Remodelling the Psychology of Education in Postcolonial India: Decolonization, Identity and Power Relations

This article examines how dominant ideologies, integrated with Western psychological frameworks, influenced education in postcolonial India. Decolonizing psychology in the educational domain requires addressing the hierarchies of culture, power relations and dominant social identities. In that sense, remodelling the psychology of education requires a critical framework and conceptual foundation grounded in the metatheory of social justice. The debate, activism, and research over many decades aimed at understanding how formal education is rooted in our minds implies a need for a new resistance to the dominant assumptions. It plays a vital role in transforming the educational system. The role of critical social sciences with a decolonial approach offers pragmatic solutions for critically engaging with the educational domain and addressing issues related to neoliberalism and methodological individualism. To make the education system accessible to socially and economically disadvantaged individuals, researchers, scholars, teachers, parents, and students must move beyond mainstream representations of educational psychology and anxieties, toward critical inter-dialogues and self-reflexivity. Decolonial and decolonization, if uncritically applied, pose the danger of homogenizing educational concepts and masking the disadvantaged's history with reductive dichotomies of powerful social identities.