Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Postformalism and a Literacy of Power 939
marginalized. Riddled with ethnocentric and class-biased conception of where children should
be along the developmental spectrum at any particular age, mechanistic educational psychology’s
discourse of developmental appropriateness makes no allowance for the ravages of poverty,
racism, or other forms of disadvantage in children’s lives. In the name of ordering the experiences
of students who are “developmentally arrested” compensatory programs overstructure marginalized
students’ school routines to the point that meaningful self-initiated play and other activities
are eliminated. In the name of providing special challenging education for the gifted and talented,
elitist pedagogy makes sure that privileged students gain the maximum benefits of school resources
and high expectations. Thus, cognitive psychology through its labeling and pedagogical
prescriptions actually creates and perpetuates an educational caste system—a hierarchy blessed
by the imprimatur of science and thus immune from serious questioning.
In schooling shaped by a sociopolitically contextualized educational psychology, self-reflection
would become a priority with teachers and students. In such a critical educational psychology,
postformalist educators attend to the impact of school on the shaping of the self. In such a context
learning would be viewed as an act of meaning making that subverts the mechanistic view
that thinking involves the mastering of a set of techniques. Education could no longer separate
techniques from purpose, reducing teaching and learning to deskilled acts of rule following
and concerned with the methodological format. Schools guided by a democratized educational
psychology would no longer privilege white male experience as the standard by which all other
experiences are measured.
Such realizations would point out a guiding concern with social justice and the ways unequal
power relations at school destroy the promise of democratic life. Democratic teachers would no
longer passively accept the pronouncements of standardized tests and curriculum makers without
examining the social contexts in which their children live and the ways these contexts help
construct their academic performance. Lessons would be reconceptualized in light of a critical
notion of student understanding. Postformalists would ask if their classroom experiences promote
the highest level of understanding possible. Such insights would undermine the elitism promoted
by mechanistic educational psychology. Educational psychologists would understand that elitism
is a socially constructed, power-related phenomenon, justified by the social privileges derived
around issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion. Again, a literacy of power is central
to moving to a more critical interpretivist form of educational psychological practice. Such a
psychology would see these issues of elitism and hierarchies in a new light, a new discursive
framework—discursive power.
Discursive Power: The Basic Characteristics
� Too rarely do we analyze the deep social assumptions and power relations embedded in everyday
language—language inscribed by the power bloc.
� Creations of particular discursive forms mobilize meanings that often sustain domination.
� Traditional linguistics was comfortable with the assumption that language neutrally conveys a description
of reality. A more complex linguistics understands the power-inscribed nature of language.
� Critical linguistics sees language as the substance of social action, not simply the reflection of it.
� A discourse is defined as a set of tacit rules that regulates what can and cannot be said, who can speak with
the blessings of authority and who must listen, and whose social constructions are scientific and valid and
whose are unlearned and unimportant.
� Consider the power relations in the existing mechanisms for producing and distributing scientific knowledge
about teaching. In this discourse teachers are deprived of power, as they are effectively eliminated
from the active process of uncovering and disseminating knowledge. They are delegated instead to the
passive role of knowledge consumers of the predigested products of educational science.