Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire: Toward a new Humanism

Peter McLaren and Nathalia Jaramillo
Sense Publishers (2007)
Reviewed by Richard Kahn
Reprinted with Permission from The Journal of Educational Controversy

Peter McLaren and Nathalia Jaramillo’s Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire (PPAE) best collects their founding theoretical work on the post-9/11, emergent international anti-capitalist/imperialist movement that reflects an active example of revolutionary critical pedagogy. Those familiar with McLaren’s recent material on the subject in books such as Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism (with Ramin Farahmandpur, 2004) Capitalists & Conquerors (2005), Red Seminars (with Compeñeras y Compeñeros, 2005), and Rage & Hope: Interviews with Peter McLaren on War, Imperialism and Critical Pedagogy (2006), will find in this latest text a further volley of unflinching and searing essays that seek to unapologetically smash like a hammer into the hateful workings of power syndicates such as the forces behind the recent Bush cabal, the ongoing litany of unprovoked American militarism, corporate media, privatized schooling and transnational capitalist class ventures.

PPAE is a book of pedagogical theory (and in the spirit of revolutionary critical pedagogy, performative acts of polemic should be included within the field of theory proper), but as McLaren and Jaramillo put it, this book’s work is not intended “as grist for advancing our careers in the academy but as a way of participating in a wider political project in which we attempt (to echo Henry Giroux) to make the pedagogical more politically informed and the political more pedagogically critical” (p. 6). Thus, McLaren and Jaramillo’s collaborations, though often conceptually and linguistically dense, are not to be mistaken as yet another speculatory exercise in pedagogical pontification about the problems of schools or how to reconstruct them so as to emancipate their democratic potentials. This is not a Cartesian mediation on social reconstructionism, but an organic attempt to articulate a burgeoning worldwide standpoint theory born of class warfare and other forms of transnational oppression that produce the dehumanization of global society.

Drawing from the energy of the international workers movements, McLaren and Jaramillo want to re-organize a worldwide front of critical, popular educators who will comprise an “educational left” (pp. 34-64) that works in concert with extra-institutional revolutionary forces. One task this educational left has is to provide a map of the neoliberal educational landscape that highlights how the stranglehold of a corporate media oligarchy continues to distribute public knowledge through strong ideological filters, how standardized educational curricula have ossified into the normative goal of education, and how the systematic segregation of people of color in schools all challenge both leftist educators and society generally with complicated and urgent problems. Therefore, McLaren and Jaramillo ask: “How can critical educators reinvigorate the civil societarian left precisely at a time when we are creating a world where elites are less accountable to civil society than ever before?” (p. 52). According to the authors, the answer to this question lies largely in the potential for generating concrete revolutionary critical pedagogy, which means going beyond progressive, constructivist, curricular methods towards developing socialist sensibilities throughout the institution of public schooling by conscientizing “teachers, students, families and other cultural workers” (p. 63).

Ultimately, McLaren and Jaramillo hope to teach us that we still have much to learn about our social and political futures, which remain open, and hence any and all efforts to build unity for a materialized opposition to the broader structures that presently attempt to determine the particular conditions of our lives is something that represents a vital sense of hope (p. 115). PPAE documents some of McLaren and Jaramillo’s hopeful efforts, and thereby provides a pedagogical statement of needed theoretical interventions into the ongoing problem of how to realize inclusively democratic forms of school and society, as well as an enactment, or performance, meant to demonstrate and create concrete possibilities for educational freedom in a time when many believe such political possibilities are in short supply.