A Pedagogy for Revolutionary Consciousness: Life in Schools and the Promise of Humanity

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

Abstract

Today, amidst the most powerful conglomeration of cultural, political, and economic oppression assembled in history, a new revolutionary consciousness is being born that seeks a world founded upon dignity, equality, creativity, peace, cooperation, love, and justice for humanity and the planet that sustains us. Life in Schools is meant to be a part of that emerging revolutionary consciousness.

The book attempts to bring together two worlds the poet William Blake once called “songs of innocence” and “songs of experience.” Within the context of Life in Schools, these worlds represent, respectively, the intuitive, practical knowledge of the beginning classroom teacher and the domain of critical educational theory and political praxis. These worlds are brought together to shed a critical light on why working-class students generally don’t succeed in school, despite the efforts of well-meaning educators and teachers.

Lofgren (2014) writes that there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. He calls this “the Deep State,” an entrenched network of major players invested in war, government deregulation, creating an artificial fiscal crisis by routinely raising the debt ceiling, buying influence over foreign countries, fomenting and sustaining civil wars in foreign countries, and government surveillance. Yet as powerful and global in reach as the American Deep State is, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. What would happen if educators took a drastic political step and made a challenge to the Deep State one of their top priorities?

Life in Schools represents an historical juncture in which the author remains poised pedagogically between the innocence and naïveté of a young man’s introduction to teaching and the reflections of a social theorist privileged with the power of hindsight and research. It is the story of Peter McLaren’s reinvention as an educator, from a liberal humanist who pressed the necessity of reform to a Marxist humanist who advocates a revolutionary praxis.

The story begins in 1980, with the publication of a journal documenting McLaren’s teaching experiences in an inner-city elementary school in Toronto’s Jane-Finch Corridor. The book became a controversial best seller in Canada but a troublesome feeling that he had not made a real difference in the lives of his students began to cloud is personal and intellectual life.

He was advised to leave the theory out and let the vignettes “speak for themselves.” Yet every description is ideologically loaded, semiotically classified, codified, and intertextually related to larger interpretive contexts and capitalist relations of production. The crucial question is: Who has the power to make some forms of class-based knowledge more legitimate than others?

Life in Schools answers this question from the perspective of the labor-capital dialectical contradiction. It also gives the reader the theoretical tools with which to critique schooling and classroom culture and the impetus to become an agent of revolutionary change.

Author

• Peter L. McLaren, Chapman University