26. Peter Mclaren
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MATTHEW DAVID SMITH & ARTURO RODRIGUEZ 26. PETER MCLAREN A Marxist Humanist Professor and Critical Scholar BRIEF BACKGROUND Peter McLaren was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Canada later spending time in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He attended public schools eventually earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in Elizabethan Drama from the University of Waterloo, later receiving a Bachelor of Education at Teachers College from the University of Toronto. He completed a Master of Arts degree at Brock University and ultimately a Ph.D. from the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education, University of Toronto. While conducting his early graduate work, in 1974, McLaren began a five- year career in the Jane- Fitch Corridor of Toronto. These experiences became the basis for his first book, Cries from the Corridor (see McLaren, 2006) which became a bestseller and sparked much debate across Canada on the issue of school reform. That book would later become an integral piece of the critically acclaimed Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (2006). At the conclusion of his doctoral work, McLaren published the critical ethnographic work Schooling as a Ritual Performance: Towards a Political Economy of Educational Symbols and Gestures (1999). Currently in its third edition that text continues to stand as one of the leading critical ethnographies in education. Following the publication of that work, McLaren served one year as special lecturer at Brock University, later moving on to a teaching post at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio where he began a lifelong friendship with Henry A. Giroux. It was when McLaren joined the faculty of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) that his reputation as a prolific writer, provocative professor, a tireless speaker, and an unflinching supporter of overcoming value production took on a worldwide scope. His epistemic and philosophical transition from his appreciation of postmodernism to that of a Marxist Humanist marks a dramatic shift in the project that is his life’s work. THREE PIVOTAL WORKS While McLaren has written prolifically and voluminously, and to be concise, we limit our examination to the critical themes of what can be considered his pivotal James D. Kirylo (Ed.), A Critical Pedagogy of Resistance: 34 Pedagogues We Need to Know, 101–104. © 2013 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. M. D. SMITH & A. RODRIGUEZ works and what collectively captures the central core of his thought, Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (2006), Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution (2000), Schooling as a Ritual Performance: Towards a Political Economy of Educational Symbols and Gestures (1999). LIFE IN SCHOOLS: AN INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN THE FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATION Currently in its fifth edition, Life in Schools stands as one of the definitive works on education where McLaren interrogates capitalism and its hold on US public education. Throughout this text, McLaren invites students, teachers, community activists, and others to consider a critical society free from labor exploitation, racism, jingoism, and a myriad of other forces of oppression; a society in the commodification of labor is in a post- capitalist, communitarian society, one that accepts the human condition of all. Amidst the Bush Presidency’s war on seemingly everything, McLaren’s theoretical outlook, to burn through the fog of neoliberal capitalism so common amongst “progressive” educators, beckons all who dare engage his work to critically reflect on their own praxis. In Life in Schools, McLaren offers an analysis and theoretical reflection of the events portrayed in his first book Cries from the Corridor. He further traces the origins of critical pedagogy in the United States and abroad and explores some of the central tenets of the critical tradition. Ultimately, McLaren poses tough questions about public education: what roles do schools play in society? Are they purveyors of knowledge or do they indoctrinate students with the norms of an exploitative, capitalist class? Can schools be sites of social transformation, a radical consideration of praxis that enacts a world in which hegemony is undone? Finally McLaren calls for a global society in which we first consider human dignity, the natural environment, racial and gender equality in overcoming value production, the commodification of the human spirit. CHE GUEVARA, PAULO FREIRE, AND THE PEDAGOGY OF REVOLUTION In the most translated of McLaren’s work, readers are presented with a comparative analysis of the life and work of two distinct pedagogues for revolution. One hailing from Rosario, Argentina, Che Guevara enjoyed a comfortable upbringing and medical education, later shedding the comforts of class for solidarity with the oppressed. An unrelenting combatant against the exploitation of the poor, el Che called for a world in which the existence of capitalism ceased. The other, Paulo Freire, from Recife, Brazil, a man who came of age while faced with the challenges of hunger and labor exploitation. Freire left law, short of practicing, to dedicate his time to education working with peasants who were illiterate in northeast Brazil. Freire began to develop the notion of “reading the world and the word” as he developed a literacy campaign with the overexploited communities in Brazil. For Freire literacy praxis 102.