Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Introduction 11
In the practice of mechanistic educational psychology the belief that experts have developed
the proper way to view psychological phenomena, the proper space from which to observe them
becomes quite problematic when considered in relation to the infinite supply of observational
contexts (see Bredo [1994]). Let’s think of intelligence from a 487th contextual perspective. Using
research techniques such as factor analysis to reduce the complexity of a wide array of variables
to a few ostensibly related ones, mechanistic educational psychologists find “the answer,” or at
least “correlations.” As with Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1994) in their best-selling
The Bell Curve, fancy methodological footwork turns correlations between African-Americans
and low IQ scores into attributions of causality and truth. Statistical correlations between African-
Americans and low IQ scores are magically transformed into genetic inferiority and is the cause of
African-Americans’ low intelligence. If it didn’t serve to hurt so many people, such an assertion
would be humorous. This is where we begin to discern the tragedy of the naïve realism of
mechanistic educational psychology.
With these naïve ways of seeing so firmly implanted in educational psychology, numerous
practitioners in the field find administering tests, determining academic grade levels, and assessing
the developmental progress to be their main activities. Depending upon their scores and levels,
students will be directed to particular vocations and life paths—I was told I should be a piano
tuner because I was not “academic material” but had an interest in music. If such practitioners
of ed psych come to question the validity and effects of their tests and measurements, they often
do so on their own initiatives—few who taught them ask social and political questions of the
process. Without such hard questions and without monkey wrenches thrown into the gears of
such mechanisms, the poor and marginalized will continue to be relegated to unchallenging and
unrewarding life paths while the socioeconomically privileged will assume the good jobs and
interesting pursuits. These privileged students will continue to succeed in education and will learn
the predigested knowledges of schooling because they have been assured that there is a future
benefit to learning such material. Such students are not “smarter” than their less privileged peers;
they simply have a different social relationship to school and its role in their lives.
Certainly one of the most important dimensions of mechanistic educational psychology involves
the dismissal of the importance of studying psychological phenomena in social, cultural,
political, economic, and philosophical context. We see the results of such dismissal in the examples
previously provided. Buoyed by this contextualization, thinking can no longer be viewed
as a mere individual computational process. As Dewey argued, such a mechanistic perspective
demeans the complex nature of thought. Thought is not simply a procedure that follows rules and
instructions. Even the most controlled bureaucrats can become brilliant rule benders and creative
exploiters of the regulations they are given. They will learn to negotiate the demands of their
bosses with the needs of their clients. Thus, their thinking is shaped by numerous forces that must
be encountered and dealt with in their immediacy.
These ideas about contextualization and the complexity of everyday cognitive activity are
profoundly important as we consider the history of educational psychology. As psychology
moved from behaviorism to cognitivism in the middle of the twentieth century, it worked to
present a less passive view of the human. Yet, despite the effort, learning continued to be viewed
as a mechanistic act with an end product of neat solutions to well-defined problems. In cognitivistbased
educational psychology classes in teacher education, students were taught that learning was
a technical, linear, and rationalistic process. Such students were induced to believe that teaching
involved primarily the act of inputting data into the students’ “processing mechanisms.” Here it is
translated into symbols, inserted into memory banks, and made ready for future usage. Though it
was a reform movement, cognitivism adeptly retained the mechanism in mechanistic educational
psychology. The mainstream scholarship and teaching of the discipline retains this mechanism
in the twenty-first century.