Peter McLaren

California State University, Dominguez Hills
Created: May 24, 2000
Latest update: May 24, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org.

This essay is based on the text for Sociology 395, Transforming Discourse: Peter McLaren. Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2000. ISBN: 0-8476-9533-6. $22.95 at Vroman's Pasadena.

To understand our use of this text for Transforming Discourse in the Love and Peace Series, we need to clarify briefly what we will be considering left and right and in what sense. First of all, by the educational left I mean to include folks like Jonathan Kozol, Alfie Kohn, Paulo Freire, Che Guevara, Bell Hooks, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, liberation theologists, and many more. I mean also to include post-modern theory, by which I mean, the study of alterity, postcolonialism, with an emphasis on the "post" that says there are things desperately wrong with late capitalism and we must stop denying them if we are to solve their attendant problems.

I'm not going to be terribly specific about exclusion and inclusion, for I find that the barriers are shifting. I have students who consider themselves radical left who are often persuaded by right wing arguments. I have students who are fundamentally right wing who embrace arguments from the left. And that does not come of poor educational skills, but of the blurring of issues by the spin professionals. To accomodate our dilemma with the blurring of left and right, together with our inexperience in judging texts on our own authority, I have provided sites that offer primarily left perspectives and others that provide primarily right perspectives. If the topics of concern to you are not explicated on those sites, I suggest that you contact them and ask for their position on the issue. And always remember that any conclusions you draw should remain open to new information, both new discoveries and new exposure to information on your part.

Some of you are going to be offended by statements in Peter McLaren's text. I hope that you will turn to Fellman's adversarialism and understand that in order to build a strong and sustainable community today, we must not exclude those we think we disagree with. Our emphasis in Transforming Discourse will be on listening to each other in "Good Faith." With the Presidency of George W. Bush, there is heavy emphasis in the media and elsewhere on the right perspective. Thus, I have selected the left perspective for your text. Readings on the site will include the right perspective, since the principle of good faith listening applies to our efforts to transform discourse. Always be sure that you know the right's response to a left wing argument, and vice versa.

Peter McLaren: The Poet Laureate of the Educational Left

This prologue by Joe L. Kincheloe, pp. ix - xii, describes Peter McLaren as a talented writer in critical pedagogy, who embodies much of what Che Guevara and Paulo Freire taught in the area of education for liberation. McLaren is skilld at turning a phrase so that it becomes unforgettable: like "bargain-basement capitalism," no-fault apostasy," Sunday School proselytizing." (At pp. ix-x.)

Foreword

This forward by Ana Maria Araujo Freire (widow of Paulo Freire), pp. xiii - xvi, . . . will finish later. jeanne

A Salute to Peter McLaren

Poem by Luis Vitale, pp. xvii - xviii. . . . will finish later. jeanne

Introduction

Right here in the introduction, Peter McLaren sets the tone for his text, not one of the cold empiricism of academic scholarship, but one of connectedness, a tone familiar to the series of classes on Love and Peace. McLaren tells of a bus ride in Costa Rica, on which he spied "a young man with a ponytail running beside the bus. As the bus passed him, he glanced up and our eyes moementarily met; I noteiced that he was wearing a Che T-shirt with the inscription, '!Che Vive! A fleeting sensation of plaintive connectedness overcame me, and I managed to give him a quick 'thumbs-up' gesture of affirmation just in time for him to return a broad smile to the crazy gringo. For a brief moment, I felt that this ponytailed stranger and I were linked by a project larger than both of us. . . . Che has a way of connecting -- if only in this whimsical way -- people who share a common resolve to fight injustice and to liberate the world from cruelty and exploitation." (At p. xix.)

Transforming Discourse is a course about this kind of connectedness, "whimsical, committed, choosing to do no harm to the "Other." McLaren says of this story with which he opens the book: "There was no way of knowing the politics of this young man and how seriously he identified with the life and teaching of El Che. But Che's image brings out the promise of such connection and the political fecundity of even this momentary reverie."

Such connection offers a space for beginning the task of listening in good faith. And hearing in good faith is a first step toward doing no harm, twoard the reverie, or the imaginary, that can produce alternative paths to human relationships.

Paulo Freire, like Che, carries "the struggle forward over the role of education as a vehicle for liberatory praxis." In other words, both Che and Paulo Freire wanted to change the world of social injustice. To document it, to cease to deny it was not enough. They were determined to end the injustice. McLaren says of them: "As intellectual and political comrades, their lives represented the best of what the human spirit has to offer." Freire, in the preface to one of McLaren's books, expressed it thus: "[I]t is imperative that we learn from and that we teach our 'intellectual relative," so that in the end we can unite in our fight against antagonistic forces." He deplored the dissipation of energy as those who are opposed to social injustice bicker among themselves, and lose their focus on the oppressors.

McLaren devotes more space to Che Guevara in the text, for Freire is known world over in education for liberation. Che is more often seen as a hero, without such emphasis on

More to come . . .jeanne