Education as “Dilemmatic Field”

Abstract

Psychology of education must discuss a number of relevant ethical, political and societal issues that cannot be simply overlooked as non pertinent to the discipline. For too long educational and developmental psychology have take divergent routes and have not enough dialogued with other fields such as pedagogy. I argue that it is first of all necessary to conceptualize the work of schooling, that is educational processes of teaching and learning in specific social contexts, as complex and dilemmatic fields. I discuss contributions from the past and current debate to support my claim that education is inherently ambivalent and dilemmatic, while educational psychology is too often normative and prescriptive. As many authors have discussed educational processes as battlefields between political and economic tendencies, we cannot avoid to discuss the relationship of such tendencies and the developmental processes of the person. The work of schooling is an action projected towards an imagined future, and educational psychology cannot avoid questioning the predictions emerging from the current socio-economic and political trends.