School Psychology

In the last decade, and especially since World War II, social psychology and school psychology have developed their own unique interests, foci, viewpoint, and scholarship. Each discipline now has its own textbooks, journals, research topics, perspectives, and political influences with which it has to deal. My intent is to show that a full appreciation of contemporary school psychology is impossible without reference to the history of studies of society generally and without knowledge of social psychological propositions.

The 1990s mark the 100th anniversary of both social psychology and psychology applied to education. At the turn of the last century, the professions of social and school psychology did not exist. Armchair theorizing about the individual and society had been recorded for approximately 2,000 years, and important work was underway in psychophysics and evolution.

Unlike social psychology, no one has proposed a widely accepted definition of school psychology. This is due in part to changes and fluctuations in the field that have occurred in the last 25 years. School psychology is no longer just the practice of clinical psychology in child guidance clinics and schools. It has been expanded to include services to individuals below and above school age, has concerned itself with social, emotional, and vocational services as well as educational ones, and has broadened to include indirect services to caregivers and social systems besides diagnosis and treatment of individual clients. Borrowing heavily from Reynolds et al. (1984), we can define school psychology as an applied psychological discipline designed to enhance the educational and psychological welfare of learners (child and adult) through prevention, diagnosis, intervention, research, and training.

By definition and tradition, school psychology is firmly embedded in psychology and its scientific method. School psychologists look to the science of psychology to provide answers to practical, educational problems, and problems that commonly are intertwined with certain social contexts. Thus, social psychology's concern with how individuals perceive, feel about, and respond to events must be shared by anyone in school psychology.

Common to both social and school psychology is the reliance on scientific method to address human behavior. Initial thinking about the origins and nature of social behavior can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, particularly the philosophers Plato ( 427-3 47) B.C.) and Aristotle ( 3 84)- 322 B.C.). Plato was concerned with how individuals and societies functioned in harmony. Plato proposed that social behavior is a function of man's biological nature and the predominance of head (intellect), heart (volition), and stomach (appetite). Particularly relevant to school psychology was Plato's claim that societies functioned best when individuals occupied places and held positions for which they were most aptly suited.

From Witmer and Goddard's work prior to and after the war, for the next quarter of a century clinical/school psychology was concerned almost exclusively with assessment, and most work was done with retarded, maladjusted, and delinquent children. Psychologists in adult-oriented clinics often were relegated to positions of testers for psychiatrists. School psychology programs also were located in metropolitan areas but in education colleges rather than psychology departments. Both school and social psychology had trouble penetrating the conservative South until the mid-1960s. As of 1963 there were only two universities awarding the PhD in school psychology in the South.