Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Desperately Seeking Psyche I 619
constitute, in fact, its strength, its rigor, and its virtue—the very ground of our confidence in
it and its discoveries. Still, that which educational psychology connotes hardly inspires us to
contemplate or marvel at the profound human mysteries and motivations subsumed in its study,
as the subject—and object—of its study, and referenced in its very name. At best, it seems, we
call to mind Piaget and his insights into different developmental stages for learning, Montessori
and the implications of her work for a child-centered pedagogy, or Gardner and his theory of
multiple intelligences capable of broadening in some measure our concept of intelligence, and
mind. Or practically speaking, we enjoy, perhaps, the validity of scientific research to support
certain beliefs—even if often somewhat obvious—and practices issuing from them, such as:
students learn more effectively with support and encouragement, hungry children have difficulty
concentrating in school, or reading with children at home positively impacts academic learning.
And we attend, in the name of this science and its findings about human learning, to things like
time-on-task, wait-time, positive feedback, and scope and sequence in instruction. Conceivably at
worst, we model our educational practices after Skinner’s discoveries about manipulating human
behavior, approach learning through the reductive lens of Bloom’s taxonomy of knowledge, or
initiate teaching in some formulaic presentation of Tyler’s Rationale or “Teacher Effectiveness.”
However, in most of these cases, we build, however unwittingly, on the history of predictive
and prescriptive education, bolstered by educational psychology, that turns texts into tests and
students into statistics—all too often in the service of educational inequality, of social regulation
and reproduction—by IQ testing and ability grouping, via psychological labels and deficit
models. In addition, this kind of education, and the psychological study that supports it, with its
dehumanizing effects, escapes scrutiny because it is cloaked in the guise of scientific objectivity,
the language of neutrality. It also undermines and diminishes the powers of the human mind, often
trivializing and de-intellectualizing the work of education, paradoxically at odds with the aim of
educational excellence. Alas, this portrait appears to paint, as well, the dominant and enduring
legacy of educational psychology. This legacy, and the problems it perpetuates, is certainly, of
course, something we need to investigate further—hopefully toward transforming it in ways that
cultivate our humanity, rather than diminish it, through the work of this field of study and the
work of education itself.
“DESPERATELY SEEKING PSYCHE”
The problems that plague the field of educational psychology have indeed seriously hindered
the realization of its immense potential for understanding the human mind and assisting the
realization of its highest powers. In fact, the field has been “troubled” from the beginning,
it seems, and the target of criticism, with its predecessor psychology since its inception as a
discipline of study in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The judgment to which it has been
subjected, however, has not abated its power—making it all the more critical to address what is
at issue in its work. In truth, educational psychology is laden with the concerns with which the
fields of education and psychology themselves are laden, especially given their histories. We can
further posit that our very selves and our very societies—how we conceive of and construct them,
are essentially fraught with these problems, as well. Basically, educational psychology—largely
symptomatic of the ills of modern times—looks enthusiastic and [rigorously], at that which
lies behind us and before us and about us, and fixated upon externals, misses the all-important
“within” us—fails to genuinely see us. With its overly active mind, inquiring into mind, the field
misses mind itself, having lost its mind, we could say. Desperately seeking Psyche, educational
psychology does so in all the wrong places; or worse, it seems to have forgotten exactly who it is
that it seeks to find, and to know.