Samuel Fassbinder 

Bringing Resistance to Education

The field of “education” can be said to be about “teaching”; but this is to offer a mere functional definition without exploring what education is about. The sociologists of education tell us that education, in the sense of the modern educational university, is about “consumer choice.” To say it thusly, however, is to pose the student as a consumer. Clark Kerr constructs college students as consumers in his classic The Uses of the University (31-32); it becomes important, then, to ask about the educational processes by which students become consumers. Such an investigation would not limit itself to discussions of schooling; Juliet Schor’s Born to Buy is importantly about how advertising pressures create “commercialized children”; little consumers. The most important thing about schooling and learning, today, is their integration into capitalism; capitalist schooling.

David F. Labaree’s study of teacher education, The Trouble with Ed Schools, situates education departments at the bottom of the university hierarchy, and suggests that “education” is the least respected academic field because it is the most subject to market forces. “Much of the scorn that has been directed at teacher education over the years can be traced to the simple fact that it has earnestly sought to provide all of the teachers that were asked of it.” (25) Teacher education gets down and dirty with the working classes in the schools, and is deprived of academic status for it.

Now, teacher education traditionally limits itself to the production of teachers; the field of teacher education, then, is the standard, “reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic'” public school curriculum. Its main subject of inquiry is how to present it in the standard public school classroom. This has been narrowed to the point at which, under the No Child Left Behind Act, many of the nation’s public schools have become mere test-prep institutions. We get a variant of commodity fetishism: test scores for test scores’ sake.

But there is nevertheless a creative side to the education department in the university. The academic end of the education department presents an alternative, sometimes idealized, to the constricted classroom reality often seen in schools. This is what Labaree calls “progressive education.” Progressive education is education as it should be, education as an appeal to the learning experiences of the children themselves. But, as Labaree describes it in The Trouble with Ed Schools, progressive education is tied to departments of education in the form of a marriage of losers:

“Both were losers in their respective arenas: child-centered progressivism lost out in the struggle for control of American schools, and the education school lost out in the struggle for respect in American higher education. They needed each other; with one looking for a safe haven and the other looking for a righteous mission”. (Labaree 143)

Labaree’s social lens allows us to focus clearly upon the “righteous mission” of McLaren and Jaramillo, two education department professors who bring the mission of education into the terrain of humanist marxism, in hopes of citing a war of position, defined as “the exercise of resistance in the sphere of civil society by popular classes who are able to avoid co-optation and mediation by the nation state” (McLaren and Jaramillo 113). Their immediate goal is to provoke a discussion about the ultimate purposes of educational institutions; their eventual goal is bringing world society into a new mode of social being.

The bulk of content in the introduction and four essays that make up Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire constitute a rallying call to that war of position. The introduction situates the disaster post-hurricane Katrina in New Orleans amidst “the current ecological crisis and crisis of capitalism brought on by fossil-fuel shortage” (18) and of the racism of the official response to said disaster. Chapter 1 contains a wide-ranging analysis of the capitalist system amidst the Bush administration’s “ideological lockdown in an attempt to return to the halcyon days of the McKinley era when the fat cats of industry ran a retrograde financial kingdom that enshrined private property rights and supported the annexation of foreign territories (Greider 2003)”. (McLaren and Jaramillo 2007).

The final portion of Chapter 1 does, indeed, contain a subdivision titled “The Politics of Organization,” (38-49) in which the path to socialism is sketched out in helpful detail.  The substance of this portion is deserving of extended mention. The authors deal with criticisms of socialist organization as too centralized, too undemocratic, too disconnected from working class struggle. Their argument proceeds quickly to examples of group struggle in Latin America: the “asambleas” of Argentina, the Zapatistas of Mexico, the “Bolivarian circles” of Venezuela. They advocate the attainment of state power for the sake of its transformation; the bourgeois state won’t save us, but a transformed state might help. The rest of Chapter 1 helpfully speculates upon the ideological ground which must be gained if a “civil societarian left” is to be resuscitated in the United States. McLaren and Jaramillo advocate the reworking of the notion of “citizenship” according to a model proposed by Takis Fotopoulos under the aegis of “deep democracy.” Bourgeois democracy is, of course, the right to elect the capitalist of your choice; real economic democracy involves popular control over economic decisions.

McLaren’s media analysis, though, fills a large portion of both intro and chapter 1. It leaves us in no doubt that the Right knows about the idea of the “war of position,” and is in fact fighting such a war right now. (After all, dear readers, Rush Limbaugh cited Gramsci in See, I Told You So; what are the rest of us waiting for?)

The educational content of the first part of Pedagogy and Praxis is plain and apparent, too: this is the real education we are getting from the American mass media, and it should scare us into action:

“Employing a politics that counts on the stupefaction of a media-primed electorate, the Bush administration has marshaled the corporate media in the service of its foreign policy such that the environment is literally suffused with its neoliberal agenda, with very little space devoid of its ideological cheerleading”.(33)

If you’re a teacher, don’t imagine you can just shut your door and teach, either – they want your classroom space, too:

“Where classrooms once served as at least potentially one of the few spaces of respite from the ravages of the dominant ideology, they have now been colonized by the corporate logic of privatization and the imperial ideology of the militarized state… Consider the case of Bill Nevins, a high school teacher in New Mexico who faced an impromptu paid leave of absence following a student’s reading of “Revolution X,” a poem that lends a critical eye toward the war in Iraq”.(33)

So the authors care about the mess that public schooling has become, too: Chapter 2 brings the reader into a social analysis of the No Child Left Behind Act, depicted here as another tool of the corporations and the Right to disempower the poor and, in general, the working class. Solutions are named: “we realize that capitalism is not something that can be fixed, or humanized, because its ‘value form’ is premised on the exploitation of human labor.”(82) An alternative pedagogy is embraced, too: “needed is a language of analysis that will enable teachers, students, and families to unpack the real objectives of the Bush regime’s educational initiatives in light of its adherence to policies and neoliberal imperialist practices as the foundation of its dominant optic.”(85)

Chapter 3, “Critical Pedagogy, Latino/a Education, and the Politics of Class Struggle,” brings us on tour with authors McLaren and Jaramillo, in Cuba with Che’s daughter, in Venezuela with President Chavez and with the beneficiaries of his educational initiatives, and with various resistance movements throughout Latin America and the world and, indeed, with populations in the US. It’s an exciting tour: pictures from it are scattered throughout the book between the chapters. The authors spread a message of unity through diversity, and oblige the reader to recognize the various real resistances to right-wing hegemony that such an educational strategy can provoke.

The Two Removes: Educational Literature and Student Experience

At the beginning of this review, when I looked through Labaree’s sociological lens upon education departments, I could see that they stood at two removes from student learning (as they themselves define it, according to the reigning criteria of progressive education).  These removes are, to be sure, institutional removes: the professors, the teachers, and the students all see schooling with different institutional eyes. The first remove is of education departments from actual schoolteachers, who work in the classroom every day for half the calendar year; the second remove is that of the schoolteachers themselves from the student lifeworld itself, seen phenomenologically as “student experience,” or in terms of the placement of such students in environments in which cultural politics and political economies are expressed. We would do well to evaluate texts written in the “field of education” for their attempts to apprehend the institutional removes which separate academic thought from student experience.

The distance of this first remove, wide and growing wider in light of the Bush administration’s educational policies, has been dramatized in polemics such as Meyer and Wood’s edited (2004) volume Many Children Left Behind. The Bush regime has brought America’s schools to heel in imposing testing mandates upon all: schools must make “Adequate Yearly Progress” in test scores, or face sanctions. The six well-established progressive authors who write in Meyer and Wood’s volume all have solid academic reasons for criticizing the banality of NCLB: its failure to use varied means of measurement in determining school quality, its over-reliance upon standardized tests, its denial of local authority over schooling. Pedagogy and Praxis is ahead of the game as it is played by the progressives: having already shown in Chapter One how progressive educators have criticized standardized testing for “reducing knowledge for its numerically determinable value,” (34) and for all of the other symptoms shown by an educational system wedded to the status quo, McLaren and Jaramillo dig at NCLB in Chapter 2 as an attempt to privatize education and as a sop to four major testing corporations (Harcourt, McGraw Hill, Riverside, and Pearson) (79). The authors’ perspective, established from the outset, is that “it is the continuation of capitalism that is the underlying issue” (85) rather than any of the symptoms cited by progressive authors.

Now, NCLB was indeed a product of bipartisan Congressional consensus; its passage was a logical extension of the Goals 2000 program under Clinton and the America 2000 program under Bush padre. It establishes the “official knowledge” that according to Stephen Arons (Short Route to Chaos) “contradicts the entire idea of constitutional democracy.” (Arons 86) However, McLaren and Jaramillo don’t make a complete case for the notion that NCLB (and beyond it, the Bush administration), is a normal course of elite action within the capitalist system as a whole. Was the invasion of the public schools (and, for that matter, of Afghanistan and Iraq) really all that much a consequence of elite consensus around “empire” (85) as the authors claim? (Or, more nagging to liberal sensibilities, would a President Gore have acted differently?) Perhaps a future book would design pedagogy to expose the financial secrets behind the relentless hunger for profit gnawing at world society’s neoliberal economic elites. Starting with interpretations of movies such as “Wall Street,” and drawing upon books such as Harry Shutt’s The Trouble with Capitalism, Levy and Dumenil’s Capital Resurgent, Kees van der Pijl’s Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq, and Robert Brenner’s The Economics of Global Turbulence. It would expose a world in which vast surpluses of capital must lean on government and drink the working class dry while the actual global economic growth rate declines. To their credit, the authors show great proficiency in the “follow the money” type of analysis which would constitute such pedagogy.

The second remove, between teachers and student learning, is covered in this book by the concept of “critical pedagogy.” Pedagogy and Praxis builds upon a background already explicated in detail by Paulo Freire, whose concept of “conscientization” (34) motivates the political discussion therein. Readers who need to understand why revolutionary critical pedagogy centers upon the students, rather than the curriculum, should consult the writings of Paulo Freire as an assumed prologue to the sort of pedagogic writing offered inPedagogy and Praxis.

Pedagogy and Praxis, then, is intended to cut through the removes separating the education faculties in their ivory towers from the students in their scholastic settings, by appealing to them to join the struggle for a better future:

“Critical pedagogy, as we envision it, avoids the bad infinity of mainstream pedagogy in which truth and justice are sought outside of living history in the precincts of a mystical otherness. In contrast, we underscore our conviction that the subjunctive world of the “ought to be” must be wrought within the imperfect, partial, defective, and finite world of the “what is” by the dialectical act of absolute negation. It is the search and struggle for a utopia in which the future is inherent in the material forces of the present”. (116)

Now, can the real-life teachers of America follow such advice? Or are they constrained to seek the mere goals of “Adequate Yearly Progress” under the watchful eyes of principals alert for dissidence? The answer to such questions lies in the political realities of each moment: a movement to overturn NCLB and to get off of the capitalist path (perhaps based on some of the living examples offered in Chapter 1) would allow the answer to the first question to shift from “no” to “yes.”

At any rate, it is through apprehensions of the difficulties of the present moment, and outlines of the road ahead, the authors arrive at the sort of utopian teaching suggested under the banner of “revolutionary critical pedagogy.” So, through the collective building of an “ought to be,” the institutional removes are themselves to be removed, and the various social forces are brought to bear upon the search and the struggle for a utopia in opposition to the false promises of capitalism.

Coda and Conclusion

Chapter 4, “God’s Cowboy Warrior,” asks us to recognize the ideological stakes of the hegemonic Bush administration in the US. “The only way Bush can pull off his image as the great American protector of the white male is if military spending becomes his major priority.” (170) Chapter 4 reads as a long coda, further developing insights mentioned in previous chapters of the book. In reading the book’s last eighty-three pages, we are led back to the serious study of power, clearly the work to be done for those living within its machineries. The Bush administration is said to combine the religious fervor of Christian fundamentalism and the financial power of neoliberalism with various white male dominator fantasies, with a few old, repackaged Nazi strategies (e.g. torture, “shock and awe”) thrown in for good measure.

At about p. 172, forty-nine pages in, the discussion reaches up a metalevel to a critique of capitalism, in which “capital performs itself through our laboring and toiling bodies.” (172) Such an insight brings much of the prior discussion of power into sharp focus, and it deserves emphasis here in this book review. It also brings Chapter 4 to the threshold of a discussion of “capitalist discipline,” so meaningfully foregrounded in Kees van der Pijl’s Transnational Classes and International Relations, in which the capitalist system is seen as an expanding disciplinary framework. This insight, moreover, further detaches the authors’ arguments from the general line of anti-Bush diatribe, which may stand for worthy ideals without connecting Bush himself with the daily operation of the capitalist system.

The end of chapter 4 engages us with the philosophy of Peter Hudis (199-200) requiring a leap into abstraction that not all readers may be able to join the authors in making. Readers will nevertheless gain a summary understanding of revolutionary critical pedagogy as a departure from existing realities.

In conclusion, Pedagogy and Praxis can be read as a major attempt to add to the struggle of a “war of position” on all levels, and is a worthy contribution to such a struggle.  Pedagogy and Praxis can also be viewed as an attempt to incite discussion, radical discussion, in the context of educational departments in universities. Such departments can be said to be handicapped by the fragmentation of university business, and separated from student learning processes by the two removes I mentioned above. To be sure,Pedagogy and Praxis does show that there are audiences in politically “ready” areas of the world (Venezuela, Mexico) which are open to revolutionary critical pedagogy. Such an audience, we might imagine, would also benefit from a different, more advanced pedagogic discussion, one more closely observing teachers and their activities. However, it seems as if they have benefited from a social climate which allows radical educators to thrive; whereas if one lives in the United States, a terrain of relatively little resistance to capitalism, ideological challenges to the “revolutionary critical pedagogy” position may prove to be insuperable for many who wish to teach in the public schools. It is that non-activist part of the world, then, which especially needs to read and re-read the essays in which the case for revolutionary critical pedagogy is inserted into a setting of present-day current events. Said events are, indeed, the cannon-fodder of the “war of position.”

References

Arons, Stephen. Short Route to Chaos. Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1997.

Kerr, Clark. The Uses of the University. 5th ed. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 2001.

Labaree, David F. The Trouble with Ed Schools. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004.

McLaren, Peter, and Nathalia Jaramillo. Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire: Towards a New Humanism. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2007.

Meyer, Deborah, and George Wood, eds. Many Children Left Behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act is Damaging our Children and Our Schools. Boston: Beacon P, 2004.

Van der Pijl, Kees. Transnational Classes and International Relations. London: Routledge, 1998.

A Philosophy of Praxis: Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy and Hope 

Bryant Griffith
Kim Skinner 

There is no change without dream, as there is no dream without hope….What kind of educator would I be if I did not feel moved by the powerful impulse to seek, without lying, convincing arguments in defense of the dreams for which I struggle, in defense of the “why” of the hope with which I act as an educator? – Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope

Questioning, compelling, and original, the emotional and intellectual impact of Peter McLaren and Nathalia Jaramillo’s latest endeavor is both disorienting and powerful. Composed by two vocal leaders in the field of critical pedagogy, Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire: Towards a New Humanism (2007) furthers attempts to make the pedagogical more politically informed. The authors’ deep personal engagement with the discourse of critical pedagogy creates a work that addresses the ever-shifting realities of the field and schooling itself, both in the United States and a global context. In their photographically documented visits with radical teachers and scholars in North America, Latin America, and other parts of the world, the globetrotting authors have illuminated for the reader in this volume how capitalism, education, and technology go hand-in-hand.

The collection of essays and the accompanying authors’ photo travelogue make visible the vital struggle for critical educators today in the face of neoliberal globalization. While not opposed to globalization per se, what the authors find problematic is the globalization of capitalism. McLaren and Jaramillo suggest that while critical educators continue to attack standardized testing, pedagogical authoritarianism, rote learning, and the muting of student voices, they have not overwhelmingly challenged the formal structure of the capitalist system, combating the privatization and businessification of schooling. While critical educators “have celebrated diversity and creativity and fought against racial segregation and racism, sexism and homophobia” (p. 34), they have not contested the transformation of the social relations of production as a step towards social justice.

The revolutionary critical pedagogy of McLaren and Jaramillo seeks to encourage and provoke questioning, to elucidate what is problematic with existing social injustices. According to McLaren and Jaramillo, “The actions of human beings are what shape history. Both Freire and Dunayevskaya stress here that the educator must be educated. The idea that a future society comes into being as a negation of the existing one finds its strongest expression in class struggle. Here, we note that dialectical movement is a characteristic not only of thought but also of life and history itself. And here the outcomes are never guaranteed” (p. 108). The task of contemporary critical educators is to work with students to build revolutionary consciousness, never abandoning a vision for the radical transformation of society. “For critical revolutionary educators, the struggle for inclusive democracy stipulates working with students to build revolutionary consciousness and collective action,” a challenge which can be produced most effectively within the framework “of an intergenerational, multiracial, gender-balanced, transnational and anti-imperialist social movement. This will not be an easy task, especially at this current moment of political despair that has infected much of the educational left. It will require radical hope” (p. 54).

Hope, one of the most fundamental of McLaren and Jaramillo’s themes, is a theme that resounds with those in the trenches trying to make a difference and embodies the aspirations of those seeking a transformative education for their students. McLaren has always believed educators must value the knowledge acquired in the field, but must be wary not to engage in the “mythification of popular knowledge, its superexaltation” (Freire, 1994, p. 84). McLaren and Jaramillo embrace the hope and dreams espoused by Freire, believing like Freire that dreaming is “a necessary political act, it is an integral part of the historico-social manner of being a person…part of human nature, which, within history, is in permanent process of becoming” – we need to remember that “there is no dream without hope” (pp. 90-91). The authors’ return to hope paints a colorful picture of what is and isn’t problematical, thus giving the reader a sense that all is not lost.

“Hope is the freeing of possibility, with possibility serving as the dialectical partner of necessity. When hope is strong enough, it can bend the future backward towards the past, where, trapped between the two, the present can escape its orbit of inevitability and break the force of history’s hubris, so that what is struggled for no longer remains an inert idea frozen in the hinterland of ‘what is,’ but becomes a reality carved out of ‘what could be.’ Hope is the oxygen of dreams, and provides the stamina for revolutionary struggle”. (p. 55)

McLaren (2007b) continues his adherence to hope as he observes critical educators today in the process of crafting their own dreams of a global community that is bending towards social and economic justice. Their dreams are “reflected in the mirror of Freire’s pedagogical dream, one that is inspired by a hope born of political struggle,” grounded in the faith of “the ability of the oppressed to transform the world from ‘what is’ to ‘what could be,’ to reimagine, re-enchant, and recreate the world rather than adapt to it” (p. 302).

Echoing Henry Giroux’s persistent call for teachers to be at the forefront of promoting conversations and actions which address social and political issues, McLaren and Jaramillo focus in this book on the need for critical educators to embrace and include teachers, parents, and students. The authors believe communities and schools must promote grassroots movements in education, as an expression of their commitment to a more just society. Grassroots constituencies have the ability to contest curriculum and policies, to enter debates, and make decisions collectively. Needed around the globe, grassroots education movements are fundamental to bringing everyone back into the education equation. Critical educators, according to McLaren (2007b), “cannot afford to sit on the sidelines and watch this debate over the future of education as passive spectators. We need to take direct action, creating the conditions for students to become critical agents in social transformation” (p. 310).

In the United States, our classroom environments are controlled by government funding, curriculum standards, testing mandates, and a neoliberal agenda. Our classrooms have been colonized, according to McLaren and Jaramillo, and our classrooms that once “served as at least potentially one of the few spaces of respite from the ravages of the dominant ideology, have now been colonized….Teachers are left suspended across the ideological divide that separates reason and irrationality, consciousness and indoctrination” (p. 33). Teachers are encouraged to avoid “politics” in the classroom by administrators and government officials; bringing politics into the classroom is considered unpatriotic.

But while teachers are encouraged to keep all that is political out of the classroom, the inverse is not happening. With the passing of the NCLB (No Child Left Behind) Act in 2001, standards-based education reform (formerly outcome-based education) was enacted across the nation. This reform movement is based on the belief that all students will succeed if goals are set and students are held to high expectations based solely on performance on criterion-based assessments. NCLB reduces student learning and effective instruction because teachers are coerced “to teach to the test.” NCLB, under the guise of championing the poor and underprivileged, has requirements for schools that are federally funded (i.e., Title I) that vary from the guidelines for other public schools not receiving federal funds. Education has become a commodity, and the narrow guidelines of the NCLB Act for what counts as “scientifically based research” affects and limits literacy initiatives, what traditions of research which will be funded, and what language arts programs can be used in federally funded schools. McLaren and Jaramillo depict the NCLB Act of 2001 as “a historical apparatus that serves to exert control over the largest and most vulnerable segments of the population in the interest of promoting capitalist consumption and the reproduction of the law of value and the value form of labor” (p. 65). The winners of this legislation are the testing industry; the losers are the poor, whose federally funded school curriculum is now even further removed from their lived experiences.

So what can be done? McLaren and Jaramillo assert that critical educators and critical citizens must heed a call for action. They challenge the official social imaginary of the NCLB act and contend:

“We need more than pamphleteers and protesters to bring about another social order. We need critical citizens capable of and willing to exercise their agency on behalf of a world without capitalist exploitation. A central challenge for critical educators today is to reject the dematerialized understanding of the sociohistorical ground upon which the Bush regime rests its case for the NCLB….Teachers need to reject their role as amanuenses of history, as clerks of testing regimes, as custodians of empire, and assume a role of active shapers of the historical present”. (p. 85)

By articulating the defining principles of many national policy initiatives today (i.e., English-only propositions, NCLB, and anti-immigrant initiatives), McLaren and Jaramillo illustrate how implicitly and explicitly Latina/o students have been the target of “the politics of erasure.” These policies are “unilaterally designed to erase students’ native language, national origin, and cultural formations” (p.99). The aims of education in this framework are to assimilate and acculturate the growing Latina/o population into the dominant ideology. Latina/o students are subjected to a pedagogy of dehumanization when educated in monolingual schools that encourage them to adopt “ways of being” that are both foreign and alien.

McLaren and Jaramillo call for a critical revolutionary vision of an educational system and society that “is driven not by a master narrative of liberation, but by a meta-narrative of hope and solidarity” (p. 86). While critical pedagogy has been accused of emphasizing ideology over inquiry, criticalists know that there are no ideologically free research practices. The authors explain, “The theoretical languages we use in our pursuit of knowledge about the social world become attributes of the actions of that world, they become part of our own self-comprehension….Seemingly objective facts are always already socially and historically produced or mediated” (p. 96). The authors argue that ideology then, realizes its goal when it is able to eradicate the evidence of its presence; ideology is always present, though frequently one is only aware of its presence retrospectively.

Critical pedagogy, McLaren and Jaramillo assert, emerges in the “everyday struggle on the part of the oppressed to release themselves from the burdens of political détente and democratic disengagement. It is anchored, in other words, in class struggle” (p. 49). The authors believe critical pedagogy must reconstruct the context of class struggle so that it includes school sites. The endless subordination of “life in schools” needs to face resistance as the process of schooling is increasingly “corporatized, bussinessified, and moralized.” As indicated by McLaren (2007b), critical pedagogy is in no way “commensurate with the attention it excites in the academic literature, yet it continues to provide an important site of praxis-making which can be used to educate and agitate about crucial issues that affect our collective future” (p. 311).  Critical educators, together with critical students, parents, and citizens need to move from criticism of class exploitation and social injustice to the search for a collective transformation.

Critical pedagogy: where are we now? We are in the schools, we are in the classroom, we are in the teacher education program, we are in grassroots organizations, we are in the communities – we are naming ourselves, and we aren’t quiet anymore. – Shirley Steinberg

We believe that critical pedagogues, like many academics, have been preaching to their believers. One of the objectives of critical pedagogy should be to reach out to graduate students and teachers in the field to engage them in conversations about the ways critical pedagogy can and should play a central role in educational praxis. More than a pedagogical practice and a way of knowing, dialogue is (Freire, 1989) “the encounter between [humans], mediated by the world, in order to name the world” (p. 76). Educational praxis is the agent for reflecting and acting upon the world as a means to transform it.

Steinberg (2007) considers critical pedagogy to be “a transgressive discourse, practice, and fluid way of seeing the world” (p. ix). Critical pedagogy continues to view the aims of education as emancipatory. Giroux (1994) offers, “Pedagogy in the critical sense illuminates the relationship between knowledge, authority and power” (p.30). The heart of critical pedagogy is now and has always been the teaching for social justice. Critical pedagogues are empowered by addressing the anger felt from the practices of social injustice around the globe. Creating a space for insurgency and critique, practitioners of critical pedagogy have, as argued by Steinberg, “the right to be angry, and to express anger, anger at the uses of power and at injustices through the violations of human rights. Critical pedagogy isn’t a talk – liberals talk. Critical pedagogy takes language from the radical – radicals must do” (p. ix).

From my perspective, a vibrant, relevant, effective critical pedagogy in the contemporary era must be simultaneously intellectually rigorous and accessible to multiple audiences. – Joe Kincheloe

Critical pedagogy, according to Joe Kincheloe (2007), recognizes the complex nature of the difficulties faced by educators who seek to promote economic and sociopolitical justice, intellectual development in individuals, institutional academic rigor, and the construction of practical transformative knowledge. Kincheloe maintains, “The pedagogical and research agenda of a complex critical pedagogy for the twenty-first century must address these realities as it constructs a plan to invigorate the teaching and study of such phenomena” (p. 16). Questions concerning power, justice, and praxis have been asked before in different times and locales, and continue to be the focus of critical pedagogy today. We agree with Kincheloe that critical pedagogy must not be sought only within the boundaries of the school; that critical pedagogy serves cultural workers, teachers, parents, students, and indeed all who engage in social activism outside the borders of the school. As advocates of critical pedagogy, we, like Kincheloe, “understand that no simple, universally applicable answers can be provided to the questions of justice, power, and praxis that haunt us” (p. 16). In spite of the absence of uncomplicated solutions, attempts at the questions advanced by the practice of critical pedagogy must continue to be aggressively explored, pursued, and unraveled.

For teachers to engage in the practice of critical pedagogy they must first clearly understand their role in and outside of the classroom; they must realize that situating critical pedagogy into practice will not be without challenges in today’s educational climate. As McLaren (2007a) states in his latest edition of Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education, “resistance to the forces of colonization within and outside the US mainland carries a price” (p. 254). In spite of the difficulties of his context, Freire (1989) established classrooms where teachers played a key leadership role while respecting student autonomy. The result was the shared construction of critical knowledge built upon student knowledge. Emphasizing the importance on teacher/student collaboration, Freire posited, “I cannot think authentically unless others think. I cannot think for others or without others…Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry [people] pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (p. 7). Critical pedagogical conversations permit students and teachers to construct shared meanings, to analyze and critique in a spirit of collective learning and understanding. Just as relevant in today’s global classroom, Freire’s pedagogical vision of the connection between teacher and student is both transformed and transformational.

McLaren and Jaramillo focus critical educators on both the hope and the struggle ahead in their book,Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire: Towards a New Humanism. Critical pedagogy remains a source of hope and possibility for educators engaged in struggles against oppression in their classrooms. The time has come for teachers and educators to embrace critical pedagogy with a renewed interest and sense of urgency. As critical pedagogy comes under increasing attack by reactionary ideologies and ideologues, its message only becomes more urgent and important in these troubled and dangerous times.

The underlying theme of this book and other recent works by the authors is how capitalism functions in North America, as well as global contexts. For McLaren and Jaramillo, revolutionary critical pedagogy must progress beyond an understanding of what is problematic in today’s schools and society to an attitude of action that uproots the sexism, racism, homophobia, oppressed nationalities, and exploitation of contemporary capitalist society. As always, McLaren and Jaramillo’s view of the role of critical revolutionary pedagogy is informed by a “class-conscious ideology.” This work is a source of inspiration, of imagination, and most importantly, of hope. “The voices and actions of critical educators will become more crucial in the days ahead. Whatever organizational forms their struggles take, they will need to address a global audience who share a radical hope for a new world” (p. 57). Critical pedagogy is well-argued by the authors as a vehicle of great consequence in the construction of a socialist future.

Bryant Griffith is professor of Philosophy and Curriculum Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. His scholarship focuses on a wide range of social, cultural, and technological issues in education.

Kim Skinner is a Doctoral Student in Curriculum and Instruction at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. Her scholarship focuses on critical issues in literacy education.

References

Freire, P. (1989). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. (Original work published in1970)

Freire, P. (1994). Pedagogy of hope: Reliving pedagogy of the oppressed. (R. R. Barr, Trans.) New York: Continuum.

Giroux, H. A. (1994). Disturbing pleasures: Learning popular culture. New York: Routledge.

Kincheloe, J. (2007). “Critical pedagogy in the twenty-first century: Evolution for survival”. In P. McLaren & J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical pedagogy: Where are we now? (pp. 9-42). New York: Peter Lang.

McLaren, P. (2007a). Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Allyn & Bacon.

McLaren, P. (2007b). “The future of the past: Reflections on the present state of empire and pedagogy”. In P. McLaren & J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical pedagogy: Where are we now? (pp. 289-314). New York: Peter Lang.

Steinberg, S. (2007). “Where are we now?” In P. McLaren & J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical pedagogy: Where are we now? (pp. ix-x). New York: Peter Lang.

Brad J. Porfilio

Peter McLaren and Nathalia Jaramillo, Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire: Towards a New Humanism, Sense Publications, The Netherlands, 2007; 200pp. 

Over the past decade, the field of critical pedagogy has gradually (re)embraced class-based analyses of what larger political, economic, and social forces perpetuate unjust policies, practices and institutions, which are responsible for the conditions that create oppression, hate, hostility, violence, and domination in schools and other social contexts across the globe. Much of the resuscitation of a Marxist humanist perspective in the world of critical pedagogy is in response to how transnational capitalists and Western politicians employ “an any means necessary approach” to commodify all aspects of life across the planet as well as to suffocate any forms of resistance or dissent launched against the social relations of capital that has led to the ruling elite’s unprecedented wealth and power and to the utter “devastation for the ranks of the poor” (Pozo, 2003)   It is also linked to the fact that much of the postmodern scholarship produced by critical pedagogues during the 1980s and 1990s focused on identity narratives, which brought newfound awareness to the discursive systems of power that trivialize or demonize the Other, gave resonance to the voices of peoples oppressed on the axes of race, class, gender and sexuality, and lent space for individuals to cross ethnic, race, class, gender, and sexual “borders” to create empowering forms of selfhood, but arguably this movement failed to account for how the larger power structures used “representations” “to exploit the objective world (as opposed to the lexical universe) of the working-classes” (Ibid).

In Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire: Towards a New Humanism, Peter McLaren, one of thisgeneration’s leading critical pedagogues, social theorists and cultural workers, and Nathalia Jaramillo of Purdue University set out to provide critical-scholar practitioners and other concerned citizens four riveting essays that pinpoint how the current “crises of global capitalism” is linked to barbarism, naked imperialism, torture, xenophobia, racism, environmental degradation, suffering and domination faced by schoolchildren, teachers, and working-class citizens in various global contexts (p.6), while concomitantly providing them emancipatory guideposts, visions which have the potency to turn their social movements into a political project that makes “the interconnections among capitalism, ecosystem destruction and the racialization of the exploitation of human labor more transparent and less seemingly inevitable-and to find ways of bringing about a socialist alternative” (p.18).

In the Introduction, “What a Disaster: The Rising Tide of Belligerence,” the authors provide a critical examination of Hurricane Katrina to contextualize their arguments in relation to how “class warfare and racism” perpetuate capitalism, oppression, and domination in the United States (p.6).  They show how the US government’s (or lack thereof) response to the victims of Katrina “is emblematic of the fate of those oppressed by the racists and imperialistic practices of global neoliberalism” (p.7). US government officials and mass media outlets failed to explicate how the victims of Katrina – mainly impoverished and elderly African Americans – endured the wrath of neoliberal capitalism before the tragedy unfolded.  Because of the capitalists’ unquenchable desire to make a profit, many African Americans in New Orleans, like other people of color in the US, were without adequate healthcare, food, shelter, public transportation, and education.  Not coincidently, during the tragedy, the US government and major media outlets played upon America’s racists’ fears and blamed the victims for the pernicious and tragic events that transpired in New Orleans. Untrue stories of African Americans, such as African American men “gang raping women and children, looting stores of liquor and drugs, shooting at ambulances, police patrols, and rescue helicopters, and throwing the city into a vortex of violence and anarchy” were told on nightly newscasts and chronicled in newspaper columns (p.9). After pumping the public full of fear and lies, George Bush, transnational corporations, and faith-based politicians shamelessly used the tragedy to advance “their fundamentalist ideologies,” their desire to promulgate military imperatives to solve conflicts, and to find new entrepreneurial opportunities during the rebuilding phase in New Orleans (p.13-17).  In the end, the authors capture how the elite’s propaganda was, in part, responsible for many flag-waving, unenlightened citizens viewing the event either as God’s mandate to punish the sinners in New Orleans, as the “Other” “typically” acting inline with aberrant forms of stereotypes, or as a barometer of the ruling elite’s power to save its White citizens from another form of savagery and tragedy (p.11). The authors conclude the introduction by showing, correctly, what is conveniently left out of ruling elite’s depiction of this tragedy.  The fact that capitalists are ill-concerned about the moral, social, and spiritual needs of their citizens or the “deaths of thousands of human beings or eco-destructively that leads to the elimination of the biosphere” (p.18).

In the first chapter, “Critical Pedagogy as Organizational Praxis: Challenging the Demise of Civil Society in a Time of Permanent War,” the authors document the impact of US imperialism in Iraq and other such unjust incursions across Latin America to challenge progressive educators to revive critical pedagogy-to ensure it challenges the neo-liberal onslaught of globalization “and its “civilizing mission” for the oppressed of developed and developing countries alike” (p.34).  Here, McLaren and Jaramillo do an excellent job capturing how critical pedagogy has been domesticated by the same transnational elite’s agenda to garner the world’s labor power and resources.  Progressive teachers are often forced to remain silent in the struggle to guide their students to understand how corporate greed perpetuates injustices in schools and other social contexts because the “corporate logic of privatization and the imperialistic ideology of the militarized state” are driving what is taught and how students’ learn in schools across the globe (p.33).  Despite the barriers critical educators may face when instituting a revolutionary agenda inside and outside of their classrooms, the authors optimistically think that, critical educators can work collectively to subvert the hegemony of neoliberal globalization.  In the remaining part of the essay, they provide us with several strategies to overcome “the dilemma and the challenge of the global working-class” (p.39), point to their own cultural work in Latin America to document how working-class peoples have successfully forged “new forms of social organization as part of revolutionary praxis” (p.41), and believe the most “important front against capitalism is stopping the US from invading more countries” (p. 56).

In Chapter 2, the authors provide a critical examination of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) – “a major political initiative that has been extolled by the Bush administration as the most significant educational reform package in the history of the nation” (p.65).  The authors show that the alleged revolutionary policy in educational reform, which was touted to produce “higher quality, more equitable, and more accountable public schools,” (Wood 2004) was used during Bush’s reelection bid in 2004 to camouflage legislation “that renounces civil liberties” and to block the public from focusing on the elite’s imperialistic missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, which led to the “slaughter of dissidents” and to the spending of billons of U.S. taxpayers’ dollars (p.74).  The policy itself has been instrumental in allowing the Bush administration to further its larger agenda to militarize and commercialize the planet.  They capture how the act has given power to military recruiters to cajole poor and working-class students into combat and provided companies, such as “the Big Four” testing companies (e.g., CTB McGraw-Hill, Riverside Publishing, Hartcourt Educational Measurement and NCS Pearson), an easy path to feed their coffers through high-stakes testing and accountability schemes (p.78-79).  Other scholars have also recently shown how NCLB has made it very arduous for many US schoolteachers to implement pedagogical projects geared to subvert the capitalist social relations. For instance, Jonathan Kozol has been fasting to bring attention to how NCLB has boiled teaching and schooling in urban schools down to “miserable drill-and-kill curriculum of robotic “teaching to the test,” pushed thousands of enlightened schoolteachers to quit their jobs, and positioned many urban youths to disengage from the schooling process (Kozol 2007). The authors conclude the chapter by highlighting the efforts of various grassroots educational movements such as the Center for Education and Justice, groups that are making inroads in promoting the critical revolutionary agenda in schools (p.81).

In Chapter 3, the authors illuminate “the importance and efficacy of Marxist theory” in relation to taking inventory of the form of Latina(o) education in the US (p.93).  The authors argue that several national policy initiatives enacted over the past decade, such as the NCLB Act, English-only propositions, and anti-immigrant initiatives, are reflexive of the ruling elite’s desire to erase marginalized “students native language, national origins, and cultural formations” (p.99). The policies amount to a politics of erasure in which transnational corporations, political leaders, and scholars, such as Samuel Huntington, use education as the chief apparatus to assimilate and acculturate “a growing Latina(o) population into the economic and social dimension of an increasingly imperial and militaristic Pax Americana” (p.99). The form of schooling provided to assimilate Latina(o) students also serves to “alienate them from their local histories, their culture and location where their knowledge is most readily inscribed” (p.109). Not only do the author believe the contemporary neocolonial model of education keeps Latina(o) youths filling dead-end jobs for US capitalists, but they argue it legitimizes to members of the dominant society their “superiority” and subordination of the Other (p.105). The authors also pinpoint how the US government purposely denigrates Latino(a) culture, language and experiences as a way to gain public support to “export democracy” to the region. However, when the US government and Western corporations intervene in non-Western regions, McLaren and Jaramillo find that the only things they export are the peoples’ resources and labor power (p.99).  The authors conclude this chapter by focusing on their own work with social and political movements across Latin America. The major lesson they learned was there remains much promise and possibility to build a larger democratic project across the globe with “people who refuse to become peons within a transnational elite protectorate stage managed by Washington” (p.106).

In the book’s final essay, the authors lend a critical examination of how “the crisis of global capitalism” has unfolded during the Bush administration.  We learn that Bush is a mere servant for the military-industrial complex. His hawkish corporate executives, political advisors, and religious irrationalists dream of creating a neoliberal empire, where “civilized” US officials, under a mandate from God, will lead the Other to become enlightened (p.128). The authors show how the mass media has served as Bush’s handmaiden to craft theocratic nationalist rhetoric, helping him lull working-class and unemployed poor Christians, right-wing Christian Zionists, and middle-class evangelical Christians to support his administration’s “War on Terror.” Besides the environmental destruction, torturing of soldiers and civilians, outright attack on any forms of dissent against US foreign or domestic policies, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of citizens during the ruling elite’s imperialistic raids across the Middle East, the authors indicate that US citizens are still politically unconscious that their country is headed on a course to continue to use force to garner resources and exploit dispossessed citizens, on a quest to build a theocratic empire, and in the process of becoming a fascist state (p.190).  The authors conclude the book with a clarion call to the US public to take the first step to examine what is causing terrorism and imperialism at today’s historical juncture. This may spark critical educators to revamp their pedagogy so as to educate their students on how capitalists’ social relations of production are antithetical to producing a society predicated on democracy, love, fairness and equity, but are firmly linked to producing the hate, violence, greed, and oppression that has permeated life under the misguided leadership of “God’s Cowboy Warrior.”

Overall, McLaren and Jaramillo’s book is must read for critical theorists, graduate students, those new to the field of critical pedagogy, and any concerned citizen seeking a Marxist analysis of what constitutive forces mediated life in schools and the wider social world during the past decade. This book provides critical insight to help us recognize how the current configuration of capitalism is inextricably linked to the Bush administration’s imperialistic policies and practices and its domestic policies of indifference and “blaming the victims” who experience the fallout associated with corporate greed, to privatization and militarization of schooling and life, to Latino(a) students’ alienation and marginalization in US schools, and to the US government’s embracement of theocratic and neo-fascist impulses. In contrast to the egregious and erroneous claim by Bill Ayers (2006) that the authors have failed on previous occasions to provide their readers with pedagogical guideposts or theoretical insights to “change their world” and to build a socialist alternative, Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire: Towards a New Humanism is grounded with concrete examples of working-class citizens confronting oppressive social formations and building larger political movements earmarked to create a socialist alternative to neoliberal capitalism. It is also layered with theoretical insights in relation to how critical pedagogues can retool their pedagogy to help their students understand how the “current crisis of capitalism” is antithetical to improving the material and spiritual condition of humanity, while simultaneously capturing how life would be ameliorated outside the orbit of transnational capitalism.

Brad J. Porfilio is Assistant Professor of Education at Saint Louis University, St Louis, Missouri (US).

References

Ayers, William. December 2006. “Essay Review of Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy Against Empire. Notes From A Self-Realizing, Sensuous, Species-Being ( I Think).” Teachers College Record.  http://billayers.wordpress.com/category/book-reviews/

Kozol, Jonathan. September 10, 2007. “Why I am fasting: An Explanation to My Friends.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-kozol/why-i-am-fasting-an-expl_b_63622.html

Pozo, Michael. Fall, 2003. “Toward a Critical Revolutionary Pedagogy: An Interview with Peter McLaren.” St. John’s University Humanities Review, 2(1). http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~ganterg/sjureview/vol2-1/mclaren.html

Wood, George. 2004. “Introduction.”  In How the No Child Left Behind Act is Damaging our Children and our Schools. Edited by Deborah Meier’s, et al. Boston: Beacon Press.