Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

936 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
� Disciplinary power, as Michel Foucault maintained, produces “regimes of truth” that involve privileging
certain types of discourse, sanctioning certain ways of distinguishing true from false statements (positivism,
for example), underwriting certain techniques at arriving at truth, and according a certain status to those
who competently employ them.
� Disciplinary power understands that power and knowledge directly imply one another—there is no power
relation without the constitution of a body of knowledge.
� The art of management is studied in the context of disciplinary power—management science promotes a
regime of knowledge and power. The power to manage life necessitates the knowledge of life’s processes
� When disciplinary power is exerted, there is an attempt to position people as receivers of information not
producers—right-wing school curriculum manifests this dynamic.
� Disciplinary power as science disguises its dominating ability with the language of objectivity. Thus, it
naturalizes power.
Central to postformalism is a sophisticated literacy of power. Such an understanding is essential
in understanding mechanistic psychology’s attempts to naturalize the mind. A postformal
educational psychology is focused on the analysis of the way macro-social processes construct
identity. In this context postformalists appreciate the Freudian assertion that reality is not pregiven
but is fashioned by human beings, that the unconscious is not a biologically bounded black box
but just as much a social construction as any other aspect of the psyche. Such understandings
are grounded on a social, cultural, political appreciation of the influence of dominant power and
power blocs. Drawing upon the work of John Fiske on power blocs, we gain a far more complex
view of how power works.
Power Blocs: The Basic Characteristics
� Power blocs are alliances of social interest around specific issues that arise in particular conditions.
� A power bloc is better identified by what it does than what it is—it is not simply a social class, for example.
� A power bloc operates not as a conspiracy but from the recognition of mutual interests—for example,
threats to family values, heterosexual dominance.
� Imperializing (dominant macro-) power and localizing (weak, resistant, micro-) power come into conflict
at zones of interaction.
� A power bloc is an exercise of power to which certain social formations have privileged access—primarily
racial (white supremacy), class (moneyed elite), gender (patriarchy), sexual (heterosexual dominance),
religious (Christianity), and several other groups constitute power blocs.
� Social formations that are subordinated along some axes of social difference can align themselves with
a power bloc on others. Some have referred to this as the contradictory and ambiguous positioning of
individuals in the web of power relations. For example, men subordinated by class or race can and do
exert imperializing power along the axes of gender and sexuality. One can observe this phenomenon with
economically poor white men in recent U.S. elections.
Of course, what we’re dealing with here is the intersection of educational psychology with critical
theory and its concern with power and oppression. Such critical scholarship refuses to accept
the reductionism common to mechanistic psychology that reduces complex sociopsychological
processes to separate syndromes or stages on the basis of a single criterion. This reductionism
views psychological truth as a knowledge of discrete and stabilized stages and categories—for
example, she’s operating at a concrete level of cognition or he is dull normal. Typically a reductionistic,
mechanistic educational psychology is constructed on an epistemology that is unable
to deal with complexity, diverse cultural contexts, transitional states, or entities in process. In a