Theories of Learning and Education. Notes for a Proposal From Psychoanalysis (Essay).

Abstract

Given the epistemological, scientific and real status that education has taken in our times, it is necessary to review again and again the postulates and constructs that support it both at the level of theoretical and methodological reflection. In its beginnings, psychology and other social sciences have generated, from their own fields of development and application, elements to build educational proposals that pursue some goals over others, as well as various strategies that have been applied in the field of teaching. -learning. In this way, we can find the behaviorist, Gestaltist, humanist proposal, etc., from which valuable contributions have been offered that have been put into practice according to the historical moment in which it is going through. This essay aims to offer some reflections on the impact and significance of assuming, as a starting point, one or another theory of learning for the theoretical development and for the practice of education.

Behaviorism has its origins in the proposal that J. B. Watson made in the year 1920 under the influence of Darwinism, empiricism, pragmatism and positivism with the desire to provide "scientificity" to the psychology that was developed then with more advanced proposals and deductions. of a philosophical type, as well as with some of the discoveries of sensory physiology, mesmerism and phrenology that sought to locate the manifestations of madness in different parts and morphological characteristics of the brain. Simultaneously, another current of thought was developed based on the Freudian postulates about the unconscious life of the human being, but whose approach could only be done under the aegis of introspection and with the inability to have certainty and objectivity in the reports provided by the experts. study subjects or patients.

The question of the scientific nature of psychology is still far from having been resolved: the Watsonian legacy, more because of the intention than because of the contents of its doctrine, continues to permeate countless proposals that have manifested themselves in various forms of materialism (eliminative, physicalist , emergentists) or in reductionist proposals whose basis finds its support in neopositivist approaches that seek to equate mental phenomena with nervous phenomena or vice versa. (Indeed, the scientific status of psychology does not depend solely on its relations to neurophysiology. It can also be debated outside of the question of mind-body relations. Unfortunately, psychology has become subservient to the more or less isolated study of different mental manifestations: sensation, perception, emotion, affects, behavior, etc., and confined to the study of such phenomena almost exclusively in the laboratory...) Although it is not the purpose of this essay to delve into these questions of scientificity, becomes relevant whenever it is intended to provide sustenance to the being and the task of education.

In this context, we will refer briefly to one of the approaches on which some educational strategies and practices were and still are based —although not with the courage, nor with the breadth and depth of the origins of the theory—: the behaviorism.