Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

20 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
a new intensity in an era of transnational corporations and the “war on terror” in the twenty-first
century.
Though most Americans are not aware of it, the anticolonial rebellion initiated the liberation
movements of the 1960s and 1970s that shook the United States and other Western societies.
Indeed, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement,
the Native American rights movement, and the gay rights movement all took their cue from the
anticolonial struggles of individuals around the world. For example, Martin Luther King wrote
his dissertation on the anticolonial rebellion against the British led by Mohandas Gandhi in India.
King focused his scholarly attention on Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance tactics, later drawing upon
such strategies in the civil rights movement.
By the mid-1970s a conservative counterreaction—especially in the United States—to these
liberation movements was taking shape with the goals of “recovering” what was perceived to be
lost in these movements (see Gresson [1995]). Thus, the politics, cultural wars, and educational
and psychological debates, policies, and practices of the last three decades cannot be understood
outside of these efforts to “recover” white supremacy, patriarchy, class privilege, heterosexual
“normality,” Christian dominance, and the European intellectual canon. They are the defining
macro-concerns of our time, as every topic is refracted through their lenses. Any view of educational
psychology, curriculum development, or professional education conceived outside of this
framework ends up becoming a form of ideological mystification.
Mechanistic educational psychology is enjoying contemporary success in its testing and labeling
functions in part because it plays such an important role in “recovering” what was perceived
to have been lost in the anticolonial liberation movements. One of the psychological dimensions
of what was perceived to be lost was the notion of Western or white intellectual supremacy. No social
mechanism works better than intelligence/achievement testing to “prove” Western supremacy
over the peoples of the world. Psychometricians operating in their ethnocentric domains routinely
proclaim the intellectual superiority of Western white people. Richard Herrnstein and Charles
Murray, for example, in their best-selling book, The Bell Curve, write unabashedly that the average
IQ of African peoples is about 75. The fact that the concept of an intelligence test is a
Western construct with embedded Western ways of understanding the world is never mentioned
in this brash assertion. Thus, the contemporary psychological obsession with labeling, measuring,
and victim blaming is concurrently a macro-historical, meso-disciplinary, and a micro-individual
matter. Critical interpretivist educational psychologists cannot allow mechanistic reductionism to
continue to subvert our understanding of the complexity of these issues.
FAILURE AND DIFFERENCE
The social dimension of the psychological process by which individuals are labeled failures is
obvious. A political economy of aptitude exists that has to do with an individual’s access to the
psychological resources of the larger society—to Bruner’s cultural amplifiers of cognition. How
can we measure intellectual ability without taking into account an individual’s or a group’s access
to such cultural tools? In light of the Eurocentrism and reductionism embedded in mechanistic
ways of viewing the psychological realm, we begin to understand that those individuals labeled
as failures are often social and cultural outsiders. Their difference from the white, male, upper
middle/upper class, conformist mainstream is viewed as deficiency, irremediable incompetence.
Without an educational psychology and a pedagogy that find insights in diverse traditions,
epistemologies, worldviews, and macro-histories, these attributions of the failure of those different
from the Eurocentric center will continue to rule the day.
As George Dei and Stanley Doyle-Wood contend in their chapter in this handbook, “we must
all develop an anticolonial awareness of how colonial relations are sustained and reproduced in