UR On...
Interview with Peter McLaren
Mashhood Rizvi

Peter McLaren is one of the most influential representatives of critical pedagogy, both nationally and internationally. A major exponent of the work of the late Paulo Freire, McLaren is considered one of the world's leading critical educational theorists. Professor McLaren began his teaching career in his hometown of Toronto, Canada, teaching in an inner-city school in one of the most highly populated housing projects in the country. McLaren completed his Ph.D at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, in 1983. In 1985 McLaren worked with Henry Giroux to create the Center for Education and Cultural Studies, at Miami University of Ohio, where he served as both Associate Director and Director. While at Miami he was awarded the title of Renowned Scholar in Residence, School of Education and Allied Professions. Professor McLaren is the author and editor of over 35 books. He specializes in critical pedagogy, multicultural education, critical ethnography and critical theory. He began teaching at the University of California in 1993, where he serves as Professor, Division of Urban Schooling, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Professor McLaren lectures worldwide and his work has been translated into 15 languages. He became the inaugural recipient of the Paulo Freire Social Justice Award on April 26, 2002 during a ceremony at Chapman University.

McLaren has been one of the major inspirational forces behind EDucate! In this interview he expresses his views on progressive and critical education, critical pedagogy, teachers as transformative intellectuals and on the role of schools in the struggle for social justice.

What do you feel about the current state of educational criticism across the world? We hear terms such as democratic schooling and progressive schooling? Are they for real? What do these look like?
Well in order to answer your question adequately, I will have to specify the context in which such 'democratic' and 'progressive' education takes place. The educational left is finding itself without a viable critical agenda for challenging (in the classrooms and schools across the world) the effects and consequences of the new capitalism. For years now we have been helplessly witnessing the progressive and unchecked merging of pedagogy with the productive processes within advanced capitalism. Capitalism has been naturalized as commonsense reality - even as a part of nature itself - while the term 'democratic education' has, in my mind, come to mean adjusting students to the logic of the capitalist marketplace. Today capital is in command of the world order as never before. What we are facing is educational neoliberalism.

What does this term i.e. 'neoliberalism' mean in the context of the critical educational tradition?
As my colleagues, Dave Hill and Mike Cole, have noted, neoliberalism advocates a number of pro-capitalist positions: that the state should privatize ownership (of the means) of production, including private sector involvement in welfare, social, educational and other state services (such as the prison industry); sell labor-power for the purposes of creating a 'flexible' and poorly regulated labor market; advance a corporate managerialist model for state services; allow the needs of the economy to dictate the principal aims of school education; suppress the teaching of oppositional and critical thought that would challenge the rule of capital; support a curriculum and pedagogy that produces compliant, pro-capitalist workers; and make sure that schooling and education ensure the ideological and economic reproduction that benefits the ruling class.
The business agenda for schools can be seen in growing public-private partnerships, the burgeoning business sponsorships for schools, business 'mentoring' and corporatization of the curriculum, and calls for national standards, regular national tests, voucher systems, accountability schemes, financial incentives for high performance schools, and 'quality control' of teaching. Schools are encouraged to provide better 'value for money' and must seek to learn from the entrepreneurial world of business or risk going into receivership. In short, neoliberal educational policy operates from the premise that education is primarily a sub-sector of the economy.

Can you be more specific in terms of what distinguishes progressive educators from more conservative ones?
The challenge of progressive educators is vigorous and varied and difficult to itemize. Unhesitatingly embraced by most liberals is, of course, a concern to bring about social justice. This is certainly to be applauded.
Mainly, I would say that liberal or progressive education has attempted with varying degrees of success to create 'communities of learners' in classrooms, to bridge the gap between student culture and the culture of the school, to engage in cross-cultural understandings, to integrate multicultural content and teaching across the curriculum, to develop techniques for reducing racial prejudice; they create conflict resolution strategies, challenge Eurocentric teaching and learning; they challenge the meritocratic foundation of public policy. Further, they strive to create teacher-generated narratives as a way of analyzing teaching from a 'transformative' perspective, to improve academic achievement in culturally diverse schools, to affirm and utilize multiple perspectives and ways of teaching and learning, and to de-construct the curriculum.

Your own work has been identified with the tradition of critical pedagogy. What is critical pedagogy?
Well, there is no unitary conception of critical pedagogy. There are as many critical pedagogies as there are critical educators, although there are certainly major points of intersection and commonality. There are the writings about critical pedagogy that occur in the academy, which are many and varied. And there is the dimension of critical pedagogy that is most important - that which emerges organically from the daily interactions between teachers and students. In short, critical pedagogy is designed to serve the purpose of both empowering teachers and teaching for empowerment. Within this perspective, pedagogy and culture are seen as intersecting fields of struggle, and the contradictory character of teaching as it currently defines the nature of teacher work. Thus the purpose of schooling and everyday classroom life is subjected to more critical forms of analysis.
As I recall, the term critical pedagogy evolved from the term radical pedagogy, and I came to associate both terms with the work of my dear friend, Henry Giroux, whose efforts brought me from Canada to the United States in 1985. I have attempted in recent years (with varying degrees of success) to introduce the term 'revolutionary pedagogy' or 'revolutionary critical pedagogy' (after Paula Allman) as a means of redressing recent attempts to domesticate its practice in school classrooms and in teacher education programs throughout.

How would you define revolutionary pedagogy then?
A revolutionary critical pedagogy - actively involves students in the construction of working-class social movements. Because we acknowledge that building cross-ethnic/racial alliances among the working-class has not been an easy task to undertake in recent years, critical educators encourage the practice of community activism and grassroots organization among students, teachers, and workers. They are committed to the idea that the task of overcoming existing social antagonisms can only be accomplished through class struggle, the road map out of the messy gridlock of historical amnesia.

Is critical pedagogy or revolutionary pedagogy the same as radical education or does there exist a significant difference?
Radical education is wide net term that refers to everything from liberal progressive approaches to curriculum design, policy analysis, educational leadership and classroom pedagogical approaches to more radical approaches. You will find many approaches to critical education that are anti-corporate, anti-privatization, but you won't find many people positioning their work as anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist. It is incoherent to conceptualize critical pedagogy, as do many of its current exponents, without an enmeshment with the political and anti-capitalist struggle.

Can you share your views on teachers as transformative intellectuals? What needs to be done in this regard?
This is an important question. I admire Giroux's important call for teachers to develop themselves into transformative intellectuals. To the question of what is to be done, I follow Gramsci in his concept of developing organic intellectuals. I see the challenge of transformative (organic) intellectuals today as developing strategic international alliances with anti-capitalist and working-class movements worldwide, as well as with national liberation struggles against imperialism (and I don't mean here homogeneous nationalisms but rather those that uphold the principles of what Aijaz Ahmad calls multilingual, multidenominational, multiracial political solidarities).
Transformative intellectuals should be opposed to policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank on 'undeveloped' countries because such measures are the actual cause of economic underdevelopment. Transformative intellectuals should set themselves against imperialism and corruption brought about by capitalist globalization. In my opinion, critical intellectuals, as insurgent intellectuals, should do more than appeal to the power elite; in James Petras words they should take a stronger stand against the State.

Can the existing form of schooling system lead us to a struggle for social justice?
Well, Mashhood schooling, in any shape or form, could only be a means to an end not an end. In so far as our goal is to create a society where real equality exists on an everyday basis, it is impossible to achieve this within existing capitalist social relations. A challenge to the causes of racism, class oppression, and sexism (and their association with the exploitation of living labor), demands that critical teachers and cultural workers re-examine capitalist schooling in the contextual specificity of global capitalist relations. Here the development of a critical consciousness should enable students to theorize and critically reflect upon their social experiences, and also to translate critical knowledge into political activism.

Another challenge that I have been faced with is the immediate rejection by teachers who claim that these concepts look good and work well only on paper or that these only work in theory but in real life situations there is no classroom application for such intellectual jargon? What would you say to that?
Well, that is a fair question. In most public schools, and in most private schools for that matter, there are no provisions for classroom applications of these concepts. There are some courageous alternative schools that are trying to employ revolutionary critical pedagogical imperatives into the curriculum, to be sure. But the public schools could not function within capitalism if revolutionary critical educators were to challenge the very foundations upon which they rest.

Can you expand on this?
O.K. What I am trying to say is that revolutionary critical pedagogy is a dialectical approach that works with both the concepts of reform and transformation. Reform efforts are important so that resources are distributed equally among schools in every neighborhood, so that curricula include the voices of ethnic minorities, so that there is equality of access and outcome in education. But we also look towards the transformation of capitalist social relations - at least keep that goal in sight - and keep working in whatever capacity we can towards its realization. While such a transformation is unlikely in our lifetime, or even in our children's lifetime, it is important to keep the dream of another world - a better world. And, we need to believe that a better world is possible.

So what you are saying is that schools suffer heavily from moral, intellectual and ethical contradiction and to a great extent hypocrisy?
Yes, Mashhood absolutely. The problem is that while schools should serve as the moral witness for the social world in which they are housed, they are today little more than functional sites for business and higher education partnerships. The corporate world basically controls the range and scope of the programs, and, of course, military research is being conducted on campuses. As Ramin Farahmandpur and I have argued, universities are now becoming corporations. They embrace the corporate model.
We talk in our classrooms about the values of openness, fairness, social justice, compassion, respect for otherness, critical reasoning, political activism, but look at how the university treats it employees, the service workers, and the graduate students who are exploited as assistants to the professors. Many of the campus workers in the cafeterias and in the warehouses and in the offices are paid wages on which they can barely subsist, and they have few, if any, health benefits and little job security. Graduate students assistants often teach most of the classes but are paid very small wages, while the professors earn robust salaries. We need to make the university mirror the social justice that many professors talk about in their classrooms.

That would require a great deal of tolerance and courage?
Absolutely! I want to give you an interesting example. Recently, in a talk I gave at a university in the Midwest, when I talked about trying to establish more links between the university and social movements for justice that operate outside of the university there was a lot of opposition from the professors in the audience. When I called for socialist principles and practices to resist corporate principles and practices, I was called 'totalitarian' by one well-known professor. When I talked about the problems with capitalism, and the relationship between the university and the corporate state, many professors became very offended. They did not like me using the word 'state' because, to them, it sounded too 'oppressive'. They told me that they preferred to think of universities as places of hope. When I replied that "hope does not retreat from the world, but radiates outwards into the world and gives us the strength for a principled opposition to the imperialist practices that surround us", there were some very angry statements from the professors.

That is where the role of teachers as transformative intellectuals becomes even more critical?
Yes. Under these circumstances, I see the role of teachers as that of transforming the world, not just describing or interpreting the world and this means understanding the ideological dimension of teacher work and the class-based nature of exploitation within the capitalist economy and its educational and legal apparatuses. For me, the most immediate challenge is to discover ways of feeding the hungry, and providing shelter to the homeless and bringing literacy to those who can't read or write.
We need to educate political workers to create sites for critical consciousness both within the schools and outside of them in urban and rural spaces where people are suffering and struggling to survive, and we need to discover ways of creating a sustainable environment. My work in critical pedagogy is really the performative register for class struggle. It sets as its goal the decolonization of subjectivity; the reclamation of public life under the relentless assault of the corporatization, privatization and bussinessification of the lifeworld (which includes the corporate-academic-complex).

How would you sum up the challenges and possibilities?
Well, the challenge is to create an authentic socialist movement that is egalitarian and participatory - not merely a different form of class rule. This means struggling against the forces of imperial-induced privatization, not just in education, but in all of social life. In this imperially dominated world, I can say that I live in the 'belly of the beast'. The challenge is to support collective struggles for social change, to support civil society in breaking away from the chains of the economic superpowers, and to support a positive role for the national state to play - all of this requires steadfastness and focus.
The struggle for co-operation, sustainable development, and social justice is a struggle that we should not leave solely to social movements outside the sphere of education. Educators need to be at the heart of this struggle. This is a very difficult proposition to make here in the United States. In my travels around the country, professors in schools of education are inclined to support the status quo because of the benefits that it has provided for them. Yet currently, the top one-half of one percent of the population of the United States hold about one-third of all wealth in the United States. We have 31 million poor people, which is approximately the entire population of Canada. We have 3 million people who live on the streets. And I live in the richest country in the world. This is the belly of the beast, a beast that in the process of maintaining its great wealth for a few and misery for the vast majority, is destroying the globe.
As I have argued with Noah de Lissovoy and Ramin Farahmandpur, struggling against imperialist exploitation means dismantling a Eurocentric system of cultural valuations that rationalizes globalization as 'development' and 'progress', and portrays those who suffer its violence especially the masses of the South - as the beneficiaries of the favors of the magnanimous and 'advanced'. We know this to be a lie. From the belly of this lie, the effects of imperialism worldwide are recycled and re-presented as proof of the need for intervention by transnational corporate elites. Dismantling imperialism means destroying this unholy marriage of capitalist accumulation and neocolonial violence. This is only a vision at this particular historical moment, but it is one that we must continue to defend.

Any message you would like to communicate to the readers of EDucate!
Yes. I would like to say that in regards to our discussions, no impatient ultimatums can be delivered to the masses from the sidelines. Critique is essential, but it must arise from the popular 'common sense'. In the terminology of Paulo Freire, the productive ground for the operation of liberatory praxis will be found in the 'generative themes' that are truly lived in the 'limit-situations' of the people. In the face of such an intensification of global capitalist relations, rather than a shift in the nature of capital itself, we need to develop a critical pedagogy capable of engaging everyday life as lived in the midst of global capital's tendency towards empire. The idea here is not to adapt students to globalization, but make them critically maladaptive, so that they can become change agents in struggles for social justice.

Mashhood: Thank you Peter.
Peter: Anything for EDucate! As I have stated over and over again, it is emerging as a strong tool for liberation. EDucate! is doing an outstanding job in advancing the cause of social justice and human dignity and setting the groundwork for the development of what Paulo Freire called conscientization (being critically reflective about the self in relation to the social). Your publication is an inspiration to many who are struggling to bring about a better world.