The Radical Canadians who made Education "Critical"
Peter McLaren: One of the "Three Musketeers" of Critical Pedagogy
By
In yesterday’s post, Critical Theory-Shmeory, I warned Woke Watch Canada readers about a series of essays which would spring from the top-secret research laboratory we call Lighthouse Think Tank. Well I was not kidding. Today’s post aims to confront the reader in a deliberate sort of manner with yesterdays dire warning. Essay number one has arrived, and as a double wallop Melanie Bennet’s - yes that Melanie Bennet from the Weekly Canadian Gender Wars Report found in these pages - video analysis of todays radical subject, Peter McLaren, can be found at the bottom of this post.
Let’s begin
The Radical Canadians who made Education "Critical"
In Melanie Bennet’s recent video (see below) on the Canadian critical pedagogue, Peter McLaren, she mentions a former teacher who viewed three Canadian academics - Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux, and Joe Kincheloe - “as Canada’s second most successful academic influence – internationally that is. Number one being Jordan Peterson.”
That is quite the statement.
One point of difference between the influence of Jordan Peterson and these three pedagogical “Musketeers” is that Petersons work is primarily focused on young adults and up, while critical pedagogy is imposed on children K-12. When viewed this way, one wonders if perhaps this hapless trio of Canadian pedagogues may turn out to be even more influential than Peterson.
McLaren, Giroux, and Kincheloe hold in common an intense adulation for the founder of their discipline, Paulo Freier. As Freierians they view the classroom as a site of revolutionary politics. Their bible is Freier’s 1970 volume Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
The point of Freier’s critical methods “is to induce a critical consciousness, which is a revolutionary consciousness,”1 a process he calls “conscientization.” In Freier’s words, “This can be done only by means of the praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.”2 It is worth pointing out that “praxis is the practical application of theory, or the action taken to dismantle oppression. To Freire, liberation doesn’t happen on its own. It comes from applying ‘critique’ of the systems of oppression.”3 Today, the social justice left refers to this as “doing the work.”
According to Giroux, who introduced Freire to American scholars, Paulo Freire “is a living embodiment of the principle…the pedagogy should become more political, and that the political should become more pedagogical.”4 Giroux helped “Freire’s ideas reach new audiences,” so that by 1990, with the publication of a new twentieth anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “Freire, had emerged where he stands today, everywhere.”5
Why did it take 20 years for Freire to catch on in America?
Freire’s work primarily focused on “adult literacy in post-colonial contexts” in the third world, whereas American pedagogues were interested in the application of his ideas to public education K-12. Giroux was able to articulate the challenges of adapting Freirean pedagogy to the American context: In the third world, the conditions of domination are well known, while in America, “not only the content and nature of the domination need to be documented…but the very fact of domination has to be proven to Americans.”6
The concept of agency was instrumental in order to refashion Freirian pedagogy to the American context. Concerning the struggle against social oppression, the power of human agency became the premise which made a Freirean approach workable in the West. Giroux developed his critical pedagogy using the conception of agency found in the critical Marxist tradition, however, unlike the lion's share of Marxists, he maintained that reform within a liberal milieu was possible. However, the reform he advocated for was socialism.
But it was Peter McLaren in an essay from 1998 who “cemented Freire’s position as the focal point of ‘cultural literacy’ within the educational left…”7
Isaac Gottesman, providing a history of leftist scholarship in his 2016 volume The Critical Turn in Education, explains that in modern critical scholarship, the word “critical” tends to evoke a Paulo Freire citation. And that because of the efforts of Giroux and McLaren, “Freire’s critical work thus became helpful (to Marxists) in thinking through and passionately articulating how and why schooling, and education more generally, should be harnessed in the push against an (increasingly theorized and understood) unjust social order.” When a critical scholar cites Pedagogy of the Oppressed, they are signaling their “belief in education as an emancipatory process” within that “unjust social order.”8
However, Giroux’s critical pedagogy was not a program of the revolutionary Marxism which influenced Pedagogy of the Oppressed, rather, his use of “critical pedagogy” instead of “radical pedagogy” signaled a commitment to “socialism through radical reform,”9 even though it “rooted itself in the critical Marxist tradition’s conception of the power of human agency.”10
McLaren’s critical pedagogy, on the other hand, “is much more revolutionary in tone and advocacy than Giroux’s work ever was.”11 McLaren is not interested in reforming anything within the framework of a liberal democracy, he is all about the radical revolutionary transformation of society and people.
Before turning to the work of McLaren, it is worth mentioning the influence that the Frankfurt School, and particularly of the highly influential figure of the 1960s New Left, critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, had on the ideas of Paulo Freier, and on critical scholars who came after him, like Giroux, McLaren and Kincheloe.
According to Melanie Bennet, “in a nutshell, Herbert Marcuse essentially created the framework for Critical Social Justice, or the Critical Theory we know today. His influence on the American academy and the New Left movement, particularly among university students in the 1960s, was profound. It can’t be understated.”
Indeed, at the height of his ascendence, he transformed into “the father of the New Left” for the student movements of West Germany, France, and the United States.12
Marcuse had first become a member of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (later known as the Frankfurt School) in 1933, however, having been forced to flee Nazis Germany, he never actually worked at the Frankfurt location. He arrived in New York in 1934 where he was employed at the Institute for Social Research branch at Columbia University.
In 1942, Marcuse took a position in Washington, D.C. at the Office of War Information and then with the Office of Strategic Services (later renamed to the Central Intelligence Agency). Between the years 1954 to 1965 he taught at Brandeis University, and at the University of California between 1965 to 1970.
“...from the beginning to the end of his literary career Marcuse looked for spaces of a critical consciousness that had not been completely whittled down by the oppressive and repressive forces of capitalism. Revolution and social change demands a space for thought and action that make resistance to the status quo possible. Well before he began to use the term ‘the Great Refusal’, he was in search of such.”13
A “fun fact,” pointed out by Melanie, Marcuse was the PhD supervisor of Marxist Feminist agitator and Communist Party founder, Angela Davis. She was accused of conspiracy to murder but was eventually acquitted under highly questionable circumstances.
A thorough examination of Marcuse will be the subject of a future essay. However, the following paragraphs provide a brief summary of some of his more controversial and influential ideas. Marcuse's grip on the radical left began to wane in the latter half of the 1970s when “he was eclipsed by second and third generation critical theorists, postmodernism, Rawlsian liberalism, and his former colleagues Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin.”14
It was Marcuse’ 1964 volume, One-Dimensional Man, which perhaps most solidified him as the “Father of the New Left.” In that work, Marcuse argues that advanced technological society creates “false needs,” or “false consciousness” - a Marxian concept which describes “the ways in which material, ideological, and institutional processes are said to mislead members of the proletariat and other class actors within capitalist societies, concealing the exploitation and inequality intrinsic to the social relations between classes. According to Marxists, false consciousness legitimizes the existence of different social classes.”15 16
Marcuse offered what he called “the great refusal” to the “One-Dimensional” universe created by the invisible structures of oppression in an advanced society. Then in 1965, the year following One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse articulated his most controversial view that violence in the service of radical leftism is to be tolerated, in his highly influential essay, Repressive Tolerance.
From Melanie:
“Marcuse's ideas became a catalyst for countercultural movements, fueling student activism and groups like the Weather Underground network, a militant far-left Marxist revolutionary organization. Some described them as domestic terrorists. Marcuse’s work provided THE theoretical framework that shaped the new radical leftism of the era. An entire generation of students were convinced that capitalism was the enemy and revolution was the only solution. These radicals didn’t disappear. They became academics themselves and sought to criticize and transform societal structures.”
Along with “praxis,” “false consciousness,” “critical consciousness,” “radical transformation,” “the great refusal,” and “repressive tolerance,” is “hegemony,” another term constantly on the minds of the critical Marxists. Rooted in the theoretical works of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci17 - what is most often referred to as cultural Marxism - hegemony refers to the power structures which control the means of cultural reproduction which create and sustain the dominant (hegemonic) culture. The goal of Marxist revolution is to transfer the power of cultural reproduction to the Marxists, in order for their radical outlook to become hegemonic.
Turning to McLaren. Born in Toronto, Ontario in 1948, McLaren was the only child of Frances Teresa Bernadette McLaren and Lawrence Omand McLaren. At the age of 19 he hitchhiked around the United States, where he met the Black Panthers in Oakland, and at one point, lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles and participated in anti-Vietnam war protests. He also met with Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsburg and began writing poetry and short stories.18
In 1973 he earned a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature at University of Waterloo, then later a Bachelor of Education at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Education, a Masters of Education at Brock University’s College of Education, and a Ph.D. at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. It should be noted that the “indoctrination camp” called OISE is a notorious hotbed of Marxist revolutionaries and anti-West critical pedagogues. Dr. M covered OISE in his piece Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!.
McLaren left Canada in 1985 to teach at Miami University's School of Education and Allied Professions. Henry Giroux was McLaren’s colleague during this eight-year period at “a time when the epistemology known as critical pedagogy was gaining traction in North American schools of education.”19 McLaren also served as Director of the Center for Education and Cultural Studies, then later worked at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, in 1993.
“Practically, his work attempted to create an oppositional cultural politics that enabled teachers and students to analyze how the dominant and negotiated meanings that inform classroom texts were produced and to uncover the ideological and political meanings that circulated within them. McLaren attempted through critical reading strategies to illuminate the dominant pedagogical codes of teachers as well as the normative codes within classroom cultures of students.”20
McLaren’s early work can be divided into four groups: critical ethnography, critical pedagogy, curriculum studies and critical multiculturalism. And from 1994-to the present, he became somewhat less focused on the classroom, and expanded on the themes of the first phase of his career by delving into what he felt were adjacent areas, like “a critique of political economy, cultural contact and racial identity, anti-racist/multicultural education, the politics of white supremacy, resistance and popular culture; the formation of subjectivity, the coloniality of power and decolonial education; revolutionary critical pedagogy informed by a Marxist humanist analysis and liberation theology.” McLaren now uses the term “revolutionary critical pedagogy” - “an approach to everyday life influenced by Marxist humanist philosophy, also known as a ‘philosophy of praxis’, to describe his approach.21
McLaren’s conception of critical pedagogy, as explained in a 2010 edited volume, Revolutionizing Pedagogy, includes practitioners such as “feminist educators, labor rights advocates, queer theorists, and Marxist humanists, among others.”22 It's worth pointing out here that the obsessive interest in Queer theory and Marxism held by Canadian educators of students K-12, goes at least as far back as 2010. As we continue digging, I won’t be surprised if we find earlier evidence of the phenomenon.
In 2015, McLaren published Life in Schools, to tell “the story of my reinvention as an educator, from a liberal humanist who pressed the necessity of reform to a Marxist humanist who advocates a revolutionary praxis. By ‘revolutionary praxis,’ I mean educating for a social revolution through critical pedagogy. The unfulfilled or unrealized democracy that I envision is unashamedly socialist. Unlike the school of ‘radical democracy,’ I don’t believe capitalism can be rescued for democracy or a cosmopolitan public sphere. Capitalism is beyond salvation. And so is democracy so long as it looks to capitalism to support it.”23
It becomes increasingly apparent as one surveys the vast canons of literature generated by critical theorists - McLaren published 45 books and hundreds of academic papers - that to them teaching is secondary to revolutionary politics. Indeed, teaching is merely an excuse for revolutionary politics, as students are meant to be transformed into critically conscious Marxist activists. Again, the approach of teaching through praxis is merely the practical application of Marxist theory.
Stay tuned to these pages for more essays, and videos, on the nuts and bolts, and the history of the Critical Social Justice incursion into Canada, from myself and the others in the terribly scary Lighthouse Think Tank. Please watch the excellent video below by Melanie Bennet as she analyzes the ideas of McLaren and shows how they are used in modern education, like in the recent federally-funded Trans-Affirming Tool Kit. Yikes!
Lastly, if you are interested in this general subject matter, stay tuned for a new essay from Lighthouse Think Tank scholar, Dr. M…COMING VERY SOON (make sure you subscribe to get it!).
Here is Melanie’s analysis:
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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read History ain't dead, it just smells funny
BREAKING NEWS: James Pew has contributed a chapter to the new book Grave Error: How The Media Misled us (And the Truth about Residential Schools). You can read about it here - The Rise of Independent Canadian Researchers
Also, for more evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!
There are now two ways to support Woke Watch Canada through donations:
1) By subscribing to the paid version of the Woke Watch Canada Newsletter for - $7 Cdn/month or $70 Cdn/year
2) By making a contribution to the Investigating Wokeism In Canada Initiative, which raises the funds necessary to maintain and expand Woke Watch Canada’s research and investigation into Dysfunctional Canadian School Boards, Education, Indigenous Issues, Free Speech, and other areas of Illiberal Subversion and the Canadian Culture Wars.
Race Marxism by James Lindsay (Pg 64)
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (Pg 51)
Education Under Siege (1985) by Henry Giourx and Stanley Aronowitz (unnumbered back cover)
The Critical Turn in Education by Isaac Gottesman (Pg 25)
The Critical Turn in Education by Isaac Gottesman (Pg 26)
The Critical Turn in Education by Isaac Gottesman (Pg 24)
The Critical Turn in Education by Isaac Gottesman (Pg 26)
The Critical Turn in Education by Isaac Gottesman (Pg 90)
The Critical Turn in Education by Isaac Gottesman (Pg 90)
The Critical Turn in Education by Isaac Gottesman (Pg 91)
Rothman, Stanley (2017). The End of the Experiment: The Rise of Cultural Elites and the Decline of America's Civic Culture. Routledge. p. 177.
See the Prison Notebooks
Revolutionizing Pedagogy Education for Social Justice Within and Beyond Global Neo-Liberalism Edited by Sheila Macrine, Peter McLaren, and Dave Hill (Introduction pg 2)
Life in Schools by Peter McLaren (Preface pg xxi)
 | A guest post by
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It is now 3 years since Legacy MSM in Canada started to publish articles asserting that the bodies of 215 Aboriginals were buried at a Residential school in Kamloops B.C. They have also suggested that there are bodies of Indigenous Children in many other locations.
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Not a single body has been found yet. … 3 YEARS, GOT IT ???
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100 Churches in Canada have been burnt to the ground or vandalized.
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I’ve read through a few articles that described Bill C-63 and it is ABSOLUTELY clear that the Executives of CBC, CTV, Global TV, etc are guilty of a HATE CRIME as defined in Bill C-63.
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They must be arrested the day this Bill is passed. If they are not arrested, then how can the Government justify arresting anyone else, in cases where the evidence is far less convincing ?
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I remember having to read and cite Foucoult and Derrida in the 1990s. At the time I didn't see it as anything but a benign intellectual exercise. But this Marxist inspired "post modernism" exercise has been taking hold of the humanities and has spread like a mind virus according to Dr. Gad Saad. It has infected the humanities, education, social work, psychology and if you want your degree you better at least pretend to be on board. The theft of individual free thought is at stake. Part of the praxis is to convert or bully others to your new religion.