Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

8 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
the social and the individual. Rogers never appreciated the ways that social power helped produce
subjectivity/consciousness. A central point in educational psychology, thus, involves the power
of the interaction between the individual and society, between macroregulatory practices and
microregulatory practices. Thus, no matter what types of reforms are proposed in the discipline,
if they don’t eventually address these power dynamics then they will leave the regulatory status quo
intact. In this context simply being learner-centered and focusing on the needs of the learner does
not create an emancipatory educational psychology. Outside of these power concerns educational
psychology consistently operates to support the regulation and control of various individuals.
In this context it is important to note that power doesn’t only operate by denying individuals
the “right” to engage in empowering activities. Power is often productive in that it produces
particular forms of both things and people. For example, mechanistic educational psychology
attempts to produce individuals who seek particular forms of regulation and control. Educational
psychology’s management of behavior in schools becomes more and more a technology of the
self. As in hegemony operating at the macrolevel, students via psychological techniques are
induced to regulate themselves, to grant their consent to the status quo. Of course, just like
hegemony such regulatory strategies can be unsuccessful with particular individuals and groups.
On the other hand, it can be (and has been) wildly successful.
Since educational psychology has been the dominant disciplinary discourse shaping schooling
over the last century, education has been profoundly shaped by the regulatory power described
above. Such power has promoted the dominance of patriarchy, whiteness, and class elitism and
the ways of seeing and being they promote. One encounters these power inscriptions in the
educational psychology validated teaching methods, classroom management procedures, content
standards, official lesson plans, and testing procedures found in contemporary schools. Mary
Frances Agnello extends this theme in her chapter here as she traces the impact of educational
psychology on the control of teachers’ work. Indeed, such control has never been stronger than
in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. As Mark Garrison points out in his
chapter, the words measure, measures, or measurement can be found at least 135 times in the
No Child Left Behind legislation. Every dimension of life in schools has been subjected to the
testing technologies of educational psychology in the twenty-first century, in the process leaving
nothing to chance. Mechanistic regulation has become more powerful than ever.
The authors of this handbook are deeply concerned with these power-driven regulatory dimensions
of educational psychology. Sandra Racionero and Rosa Valls, for example, argue in
their chapter that the social decontextualization of the mechanist paradigm assures that existing
power relations are maintained and dominant culture continues to be viewed as superior to all
others. In his compelling chapter on educational psychology in South Africa, J. E. Akhurst writes
that during apartheid mechanistic educational psychology helped produce a theory of “deviance”
where the “culturally different” learner was viewed as a dangerous person who was capable
of challenging the dominant (white) culture. Teachers were induced to identify and “reorient”
such young people. Not unlike their contemporary U.S. counterparts, South African educators
under apartheid were given preconstructed syllabi to follow that were tied to carefully inspected
textbooks. Administrators would not tolerate teacher divergence from this official curriculum and
monitored teacher behavior via the administration of a system of standardized tests.
Only a multidisciplinary psychology with social, economic, cultural, political, and philosophical
dimensions will help educational psychology come to understand its oppressive dimensions. In
this context educational psychologists will come to understand that the content of the curriculum
holds dramatic consequences and is not simply background noise to the brain activity under study.
Analyzing the political implications of particular ways of thinking about educational psychology
is not an outsider interruption to the “real work” of the discipline. Such analysis is central to the
very purpose of studying cognition, selfhood, learning, and teaching in the first place. In particular,