congressional Cooperative Research
109–110, 114, 123n1 Act (1954), US 31
Church Law (1686) 212 Congress of the American
civil rights movement 29 Psychological Association 96
Claparède, Édouard 4, 133, 137 connected systems theory 9
classrooms: algorithmic pedagogy constructivism, Soviet 55
53; cybernetics 61; instruction 37, contemporary historiography 15
174, 179, 183; interactions 161; as continuity/discontinuity 110
laboratories 51, 141, 146; learning continuum 11–12, 28
158; principles 32 cosmopolitanism 5–6, 11, 27, 85n3
codifications 38, 44, 58, 63 Crary, Jonathan 76
coevolution 209 creative: brain 99; child 10, 19,
cognitive ability 144; see also 91–93, 100–102, 104–106; citizen
ability(ies) 93; human 94–95, 97, 98, 100;
cognitive development 142 mind 92, 95, 100; new democratic
cognitive psychology 8, 19, 30, 37–38, self 54; personality 96, 98;
135, 141, 143 potentialities 95, 100–101; self 51,
cognitive skills 200; see also skills 57, 63; turn 98
Cohen-Cole, Jeremy 94, 160 creativity(ies): art 104; childhood 102;
coherent aesthetics 72 cybernetics 5; defined 94; human
Cold War 2, 80, 160, 191, 202 kind 96–100; mind 92; moral 104;
collective: aesthetics 72; attributes 8; originality 54; play 51, 91, 104;
being 71; belonging 10, 15, 19, 27, problem-solving 38; psychological
29; identity 8, 19; imagination 81; tests 98; research 92–93, 101; as
reassembling 61 scientific object of inquiry 97; self
coloniality 3, 75 51, 57, 63; studies in space age
colonializations 6, 11 93–96; thinking 96, 98, 100, 201
Columbia University 32 crime 11
communications 42; designing critical thinking 201
processes 38; interactions 32; cultural anthropology 143
skills 63; systemic 73; theory 169; cultural deprivation 146; see also child
visual 73 development and national progress
Communist bloc countries 80 cultural distinctions 1
Index 245
cultural diversity 11 de-politicalization 80
culturalization 117 designs: culture 93; education 53–59,
culturally disadvantaged children 140; 64, 66n1; educators 52; info-signs
see also child/children/childhood 73; initiatives of 71; utopia 71–77;
cultural theories 8 visual pedagogy 77
curriculum planning 179 desires: indiscernible 84; locationless
cybernetics 1–2, 4, 45n11, 129, 144, logic 10–11; mobilizations of
181, 187–202, 203n2; classrooms science 18–19; ordering 77–80;
61; computational science and populations 30; qualities of 42;
52; creativity 5; Cybernetics science as utopia 81–85; security
Model for Teacher Education 83; society 30
35; cybernization 194–196, 201; desiring machine 82, 84, 85n6
diagrammatic teaching system developing countries 17
60; dominant 51; education 27, Developing Creativeness in Children
169, 188–189, 197–201; hyper- (exhibition) 104
confidence in 63; imagineering Developmental Mathematics
19–20; machines 198; magnetic Program 40
field of 191; mass observations 28; developmental psychology 131, 145
models 44; pedagogy 52, 59–64, deviant populations 27
170; planning 172, 179–182; Dewey, John 3–4, 67n10, 91, 131,
potentialities 33–34; principles 35; 137, 162, 229
psychological sciences 33; rational diagram, feedback 171–172
planning 170; reflexivity 43; social diagrammatic pedagogy 62
relations 9; social sciences 33; in dialectical materialism 195
Soviet Union 191–194; statistics 16, didactically thinking 177
189–191; STEM 45n11; systems 8, didactic thinking 173
18, 31, 33–34, 38, 44, 97; see also differentiation see school
tactile pedagogies in postwar differentiation
cyberspeak 191, 202 disciplinary: power 82; repetition
85n2; technique 110
Dada 55 discontinuity 110
daily life 28, 56, 78, 81, 93 discourse analysis 109, 129
D’Amico, Victor 104 discursive: formation 171; materials
Darwin, Charles 132 110; objects 76; practice 109
da Silveira Rudolfer, Noemy 131–133 discussion cells 60
data: behaviorism 16; classification disequilibrium 33–34, 40
7; empirical 9; infrastructures dispositif 78
182; inputs 65; processing 59, 63; dissemination, educational psychology
production 8; reterritorization of knowledge 137–145
7; statistic 7; tactilities after 59–64; distributed cognition 61
technologies 28 diversity 92
de-: politicalization 80; dividuality/dividuals 78, 82
traditionalization 207, 221 do Amaral Fontoura, Afro 138
de Almeida, José 137 Dollard, John 143
de Arruda Penteado, Onofre 133, 137 dome 80–81
decision-making 11, 30, 158 Dória, Sampaio 131–132
decolonialization 11 Drevdahl, J. 99
decontextualization 179 dysfunctional family life 11
de Freitas, Teixeira 233, 238
Deleuze, Gilles 4, 82–84, 171–172 economic anxieties 95
delinquency 11 Economic Commission for Latin
democracy 28–29, 92; America and Caribbean (CEPAL)
democratization 72, 226–227, 238; 229
institutions 29; personalities 11 economics 7, 11, 13, 230
246 Index
education: agora 209, 220; art Escola Nova movement 136
53–56; assessments 32; childhood Euclidean space 5
75; children 93; cultural virtue Eurocommunism 3
and morality 113; cybernetics European Enlightenments 27
27, 188–189, 199–201; European industrialization 3
democratization 226; design European Renaissance 11
53–59, 64, 66n1; discourse 109; evolutionary theory 131
elementary school teacher 35; evolutionism 145
integral 57; learning psychology 14; exceptionalism 10, 28, 94, 201
measurements 8; modernization in exciting touch 55; see also touch
Taiwan 9; performance rankings existentialist crisis 84
234; psychology 37, 76, 131–145, experimental psychology 7, 135, 236;
169; quality 35; reasoning based on see also psychology
numbers 188–189; reforms 64, 131, expertise, sciences 30–31
134, 179; research 8, 32, 52, 64–65, expressionism, abstract 93, 99
71, 84, 85n6, 197–199; reserve 215;
sciences 2–5, 73, 227–231; statistics fallibility 30
8, 231–236; systems theory 27; falsification 192
transform 31; United States (US) family: dysfunctional life 11; nuclear
76, 150–153; urban and inner city 11; personality and 30; value of
life 28; see also quantification of needs 80–81
education system in Brazil; teacher fascism 11; defeat 28; Holocaust and
education 30; optimism and 28
Education Bill (1962) 210 feedback 169–183; behaviorist
Education by the Eye (project) 73 teaching and learning 172–175,
educators: artists and 53; Catholic 173; charts 182; comparative
131; children and 104; design reasoning and 13; cybernetic
52; parents and 92, 103, 105; planning 179–182; diagram
psychologists and 142; teacher 152 171–172; loops 16; mechanism
Elementary and Secondary Education 160; ontological variance 175–179,
Act of 1965, US 42 178; overview 169–170; rational
elementary school: components 35; planning 179–182; teacher
program 35; students 40; teacher education 153–158; teaching
education 35; United States (US) 28 machines 175–179, 178; topology
emotions 11, 42, 57, 200 179–182
empirical evidence/data 9, 40–41; field studies 32
faktur/faktura 55, 57 field theory 133
empirical utopia 80 Filho, Lourenço 130–132, 228–229,
empiricism 5 233
engagement and motivation 34 finalist theory 133
Enlightenments: change 12; First International Mathematics Study
cosmopolitanism and 5–6, (FIMS) 6
11, 85n3; European 27; First World War see World War One
industrialization and 3; psychology fitting numbers 16
75; reformation and 29; themes of Flanders, Ned A. 153–155, 154, 155,
progress 13 160, 162, 165n1
epistemological: assumptions 156; flexibility 37, 92, 99
desire 94; ordering 71; principles Flusser, V. 83–84
43, 156 foreigner see indigenous foreigner
equality 5–6, 27, 73 formalism 199
equilibrium and disequilibrium 40 Foucault, Michel 82, 85n8, 129,
equity 5 171–172
Erickson, P. 159 Four Estates 211, 214
Erlander, Tage 208 freedom 28–29, 73, 92, 94, 102
Index 247
French Revolution (1789) 12 human behaviors 33
frequentist statistics 16 human capital 101, 230
Froebel, Friedrich 53, 91, 103, 132 humanism, boundless 51
Fuller, Buckminster 14, 60, 71, 78, humanistic psychology 141
80–81 human sciences 6; see also science(s)
Hunt, Ethan 66n1
Gage, N. L. 177 Husén, T. 4, 208, 210, 214–216
Galison, P. 67n11 hybrid psychology 38
Galloway, A. R. 72 hyper-confidence 63
game learning 76
game of design 80–81 identity(ies): belonging 10, 20;
Gates, Arthur I. 131, 138 collective 8, 19; national 175, 239;
gender differences 42 social attitudes and 8; systems 113,
General Panel Corporation 60 121
genetic epistemology 5, 19 IGE see individually guided education
geodesic dome 81 (IGE)
German cybernetic pedagogy 170 imagineering/imagineer 6, 45n2;
German idealism 175 belonging as social differentiation
Gerovitch, S. 190–191 19–20; science 10; social belonging
gestalt psychology 62; see also 19–20
psychology immigration 1, 27
Giedion, Sigfried 66n2 imperial education 188
Gil, Lacerda 8 imperialism 192
Gladkov, K. 192 indigenous foreigner 3–4, 91, 130;
globalization 1, 11 as intermediary in science 4–5;
Glushkov, Victor 199–200 objectifications of populations 13;
Goeritz, Mathias 66n1 relational logic 5
governmentality 58, 92 indiscernible desire 84
Gropius, Walter 53–54, 56, 59–60 individually guided education
Group of Studies and Research in (IGE) 35–36, 36–37, 39, 40–41;
Cognitive Psychology (GREC) 142 Individual Differences and School
Guattari, F. 4, 82, 83–84 Differentiation 210; individualism/
Guilford, J. P. 92–95, 98–99, 105 individualization/individuality 2,
Günther, Harmut 141 27, 35, 84, 199; Individualized
Guthrie, Edwin 133 Mathematics Instruction (IMU) 177
industrialization 1, 3, 27, 133, 225
Hacking, Ian 95, 97, 188, 207 inequality 27, 72
Haeckel, Ernst 131 information retrieval 63
Hall, Stanley 132 information system 182
Halpern, O. 62, 76–77 info-signs 73–74
harmless utopia 79; see also utopia infrastructure 73–74, 77, 82, 84
Härnqvist, Kjell 208, 210, 215–220 Ingold, Tim 66n3
Harvard 62 initiatives of design 71
Harvey, Fred 31 Institute of Selection and Career
hedonistic society 84 Guidance, Brazil 134
heterogeneous discourse 109 institutionalization 30, 114, 117, 135
Heyck, Hunter 153, 156, 159 Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas
Höjer, H. 213 Educacionais (INEP), Brazil
Holland, James G. 176 225–229, 232, 235, 239, 240n1,
Holocaust 30 240n3
homelessness 83 instructional flexibility 37
homogeneity 8 instructional psychology 38; see also
Hulicka, K. 151–152 mastery learning
Hull, Clark 133, 143 instructional research 37
248 Index
integral education 57 Lazerfeld, Paul 32
intellectual development 142 learner: behavior 156; child 76;
intelligence 38, 42 comparative reasoning 75; defined
intelligibility 113–122, 149 75; perception 76; reluctant 41–42
interaction analysis 154–155 learning 42; behaviorist teaching
interdisciplinarity 58 and 172–175, 173; children
International Review of Education 13; coloniality 75; education
139 psychology 14; effective teaching
International System of Typographic and 41; game 76; hierarchies 38;
Picture Education (ISOTYPE) 53, individualization 199; machines
71, 73–75, 77 in US 9; model of 40; objectives
IQ tests 98, 124n4 38; optimal 38; outcomes 38;
irrationality 30 psychology 3, 14
irritating touch 55 Learning Research and Development
Itelson, L. B. 198 Center (LRDC), US 45n3
Itten, Johannes 54, 66n5–6 Lenin, Vladimir 189, 195–196, 199
Levi-Strauss anthropology 33
Johansson, U. 211–212, 222n4 Lewin, Kurt 133
Jorner, Ulf 213 Liapunov, Alexey 195
Journal of Creative Behavior 93 liberalism 10
Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) libido-infrastructure 82
150–153 libraries see traveling libraries
juvenile delinquency 121 lightness 63
Lima, Godinho 5, 13
Kahn, Fritz 85n4 Lindblad, F. 208
Kahn, Herman 95 Lindblad, S. 208
Kai-Shek Chiang 110, 117 locationless logic 8, 52; conduct and
Kandel, Isaac Leon 139 differences 19; desires 10–11; mass
Kant, Immanuel 12 observations 13
Keller, Fred 135 Locke, John 91, 103
Kepes, Gyorgy 57–59, 61–62 Lowenfeld, Viktor 101, 105
Key, Ellen 103 loyalty/disloyalty 112
Keynesian economics 7 Lury, C. 179
Khrushchev Thaw 195 Lutheranism 212
Kilpatrick, William H. 131
Kimball, Solon Toothaker 139 macro-statistical analyses 7
Kinney, L. B. 160 Mager, Robert 177
Klein, R. L. 151 Malinen, Paavo 181
Klineberg, Otto 134 Manifesto of the Pioneers of the New
knowledge: confluences and 5; Education 131
educational psychology 137–145; Maoist Marxism 3
generation 15; hierarchies 53; Marinetti, Filippo 55, 62–63
mathematical 40; pedagogy and Marques, J. C. 141
13, 40, 52; positivity of 120–122; Marx, Karl 3
production of 60; of psychology 37, Marxism–Leninism 4, 192, 195
130, 149; scientific 110; skills and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
8, 14, 38; system 163; systematic (MIT), US 52, 58
110; utilization 32–33 mass communication 7
Kubrick, Stanley 95 mass observations 56; cybernetics 28;
Kuomintang 112, 117–118, 123n2 locationless logic 13; statistics 16;
systems theory 28
Landa, L. 197–199 mass social reforms 29
Latour, Bruno 4 mass surveillance 85n7
La Villette park 82 mastery learning 36–41
Index 249
materialism 4 national exceptionalism 28, 43
mathematical knowledge 40 national exigency 122
mathematization 197 National Fund of Primary Education,
McGeorge, M. 150 Brazil 234
McPhie, W. E. 160 National Guidelines for the Long-
Mead, Margaret 101 range Development of Science
mechanical memorization 199 (1959) 114
media response 218–220 National Institute of Educational
mentally retarded 41 Research, Brazil 225
Merleau-Ponty, M. 75, 77 National Institute of Mental Health
microcosm 7 (NIMH) 30
micro-planning 181 National Institute of Pedagogical
midcentury 2 Studies (INEP), Brazil 135
military science 114–115 Nationalist Party of China 123n1
Miller, Neal Elgar 143 nationalist reasoning, adolescent
Mode 2 society 209; see also society 110–113
modeling theory 122 nationalization 117
modernity 2; development 188; to National Library, Sweden 219
form and govern progression of national romanticism 175
government 113; politics 5, 28; National Science Foundation (NSF),
production of scientific knowledge US 30, 45n10
128; restoration and 109; utopias national security 151
and 17 natural sciences 7
modernization: of education 9, Nazis 54, 67n9
207, 209; history 119; human neo-behaviorism 133
survival and progression 113; neogestaltism 133
indicators 32; nationalist evolution neologism 55
121; pedagogical 232; religious Nespor, J. 181
conversions in process of 13; of Netto, Samuel Pfromm 143–144
society 131, 207, 209; stability and Neurath, Otto 14, 53, 71, 73–74, 77,
110; Taiwan’s recovery toward 111; 79, 81
theory 226, 229, 239; transnational neutrality 71
and 229 New Bauhaus/School of Design 57–58
Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo 54–58, 63, New Curriculum Movement 30
66n7–8, 67n10, 67n11 New Education movement 131
Montessori, Maria 91, 103 Newell, Allen 144
Montreal World Expo 81 normality 34
moral creativity 104 Novaes, Maria Helena 135
moral principles 94, 109 Nowotny, H. 209
Morris, Charles 67n10 nuclear family 11
motivation 34, 42–43, 140, 200 numbers 7, 188–189
Munari, Bruno 52–53, 62–64
Museum of Modern Art in New York objectifications 41; see also adolescent
104 objective planning 179
Oedipus complex 144
naming 95 Office of Economic Opportunity
National Academy of Sciences 152 (OEO), US 30
National Defense Act’s Cooperative ontological variance 175–179, 178
Research Program (1957), US 30 open-ended research 56
National Defense Education Act open-minded autonomy 160
(NDEA), US 151 open-mindedness 92
national development 11 openness 99, 102
National Educational Association operant behavior 141
(NEA), US 31 operant conditioning 38
250 Index
optimal learning 38 political structure 31
optimism 28, 42 political theories 10
ordering 72–80 Popkewitz, Thomas 66n1, 85n1,
organismic theory 133 85n3, 129
Organization of Economic Poppovic, A. M. 140
Cooperation and Development population 17–18, 32, 231
(OECD) 6, 96, 105, 222n7, 229 Porter, Theodore 207, 213
originality 54, 96 positivism 5
Orwell, G. 84 positivity of knowledge 120–122
otherization 109 postwar see tactile pedagogies in
outcomes 32, 34, 38, 222 postwar
output optimizing 40 post–World War Two 2, 27, 91–106,
209–210; children creativity
parallelism 79 100–105; creativity as fabrication
parks over slaughterhouses 81–85 of human kind 96–100; creativity
Parnes, Sidney 100 studies in space age 93–96; fears
Pask, Gordon 175–176 93–96, 150–153; hopes 93–96,
Patto, Maria Helena Souza 136, 150–153; overview 91–93; welfare
139–140 states 28; see also teacher education
Paulista State University, Brazil 142 poverty 1, 42, 180
Pavlov, Ivan 189–190, 192, 197–198 pragmatism 32, 57, 229
pedagogical knowledge 13, 40; Pressey, Sidney 176
see also knowledge primitivism 56
pedagogical modernization 232 principles: of certainty and
pedagogical sciences 92 uncertainty 40; of creative self
Pedagogical Studies Brazilian Review 63; epistemological 43; moral 94,
129 109; of operant behavior 141;
pedagogy: algorithmic 53; cybernetic psychological 5
59–64, 170; diagrammatic 62; probability theory 15
infatuation with psychology 76; problematic adolescent 121–122
knowledge and 52; materialization problem-solving 27, 33; creativity 95;
62; reconstructions 56; sensory creativity and 38; process of 30;
74; utopian 74; visual 59, 66n1, research 30–32, 42; revelation 29;
72–77; see also tactile pedagogies in skills 38
postwar Problemy kibernetiki 195
Peltonen, J. 174, 177, 179 process: autonomous teachers for
Penna, Antonio Gomes 134 change 159–161; teacher education
perception 42, 76–77 153–158; teaching 154–155
personality 30, 63, 92 productive thinking 38
perversion 192 professionalization of schooling 149
Pestalozzi, Johannes 53, 91, 132 profound isomorphism 181
phantasma/phantasmagrams 74, 172, programmed instruction 170, 172,
180 175–179, 178, 200; see also
phenomenological psychology 141 feedback
Piaget, Jean 4–5, 19, 38, 102, 129, Programme for International Student
133–135, 142, 145 Assessment (PISA) 218, 222n7
playfulness 51, 59–64, 91 progressive society 28, 101
Play Orbit (exhibition) 97–98 progressivism 3, 29, 31
Playthings 104 proletarian culture 193
pluralism 29 prosperity/suffering 112
political attitudes 30 psychoanalysis and therapy 8
political culture 11 psychoanalytic theory 142–143
political economy 31 psychology(ies) 7, 30; of behaviorism
political science 7–8; see also science(s) 5, 9, 19; child 75; cognitive 8, 30,
Index 251
37–38, 135, 141; developmental movement 94; cultural theories 8;
145; education 14, 37, 76, 131–145; designs 32; education 8, 32, 52,
Enlightenment 75; experimental 7, 64–65, 71, 84, 85n6, 197–199;
135, 236; gestalt 62; humanistic educational psychology knowledge
141; institutionalization of 135; 137–145; grants 35; instructional
knowledge 37, 130, 149; learning 37; as materializing potentialities
14, 38; phenomenological 141; in 43–44; open-ended 56; phantasma
post–World War Two 133–136; of 40–41; problem-solving 30–32,
principles 5; sciences 1–2, 27, 33, 42; processes and communication in
92, 113; as scientific foundation of 35; science for social change 43–44;
pedagogy 130–131; Swiss 38; tests social theories 8; in United States
of creativity 98 11; Wisconsin R&D Center 40–41
Psychology Bulletin 134 Research Center for Adolescent
psychometrics 209–210 Problems, Taiwan 121
psychopathologizing adolescent reserve of ability/talent 16, 215–216,
120–122 221
psychopathology of adolescent 121 revelation, problem-solving 29
public disaster 238 Revista Brasileira de Estudos
public management agencies 227–231 Pedagógicos 226, 228, 231–237
Ribot, Theódule 96
Qing dynasty 123n2 Richardsson, G. 211
quality education 35 Rip, A. 209
quantification of education system in Romanovsky, E. 190
Brazil 225–240; education sciences Romberg, T. 35
in public management agencies Rose, Nikolas 234
227–231; education statistics Rosenberg, M. P. 198–199
231–236; overview 225–226; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 53, 91, 132
school failure 236–239; teaching Rouvroy, A. 16
statistics 236–239 Rudenschöld, Torsten 212
quasi-transcendentals 172
Salzburg Summer Academy, Austria
Rancière, J. 77, 80 67n12
RAND Corporation, US 152 Santos, Theobaldo Miranda 137–138
rationality 43; of decision-making Saussurian linguistics 33
30; modern 16; of post–World War school(s): effectiveness 44; failure
Two 94; reason and 11; of science 236–239; reform 34–43, 36–37,
114–116; touch 63 39, 83
rational planning 170, 179–182 school differentiation 207–222;
Read, Herbert 101–102 history of statistics 210–214;
reading ability 40 media response 218–220; overview
reading deficiency 42 207–210; talent 214–216
reading skills 39, 212 science(s): change 10; changing
recapitulation theory 13, 131–133 technologies of 32; comparativeness
reflexivity 43 of 11–17; as defense and rescue
reflex theory (Pavlov) 190 technology 114–116; education
reformist regime 209 and 73; expertise 30–31; history
reforms: assessment 188; education 3–4; imagineering 10; indigenous
131, 134, 179; Enlightenments and foreigner as intermediary in 4–5;
29; school 83 materiality of 3; mobilizations 2,
rehabilitation 12 18–19, 30–31; pedagogical 92;
research: academic 6, 118; pluralities 2; psychological 92,
comparative reasoning 42; 113; rationality of 114–116; as
conducting and synthesizing 34; redemptive theme 41–43; statistical
creativity 92–93, 101; creativity reasoning 16; in teacher education
252 Index
150–153; technologies of 4, 6–8, social cybernetics 181; see also
11; transnational 2 cybernetics
science as utopia 71–85; design social differences 11
72–77; desire 81–85; game of social differentiation see
design 80–81; ordering 72–80; quantification of education system
overview 71–72; parks over in Brazil
slaughterhouses 81–85; security social distinctions 1, 42
81–85; societies of control 81–85; social identification 7
utopian architecture 77–80; visual socialistic society 151
pedagogy 72–77; weaponry to social learning 142–143
livingry 80–81 social life 2–3, 6–10, 15, 27, 51
science for social change 27–44; as social reforms 29
beacon 28–34; overview 27–28; social sciences 1–2, 122; analyses 30;
research 43–44; school reform cybernetics 33; educational sciences
34–43, 36–37, 39; Wisconsin R&D and 2–5; history 1, 27; materializing
Center 34–43, 36–37, 39 5–11; systems theories 33;
scientificity 71 technologies 1; see also scientific
scientific knowledge 110 knowledge
scientific phantasmagoria 192 social structure 172
scientific rationality of childhood 91 social technologies 19
scientization 116–120 social theories 8, 12
secondary school 40, 134, 215, 221 society(ies) 7, 172, 180; authoritarian
Second World War see World War Two 161; challenge 29; citizen
securitization 74 and 64; communist 195–196;
security 81–85 conceptualization of 82; of
seeing-saying machine 172 control 81–85; as experimental
self-insight 14, 157, 160 and laboratory site 11; hedonistic
self-learning 201 84; imagineer 27; populations
self-organizing ability 181 and 18, 32; progressive 28, 101;
Seminério, Franco Lo Presti 134–135 reconstruction of 92; socialistic 151;
sensation 42 Soviet 8–9; Vampyroteuthian 84
sensory pedagogy 74 Society of Psychology of São Paulo
sensual touch 55 134
sex discrimination 42 sociology 7–8, 30, 32, 143
sexual behaviors 11 Sontag, Susan 72
Shannon, Claude 169–170 Soviet constructivism 55
Shaw, John Clifford 144 Soviet Leninism 3
signs and forms, infrastructure Soviet Marxism 3
between 73–74 Soviet science, cybernization of
Silveira, Joel 233 194–196
Simola, H. 179 Soviet Union 3–4, 151, 191–194
Simon, Herbert A. 144 spatiotemporal multiplicity 170
Sinicized culture 111 spirited touch 55
Sipinen, O. 177 Sputnik crisis 151–152
skills: cognitive 200; communication 63; standardizations 44
concepts and 40; conceptualization state citizenship 79
42; decision-making 158; knowledge state intellectuals 208
and 8, 14, 38; problem-solving 38; statistics 210–214; analysis 15–17,
reading 39, 212 32; Bayesian 16–17; cybernetics
Skinner, B. F. 38, 134, 170, 176 16; data 7; education 231–236;
Skinnerian behaviorism 177 frequentist 16; mass observations
social belonging 19–20; see also 16; population 231; reasoning 16;
belonging Statistics Sweden 213, 221; systems
social change see science for social 16; teaching 236–239; traveling
change libraries 16; worldview 189–191
Index 253
Stolurow, Lawrence 177 236; Catholic 131; children and
Strasser, B. 156–157 14, 104; design 52; effectiveness
students: achievement 32; bureaucracy 13, 153–163; Finnish 177; parents
83; elementary school 40; learning and 92, 103, 105; preparation 32;
style 38; secondary school 40 psychologists and 142; systems
subjectivization 78 theory 153–158; teacher 152;
subjectless representation 32 training 43
Sudan-Paris 55 teaching: effective 14, 41, 158–163;
superficialities 80 event 173; learning components
Swedish welfare state 16 35; machines 175–179, 178;
Swiss psychology 38 process 154; statistics 236–239;
synopticism 182 technologies 52
systematic conditioning theory 133 technical utopia 84
systematic knowledge 110 technologies: biopolitical 82; data 9,
systematic planning 180 28; experimental logic 8; of mass
systemic communication 73 observation 56; psychological
systemization 116 sciences 1; sciences 4, 6–8, 11,
systems 120; abstraction of 35; 114–116; self-government 105;
analysis 33–35; cybernetics and 31, social 19; of statistical analysis 32;
38, 44, 97; imagineering belonging teaching 52; visual 73, 76
as social differentiation 19–20; techno-social moment 57–64
knowledge 163; of observation tectology 193–194
161–163; statistics 16; theorization Teixeira, Anísio 229
116–120; thinking 63; Wisconsin teleological history 6
R&D Center 36–40 temporality 12
systems theory 1–2, 4, 8, 33, 119–120, Tennessee Valley Authority Act 111
129, 161, 164, 229; cybernetics and Thelen, H. A. 162
18; diagrammatic teaching system thermodynamics 169
60; dominant 51; education 27; thinking 42; creativity 96, 98, 100,
individualism 84; mass observations 201; machines 95; productive 38;
28; reflexivity 43; teacher 153–158 systems 63
Thorndike, Edward L. 131
tactile pedagogies in postwar 51–65; Three People’s Principles 116–120,
Americanization of tactilism 123n2
57–59; in art and design education tolerance 92, 161
53–56; cybernetic pedagogy Tolman, Edward 133
59–64; overview 51–53; playful Tolstoy, Dmitry 188
workshops 59–64; second techno- Torrance, E. P. 98, 102
social moment 59–64; techno-social touch/touching 54; rationality 63;
moment of design education 57–59 types 55; without heat 55
tactilism/tactility 56, 63; training 13, 43
Americanization of 57–59; concern transnational movements 2–5
for teachers 54; manifesto 55 transnational studies 2–3
Takala, Annika 180 traveling libraries 3, 6, 91, 130;
talent 214–216 experimental logic 8; indigenous
teacher education 13, 35, 149–164; foreigner as intermediary in science
change 150–153; feedback 4–5; philosophical realism 5;
153–158; new social science statistics 16
158–163; overview 149–150; Tsai, J. 67n11
process 153–158; researchers 151, Tyler, Ralph 134
157–159; science in 150–153; in
US 149 United Nations Educational, Scientific,
teacher(s)/educators: as agent of and Cultural Organization
change 43; artists and 53; attitudes (UNESCO) 6, 102, 229–230, 239
153; autonomous 73; Brazilian 129, universalism 3
254 Index
University of Chicago’s Lab School Wachsman, Konrad 52–53, 56, 59–64,
67n10 67n12
University of São Paulo (USP) 134 warfare and welfare 71, 80
University of Southern California Weiner, Norbert 4
56, 60 welfare states 1, 5, 15, 80; modern 27;
unprecedented synthesis 33 Post-World War Two 28
unrestrained capitalism 1, 27 Wells, H. G. 14, 71, 78–79, 81–82
unsystematic planning 180 Wellsian utopia 78–80, 84
urbanization 74, 133, 225 Wertheimer, Max 134
urban planning 11, 13 Western Europe 12
urban poor 27 Wheeler, William Morton 133
USAID 114 Wiener, Norbert 4, 94, 169, 191, 194
U.S. Department of Defense 58 Wigley, Mark 62
U.S. Department of Health, Wisconsin Design of Reading
Education, and Welfare 101 (reading acquisition program)
U.S. Office of Education (USOE) 30 41; see also individually guided
utopia/utopian 83–85; architecture education (IGE)
77–80; designs 71; empirical Wisconsin Idea 31
80; harmless 79; pedagogy 74; Wisconsin R&D Center 34–43,
protocols 74; technical 84; Wellsian 36–37, 39; behavioral objectives
78–80, 84 36–40; empirical evidence 40–41;
mastery learning 36–40; research
Valenzuela, Sandra 66n1 40–41; science as redemptive
Vampyroteuthian society 84 theme 41–43; systems 36–40;
van der Rohe, Mies 60 see also individually guided
verbalization 54 education (IGE)
Vernon, E. P. 100 Witter, G. P. 140–141
Vestnik Statistiki 190, 196 Wölfflin, Heinrich 66n2
Vico, Giambattista 91 Woods Hole Conference (1959) 152
Vidich, A. J. 7 worker-schoolkids 83
Vienna Circle 53, 85n4 workgroups 60
Vietnam War 29 workshops 56; for children 62–63;
vision and tactility 56 courses and 57; on light 58; playful
visual arts 63 59–64
visual communication 73 World War One 13, 54, 67n11, 85n5
visual immediacy 72 World War Two 1, 6, 51, 80, 83,
visualization 71, 163 170, 196, 214; see also school
visual pedagogy 59, 66n1, 72–77, differentiation
74–75
visual technologies 71, 73, 76 Xinhai Revolution in China 123n2
von Bertalanffy, Ludwig 169
von Lantinghausen, Jakob 213 Yaroshevsky, M. 192
Voprosy filosofii 192 Yat-Sen Sun 117, 123n2
Vorkurs 54
Vorobjev, Gennady 199–201 zeitgeist 66n2
Vygotsky, Lev 3, 38 Zhishi qingnian 110–113, 115, 124n4

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The International Emergence

of Educational Sciences in the

The book brings together contributions from curriculum history, cultural

Thomas S. Popkewitz is a professor of curriculum and instruction and

Daniel Pettersson is an associate professor in pedagogy at the University

Kai-Jung Hsiao is a PhD student of curriculum and instruction at the

This is a series that offers a global platform to engage scholars in continu-

Titles in the series include:

Considering Inclusive Development across Global Educational

Blended and Online Learning for Global Citizenship

The International Emergence of Educational Sciences in the

Teaching and Learning for Comprehensive Citizenship

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

Edited by Thomas S. Popkewitz,

ISBN: 978-0-367-18279-3 (hbk)

1 How Contemporary Educational Sciences Became

2 Science as “the Beacon” for Social Change: The Reason of

3 Tactile Pedagogies in the Postwar: Cybernetics, Art, and

4 Science as Utopia: Infrastructures, Pedagogies, and the

5 Post–World War Two Psychology, Education, and the Creative

6 Objectification of Human Nature: “Adolescent” as a

7 The Development of the Child and National Progress:

8 The Embrace of Systems in Post-World War Two Teacher

9 Diagrams of Feedback: Behaviorism, Programmed Instruction,

10 From “Threat” to “Treat”: Cybernetics in the Soviet Union 187

11 School Differentiation and Re-forming Human Kinds in

12 Quantification of an Educational System: Numbers in the

The process of organizing this book as an intellectual project involved

The book focuses on the international movements and settlements of the

1. Research as an actor in social life: The book addresses the often-

Natália de Lacerda Gil, Faculty of Education of the Federal University of

Transnational Movements and the Social and

Indigenous Foreigner and the Historical Spaces of Science

Traveling Libraries: The Indigenous Foreigner as

Materializing a Social Science Apparatus

The Study of Social Life as an Experiment and Laboratory

The Locationless Logic That Has Desires

The Comparativeness of Science: Producing Differences

Comparing Through Numbers as Representing Differences

Section One: Mobilizations of Science and Desires

Section Two: Locationless Logics, Conduct, and Differences

Section Three: Systems and Cybernetics: Imagineering

Mobilizing Science and

Science as “the Beacon” for Social Change: The American

Wisconsin R&D: Systems at Work as School Reform

• Conducting and synthesizing research to clarify the processes of

The Working of an Abstraction: The System, Mastery Learning,

Figure 2.1 Major components of individually guided education.

Figure 2.2 Multiunit organization of an IGE school of 400–600 students.

Figure 2.3 Instructional programming model in IGE.

this volume). The subtasks of learning mathematics, reading, and preread-

The Working of an Abstraction: The Phantasma of Research and

Science as a Redemptive Theme Against Dangers and

Research as Materializing Potentialities in the Present

Tactile Pedagogies in Art and Design Education:

Metal, paper, textile and natural materials were combined in two- or

Faktura became a concept to debunk easel painting in favor of mod-

It was a heavily charged concept that emphasized the social produc-

1. Confident touch—cold and abstract, silver paper

While there is an echo of faktur in this statement (the process leading to

[t]o convert this new environment into a human landscape, we need

Language shifted toward environment, and vision to processing data; the

A Second Techno-Social Moment: Tactilities After Data,