A Critical Politics of Knowledge: analyzing the role of educational psychology in educational policy

This article examines the ideological dimensions of educational psychology and psychometrics as they relate to the validation of the 'intelligence' of the privileged and the 'deficiency' of the marginalized. In this critique a critical psychology emerges that takes seriously the lifeworld experiences of culturally and politically oppressed groups. This critical intervention in psychology forces the field to confront its class elitism, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy, as well as the epistemological foundations on which it is constructed. Here the abstracted study of individual minds is rejected for a more contextualized view. Mind in the critical view is more a distributed concept than an autonomous, isolated one bounded by the border of the brain. In this context the ideological dimensions of psychology can be challenged.