Reading the Subtext of Hope and Courage: Preparing Teacher Education Students for Revolution

• In Event: 31.076 - Creating a Culture of Revolutionary Praxis: The 25th Anniversary of Life in Schools

Abstract

Our world is filled with human suffering – hunger, war, racism – inhumanities so extreme that we cannot conceive that we could do anything to change it (McLaren & Monzó, in press). Thus, we turn a blind eye and attempt to find relief in an anesthetized consumer existence. We have been well trained by the master preservers of capital to blame those in greatest need and to justifying our own “successes” as deserved. This may be especially true for teachers who must be made to believe the meritocratic myth that education brings equal opportunity and to engage in the alienating, mind-numbing, and dehumanizing practices against students that continue to reproduce our capitalist system (Freire, 1970).

Life in Schools (McLaren, 2015) brings us face to face with the anguish of young people whose life and educational opportunities are seriously hampered by poverty and a structure of oppression that proves insurmountable for most. Reading discussing, and deconstructing the scenes played out in Life in Schools through a revolutionary critical pedagogy, we are forced to see the horrors of our world and in many schools, especially those serving working class people of color (Kozol, 2007).

In my multicultural education courses I see the desperate cries of students (through tears, anger, and/or guilt) whose belief systems are shattered by the staggering evidence of oppression. Yet, I have noted that when we can relate the existence of poverty, racism, sexism, and other antagonisms to class struggle and keeping workers from uniting against capital, pre-service teachers are able to recognize how each of us as human beings have been pitted against the other.
McLaren’s forthright and reflexive treatment of privilege, whiteness, and oppression support an honest reflection and deep understanding of the different opportunity structures available to different communities. This clarity often alleviates among some students feelings of guilt, humiliation, and internalized oppression, especially when we explore that totality of capitalism and how it manages to structure even our beliefs, values, and how we disengage with the problems of our world. When students recognize the courage and hope within the subtext of the lives of the youth depicted in Life in Schools, we then have touched upon our human potential to love fully and to resist the social reproduction role of education.

The Marxist humanism embedded in a revolutionary critical pedagogy reveals both our agency and our complicity in this structure of unfreedoms and brings hope for an alternative world, one beyond capital’s value production (Allman, 2001). Responsibility and commitment follow suit when students realize that to do nothing is indeed to accept the status quo. As Freire (1998) notes “No one can be in the world, with the world, and with others and maintain a posture of neutrality. I cannot be in the world decontextualized, simply observing life. (pg. 73).” Our challenge is to support ongoing ethical dialogic praxis that will continue to support student clarity and commitment to social change amidst the continual onslaught of ideologically-driven messages to sustain relations of exploitation.

Author

• Lilia D. Monzo, Chapman University