Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Critical Epistemology 519
approach. This is not to say that they suggest that schools completely dispose of scientific (positivistic)
ways of knowing. By contrast, they assert that transformative scientists understand that
any science is a social construction, produced in a particular culture and specific historical era, an
understanding shared by phenomenological hermeneutists, complexity theorists, as well as other
scholars and proponents of indigenous knowledges. In sum, inclusion of indigenous knowledges
in education serves two essential purposes: (a) providing a means of understanding the world
from a variety of different epistemological orientations and (b) promoting a more democratic
ideology by reinforcing the notion that understanding the world via the knowledge systems of
indigenous (subjugated) peoples have value for everyone.
Giroux’s Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope (1997) offers a response to the reductionistic
notion that schools are necessarily and hopelessly subordinate to political, economic, and social
power structures by demonstrating both the oppressive and potentially emancipatory forces
of the process of schooling. Giroux asserts that we all participate in ideology on conscious,
subconscious, and material levels, but that we are not necessarily imprisoned in it: human beings
have “agency”—the ability to resist and transform the ideologies that oppress us. To begin to
address social injustices and transform society, Giroux believes that critical educators need to
(a) become aware of the extent to which ideologies exert a force over our belief systems and
behaviors and (b) enable students to become critically aware of these forces. Giroux (in keeping
with the post-discourses of other theorists), views positivism as antithetical to developing students
to participate in a critical democracy (society as a struggle for just distribution of knowledge and
power) since the mode of reasoning embedded in the culture of positivism cannot reflect on
meaning, value, or anything that cannot be verified in the empirical tradition. To counter this
tradition, Giroux argues that teachers need to regard themselves as transformative intellectuals
who help students acquire critical knowledge about basic societal structures such as the economy,
the state, the workplace, and mass culture. To do this, teachers and students need to become aware
that ideology operates at the level of lived experience signified in material practices produced
within certain historical, existential, and class traditions. In sum, it can be said that for Giroux, to
be liberated from the oppressive ideologies of society (reproduced and reinforced in schooling,
institutions, mass media, and culture), students and teachers must become producers of their own
knowledge, drawing on epistemologies such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, and complexity
theory in their efforts to become critical not only of themselves but also of the society at
large.
WHAT NEXT?
Without question, the current system of education is in crisis in this country. Conservative
“solutions” to the problem, steeped as they are in the “scientific data” of traditional mechanist
educational psychology, have taken the form of reactionary measures such as those embodied by
the No Child Left Behind legislation. Similar to other educational efforts predicated on dominant
Western, white, male, epistemology and ideology, these measures are certain to broaden even
further the chasm between the dominant elite minority and vast marginalized majority that
comprise this country. Rather than try to return to a mythical Golden Age of education that never
existed except in our imagination, we must honestly examine the purpose of teaching and learning
and our goals in educating the young. Gaining a greater understanding of the oblique agendas
embedded in how we go about schooling via familiarity with the study of critical epistemology is
an integral first step in this process. We must optimistically redefine what the primary objective
of education should be, beginning with the question of what kind of society we hope to create.
Mindful of the seriously debilitating limitations of mechanistic educational psychology that
traditionally has been the basis for how we construct intelligence and knowledge, we must