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Critical Pedagogy, Latino/A Education, and the Politics of Class Struggle

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Critical Pedagogy, Latino/A Education, and the Politics of Class Struggle PETER MCLAREN AND NATHALIA JARAMILLO CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, LATINO/A EDUCATION, AND THE POLITICS OF CLASS STRUGGLE Teaching in the Belly of the Beast Fox News host John Gibson: “Do your duty. Make more babies. That’s a lesson drawn out of two interesting stories over the last couple of days. First, a story yesterday that half of the kids in this country under five years old are minorities. By far, the greatest number are Hispanic. You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic. Why is that? Well, Hispanics are having more kids than others. Notably, the ones Hispanics call ‘gabachos’—white people—are having fewer.” Retrieved from AlterNet, December 28, 2006 at http://www.alternet.org/ mediaculture/45983/. Due to the fact that critical pedagogy constitutes a narrative of universal emancipation (at least those versions that have escaped attempts by post- modernists and neoliberals to domesticate them), critics on both the political left and the right not only have dismissed its politics as yet another example of the colonizing incarnations of the Western educational canon but also have rejected it as a valid means for social transformation. They have accused it of possessing, among other toxic attributes, an outdated and historically discredited working-class triumphalism premised on vulgar economic reductionism that should have been abandoned long before Fukuyama (1989) famously announced that the teething pains of capitalism were over and that liberal capitalist democracy had finally ascended to the zenith of humankind’s ideological achievements through its ultimate victory over its conquered rival ideologies of hereditary monarchy, fascism, and more recently communism.1 Of course, the primary object of attack is Marxist theory itself, which has been making some significant inroads of late within the critical pedagogy literature (thanks to scholars such as Glenn Rikowski, Dave Hill, Ramin Farahmandpur, Noah Delissovoy, Mike Cole, Gregory Martin, Deb Kelsh, Juha Suoranta, and others), more specifically as the central theoretical armature of the critique of the globalization of capitalism and the pauperization of the working masses in the wake of recent ‘free trade’ agreements and the economic and military imperialism of the Bush Jr. administration. In this chapter, we attempt to discuss critical pedagogy in light of what we perceive to be the importance and efficacy of Marxist theory, particularly within the Marxist humanist tendency. We S.A. Moore and R.C. Mitchell (eds.), Power, Pedagogy and Praxis: Social Justice in the Globalized Classroom, 125–148. ©2008 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. PETER MCLAREN AND NATHALIA JARAMILLO have chosen to accomplish this as part of a larger discussion of Latina/o education in the United States. Our central position is that by grounding critical pedagogy in Marx’s critique of political economy, educators are better able to challenge not only the exploitation of human labor that is endemic to capitalist society with its law of value, private property, and production for monetary return but also the assault on civil rights and human dignity that can be traced to the policy- making practices of the Anglosphere, not least of which has been directed at Latina/o populations through institutionalized forms of White supremacy and capitalist patriarchy. Capitalist society requires that we routinely perform our labor in schools, in factories, in churches, at the voting booth, and on the picket line and that we educate ourselves to enhance our labor power (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2001a, 2001b; McLaren & Jaramillo, 2002, 2004; McLaren & Martin, 2003; see also Rikowski, 2001a, 2001b). Consequently, we have borrowed the term used by Paula Allman (1999, 2001) revolutionary critical pedagogy—to emphasize critical pedagogy as a means for reclaiming public life that is under the relentless assault of the corporatization and privatization of the life world, including the corporate/academic complex. This is not a reclamation of the public sphere through an earnest reinvigoration of the social commons but its socialist transformation (McLaren, in press). The term revolutionary critical pedagogy seeks to identify the realm of unfreedom as that in which labor is determined by external utility and to make the division of labor coincide with the free vocation of each individual and the association of free producers, where the force of authority does not flow from the imposition of an external structure but from the character of the social activities in which individuals are freely and consciously engaged. Freedom as we are conceiving it, is freedom from necessity. Here, the emphasis is not only on denouncing the manifest injustices of neo-liberal capitalism, critiquing the current global crisis of overproduction, stagnation, and environmental ruin and on creating a counterforce to neo-liberal ideological hegemony but also on establishing the conditions for new social arrangements that transcend the false opposition between the market and the state. Accompanied by what some have described as the “particular universalism” of Marxist analysis as opposed to the “universal particularism” of the postmodernists, critical educators collectively assert—all with their own unique focus and distinct disciplinary trajectory—that the term social justice all too frequently operates as a cover for legitimizing capitalism or for tacitly admitting to or resigning oneself to its brute intractability. Consequently, it is essential to develop a counterpoint to the way social justice is conceptualized and practiced in progressive education. This stipulates not only a critical examination of the epistemological and axiological dimensions of social democracy but also a contrapuntal critique of the political economy of capitalist schooling so that teachers and students may begin to reclaim public life from its location within the corporate-academic complex in particular and the military-industrial complex in general while acknowledging in both cases their violent insinuation into the social division of labor and capitalism’s law of value. Amid the Bush regime’s star-spangled war on hope, “full spectrum dominance” 126 .
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