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This review has been accessed times since February 21, 2007

McLaren, Peter. (2007). Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education. (5th Ed). Boston, MA: Pearson Allyn & Bacon. Pp. 352     $52     ISBN-10: 0205501818

Reviewed by Samuel Day Fassbinder
California State University, Los Angeles

February 21, 2007

This book, with its spectacular inner-city school cover and glossy textbook finish, is a re-release of one of McLaren’s first books. Life in Schools has three parts: 1) beginning with a lengthy preface, which summarizes McLaren’s overall view of the educational process, 2) a short collection of McLaren’s old diaries from his early years of teaching in the impoverished Jane-Finch Corridor in suburban Toronto, titled “Cries from the Corridor,” and 3) an explication of critical pedagogy with references to the social ills discussed in the diaries. Parts 1) and 3) are sophisticated, wide-ranging theory; part 2) is specific, local observation based upon experience from a different period of history. Life in Schools, then, is a nut of earlier writings encased in a shell of 21st century origin. The reader may feel at times as if she is reading two books by somewhat different authors. Each “book,” considered separately, may leave the reader wanting more; together, they make something interesting.

As Peter McLaren’s career has proceeded, moreover, each successive edition of Life in Schools has elaborated upon the shell of theory while leaving the autobiographical nut as it is. So, as the reader approaches the 5th edition, the shell of parts 1) and 3) has become something lengthier and, perhaps, something even more nutritious than the nut of part 2). One may wonder, then, to what extent the theory part of this book really needs the autobiographical diaries as a pretext, as the theory could be said to stand alone by itself.

At this point, however, the “Cries from the Corridor” diaries have become something of great literary interest. There are cool references to the ‘60s: “Timothy Leary, the high priest of LSD, handed me a note at a concert: DIPLOMA, it read. YOU ARE NOW FREE.” (p. 66) The main action in these diaries concerns the humorous and pathetic things McLaren sees as a teacher. Practically every diary entry puts forth some intimation of black comedy; after McLaren harangues the students on their apathy, for instance, one student raises his hand and asks him why he wears a beard (p. 69). Much of this black comedy revolves around pathetic student behaviors: McLaren tells us that “I told Marta that she couldn’t go to the library before I dismissed the other kids; she had to wait her turn. She grabbed the stapler out of my desk, and before I could stop her, she had pumped three staples into her thumb (p. 132).” Overall, McLaren paints a picture of himself as a teacher faced with overwhelming difficulties and making light of his situation as best he can.

Much of the humor of this book trades upon the contrast between the petit-bourgeois educational culture and the syndrome-plagued culture of the student underclass. A bald display of this is in a journal entry of an adult visitation:

Thursday, April 26

A senior administrator on the Board paid a visit to my classroom. Every few years he makes his rounds, visiting all the elementary schools in his jurisdiction to pay his respects. He walked into my room smiling. “Glad to see you!” he said heartily. “Fine group of kids you got here!” I smiled and shook hands.

“Like your set-up here,” he continued. “Room sure is colorful.” He was short and on the plump side, and he fingered a cufflink nervously. “Nice bunch of kids!”

The kids laughed and applauded themselves. “Who’s the turkey?” one of them stage-whispered.

Mr. Brooks cleared his throat. “Hear you’re doing a good job,” he said. I nodded, and he smiled and walked out.

Mickey watched him go, then pulled urgently at my sleeve. “I’ve seen guys like that at my house. They come to see my brothers. He’s your parole officer, ain’t he?” (p. 159)

This, then, is the pretext for the part of Life in Schools to be found in the rest of the book, the theory portion, outside of Part 2. One immediate impression to be gained from the theory portion of the fifth volume of Life in Schools is that of how McLaren’s theoretical ambitions have expanded. The first edition proclaimed, with great humility, that

…we must face our own culpability in the reproduction of inequality in our teaching, and (that) we must strive to develop a pedagogy equipped to provide both intellectual and moral resistance to oppression, one that extends the concept of pedagogy beyond the mere transmission of knowledge and skills and the concept of morality beyond interpersonal relations. This is what critical pedagogy is all about. (McLaren 1989, p. 21)

The fifth edition, however, is about revolutionary critical pedagogy, pedagogy that has as its goal the provocation of a real live revolution in human affairs. Between editions one and five, we have gone from “anything but” to a specific goal. If the goal of revolutionary critical pedagogy is to provoke a revolution, moreover, the goal of the 5th edition of Life in Schools is to adorn an old journal of McLaren-as-teacher with a real life manual on revolutionary critical pedagogy, intended for an audience of teachers. The literature needs more of such things.

In the new Part One of Life in Schools, the preface, McLaren paints a forbidding picture of the political and economic status quo. He suggests that life in schools has an intimate connection to his picture of the status quo. We are told that we live “in an age of political deceit and imperial grandeur” (1). In reading this narrative, we are perhaps supposed to link the negative student realities of the “Cries from the Corridor” narrative to the negative adult realities of politics and economics; either that, or we are being treated to a general leftist “orientation.” McLaren’s readers are not being asked to blame everything on Bush, or conservatism, or capitalism, but his intimation that politics is somehow connected to classroom life may be lost on some who only read Life in Schools from beginning to end (a practice I don’t recommend – do skip around). Nevertheless, he exhorts his readers to “make the link for themselves between the ‘macro’ socio-economic domain of social life and the microsocial relations found within the agitated fabric of school classrooms.” (p. 17) This exhortation forms the basis for an introduction that bridges Marxism, democracy, No Child Left Behind, oppression, and the corporate assault on education. And this is the theoretical mix with which McLaren introduces his book.

Part Two, of course, is the diaries, and in Part Three McLaren introduces critical pedagogy in earnest, spending a lot of ink on explanations of critical pedagogy as a specific, rather sociological, perspective upon students and teachers. There is a Part Four and a Part Five; Part Four, a relatively short (32 pages) portion of the book is an attempt to bridge theory and practice by explaining how to “read in” race, class, and gender into the diaries. Part Five offers two meaningful chapters of recent origin; one a discussion of revolutionary multiculturalism, the other a discussion of “hope and the struggle ahead” made at a university in Venezuela.

Peter McLaren

The unequipped reader will not make the connections McLaren wants her to make, and cling to her unrevolutionary presuppositions about teaching, society, and life. Much of what McLaren does in his text, then, is to push that point as far back as possible. Enacting a revolutionary critical pedagogy in actual teacherly practice appears difficult; as McLaren himself admits, “resistance to the forces of colonization within and outside of the US mainland carries a price.” (p. 254) But this price is exacted beyond the price of persecution by the radical Right and the secret police, and outside of havens such as the Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School in Chicago. One can encounter resistance to critical pedagogy in one’s students, in the teaching environments of modern schools, colleges, and university, and in the general lack of solidarity in the communities of teachers, activists, and the general public. Perhaps most expensive for critical teachers is the general difficulty experienced in picturing the “socialist imaginary” (p. 312) that is the domain of revolutionary critical pedagogy. Allies are few, ideals are compromised, and institutional imperatives define the scene. What can an educator do?

Educators who read the 5th edition of Life in Schools can to a certain extent find advice on to how to deal with problems in the application of revolutionary critical pedagogy. For example, one of the most prominent critiques of critical pedagogy can be found in a famous essay by Victor Villanueva titled “Considerations for American Freireistas” (pp. 621-637 of Cross Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader (Ed. Victor Villanueva), Urbana IL: NCTE, 1997). Villanueva’s essay depicts a Freirean teacher whom he names “Floyd,” who teaches a college composition class in the United States. “Floyd’s” problem is that his students do not recognize the goals he sets out for them. The denouement of this teaching situation, Villanueva tells us, is that

Individual achievement is sold as the betterment of society through the progress of a collection of individuals. Such progress undermines Floyd’s zeal, negates Floyd’s call to arms. One successful figure – Floyd – espousing the students’ abilities for success, is not likely to persuade those students that a revolutionary consciousness is a better definition of success than the possibility for individual fame or fortune. (p. 632)

But wait! It gets worse for “Floyd.” Villanueva continues:

Floyd offered a worldview that if appreciated and acted upon could bring about change, could be liberatory in the purest, purist Freireian sense, freeing both oppressed and oppressor, as Freire would have it. But Floyd had not affected a revolutionary consciousness in his students, at least not that could be seen, not at the time. More importantly, he had not prepared them for what they themselves desired – literacy of the kind that leads to certification, access to high school, maybe to college, the middle class. (p. 633)

What does one do, at the college level (or even below that), when one’s students are plugged into the possessive-individualist rationale for schooling? Careerism and individual advancement look like relative goods when collective assertion, organizing or protest or strike, have been deprived by neoliberalism of their power, meaning, and profit. The increasing expense of education may cause students to play the educational game the way David F. Labaree describes it:

When students at all levels see education through the lens of social mobility, they quickly conclude that what matters most is not the knowledge they attain in school but the credentials they acquire there. Grades, credits, and degrees – these become the objects to be pursued. The end result is to reify the formal markers of education and displace the substantive content. (Labaree, 1997, p.32)

Now there’s a powerful connection between political economy and the classroom: neoliberalism may make the words of teachers irrelevant to their students.

Note also the way in which Peter McLaren himself is typically introduced in (capitalist) academic publication: titled professor, written over forty books, known worldwide. In short, they can portray him as an individual who possesses something. There’s a game to be played there. Where is the collectivist game?

One possible pedagogic remedy for the possessive individualism of the classroom (and, indeed, of the world outside) might be to teach the concept of “utopia,” as it appeared now and then in Paulo Freire’s opus. The most forthright display of utopian pedagogy that I have seen is in a short article by Ira Shor (“Learning How To Learn: Conceptual Teaching in Course Called ‘Utopia’” College English 38:7 (1977) 640-647). McLaren’s pedagogy, too, is utopian: he argues that “spaces need to be created where students can imagine a different world outside of capitalism’s law of value (i.e. social form of labor), where alternatives to capitalism and capitalist institutions can be discussed and debated....” (p. 312)

In sum, Life in Schools, 5th edition, with its marriage of old experience and new theory, fills an important gap in the literature. Not much has been written, for teachers, to encourage them to make good on the promises of critical pedagogy. Perhaps this book will encourage the production of even more in that vein.

References

Labaree, David F. (1997). How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning : The Credentials Race in American Education. New Haven CT: Yale University Press.

McLaren, Peter. (1989). Life in Schools. (1st Ed). New York: Longman.

Villanueva, Victor. (1997). “Considerations for American Freireistas.” Pp. 621-37 in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. Urbana IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

About the Reviewer

Samuel Day Fassbinder is currently Adjunct Professor of Communication at California State University, Los Angeles. His weblog is at http://ecosocialism.blogspot.com/ . He works with Food Not Bombs (http://foodnotbombs.net/).

Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.

Editors: Gene V Glass, Kate Corby, Gustavo Fischman

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