Life in Schools

An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education

Peter McLaren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317256649
• Edition: 6
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This new edition brings McLaren's popular, classic textbook into a new era of Common Core Standards and online education. The book is renowned for its clear, provocative classroom narratives and its coverage of political, economic, and social factors that are undervalued in other educational textbooks. An international committee of experts ranked Life in Schools among the top twelve education books in the world.

PART
I

Class Dismissed

Teaching in the Homeland’s
National Security State

The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.

—Karl Marx

A liberal sees a beggar on the street and says the system is not working. A Marxist sees a beggar on the street and says it is.

—Bill Livant

When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.

—Bishop Dom Helder Camara

Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Karl Marx is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned with only gain and profitability. Marxism is concerned with the distribution of wealth on an equal basis and the equitable utilization of the means of production. It is also concerned with the fate of the working classes—that is the majority—as well as with the fate of those who are underprivileged and in need; and Marxism cares about the victims of minority-imposed exploitation. For these reasons the system appeals to me, and it seems fair. … The failure of the regime in the Soviet Union was, for me, not the failure of Marxism but the failure of totalitarianism. For this reason, I think of myself as half-Marxist and half-Buddhist.

—the Dalai Lama

If you have chosen this text because you are familiar with its previous contents, then likely you will be fully aware that today the world is awash in a galloping neoliberalism, bankers mounted on leviathans of speculation and cronyism, waving their cowboy hats at their megacorporatist and politician friends. The latter seek to “harmonize” dissent by targeting and labeling dissenters—including radical teachers—as extremists and terrorists, and there is no more effective way to muzzle dissent than to criminalize it. We’ve been hoodwinked into believing it is preferable to live a lie than expose it. We’ve found it safer to live as objects rather than subjects. Economics is now the dominant science of human behavior, helping move us to merge governments and corporations. We are arriving at the twilight of democracy, the end of freedom’s long and slippery road.

Today’s unrelenting urgency of redeeming life from the belligerent forces of social reproduction—the internally differentiated, expanding whole of value production, inside of which is coiled a slimy incubus—marks a watershed in the history of this planet. At this historical juncture, the malfeasant conglomerate of economic, political, and social forces has become so daunting an opponent of democracy as to make the earth shudder in mere contemplation. Capitalism is being restructured around information, and human beings have been reduced to digital blips on a niche marketer’s drawing table.

Here in the United States, we have the greatest amount of consumer debt in the world, a staggering rate of both child and adult poverty, skyrocketing unemployment, more people in prison than anywhere in the world in proportion to our population, and we have all but sacrificed our civic sovereignty. The CEO of our Walmart stores makes $11,000 an hour (McElwee, 2014). Our infrastructure is crumbling, and we continue to fight undeclared wars. We are salivating at the destruction of Syria, and the media are busy beating the war drums to bring the people on board. Wages for workers in the United States are at their lowest level since the 1930s. Even so, massive cuts are being implemented at every level of government, justified by the claim that “there is no money” for health care, education, or other basic social needs. The federal government implemented $1.2 trillion in “sequester” budget cuts in 2013 that will not be reversed. The wealth of the ruling class at this crisis-ridden historical juncture is almost entirely divorced from productive activity in the real economy through financialization, in which the productive forces of the economy are steadily undermined.

In what follows I will attempt to set the sociopolitical context for my discussion of revolutionary critical pedagogy with reference to events that transpired throughout the Bush Jr. and Obama administrations.

We have clearly entered into a knowledge-based society and are the unwilling servants of a knowledge-based economy. The free flow of information has been hijacked by neoliberal capitalism in its development of informational restructuring of capital. There is a distinct concentration of corporate power, and much of this is related, obviously, to the growth of Internet access and informatics.

Public education today is in its death throes but refuses to acknowledge its own demise, and its once proud luminaries fail to see how capitalism is responsible. It is not impossible to resuscitate public schooling, but we need to be clear about the issues. Unfortunately, and tragically, the terms of the debate over what to do with education’s neglected carcass are selectively adduced to remind the public that the important issues that might raise public education from the dead have to do with narrow reforms that all increase “educational choice” and standards by privatizing education. Consequently, the debate today—which could only be described as death-haunted and excremental—has an undertow dragging public education into the sinkhole of financialization and neoliberal capitalism and an understocked conceptual vocabulary consisting of pithy terms such as “free choice,” “common core,” “competency based education,” and “accountability.” Competencies, which clearly define what the student will do to demonstrate learning for a workforce-related need, are self-paced but must be rendered measurable. The emergence of massive open online courses (MOOCs), adaptive learning environments, peer-to-peer learning platforms, third-party service providers, and new online learning technology and increased emphasis on learning outcomes and assessment obscures the question of why we are educating students in the first place. Standardized testing thrives in a world where the humanity of students is enslaved to a particular analytic structure combining instrumental reason, positivism, and one-dimensional objectivity. Its heteronomous dogma is all about increasing control of our external and internal nature, creating a reified consciousness in which the wounds of our youth are hidden behind the armor of scientificity. Reason has become irrational as the animate is confused with the inanimate and students are turned into objects where the imprint of unbeing is left upon being, with tragic consequences such as the mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School and Columbine High School.

My own experiences of the educational system are housed in the cold chambers of memory. Readers of this book will soon learn that I am in sympathy with many of the youth of today, whose full-throated screams meet the immemorial silence of the pedagogical tradition—an ear-shattering silence replete with bellowing monsters that compelled me as a youngster to keep my eyes squarely focused ahead and my hands folded together on the top of my desk as neatly as a crisply starched handkerchief. The earliest recollections I have of “being schooled” are felt in the sockets and joints of time and do not bear the fleshiness of a living presence. As one of the first students among my primary school classmates to enter the room each day, I was welcomed by row upon row of chairs stacked upside down on desks, what looked to me like varnished, wind-worn bones of long-vanished creatures. In the fogbound reaches of my mind, I can still recall the pungent stench of the cleaning fluid used to wipe away the undeviating anxiety of the school day, but I cannot recall the face of a single teacher prior to my junior high years, save one “shop” teacher with a jack-o-lantern rictus who struck me repeatedly on top of my hand with a metal ruler, bruising me to the bone. The bleak archaeology of the setting and the threat of teacher violence kept me uncomfortably attentive, which was its purpose. I came to understand the meaning of tradition as the repetition of misery, tragically prolonged. All I recall are charts, tables, and formulas, wall diagrams and lists—dead letters for the living dead. It took me years to figure out how capitalism played a part in all of this.

Capitalism as a discourse is self-validating and self-perpetuating, and as a social relation it works as a self-fueling engine whose capacity to travel around the globe and devour everything in its path is expanding exponentially. As a discourse and social practice that in its current neoliberal incarnation is shorn of neither self-enrapture nor fanatical adherence by most business leaders and guardians of commerce, capitalism shatters collective experience into monadic bits and pieces, bifurcating students’ relationships to their bodies, brutally taxonomizing human behavior into mind and body, into manual and mental labor. Capitalism is a colossus that bestrides the world, wreaking havoc. It possesses the terrible power of psychologizing entrenched and dependent hierarchies of power and privilege and reformulating them into homogeneous and private individual experiences. The upshot is that 99 percent of the world’s inhabitants are made to feel solely responsible for their own plights.

It’s difficult not to recognize that in the United States today billionaires are increasingly acquiring more rights while the poor are constantly pushed to the limits of morbidity, to the barren hinterlands of need deprivation. Capital maintains its seductive grip through a combination of life-destructive market price mechanisms and the powerful allure of profit motive; it both creates and revels in our desire like a whipped-up dominatrix commanding leather-trussed slaves at a Hollywood fetish ball to serve as human ashtrays for guests’ hecho en Cuba cigars. You’re free to lick the boots of your appointed master or have your boots spit and polished by unwilling, neurasthenic quislings (suffering from what William James once popularized as “Americanitis”). This fits in well with our social universe of effective demand. We give ourselves up to the thrall of contending oppositions; we luxuriate in the iniquitous tension created by absolutes in the cosmetic playground of subject formation; we thrill at forging our self-images in the war between extremes; and most of all, we love redrawing them so that their shock value is never dulled by familiarity. I’m thinking here of soccer moms whose children fell in love with the wholesome Hannah Montana, yet who love to condemn the unDisneyfied Miley Cyrus with her leotards cut above the hip and embellished with marijuana leaves, her gold leaf rolling papers, her bowl-cut hairstyle, and her stud-embellished cowboy boots, as she attempts to twerk out of her Disney character. At the same time, their equally moralistic husbands relish in the sexual power of Miley’s extended tongue that can flick and lick anything and anyone in within a city block. In any case, Miley’s rich, so the media will give her a pass. In this decidedly anti-dialectical process of identity formation, we have been engineered to love the wealthy and despise the poor, except in those “extreme” cases when the poor are able to become one of the rich, usually in those economic interludes when capitalism is recovering from an imperial hangover—more specifically, on those rare occasions when the United States is not at war with another country.

After initially agreeing to publish a sixth edition of Life in Schools to bring into further relief how capitalism is destroying education, Allyn and Bacon (Pearson) did an about-face during a meeting that my wife, Angie, and I had with one of the editors at Hotel Mark Twain in San Francisco in April 2013. Very suddenly, the publisher had decided to drop the book from its education list, not because it wasn’t a steady seller (it was) and not because of the quality of the book—the publisher acknowledged the book’s many awards, including from an international panel of educational experts as one of the top twelve education books ever published—but because, as I was told by the editor, who had arranged to meet me at the hotel bar, Pearson had become too “corporate” and the book’s theoretical section contained very “complicated” language and terminology. That this terminology had been drawn from a Marxist framework in the fifth edition wasn’t mentioned, but I felt that this was the elephant in the room. I left the meeting and headed over to the Hilton hotel across the street. Less than ten minutes later, I noticed a familiar gray-haired figure enter the hotel lobby. It was Dean Birkenkamp of Paradigm Publishers, an old friend and a former editor of mine. Not realizing that Pearson had dropped the book from its list minutes earlier, he called out to me: “Peter, I have been meaning to ask you for some time, is there any way that I can acquire the rights to your book, Life in Schools?” And so a new chapter in the life of this book began.

I am still surprised that Life in Schools continues to be widely used as a textbook in schools of education throughout North America, twenty-five years after it first appeared. When I initially proposed the text to various publishers throughout the United States, the general response to my prospectus was that it would never fly in a conservative field such as education, especially in a country like the United States, which is widely committed to capitalist principles and practices. The prospect of Life in Schools being placed with a major textbook publisher looked grim. That it was a book absent of treacly paeans to the Founding Fathers, munificent advice on how to foster the entrepreneurial spirit, directions on how to narrow the digital divide, and the usual piquant tips on how teachers can raise standardized test scores in their classrooms apparently was not the issue. It was not a question of the book lacking in relevant content. It was clearly a question of the book proposing a specific type of analysis of educational issues usually dealt with in foundations of education classes. Foundations of education textbooks written from a critical perspective were virtually nonexistent in the 1980s. It wasn’t exactly a strong selling point that Life in Schools was created to challenge race, class, and gender privileges within North America’s dominant capitalist society.

Yet even with the success and critical acclaim that Life in Schools has enjoyed, I admit that with the launching of each new edition, I steady myself for the likely reality it will be the final one to see print. Not because I consider the ideas discussed in the book to be conceptually outdated, but because my politics have become more progressively radical with each new edition. And with few exceptions (with Life in Schools appearing to be one of them), radical politics and teacher education textbooks do not have an untroubled history or one of longevity. This is not likely to be the case, however, with a publisher such as Paradigm Publishers, which has a trusted history among progressive thinkers.

Those who are familiar with some of my other recent books, or who have happened to notice the progressive radicalization of my politics, surely will not be surprised by this new introduction and other additions. I have in no way concealed the fact that what is underwriting my larger project of educational reform is nothing less than what Karl Marx referred to as a total social revolution. How is this so different from my position in the last five editions? My educational project has always supported an emancipatory politics, certainly. I have always taken a stand against the abuses of capitalism, the practice of tracking, institutionalized racism and sexism, economic and cultural imperialism, and homophobia, and, to the best of my ability, I have attempted to redress asymmetrical relations of power and privilege wherever and whenever they have crossed my pedagogical path (or other paths). for the last two decades, I have vigorously challenged the conservative position that the breakdown of our schools can be directly traced to a lack of Judeo-Christian family values, a lack of professionalism among teachers, or a lack of ability on the part of economically disadvantaged students, even though such a position mounted in the most reactionary precincts of the dominant ideology is so stupefying that even addressing it is giving it too much credibility. Shifting away from a left postmodernism, my emphasis over the last twenty years has been on developing forms of revolutionary praxis and transformation rather than on the politics of reform, although “reform” efforts can be good places to start a social revolution.

This edition of Life in Schools is not meant to be an homage to revolutionary socialism as much as an anti-elegy to capital and a challenge to educators to give sinew to revolutionary critical pedagogy by striving for forms of associated labor outside the social factory or social universe of capital. As Ellen Meiksins Wood (1999, p. 121) makes clear, it is undeniably and tragically the case that today “the imperatives of the market will not allow capital to prosper without depressing the conditions of great multitudes of people and degrading the environment throughout the world.” With the associated pressures of competition, accumulation, and exploitation imposed by more-developed capitalist economies and leading t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• About the Author
• Dedication
• Brief Contents
• Contents
• Foreword
• Foreword to the Third Edition
• Preface
• Part I Class Dismissed Teaching in the Homeland's National Security State
• Part II Cries from the Corridor Teaching in the Suburban Ghetto
• Chapter 1 The Frontiers of Despair
• Chapter 2 The Invisible Epidemic
• Chapter 3 “The Suburbs Was Supposed to Be a Nice Place…”
• Part III Critical Pedagogy: An Overview
• Chapter 4 The Emergence of Critical Pedagogy
• Chapter 5 Critical Pedagogy
• Part IV Analysis
• Chapter 6 Race, Class, and Gender Why Students Fail
• Chapter 7 New and Old Myths in Education
• Chapter 8 Teachers and Students
• Chapter 9 Conclusion to Parts III and IV
• Part V Looking Back, Looking Forward
• Chapter 10 Unthinking Whiteness, Rethinking Cultural Contact as Interculturality
• Chapter 11 Hope and the Struggle Ahead
• Chapter 12 Conclusion to Part V
• Epilogue Reflections on Twenty-Five Years of Life in Schools
• Appendix: Interview with Peter McLaren
• Index