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What Goals Should Schools Be Trying to Meet?

David Olson is deservedly well-known as a developmental and cognitive psychologist with broad-ranging historical and philosophical interests. Two of his previous books that anticipate aspects of Psychological Theory and Educational Reform (PTER) are The World on Paper [1994], which he authored, and The Handbook of Education and Human Development [1996], which he coedited. The mission of PTER is ‘to provide a better understanding of the relation between psychological theory and educational reform’ (p. xi) through ‘an elaboration of chapter 3 of Bruner’s The Culture of Education (1996), in which he poses an antinomy between education as human development versus education as social reproduction’ (p. xiii). The problem that Olson sets out to solve is how to treat as analytically real both persons as intentional beings and institutions with their normative bureaucratic structures and practices, and then grapple with the relationship between them in one domain, schooling (law would be another). He exemplifies the more typical focus on either persons or institutions in recent influential books: ‘Much of the current educational reform literature merely takes sides ..., one side [historian] (Ravitch, 2000) attentive primarily to issues of norms and standards of the institution, the other [school principal] (Meier, 1999) attentive primarily to the subjective mental life of students’ (p. 143). After two opening chapters, PTER is divided into three sections, of five chapters each, on the school as institution and then as pedagogical environment for individuals, and a shorter section on how to conceptualize a better relationship between them. Part II, on schools as institutions, quickly becomes an analysis of schools as bureaucracies (and I will use the two terms interchangeably). This section may be less familiar to Human Development readers, as it was to me, and even seem of less