Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

10 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
intelligence. Of course, this holds profound consequences when students—often from the social,
cultural, and economic margins—are judged to be deficient or incapable of productive thinking
or activity. Far too often such deficiency is nothing more than a way of operating that falls
outside the purview of the mechanistic imagination. An epistemological pluralism, a diversity
of paradigmatic perspectives, is direly needed in mainstream educational psychology for both
catalyzing the advance of the discipline as well as saving “different students” from the label of
“failure” and the justification of their marginalization. The editors and authors of this handbook
believe that it is more important than ever to challenge the victories of mechanism.
MECHANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY AND NAÏVE REALISM
The great cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner uses the phrase “empty mechanism” to describe
the decontextualizing, individuating educational psychology that has resulted in universal
pronouncements about the nature and development of the human mind. (See Lise Bird’s powerful
chapter on developmental appropriateness in this context.) The naïve realist epistemological
stance of the mechanistic position unquestioningly believes that its findings are
� transhistorical and transcultural truths
� descriptions of the mind that correspond to a natural reality
� political neutral pronouncements about the psychological world (see Kenneth Gergen [1997]).
Even when particular scholars such as Jean Piaget operated outside the mechanistic context,
the naïve realism of field induced educational psychologists to discount such transgressions and
emphasize the most reductionistic dimensions of such work (see Burman [1994]). The reasoning
of the mechanistic paradigm is universalistic, unhampered by those pesky differences of culture.
Thus, the unquestioned epistemological assumptions of mechanism tacitly shaped what aspects of
the mind psychologists could or could not see. And this is one of the key points of this handbook:
structures, unseen and ignored by mainstream psychology, have profoundly shaped what passes
as our knowledge of the subject matter of educational psychology.
In his own brilliant way John Dewey in How We Think in 1933 exposed the deficiencies of
an epistemology of naïve realism. Such a form of empiricism, he contended, leads to “mental
inertia, laziness, [and] unjustifiable conservatism.” In psychology such a lack of rigor, albeit in
the name of hard science, induces scholars to invent “fantastic and mythological explanations”
for cognitive processes. Thus, inventions such as Spearman’s “g”—the internal force that propels
mental ability—or IQ or multiple intelligences are assumed to be “real.” In this process belief
in such scientific phantasms becomes disciplinary dogma and the rigor of subsequent research
and theorizing is actually subverted. In the end we are not nearly as smart as we think we are
as scientific and rational beings. With the help of this naïve realism the heart of psychology was
extracted and consumed in the ritual of modernist science.
Thus, we come to the more fallible and tentative psychology of interpretivism. We begin to
see that all psychological assertions are interpretations of a complex reality and that those who
articulate a view of the mind with the claim of truth are victims of the sirens of realism and
positivism. Such truth mongers fail to discern the social, cultural, discursive, epistemological,
and ideological construction of our sense of reality. Naïve realism/positivism in this context
fails to account for the fact that all entities are parts of larger processes that change over time.
Mechanistic psychologists caught in the trap of these epistemological webs do not understand
that when we view particular psychological phenomena in light of different contexts, we may see
them in entirely new ways. Indeed, the supply of such contexts is infinite.