Literate Practices and the Production of Children: Psychological and Pre- Psychological Discourses

Page 1 LITERATE PRACTICES AND THE PRODUCTION OF CHILDREN: PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PRE- PSYCHOLOGICAL DISCOURSES Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD at the University of London by Gavin Patrick Kendall Institute of Education Page 2 ABSTRACT This thesis examines discourses around reading and reading instruction, with particular reference to children. The argument is that literate practices are crucially involved in the formation of that child. Psychology, when it establishes itself as the science which has the measure of the individual, becomes intertwined with literate practices and illuminates the relation between reading and the child in a new way. This thesis suggests that to understand the interrelations between reading, psychology and the child in our culture, one must pay attention to problems connected with the government of that culture, and, more specifically, to what Foucault has termed `governmentality'. Nowadays, literate practices are fundamental to the construction of citizens fit to take their place in society; this has not always been so. This thesis writes a genealogy of how a cognitive maximisation of literacy skills became a social imperative. It examines a series of crucial historical moments in this transformation. First, a set of reorganisations in the philological world in the middle of the eighteenth century enable the reader to become, for the first time, a problem. Second, the nineteenth-century reappraisal of the Page 3 transformative effects of education makes literacy for the lower orders desirable. Experiments in techniques of schooling allow for the formation of certain sorts of individuals. The thesis examines these processes of formation and analyses the contemporaneous reorganisation of the teacher-pupil relationship. Third, the beginning of our century sees psychology take an interest in literacy and the child. Psychology colonises such discursive processes and provides techniques for making new aspects of the literate child visible. The child is scientifically made subject to a set of practices which aim to calculate and administer. Page 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements 5 Introduction 6 1 The Theoretical 20 2 Reading Untamed 94 3 The Invention of the Normal 125 4 The Detailing of the Child: the New Pedagogy 144 5 Meaningfulness and Silence 173 6 Towards a Pedagogical Experiment: Monitorialism 190 7 Moralisation: For Love's Sake 219 8 The Psychological Gaze 275 9 The Reinvention of Reading 290 10 Of the Present: the Contemporary Classroom 317 Conclusion 347 Works Cited 367 Page 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis was conducted with the aid of a postgraduate student grant from the ESRC, for which I express my gratitude. Valerie Walkerdine supervised the thesis; her critical attention to the work and her encouragement were unfailing. I find it hard to thank her enough for her intellectual generosity. Various other debts were incurred in the course of this work, and I should like to thank the following for their support: Phil Bevis, Gavin Bremner, Michele Cohen, Alan Collins, Susan Condor, Kate Kendall, David McCallum, Mike Michael, Katherine Sheehan, Mary Smyth, Deb Tyler, Gary Wickham. I should also like to express my thanks to the staff of the various libraries where the bulk of this research was conducted, especially those at: University of London Library, Institute of Education Library, British Library, University of Manchester Library, Lancaster University Library. Page 6 INTRODUCTION "Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it."' "In Books lies the soul of the whole past time the articulate and audible voice of the past when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream."2 This thesis attempts to investigate the topic of children learning to read. In doing so, it situates itself in a critical way in relation to a whole series of theoretical and experimental projects in developmental psychology which have set out to discover the truth about this process: it takes these various studies as its backdrop and its point of departure. However, this thesis does not engage directly with these studies - it engages ' Michel Foucault, The Order of Discourse', in R. Young (ed.), Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, p.64. 2 Thomas Carlyle. Page 7 rather with the historical conditions which have allowed these studies to occur, the conditions of possibility for such studies to constitute themselves as possible (that is to say, thinkable) projects The thesis attempts to develop an argument that dominant psychological explanations of the developmental reading process are produced within a field that can be termed the field of `governmentality'. That is to say, they relate to a series of historically specific strategies which have concerned themselves with the problems involved in governing the population or specific populations according to specific rationalities of government. `Governmentality' does not carry a simply negative meaning: a sense of the 'state' repressing individuals by forming apparatuses of oppression above them. Rather, it refers to all those processes which, since the eighteenth century, have aimed at the maximisation of the abilities, happiness, and health of the population - a process we might think of as the 'amplification of capacities'.3 My argument is that the child is caught up in the web of governmentality; s/he is constantly incited to an amplification of his/her capacities, whether cognitive, emotional, or physical. Governmentality causes a series of interventions to be targeted 3 I follow Michel Foucault's periodisation for the birth of governmentality here. See also Chapter Four, 'The New Pedagogy', which deals with the beginnings of these maximisation strategies in relation to literacy, starting also early in the eighteenth century. Page 8 at the subjective existence of the child; in fact, these interventions are crucial in the constitution of the child. The humble techniques of reading instruction, and the uses that literacy skills are put to, are some of the vectors of these new types of power. Many recent critiques of psychology have focused on psychology as an agent of oppression.' They have pointed to the theoretical and epistemological problems that make psychology unable to function as a liberatory mechanism in people's lives. It would have been possible for me to have taken a similar perspective in regard to the psychology of reading: in particular, because of the theoretical problem of dualism, I would have been able to sustain a critique of psychology as something which distorts our understanding of the 'real' processes going on.5 No doubt psychology is constrained ultimately to conceptualise reading as a mechanical, cognitive process. This conception of reading as a transaction between the child and the text, involving the former in some way processing the latter, in its pure form ignores the social context in which the 'process' takes place; and °In the field of psychology, the texts that assume this position are legion; some of the Marxist accounts of the functioning of psychological knowledge are clear examples. See, for example, Edward Sampson, 'Cognitive Psychology as Ideology', American Psychologist 36, 730-43, 1981; Ian Parker, Discourse Dynamics, London, Routledge, 1992. 5 In the field of education, it is a fairly common strategy to engage in arguments of this sort. See, for example, Herbert R. Kohl, Reading - How To, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974. Page 9 in its diluted form reduces the social context to a purely additive effect, 'surface noise' that, in the final analysis, is secondary to the cognitive transaction between the individual and the object (in this case, the child and the text). While there is much to be gained from such critiques of psychology, I am ultimately not interested in disputing the truth claims that psychology makes as regards its knowledge of the reading child: I do not wish to join battle with psychology on the terrain of epistemology. On the contrary, I am willing to go some way to accepting such psychological theorisation, because I believe that it is productive, rather than merely descriptive, of people and the social world they live in. What I aim to do is unsettle some of the claims this body of knowledge makes to be self-evident and humanitarian. To do this, I make use of theory that has originated outside psychology, partly because it is my contention that the way psychology is set up as a discipline makes it unable to conceptualise its history and its role in the formation of `the social' in any way other than as a history of progress: a privileged access to 'truth' which is a neutral, scientific understanding of Page 1 0 the individual.6 The theory I make use of can be broadly termed `critical theory', and has in the main developed in France over the last thirty years or so. Of primary importance among these alternative positions is the notion of `discourse'; discourse, at its most basic, refers to people's talk, but the meaning of discourse in French critical theory has become somewhat extended. A particular discourse refers to a coherent set of beliefs or practices: thus there may be particular discourses that are appropriate to medicine or schooling, for example; one can speak of the discourses of paediatrics, or of developmental psychology. These phenomena, by exhibiting a systematicity in the ways in which they can be spoken of as well as practised, attain the status of discourse. The notion of discourse has been extended to encompass not just words, but actions and practices as well.

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