Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Critical Epistemology 515
not for producing them: In turn, students became responsible for “receiving the facts” and not
interpreting/questioning or otherwise making sense of them. Ultimately dispossessed of whatever
other knowledges they may have had before entering the education system as well as the ability
to produce knowledge through the teaching/learning experience, it seems inevitable that both
teachers and students should come to feel and behave adversely to what they are expected to “do”
together in the classroom.
Unfortunately, how education is traditionally conceived was not the only domain affected
by Western science. Approaching human thinking as an “object” that can be dismantled and
understood in terms of its component “parts,” traditional mechanistic educational psychologists
and cognitive scientists have endeavored to define intelligence by applying positivistic methods
to the human mind, the primary objective being to “quantify” intelligence, which they narrowly
defined as performing certain “thinking” tasks on demand. One devastating consequence of
this approach was the utter dismissal and denigration of human emotion, physical sensation,
intuition, and spontaneous improvisation, without which it is nearly impossible to imagine being
able to “think” or lead a healthy, interesting, and successful life. Another terrible outcome of
this positivistic approach was that it also led to the development of “objective” measurements
such as the Binet–Stanford IQ test, the Standardized Achievement Test, and a variety of other
assessments designed to “quantify” human learning. These tests are predicated on the assumption
that if schools, teachers and students are doing their jobs, one can measure what students know
on the basis of how they perform in the decontextualized setting of an examination room. On
closer analysis, however, Bourdieu among others has suggested that these tests reveal more about
the values and cultural assumptions of those who construct the tests and the students’ familiarity
with cultural norms (including the curricular “facts”) of the dominant class than they do about
the critical and creative qualities of how students process and apply what they know. In short, in
their efforts to analyze the human mind in terms of very narrow mathematical and psychometric
measurements that essentially reduce intelligence to quantifying how many “facts” one knows
during a decontextualized test, traditional mechanistic educational psychologists and cognitive
scientists fail to recognize, as Varela (1992) has pointed out, the value and importance of the
nuances, subtleties, and ambiguities by which some of the most spontaneous creative and abstract
thinking is characterized and enacted throughout lived experience. Assessed in this manner, it is no
wonder that many students feel misunderstood and ultimately insulted by traditional instruction
and evaluation.
The simplistic curriculum design and intelligence assessment standards provided by educational
“experts”—those followers of traditional mechanistic educational psychology and cognitive
science—ultimately have served to undermine education in this country. It is inevitable that
teachers and students, excluded from research and knowledge-producing activities in the daily
teaching/learning experience and constrained by highly limited definitions of what intelligence is,
feel dispossessed from what they are expected to “do” while in the classroom. So long as teachers
are regarded as unskilled taskmasters responsible for inculcating a static set of state-sanctioned
scientifically produced “facts,” the sheer boredom and disempowerment that accompanies this
approach will continue to result in professional dissatisfaction and burnout. Likewise, so long as
students are expected to be unquestioning recipients and parrots of such an education, there will
continue to be “winners” (compliant students) and “losers” (noncompliant ones) in the educational
process. Within the current traditional positivistic, Western, white, male framework that
underlies education in this country, it is now clear to me that the primary objective of schooling
is to reinforce the dominant culture/class structure while ensuring the continued subjugation of
marginalized (nonpositivistic, non-Western, nonwhite, nonmale) voices that would challenge its
authority. As such, much of our educational system facilitated a dominant belief in traditional
mechanist educational psychology, has become a bleak, spirit-breaking institution destined to