RADICAL EXCURSIONS INTO EDUCATIONAL THEORY, CULTURAL POLITICS, AND PEDAGOGY Peter McLaren and Compafieras y Comparieros HAMPTON PRESS, INC. r CRESSKILL, NEW JERSEY Ramin Farahmandpur Portland, Oregon Why should teachers and teacher educators at colleges and universities read Marx? What does Capital (Vol. 1), Marx's magnum opus—which took him nearly forty years of his life to complete and covers more than one-thousand pages—reveal to us? More important, why has Marx become so unfashionable among—if not anathema—to scholars and professors in academic circles across the United States? Why it is that universities are eager to offer courses on post- colonialism, postmodernism, post-structuralism, and cultural studies, but are far less willing to provide any serious forums or seminars in which Marx can be critically discussed, debated, and studied? What does Marx, who stood as one of the leading "declassed intellectuals" of the 19th century, reveal that has made him such a pariah in the eyes of the establishment? From the perspective of the authors of the essays in this volume, a partial response to those questions would be that universities and colleges function as part of the ideological state apparatus that participate in the reproduction and maintenance of capitalist social relations of production. It is precisely because capitalism is able to absorb and neutralize most, if not all, forms of progressive and left-liberal social and political criticism directed against it that we need to reconsider a sustained and renewed Marxist critique of capitalist schooling. As Barbara Foley aptly put it: Examining all institutions in capitalist society as part of the ideological state apparatus, Marxism cautions those of us who teach in colleges and universities to have few illusions about higher education as a site for trans- formative pedagogy. The purpose of higher education under capitalism is to ensure the continuation of class stratification and exploitation. Colleges and universities are above all ideology factories—from the humblest vocational programs in community colleges to the most exalted study of liberal arts in the Ivies. Even the most paradigm-shattering pedagogy thus occurs within a context of hierarchical and authoritarian social relations that divests what we do in the classroom of about 90 percent of its radical effects. Indeed, our very existence in the classroom of the bourgeois college or university can ix x Farahmandpur be taken as testimony to the virtues of capitalist pluralism and democracy. (pp. 30-31) This also holds true for public schools. In the last decade the corporatiza- tion and privatization of public schools has become a growing trend among many school districts in the United States. Consider a national organization called Field Trip Factory, which as part of its "Be a Smart Shopper" program, organizes field trips for students who live in the Boston metropolitan area to local chain stores such as Sports Authority. For their homework assignment, students are encouraged to check their local newspaper for Roche Bros. and Sudbury Farms coupons and make a "shopping list." Corporations have also set foot in the lucrative and profitable market of "branding" adolescent consciousness—literally. In England, for example, the marketing agency Cunning Stunts has developed an innovative approach to advertising commercial brand products. The company has found that students' foreheads can be made into a profitable venture. The advertising agency is hir- ing students who are willing to wear a corporate logo on their heads for a mini- mum of three hours a day for £88.20 a week. As John Cassy (2003) of The Guardian reports: "The brand or produce message will be attached by a veg- etable dye transfer and the students will be paid to leave the logos untouched." What is evidently clear from the these examples and others is that corpora- tions are not preparing students for critical citizenship, but rather they are preparing them to play their roles as consumer-citizens. Whereas the former encourages students to question, conceptualize, analyze, theorize, and to criti- cally reflect upon their experiences, the latter lures students into an uncritical and blind acceptance of Capitalist market ideology, values, and practices designed to reinforce and reproduce capitalist social relations of production. As Charles Sullivan (2003) noted: Of course it is not in the self-interest of capitalism to educate people who can see capitalism for what it is. to think critically about it, and perhaps even do something to change it. Corporate education exists to promote pro- gramming consumers and providing an obedient work force to an unfair slave wage system, not to provide society with a well informed and politi- cally active citizenry. In fact these are the things that pose the greatest threat to America's corporate oligarchy. In spite of the daunting challenge that awaits critical educators in the days ahead, we should not be discouraged and dissuaded from inviting students to participate in ideological and political dialogues regarding the structural contra- dictions and antagonisms that plague capitalism. But the question is: Where should we begin? In my own teaching experience as an assistant professor at Portland State University, I invite my undergraduate and graduate students to share their per- Foreword xi sonal experiences by having them write an educational biography paper at the beginning of the course. In the second week of class, students break up into small groups and read each others educational biography. In the course of those read- ings, I ask students to identify the similarities and the differences of their educa- tional experiences. Here, students begin to explore and examine how race, class, gender, disability, and other forms of identities have been deciding factors in their schooling and their education. By comparing and contrasting their educa- tional experiences, students can begin to recognize how race, class, and gender privileges have a profound influence on their educational opportunities and life chances as well as those of others. Next, I encourage students to make connections between their experiences and what Iris Marion Young (1990) refers to as the five faces of oppression.' Later on in the course, I help students to examine their experiences by introduc- ing them to new concepts and ideas such as alienation, domestication, codifica- tion, dialectics, and the banking model of education among others. Throughout the rest of the course, I encourage students to reexamine and rethink the concep- tual categories they use to make sense of their experiences and of the world. Of course, there is no guarantee that all students will be prepared to take such risks. Given that a great many graduate students in education in the United States have cultivated the idea that they will be handed prepackaged teaching tools, frames, and models that they can steadfastly apply to their workplace or teaching environment, they are reluctant to theorize or to critically reflect upon their teaching practices. In some instances, teaching critical pedagogy to stu- dents unprepared for the challenges of self-reflections and critique can backfire as in the case of one of my students who wrote in her evaluation of the class the following statement: I had a very painful winter quarter in [the] social foundations of education [class]. The direction that the course took was simply problem identifica- tion. We talked about problems all quarter, and never even hinted at viable solutions. We didn't even discuss tools, frames or theories that can be used to make decisions. It was so frustrating. I left many classes feeling very depressed that there were too many problems to even try to conquer. While I would agree that students feel overwhelmed and frustrated by the lack of solutions available for challenging undemocratic educational practices in their workplace environment, I also believe students need to acknowledge that the right questions need to be asked before the right solutions can be developed. Freire talked about problem-posing as the first step, and that developing solu- tions to these problems has to be a collective process that is achieved by engag- ing the larger community. I Marginalization, powerlessness, exploitation, violence, and cultural imperialism. xii Farahmandpur What needs to be emphasized more than ever in teacher education pro- grams and in graduate schools of education is the dialectical unity between the- ory and practice, and action and reflection. Here we need to make a distinction between reflection and critical reflection. The former is related to students' awareness of their concrete social and economic circumstances: the latter deals with the investigation of their social location in the world as well as their rela- tionship to the world. Paulo Freire refers to this as a "radical form of being," which he attributes to "beings that not only know, but know that they know." The essays in Red Seminars offer a decidedly Marxian edge to critical ped- agogy. The authors—while not all self-identifying Marxists—hold the view that students and teachers are "socially self-critical" political beings. Following in the footsteps of Marx, they maintain that as active self-conscious beings, we have the ability to transform our social environment through cultural and mater- ial practices, and that by interacting with the social world through our labor, we can recreate ourselves as "working, thinking, and still-evolving species" (Raines, 2002. p. 2). Thus, part of the project of critical pedagogy in the essays presented in Red Seminars is to recognize that we are not only "natural beings," but also "human natural beings" (Raines, 2002, p. 71). In other words, because we have a capacity for self-awareness and self-reflection we are beings for our- selves, and thus, a "species being." Hence, a renewed Marxist approach to criti- cal pedagogy stresses that our human life activities—the way in which we orga- nize and produce our livelihood—is both "sensuous" and "self-reflexive" (Raines, 2002).