Educational psychology is one of the cruellest frontline in contemporary psychology.
It is a scientifi c arena overwhelmed by different social demands in our globalized
society. It has been asked to provide ready-made solutions to many different
problems: from the inclusive education to the disruptive behaviour and lack of
school discipline, from the increased competition between national educational systems
to the reduced student learning outcome in the progressively outcome-based
school system (Szulevicz and Tanggaard 2014), from the socially disadvantaged
children to the new highly complex tasks in the modern workplaces, from the standardized
testing to the need of cultivating creativity (Tanggaard 2014).
Very often, these social demands are formulated in terms of individual problems:
something is wrong/strange/weird with the student’s traits, characteristics and abilities.
As a consequence, the pathologization of the school experience is the new
tendency in the educational debates both among professionals, teachers and academics
and in the ordinary discourse.