ISSN 1935-7699
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ISSN 1935-7699 |
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ARTICLE A Review of Peter McLaren and Nathalia Jaramillo’s
Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of
Empire: Toward a new Humanism Richard Kahn University of North Dakota As we lurch from crisis to crisis, beamed directly into our brains by satellite TV, we have to think on our feet. On the move. We enter histories through the rubble of war. Ruined cities, parched fields, shrinking forests, and dying rivers are our archives. Craters left by daisy cutters, our libraries. (Roy, 2003) It’s interesting…to see again how systematic or formal
education, in spite of its importance, cannot really be the lever for
the transformation of society…The problems of school are deeply rooted
in the global conditions of society, perhaps the problems of discipline
and alienation above all…I was thinking for example, of how a teacher
working several years in the classroom, trying to become a very concrete
example to the students of a radical democratic teacher, after five
years can fall into some despair, or can fall into some
cynicism…Precisely because education is
not the lever for the transformation of society, we are in danger of
despair and cynicism if we limit our struggle to the classroom. (Freire
in Shor & Freire, 1987, p. 129). Peter McLaren and Nathalia Jaramillo’s
Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire (PPAE) best collects their founding theoretical work on the
post-9/11, emergent international anti-capitalist/imperialist movement
that reflects an active example of revolutionary critical pedagogy.
Those familiar with McLaren’s recent material on the subject in books
such as Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism (with
Ramin Farahmandpur, 2004)
Capitalists & Conquerors (2005),
Red Seminars (with Compeñeras
y Compeñeros, 2005), and Rage &
Hope: Interviews with Peter McLaren on War, Imperialism and Critical
Pedagogy (2006), will find in this latest text a further volley of
unflinching and searing essays that seek to unapologetically smash like
a hammer into the hateful workings of power syndicates such as the Bush
cabal, unprovoked American militarism, corporate media, privatized
schooling and transnational capitalist class ventures.
PPAE
should serve to call further professional attention to Jaramillo
herself, who is undoubtedly one of revolutionary critical pedagogy’s
most exciting young scholar-activists, and whose contribution to the
movement is here apparent both in her first-hand praxiological work
alongside McLaren throughout Latin America (and elsewhere), as well as
in her trenchant analyses of the intersections of class, race, gender
and culture evident in the book. For instance, in the book’s third
chapter (pp. 91-120), “Critical Pedagogy, Latino/a Education, and the
Politics of Class Struggle,” one perceives Jaramillo’s guiding insights
into how a Marxist Humanist framework might effectively develop
political and educational solutions in a time when the Latina/o
population moves headlong towards becoming a primary, if not majority,
demographic in the United States over the coming decades. PPAE is a
book of pedagogical theory (and in the spirit of revolutionary critical
pedagogy, performative acts of polemic should be included within the
field of theory proper), but as McLaren and Jaramillo put it, this
book’s work is not intended “as grist for advancing our careers in the
academy but as a way of participating in a wider political project in
which we attempt (to echo Henry Giroux) to make the pedagogical more
politically informed and the political more pedagogically critical” (p.
6). Thus, McLaren and Jaramillo’s collaborations, though often
conceptually and linguistically dense, are not to be mistaken as yet
another speculatory exercise in pedagogical pontification about the
problems of schools or how to reconstruct them so as to emancipate their
democratic potentials. This is not a Cartesian mediation on social
reconstructionism, but an organic attempt to articulate a burgeoning
worldwide standpoint theory born of class warfare and other forms of
transnational oppression that produce the dehumanization of global
society.
Supporting this claim are a variety of personal
photos included as textual bookends (which chronicle the authors’
journeys and meetings with key figures/groups over the last five years
in places such as the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America) that are
emblematic of how McLaren and Jaramillo have begun to construct a
critical revolutionary pedagogy that both walks its talk and makes its
road by walking it. Indeed, the images in
PPAE undoubtedly gesture
stylistically to those taken of Che Guevara during his travels –
portraits produced to express the themes of unity, companionship and the
vital embodiment of collective struggle, what Ché and Freire each meant
in their respective ideas of a materialized “revolutionary love”
(McLaren, 2000). It should be observed that
PPAE’s emblematic cover art,
produced by Erin Currier in a mural of stirring revolutionary portraits
of everyday warrior women of color (which serve as necessary expansions
of the legacies that otherwise tend to brandish names such as Zapata and
Villa), which similarly helps to evoke the potential beauty and dignity
of the historical struggle from below as refleshed socialist passions in
the face of the transnational imperialist enterprise. It is crucial, then, to recognize the extent to
which PPAE attempts to both
theorize and enact a critical revolutionary pedagogy that, as Gregory
Martin (2005) describes, is a radical shift of social priorities . . . that
seeks to enrich the knowledge base of grassroots political movements
through the development of social relations [labour practices] that
encourage critical analysis, genuine dialogue and problem solving based
upon people's everyday knowledge of capitalism.
When most progressive academics are still engaged
in coffee talk over how to better involve the local community in campus
life, McLaren and Jaramillo appear to have leapt over imperialist
barricades in order to speak with and forge a wider resistance to
present-day colonialist domination agendas. In short, with
PPAE they provide a living
example of how a forged solidarity between critical educators, political
activists in social movements, informed workers of the world, and others
involved in the growing struggle against imperial capitalism can be the
fertile ground in which critical revolutionary pedagogy can become
rooted and begin to sprout.
By articulating a global working-class standpoint,
McLaren and Jaramillo are essentially tracing the objective structures
of global capitalism that have come to organize geo-political versions
of the modern state as well as the social conditions of local
communities across the planet. Further, by aligning their perspectives
on the margins of global imperialism, their theoretical work provides an
anthropological grounding that allows the authors to gain a variety of
outsider-within-critical-ideational status on the contradictions of
global capitalism that are at work within the U.S. presently.
PPAE thusly spends a good
amount of energy calling out and identifying these dehumanizing aspects
of the U.S. corporate-state-military-academic complex, which include,
according to McLaren and Jaramillo, the institution of a state of
permanent war (p. 35), a rightist fomenting of anti-immigration and
other xenophobic attitudes throughout society (p. 99), the rise of
anti-bilingual/multicultural efforts in educational policy such as NCLB
(p. 76), the corporate media and culture industry’s complicity in the
erosion of an educated civil society (p. 49), the blatant classism and
racism underlying the Bush administration’s response to hurricane
Katrina (p. 8), and the ecological genocide that is a direct result of
predatory capitalist expansion at all costs (p. 17).
In opposition,
PPAE hopes to bear witness to
the birth and maturation of a movement within the field of education
that viscerally realizes
the need for a new critical humanist pedagogy, an
approach to reading the word and the world that puts the struggle
against capitalism (and the imperialism inherent in it) at the center of
the pedagogical project, a project that is powered by the oxygen of
socialism’s universal quest for human freedom and social justice. (p.
20) Again, McLaren and Jaramillo’s mapping of the
domestic contradictions of global capitalism evident here in the U.S. is
importantly not limited by a parochial view of the matter. Rather, the
spirit of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela, the work of critical
educators in Oaxaca, Mexico, and the historical legacy of an ongoing
attempt for an emancipated Cuba animate the collective thrust of the
book’s thesis. For McLaren and Jaramillo, such sites are not isolated
instances of a controlled alternative to the capitalist form of life.
They clearly delineate a burgeoning constellation of socialist
resistance that is the movement-generated possibility of another world
beyond the paltry business-class-as-usual-driven political openings for
change in the social and educational structure of the United States. Drawing from the energy of the international
workers movements, McLaren and Jaramillo want also to re-organize a
worldwide front of critical, popular educators who will comprise an
“educational left” (pp. 34-64) that works in concert with
extra-institutional revolutionary forces. One task this educational left
has is to provide a map of the neoliberal educational landscape that
highlights how the stranglehold of a corporate media oligarchy continues
to distribute public knowledge through strong ideological filters, how
standardized educational curricula have ossified into the normative goal
of education, and how the systematic segregation of people of color in
schools all challenge both leftist educators and society generally with
complicated and urgent problems. Therefore, McLaren and Jaramillo ask: “How can critical educators reinvigorate the civil societarian left
precisely at a time when we are creating a world where elites are less
accountable to civil society than ever before?” (p. 52). According to
the authors, the answer to this question lies largely in the potential
for generating concrete revolutionary critical pedagogy, which means
going beyond progressive, constructivist, curricular methods towards
developing socialist sensibilities throughout the institution of public
schooling by conscientizing “teachers, students, families and other
cultural workers” (p. 63).
Now,
without seeking to contradict the spirit of McLaren and Jaramillo’s
project, it cannot hurt to raise some questions about the tactics of
revolutionary critical pedagogy as regards to its implementation in
school systems. Particularly, we might reflect seriously about critical
pedagogy’s ongoing historical attempt to transform schools (e.g., as
sites functioning as Ideological State Apparatuses) into democratic
spaces, especially to the degree that this has been done through
volunteeristic appeals made by the professoriate to teachers, with the
expectation that schoolteachers can learn to act against their own
immediate individual self-interests in the name of the future
realization of the greater good. While schoolteachers certainly should
not be dissuaded from engaging with forms of public-oriented
intellectualism or ethically driven civic-mindedness, it may be asking
more of them than they can bear if revolutionary critical pedagogy
courts the idea that they should become subversive agents who can work
to monkey-wrench school ideology from within. In George S. Counts’s
version of this form of program (and this is going back now some three
quarters of a century!), he at least expected teachers to be widely
organized and empowered to dare a new social order and teach openly
against class/state interests.
Today,
rather, one can no doubt find radical teachers here and there in many
school systems (and, to be fair, much of this is doubtless a result of
the work of critical pedagogy over the last few decades), but often
these teachers are institutionally limited in their power such that they
cannot realize the organization of trans-local threats of a kind that
would demand their suspension and/or removal by panoptic superiors
further up the economic food chain. Indeed, just as McLaren and
Jaramillo apparently seek to support the emergence of a revolutionary
state of governance (p. 49) but do not believe that this can be
accomplished through either mere shifts in party power or, perhaps, even
the reformation of any extant
state (at the end of their book they soberly admit that there are no
guarantees as to the meaning of Hugo Chavez’s tenure, though they do
have real hope for the Bolivarian revolution), it seems questionable
then that they suggest in PPAE
that schools as an institution of social reproduction might be
qualitatively changed by a platform of praxis that seeks to substitute
teachers-as-servants-for-the-status-quo with
radical-educators-as-cultural-workers-and-anti-class-agonists (e.g., pp.
34, 85, 106).
Moreover,
whereas McLaren and Jaramillo correctly look to the direct and
participatory democracy of social movements as organizational forms that
can alter social possibilities and more equitably distribute state power
(p. 114), perhaps the correlate to this thinking
vis-à-vis schools would be to
more widely promote versions of nonformal popular education. In other
words, could it be that revolutionary critical pedagogy needs less
Freire and more Ivan Illich? As I have written elsewhere, revolutionary
critical pedagogy would be strengthened through a deeper engagement with
Illich and the anarchist
tradition in pedagogy generally (see Kahn, forthcoming; Kahn & Kellner,
2007). In this respect, does not the increasing popularity of the home
schooling movement – even if this popularity is now in part fueled by
interests of rightist reactionaries who seek sectarian religious
curricula for their children – also offer potentials for radical
“learning webs” (Illich, 1970) that would be near impossible in more
formal schooling circuits? This said, it is not clear that the choice to
be made is one of to school or not to school, but rather of whether a
critical dialectical approach to the problem of democratic education
focuses merely on schools or is capable of strategically thinking beyond
them.
To the
degree that schools do remain sites of contestation and power struggle,
it will increasingly be necessary for revolutionary critical pedagogy to
begin to mount its cultural work outside the discipline of education
proper and to move its focus past school teachers to those who are also
directly involved in regulating school institutions like principals,
superintendents and other community leaders. There is the need for texts
and training in revolutionary critical pedagogy, as well as titled
professorships, to increasingly find integration in academic departments
of educational leadership and organizational change, in addition to
those designed to certify teachers for secondary and elementary schools.
Indeed, to the degree that Freire remains iconic for critical pedagogy,
there is in Freire himself an example of a radical educator who also
took up questions of administrative leadership when he served as Sao
Paulo’s Secretary of Education in 1989 during the tenure of the
Socialist mayor Luisa Erundina (Freire, 1993). While having radical
educational leaders will, of course, itself not be enough to produce
long-standing change in the American school system, at least it would
allow existing and future critical community educators to have
administrative counterparts so that the teachers such as Bill Nevins (p.
33) are not left open to easy rightist attacks, poor evaluative reviews,
and demands for their leave-of-absence or untenured removal. Of course,
it is not clear that McLaren and Jaramillo would disagree with this. To recap,
then, McLaren and Jaramillo’s latest collaboration has undoubtedly added
volume to the developing Marxist framework for understanding the
struggle over contemporary education through its careful attendance to
the ways in which the politics of schools can link up with and be
informed by international anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist political
movements. PPAE provides a
fertile bevy of conceptual analysis that will allow others to delve
deeper into the recesses of predatory global capitalism and its
militarization of the planet, thereby helping to suture together
networks of oppression that have become the reified sociopolitical
artifacts of the contemporary divide-and-conquer moment. More than a
mere theoretical contribution, though, critical theorists of education,
critical educators, and a radicalized citizenry concerned with the
direction and shape of education in the U.S. generally are reminded in
PPAE that the world is larger
than that which is daily fed to us by American politicians and news
anchors.
McLaren and
Jaramillo hope to teach us that we still have much to learn about our
social and political futures, which remain open, and hence any and all
efforts to build unity for a materialized opposition to the broader
structures that presently attempt to determine the particular conditions
of our lives is something that represents a vital sense of hope (p.
115). PPAE documents some of McLaren and Jaramillo’s hopeful efforts, and
thereby provides a pedagogical statement of needed theoretical
interventions into the ongoing problem of how to realize inclusively
democratic forms of school and society, as well as an enactment, or
performance, meant to demonstrate and create concrete possibilities for
educational freedom in a time when many believe such political
possibilities are in short supply.
References Freire, P. (1993).
Pedagogy of the city. New
York: Continuum Publishers. Illich, I.
(1970). Deschooling society.
New York: Marion Boyers Press. Kahn, R. (Forthcoming).
Anarchic epimetheanism: The pedagogy of Ivan Illich. In. R. Amster, et.
al. (Eds.), Contemporary anarchist
studies. New York: Routledge. Kahn, R. &
Kellner, D. (2007). Paulo Freire and
Ivan Illich: Technology, politics and the reconstruction of education.
Policy Futures in Education,
5, 4. Martin, G.
(2005). You can’t be neutral on a moving bus: Critical pedagogy as
community praxis.
Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies,
3, 2, online at:
http://www.jceps.com/?pageID=article&articleID=47%3E.
McLaren, P. (2000).
Che Guevara, Paulo Freire and the
pedagogy of revolution. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. McLaren, P. (2005).
Capitalists & conquerors: A
critical pedagogy against empire. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. McLaren, P. (2006).
Rage & hope: Interviews with Peter
Mclaren on war, imperialism, and critical pedagogy. New York: Peter
Lang.
McLaren, P. &
Compeñeras y
Compeñeros. (2005). Red
seminars: Radical excursions into educational theory, cultural studies
and pedagogy. Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press. McLaren, P. & Farahmanpur,
R. (2004). Teaching against global
capitalism and the new imperialism. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield. McLaren, P. & Jaramillo,
N. (2007). Pedagogy and praxis in
the age of empire: Toward a new humanism. Rotterdam, the
Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Roy, A. (2003).
Instant-mix imperial democracy (buy one, get one free).
Common dreams, online at:
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0518-01.htm. Shor, I & Freire, P. (1987). A pedagogy for liberation: Dialogues on transforming education. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
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