ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests, psychology’s past was promising, but its future could be enigmatic. In what sense was the past promising? Psychology in the 19th, 20th, and the beginning of the 21st century was optimistic and surprisingly productive. Psychology could inform and enhance educational practice from pre-kindergarten through graduate school—and beyond, in lifelong learning. The moral improvement of college students that was the focus of 18th- and early 19th-century psychology could now be based on sound empirical findings. Psychology’s past held out enormous promise of all the wonderful things that psychology could do by way of research progress to deepen understanding of the human condition and to apply psychological knowledge. Psychology as an integrated, diversified umbrella discipline might have had its heyday in the middle of the 20th century, but that heyday appears to have passed. Psychology continues to provide ever-increasing understanding of mind and behavior as well as applications of such understanding to the improvement of the human condition.
