Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Postformalism and a Literacy of Power 937
critical postformal educational psychology, for example, IQ is not a genetically fixed phenomenon
but a rather insignificant signpost in an ever-changing, socially contingent process.
Such a reductionistic educational psychology, thus, is blinded to the possibility of growth or
breakthroughs that can occur with a modification of sociocultural, historical, or political context.
It is blinded to the possibility of a pedagogy that refuses to give in to the determinism of
psychological classifications. A postformal educational psychology is a discourse of hope that
is optimistic about the ability of humans operating on their own recognizance. Understanding
these power dynamics, postformalists believe, is a first step on a longer trek toward human
potential. We have to become experts into the way ideology and disciplinary power construct
human incompetence.
MARGINALIZATION BY PSYCHOLOGIZATION
The failure of educational psychologists to operate with a literacy of power, to understand
the social structuring of the self, leads to a variety of problems, especially for those who are in
less-powerful, marginalized positions. Without such contextualization individuals from dominant
cultural backgrounds are often unable to understand that the behaviors of socioeconomic subordinates
may reflect the structural pressures under which they have to operate. In addition, men and
women from the mainstream often believe that socioeconomic success is the result of individual
merit and that social hierarchies and bell curves represent the natural dispersion of biological
cognitive aptitude. Quite conveniently for the more privileged members of society, such individualized
belief structures serve to hide the benefits bestowed by dominant-group membership. The
same type of elitist concealment by individualization has also taken place in Western cognitive
science. Such a tacit process allows gifted education to promote the chimera that giftedness is
exclusively an individual not a socially constructed phenomenon.
The mind, mainstream cognitive scientists have contended, is the “software program” that can
be studied in sociohistorical isolation by fragmenting it and analyzing the parts—a quick and
clean form of analysis that avoids the complication of “messy” sociohistorical contextualization.
Such messiness involves touchy issues such as social values or politics and the intersection of the
biological (individual) with the collective. Thus, individualized psychology studies the machine
(mind) but not the uses to which it is put in the social cosmos of ideological conflict and political
activity. Psychologists and teachers like specialists in all fields are often educated as technicians
who must pursue a critical and contextualized view of the world through their own efforts outside
of their professional education.
These decontextualization processes tend to psychologize the study of cognition or the formation
of subjectivity in that analyses of such phenomena are undertaken only as psychological
processes, not psychological, sociological, political, economic, and other processes as well. Jean
Piaget decontextualized his study of children, often removing questions of cultural context from
his observations and analyses. Did children in non-European cultures develop in the same way?
In other historical times? In diverse class contexts? Child development in Piaget’s work was not
examined in these contexts. In the attempt to understand human political behavior, modernist
political scientists often neglected to view political beliefs and actions in the context of desire
and other emotions, focusing instead on rational dynamics.
Such abstraction/decontextualization undermined the larger effort to make sense of such activity.
Students of education often approach schooling as an institution that exists outside the
cultural, linguistic, or political economic context. Indeed, the very organization of schooling in
America is grounded around the modernist belief that knowledge can be decontextualized. Only in
this decontextualized domain can intelligence testing be viewed as an objective, uncontaminated
instrument of measurement. Moreover, only in this domain can giftedness and gifted and talented