Educ Psychol Rev (2012) 24:911 DOI 10.

1007/s10648-011-9188-1 COMMENTARY

Reprising John Dewey: A Review of Andreas Demetriou, George Spanoudis & Antigoni Mouyi's Educating the Developing Mind: Towards an Overarching Paradigm
David R. Olson

Published online: 20 December 2011 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

Abstract As a summary of current advances in developmental psychology, the above article makes some useful contributions. As a contribution to educational policy and practice, it is limited if not a failure for two reasons. It fails to come to grips with the real demands of living classrooms, and second, it fails to grasp the actual subjective lives of the children taught. The gap between science and practice is now as large as it was when John Dewey first called attention to the whole child and a pragmatic approach to knowledge and thinking. Keywords Reform . Folk pedagogy One cannot but admire the attempt by Andreas Demetrious, George Spanoudis, and Antigoni Mouyi to provide an overarching paradigm for a century of research on cognitive development that would have significant implications for educational practice and policy. The science they review, all of it, is sufficiently important, serious, and original that it has earned publication in major journals. Some of their efforts such as itemizing the cognitive domainscategorical, quantitative, spatial, causal, and socialand cross-classifying them with stages of logical, epistemological, and self-development are impressive. It remains unclear, however, whether such a taxonomy has any relevance to the educational goals embraced by the authors. The major themes that bubble to the top of the analysis are sometimes important. Unfortunately, these themes are far from original, as they have characterized the study of education for well over a century. That development proceeds by stages and must be accommodated by the school has been recognized since the invention of grade levels and the concept of promotion. The pedagogical importance of big ideas such as gravity and evolution around which more specific studies could be organized were central themes for both Dewey and Bruner and, indeed, find a place in the textbook called Teaching and learning that I read as a prospective teacher more than 50 years ago. That children's knowledge grows in depth and complexity with development and, more importantly, that children's epistemological development, that is, their understanding of how one knows, is embedded in the traditional educational mantra give reasons for your answers. The importance of learner's own false reasons in cognitive growth is
D. R. Olson (*) OISE/University of Toronto, 252 Bloor St. W., Toronto, ON M5S 1 V6, Canada e-mail: david.olson@utoronto.ca

10

Educ Psychol Rev (2012) 24:911

something we learned from both Piaget (1952) and Bruner (1996). The author's review in confirming these views perhaps puts meat on these traditional bones. Their more original proposal of a problem solving loop that links model building with cognitive control processes and the self-awareness and control loop which links self-awareness and self-control adds to these more traditional theories and perhaps offers interesting pedagogical possibilities. They certainly invite further research. Other traditional educational themes get short shrift. That moral development is an integral part of intellectual development, which would seem to be implied by their selfawareness and self-control loop, is set aside as if independent of cognitive development. Further, motivation, while essential for learning, is set aside as non-cognitive. Perhaps most importantly, the relation between the personal, the whole child made famous by Dewey (1976), is set aside in preference for the learner's subpersonal processes, processes over which the child has no control and for which he or she has no responsibility. The two or three pervasive changes that have occurred in schooling in the past few decadesthe attention to meaning making or hypothesis testing now pervasive in the enquiry methods of schooling and the pervasiveness of group learning, peer teaching, and the like, are neither suggested by the theories the authors review nor implemented because of such theories. The raging debates about the teaching and learning of reading will not be helped by the theories offered herein. Reform seems to come from a different direction. In a word, I am not optimistic that the author's ambitious goal, that of informing practice, has been achieved. Of course, such a review serves a second purpose, that of apprising the educational theory and research community of current developments in the field of developmental psychology. Education is at the intersection of several disciplines, and it is important that we keep tract of developments in each other's domains. The review serves a useful function in meeting that goal. Indeed, there are few, if any, comparable attempts to bring all of developmental and differential psychology together. Most developmentalists spend their time trying to marginalize if not supplant their competitors in the way that cognitive psychology, for example, has, at least in their own eyes, largely displaced personality and intelligence theory. So the search for complementarity is welcome and relatively successful. Like an annual review article, this review does help to bring a reader up to date with a broad range of research. On the other hand, the uncritical compilation of an abundance of somewhat loosely integrated findings makes for dull reading and would overwhelm those who want to better understand the learning and development of children. The analysis pulls poor Humpty Dumpy into fragments so small that no amount of summarizing can ever put him back together again. The child as a learner trying to make sense of the complex social world of the classroom is completely lost in the flurry of specific findings. Worse still, any teacher attempting to entertain the myriad considerations enumerated by the authors in teaching any group of children any topic whatsoever would be completely overwhelmed. There is little here that an earnest teacher could actually apply in planning or executing a lesson. How does one keep in mind the expectancies, knowledge, modes of thinking, and goals of 20 children at the same time that one thinks of the knowledge to be covered, the epistemological and logical processes involved in acquiring that knowledge as well as the possible contributions to the self-efficacy of the learners? Impossible of course. Educators require and indeed have developed an entirely different vocabulary, a folk pedagogy (Olson and Bruner 1996; Bruner 1996) for dealing with children, lessons, and classroom lifewhere did we leave off, what are we to cover today, what are students responsible for, who did their assignments, how do we know that children actually learned what was set out in the guideline, and so on. Perhaps we need a new psychology that would provide teachers with

Educ Psychol Rev (2012) 24:911

11

a more powerful vocabulary for talking to and thinking about their students, a vocabulary shareable with all of the partners concerned with the welfare of children. What would such a theory of cognitive development and education look like? Foremost, in my view, it would help us to understand more fully just what the child is up to, what the learner thinks he or she is doing, how they establish mutual knowledge, what goals they are willing to take responsibility for, and the ways they judge their own and others' successes and failures. The cognitive psychology summarized by Demetriou et al. describes the mental life of the child from the outside in a vocabulary that is largely unknown and essentially irrelevant to the learner himself or herselfhis long-term store or her spatial ability, his IQ or her ADD. To engage with learners is to engage with them as persons capable of entertaining and evaluating beliefs and acting for reasons. Giving and evaluating reasons is essential to the growth of responsibility (Olson 2003). Demetriou, Spanoudis, and Mouyi, like many of the psychologists whose work they report, view children as an entymologist views a colony of ants, observing them from the outside, calculating variables, and correlating them with aspects of behavior. Educators, on the other hand, must see learners from the inside, as one of us, if they are to engage them in the practice of giving and asking for reasons for thinking and acting in more sophisticated ways. The goal of education is to foster the development of rational persons capable of grasping more worthwhile goals, mastering more advanced means of approaching them, and accepting responsibility for achieving them. The best parts of developmental psychology are those parts that alert us again to the boundless energy and enthusiasm for understanding visible in even the youngest children and their amazing capacity for learning from others, especially well-prepared and devoted teachers, who help them realize the limits of their present competencies and the understanding to be gained through developing new ones. This is beginning to sound like a reprise of John Dewey, always a good sign.

References
Bruner, J. S. (1996). The culture of education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Dewey, J. (1976). The child and the curriculum. In Boydston (ed.), John Dewey: The middle works, volume 6: 19101911 (pp.271291). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Olson, D. R. (2003). Psychological theory and educational reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olson, D. R., & Bruner, J. S. (1996). Folk psychology and folk pedagogy. In D. R. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), Handbook of education and human development (pp. 927). Oxford: Blackwell. Piaget, J. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children. New York: Basic Books.