Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

4 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
traditions the effort to understand phenomena in relation to the processes and contexts of which
they are a part takes precedence over identifying causal relations between discrete variables (see
Smith [1998]). Thus, in this introduction I will explore the different traditions of educational
psychology, focusing on the root belief structures that shape them. Following this effort I will
analyze the contributions of the interpretivist tradition, in the process describing a critical interpretivist
approach. Such analysis will emphasize the explanatory benefits of interpretivism while
embracing the critical concerns with the role of power in human affairs and the ways it operates
in relation to issues of oppression and social justice.
We see the results of the dominance of the mechanistic tradition, as Mary Frances Agnello
points out in her chapter on scientific literacy testing, in the emergence and influence of IQ
and other forms of testing and measurement as well as the demand that research in educational
psychology be conducted only as a verifiable and statistics-based human science. Agnello goes
on to assert that in this mechanistic tradition the focus on the measurement of “human responses
to various stimuli” led to a split between those mechanists who would not study consciousness
and those interpretivists who would. Picking up on this theme, Kathleen Berry in her chapter on
memory traces the mechanistic perspective back to the science of Rene Descartes who positioned
the study of cognition in biology as an analysis of the physiology of the brain. Memory, thus, was
viewed as an object existing materially within the container of the brain. Memory and mind were
viewed as fundamentally separate from body and spirit. (In this context see Richard Prawat’s
chapter on diverse historical understandings of the nature and location of mind.) In the Cartesian
context the biologically grounded, cause and effect tradition of mechanism exercised its power
over the interpretive tradition, positioning human beings more as objects than as subjects.
The debate between the two traditions of educational psychology, as Patricia Whang points out
in her chapter on Buddhism and educational psychology, may be best exemplified historically in
the early twentieth-century debate between mechanist Edward Thorndike and interpretivist John
Dewey. In the eyes of the educational psychologists Thorndike won the argument, tying educational
psychology to quantification and laboratory studies of teaching and learning. Thorndike’s
victory, Mark Garrison maintains in his chapter on psychometrics, meant that the knowledge
produced by the testing technologies of educational psychology could be used to justify forms of
oppression based on particular individuals being designated as less than human. Obviously, this
is one of the negative social effects of the mechanistic tradition previously referenced.
Psychology is a child of the Age of Reason, the Western European Enlightenment of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What scholars refer to as modernity arose out of this
Scientific Revolution. Traditional sources of meaning were swept aside in the modernist tsunami
and psychology emerged as a discourse designed in part to restore meaning in new social and
intellectual conditions. The hope was that by placing our faith in the scientific method and its
objectively produced knowledge that human beings could move beyond arbitrary authority. They
would have the knowledge to make rational and moral decisions about their lives and the world
around them. In later centuries we can see this same impulse at work as educational psychology
would be used as a scientific means of determining educational purpose.
In the mindset of mechanistic educational psychology, educators do not determine their purposes
based on larger understandings of justice and meaning as they interact with the demands
of particular social, political, and cultural contexts. Instead, such educators derive purpose from
the empirical studies of educational psychology. Objective knowledge in this context is used to
guide what teachers and students should be doing in terms of efficiency and smooth functioning
of bureaucratic organizations. In this context the work of those who study the political, social,
cultural, and economic contexts of education in relation to larger philosophical and theoretical
systems of meaning is irrelevant to the work of schools. The modes of knowledge constructed in
these contexts are not viewed as legitimate in the mechanistic educational psychological cosmos.