Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

938 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
education be viewed as simply a phenomenon of individual cognitive ability. To maintain the
psychological, educational, social, and political economic status quo, contextual insights must be
removed from efforts to understand cognitive and pedagogical processes.
THE HIERARCHIES OF MIND
Employing a variety of sociopsychological modes of inquiry, critical students of the mind gain
new angles from which to make sense of cognition and intelligence. Lacanian psychoanalysis’s
emphasis, for instance, on the ways social institutions shape individual subjectivity is essential
knowledge for educational psychologists seeking to trace the subtle ways schooling inscribes student
consciousness. Vygotskian cognitivism alerts these same psychologists to the ways social
relationships and cultural context are not only influential in cognitive development but are the
sources of the mind. When the understandings of psychometricians do not include such cultural
appreciations, these specialists in measurement/assessment will perceive no problem with standardized
texts being prepared by people from only one culture. What’s the problem, they may
ask, intelligence is intelligence, giftedness is giftedness, no matter where it’s found.
Because psychology is an important aspect of the social and political world, the discipline has
responsibilities to such a cosmos. The sociocultural dynamics that shape psychological functions
do not alert us simply to methodological features of scholarly conversation—from a critical perspective
they focus our attention on the human damage that results from the cultural blindness of
professionals in psychological positions. When cultural difference is confused with, for example,
mental deficiency or pathological behavior, serious ethical questions arise. Concurrently, when
social privilege is confused with giftedness, great injustice can be justified.
If we accept Lacan’s view of the positivist notion of an inner “authentic” self as a fiction
and that there is no biological schema that presets behavior in advance, then we will find it
difficult to accept Piagetian developmentalism. A critical educational psychology interrogates
the foundations on which developmental psychology is grounded, positing that there are (1) no
predetermined stages to human development existing independently of an individual’s personal
history or social group(s) affiliation and (2) no genetically programmed stages of intellectual
maturation. Cognitive science’s and education’s taxonomies are merely heuristic, tools for facilitating
understanding—not descriptions, as many assume, of an absolute independent reality.
Indeed, postformal psychology finds nothing wrong with Piaget’s efforts to discern patterns in
child maturation. William Perry’s attempt to identify levels of commonality in adult modes of
thinking, or Freud’s isolation of syndromes and disorders. There is no difficulty with such academic
work as long as the theorists and their faithful followers don’t take the insights as the truth.
Piaget, Perry, and Freud’s work are mere constructs, conceived in particular times and places
about individuals carrying particular cultural and historical baggage.
Lev Vygotsky alerted us to these problems of reification and universalization of cognitive
theorizing. Arguing for the need for social contextualization, Vygotsky turned his attention to the
ways cognitive development occurred rather than pursuing stage theory. Development is much
more complex, constantly changing as it unfolds. Indeed, a postformal cognitive psychology views
cognitive growth as a dynamic hermeneutic, a process of culturally inscribed meaning making
and knowledge production that continues throughout one’s entire life. Such a reconceptualization
holds dramatic implications for education and entities such as talented and gifted programs, as
it rejects traditional developmentalist notions that education should guide students through their
natural phases of development. Instruction, Vygotsky maintained, does not follow children’s
“cognitive unfoldment” to some genetically programmed developmental plateau.
In this pedagogical context postformal psychology understands the damage that cognitive
science’s notions of developmental appropriateness inflict on the economically and culturally