Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Introduction 35
relinquishing their disposition to explore themselves and the world around them. Do not mistake
this rejection of dry formalistic procedure as a call for a “return to nature” and the hereditary
natural developmental process of the child. (See Lise Bird Claiborne’s compelling chapter on
developmentalism and developmental appropriateness to gain a textured understanding of the
complexity of the developmental process.)
The vital logical movement of individuals can be facilitated by good teachers and by entry into
Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (ZPD) where students learn by association with skilled
others. Thus, as is generally the case with postformalism, we seek to expand cognitive abilities
in ways that are informed by multiple insights while avoiding dogmatic blueprints for how to do
it. Formal reasoning is profoundly different from everyday thinking. Formal thinking embraces a
subject matter that is impersonal as algebraic formulae and consciously operates to remove itself
from the subjectivity, the dispositions, and intentions of the thinker. Postformalism categorically
rejects this type of cognition and seeks to connect with and understand all that formal reasoning
seeks to exclude.
In the postformal context we get smarter by creating our own multilogical ZPDs. In these
contexts we construct our own community of experts—whether virtually by reading their work or
by interacting with them personally. In our self-constructed ZPDs we build new intellectual and
action-based relationships and structurally couple with multiple minds. Schools, postformalists
argue, should be grounded on these types of cognitive principles—not on the psychometric,
abstract individual, decontextualized, and personally disconnected models of the no-child-leftbehind
ilk. We can teach students to be lifelong learners who understand that intelligence is
not a fixed, hereditarian concept but a fluid, socially constructed construct that can be learned
when individuals are exposed to dynamic and challenging new contexts—for example, teacher
and/or self-constructed ZPDs. Viewed in this context postformalism is a psychology of hope than
transcends the nihilism of mechanism. Postformalists refuse to believe that human beings are
condemned to academic hell because of the infallibility and intractability of test scores.
Thus, as a critical discourse, postformalism seeks an empowering notion of learning. Directly
challenging mechanistic psychology’s passive view of the learner, postformalism is dedicated to
a respect for human dignity and the diverse range of talents and abilities that individuals operating
in diverse social, cultural, geographic, and economic context develop. Indeed, postformalist look
behind IQ and other standardized test scores to uncover the infinite talents that people with
low-test scores develop in the idiosyncratic contexts of their lives. When mechanistic influenced
pedagogies refuse to consider these amazing talents and pronounce individuals with low-test
scores incapable of learning, they commit a psychological and educational crime against such
students.
Postformalists in this context believe in the ingenuity of human beings, the power of individuals
to learn, to create their own ZPDs. One of the most important impediments to such human
agency is the ideology of mechanistic psychology. This regressive ideology works to convince
individuals from marginalized backgrounds that they are incapable of learning like “normal”
students. Unfortunately, mechanists do a good job of convincing such boys and girls, men and
women of their “lack of ability.” Over the last few decades I have interviewed scores of brilliant
people who told me that they were not good at “school learning” or “book learning.” Often they
told me of their lack of intelligence as they were in the middle of performing difficult and complex
forms of mental labor. They may not have done well in school but they had learned the most
important mechanistic psychological lesson—they were not academic material.
In my conversations with those students mislabeled and abandoned by mechanistic educational
psychology, I observe powerful intellectual abilities in their interactions with the world. They
often illustrate a compelling ability to see things previously not discerned in domains dominated
by conventional perspectives. They many times break through the tyranny of “the obvious”