McLaren Gives Hope to Critical-Marxist Scholars

• In Event: The Peter McLaren Reader: Reflecting on Three Decades of Critical Pedagogy

Abstract

This part of the symposium looks at Peter McLaren’s early days as an intellectual and activist and Marxist. Despite his stature as an intellectual, and as one of the leading architects of Critical Pedagogy, Peter McLaren has always been a Marxist revolutionary at heart as he valorizes his hero with his tattoos of Che.

Even as a young professor and emerging intellectual, Peter was vocal, as a result, he was often regarded with trepidation by those unsettled by the courageousness and fearlessness—and sometimes outrageousness—demonstrated in McLaren’s works, many readers of McLaren would be surprised to know how approachable and likeable he is. Many educators suspect that upon meeting McLaren he would assume the air of an insufferable prima donna. But the truth of the matter is that McLaren is almost the diametric opposite to the academic prima donna. Even educators who have been dead set at disliking McLaren have, upon meeting him for the first time, warmed to him immediately.

With the publication of his first book, Cries from the Corridor, which chronicled his life teaching immigrant populations over five years in the late 1970s, McLaren was thrust into the limelight. As soon as the book was released in 1980, McLaren quickly became l’enfant terrible of the educational establishment and catapulted into the public eye as an expert in inner-city education. McLaren relished this role at first but was happy to abandon it after moving to the US in 1985 at the invitation of Professor Henry Giroux. Since his early days as an elementary school teacher in Canada, McLaren has become one of the most recognizable names among progressive educators today (Gabbard and Anijar, 2005).

Since the publication of the text focused on teaching McLaren, he has not slowed down. McLaren has continued to be a highly visible and valued international firebrand with a penchant for an exquisite militancy in his writings, speech and activism, from talking educational theory with the late President Hugo Chavez in Miraflores Palace to reminiscing in a Hollywood bistro about his days communing with Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsburg in San Francisco in the 1960s. Peter McLaren continues to educate and cries out for radical change, at the same time that he struggles for working people against all forms of oppression. And he is not afraid to stand up to tyranny by his demonstrations of solidarity from Venezuela to China to Slovakia.

Peter McLaren is a scholar and activist noted for his ability to crystallize Marxist theory, critical pedagogy and revolutionary theory and to braid them into coherent strategies for creating a socialist alternative to capitalism. McLaren does more than simply talk he walks the walk. McLaren’s work is a clarion call for radical change, his voice and work gives us the courage to stand up and be counted.

Author

• Sheila L. Macrine, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth