Learning 113(whose agenda would be to prepare students to occupy workplaces
governed by the rule of efficiency) and industrial psychology (whose task
had been research and transmit skills).
In addition, throughout the twentieth century, clinical psychology as an
expanding field of application out of these settings governed by the agenda
of efficiency, sought to extinguish irrational fear and anxiety through
conditioning as well to reinforce behaviors aligning with workplace values
of production and compliance with authority. In this way, clinical
psychology aligned itself with the agenda of efficiency for schools and
workplaces. This all was done while relegating the mind to an inner and
private realm untouched by such experiences as solidarity with others, and
not addressing the unavoidably present language and voice of the therapist
or manager who directed such treatments. As Rose (1996) argues,
behaviorist theory and therapy symbolize the vocation of psychology as an
administrative discipline, whose aim is social control. From training
courses in managerial techniques that promise more motivated workers, to
manuals on classroom management, or in the extinction of behaviors
giving rise to depressive symptoms, such fields of application recall
Foucault’s (1995) well-known metaphor of the prison for the operation of
disciplinary power. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
such disciplinary power regulated the production of individuals in schools,
asylums, barracks, and prisons, and these sites became regularized
according to surveillance, examination, and correction. Observation,
explanation, and intervention (as laws of learning formalized and as
validated under the standards of natural science inquiry) become, thus,
refinements of a historically preexistent bent towards calling into being a
subject whose movements may be tracked and corrected; a subject whose
consciousness remains distanced from implicit forms of learning
emanating from others, and in relation to others as well as to a commonly
lived socio-cultural context.
Summing up, we argue that contemporary general psychology does not
address, and even negates the role of the key elements to learning we noted
in section 1: others, mediating tools and language (dialogues with others),
and the specific context in which learning takes place. Rather, it is the