Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Critical Epistemology 511
from much more complex issues of what and how we conceive of truth, knowledge, intelligence,
and ultimately the purpose of education.
Fundamental to understanding the causes of the failure of our educational system is to uncover
the traditional assumptions underlying the thinking of critics and even supporters of education
in this country, as well as our own. This requires that we look closely at our conceptions of how
the human brain works, how learning takes place, what we consider worth learning, and how we
assess intelligence. In short, we must reexamine our most deeply held beliefs about the kind of
human beings we are teaching our children to be and the role of schools in achieving that goal.
In pursuing the above line of inquiry we discover inevitably that so much of what we consider
“true” about how the brain thinks and learns is derived from the dominant mechanistic tradition
of educational psychology. This tradition, which reduces the brain to the simplistic metaphor of a
computer that uploads and downloads information on command if the right sequence of buttons
are pressed, has resulted in producing a vast population of teachers and students dispossessed
from the teaching/learning experience by imprisoning the conception of what humanity is and
the role of education in its development. If we earnestly are committed to providing all children
with a meaningful, joyous, and empowering education, we need to redefine the problem by
acknowledging fundamental misconceptions born of the tradition of mechanistic educational
psychology that are embedded in the current dominant educational structure. Educational “failure”
is not to be found in the teachers and students: It’s within the dominant traditional tightly bound
notions of the brain, knowledge, truth, and intelligence that have subsumed and misguided even
the most well-intended educational efforts.
The study of critical epistemology has enabled me to begin to understand what I had regarded
as teacher and student dispossession from the teaching/learning experience. Rather than assume
that the teachers and/or students are somehow to blame, I now interpret their disengaged behavior
as an act of resistance to the ultimately dehumanizing and professionally deskilling effect of
a state-imposed standards-driven curriculum and assessment régime, one that demands that
teachers instruct “the facts” with little or no room for creativity, and worse, with little or no
opportunity to evaluate and question the value of what is taught. Although I am loath to admit it,
I was formerly likely to attribute the disturbing phenomena I observed to a fundamental lack of
teaching ability and/or the insurmountable and debilitating effect of socioeconomic issues of the
students’ backgrounds. Perhaps in some cases my analysis may have been accurate. Even so, I
am convinced that the behaviors I observed can be better understood in terms of the far-reaching
and powerful legacy of the effects that traditional mechanistic educational psychology have on
virtually every aspect of how we “do” education, from teacher training and curriculum design
to the physical appearance of classrooms, buildings, and how teacher and student behaviors are
regulated. To begin to address the “problem” in education today, we must uncover the underlying
ideological and epistemological paradigms inscribed in teaching and learning that have served not
only to create a sense of dispossession between teachers and students and the teaching/learning
experience, but also understand how these have served to reinforce dominant power structures
and class/cultural inequalities in this society. For some, and most likely for those who firmly
believe in the absolute merit of traditional mechanistic educational psychology and the structures
it has produced, this may be a very unsettling process.
My objective in writing here is to trace the historical derivation of the dominant ideological and
epistemological frameworks underlying traditional (positivistic, Western, white, male) education,
and postmodern responses to these frameworks. If successful, I hope that students of traditional
mechanistic educational psychology and others will gain insight into understanding why so much
of what takes place in most educational settings is experienced as frustration, apathy, and despair.
Moreover, I hope to respond to those critics who are only too willing, as I had been, to blame