Peter McLaren

Peter McLaren
McLaren in 2015
Born	(1948-08-02) August 2, 1948 (age 76) Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Spouse	Yan Wang
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Waterloo University of Toronto Brock University
Thesis	Education as Ritual Performance (1984)
Doctoral advisor	Richard Courtney[1]
Influences	Paulo Freire[2] Henry Giroux Emmanuel Levinas[3] Karl Marx[4] Paul Ricœur[3]
Academic work
Discipline	Pedagogy
School or tradition	Critical pedagogy Marxist humanism[5]
Institutions	Miami University University of California, Los Angeles Chapman University

Peter McLaren (born 1948) is a Canadian-American scholar and is known as one of the leading architects of critical pedagogy.^[6] He is known for his writings on critical literacy, sociology of education, cultural studies, critical ethnography, and Marxist theory.

McLaren is a practicing Catholic and identifies with Catholic social justice teaching and liberation theology. He is a strident critic of Christian nationalism and Catholic Integralism.^[7]

Peter McLaren was born in Toronto, Ontario, on August 2, 1948, and spent a brief time living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He began writing creatively in grade school.^[8]

He earned a Bachelor of Arts in English literature at University of Waterloo in 1973, attended Toronto Teachers College, and then earned a Bachelor of Education at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Education, a Masters of Education at Brock University's College of Education, and a Ph.D. at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.^{[citation needed]}

McLaren taught elementary and middle school from 1974-1979.^[9]

After earning his doctorate in 1983, he served as a Special Lecturer in Education at Brock University, where, as a one-year sabbatical replacement, he specialized in inner-city education and language arts. When McLaren's contract was not extended, he decided to pursue an academic appointment in the United States.

McLaren taught at Miami University's School of Education and Allied Professions from 1985-1993, where he worked with Henry Giroux during a time when critical pedagogy was gaining traction in North American schools of education. McLaren also served as Director of the Center for Education and Cultural Studies and held the title of Renowned Scholar-in-Residence at Miami University before being recruited by the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, in 1993.^[10]

In 2013, McLaren was appointed Distinguished Fellow in Critical Studies at Chapman University, Orange, California, where he worked until his retirement in 2023. He was co-director of the Paulo Freire Democratic Project and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice.^[11] He is the honorary Director of the Center for Critical Studies in Education at Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China.

In 2019, McLaren published an autobiographical graphic novel with artist Miles Wilson.

After graduating, McLaren focused on educational theory, specifically exploring ethnography, pedagogy, curriculum, and multiculturalism. He was inspired by his undergraduate work with Elizabethan drama and William Morris, an English artist and socialist. Victor Turner, a symbolic anthropologist, was contemporaneously conducting research on rituals and how they related to dramaturgical theory and anthropology, and McLaren took inspiration from Turner. His first major publication, Schooling as a Ritual Performance Towards a Political Economy of Educational Symbols and Gestures in 1986, was based on his Ph.D. dissertation. ^[12]

McLaren's work from 1984 to 1994 closely stuck with the teachings of the Frankfurt School of social theory and critical philosophy. Each of McLaren's scholarly projects attempted to explore the construction of identity in school contexts within a neoliberal society.^[12]

McLaren shifted focus after 1994 to critique the political economy, focusing on the social relations of production and its relation to the production of subjectivity and protagonist agency. McLaren's work is now less directed at the classroom and more focused on issues such as a critique of political economy; cultural contact and racial identity; anti-racist/multicultural education; the politics of white supremacy; resistance and popular culture; the formation of subjectivity; the coloniality of power and decolonial education; and revolutionary critical pedagogy informed by a Marxist humanist analysis and liberation theology.^[13]

During this time McLaren spent time in Latin America working with Chavistas in Venezuela and with labor and union leaders in Mexico and Colombia. While McLaren adopted the term critical postmodernism, or resistance postmodernism, to describe his work up until the late 1990s, he recognized that he needed to engage the work of Karl Marx and Marxist thinkers.^[13]

As McLaren began engaging in the work of Marx, and meeting social activists driven by Marxist anti-imperialist projects throughout the Americas, he no longer believed that the work on "radical democracy" convincingly demonstrated that it was superior to Marxist critique. McLaren describes his current work as Marxist humanist, a term developed by Raya Dunayevskaya, and now uses the term revolutionary critical pedagogy. His work invites students to examine critically the epistemological and axiological dimensions of democracy in the light of a Marxist critique of political economy and the coloniality of power (a term developed by Anibal Quijano). McLaren's work today comprises poetry, reflections on his activist work in Venezuela, Mexico, and other countries, contributions to critical theory, and Marxist analysis as applied to current educational policy and reform initiatives.^[13] McLaren is also a regular contributing writer to independent news outlets such as the LA Progressive.^[14]

Through McLaren's current re-engagement with Marx and the tradition of historical materialism, McLaren supports the work of colleagues who pave the way for new generations of educators to encounter Marx.^{[15][16][17][18]}

In 2017, McLaren engaged in dialogue with Nobel Prize-winning economist and libertarian Vernon Smith at Chapman University. The exchange resulted in a dialogue on topics such as their shared working-class backgrounds, liberation theology, and economic necessity.^[19]

McLaren converted from his Anglican roots to Roman Catholicism when he was 35 and completing his dissertation. Subsequently, McLaren became interested in Catholic social justice teaching and liberation theology.^[20] Since then McLaren’s work has been expressly Catholic and is critical of Christians who do not believe that the eschaton, or "divine climax of history," has arrived / come to pass and look for its future arrival, thus failing to heed Christ's call to social justice In the here and now. Theologies that do not accept the eschaton as having arrived are tools deliberately used by the masters of this world to prevent Christ's message from revolutionizing the world and bringing about the messianic kingdom on earth.^[21]

McLaren holds that "all acts of violence generate forms of evil" and through evil and violence there can not be the Kingdom of God.^[22]

Right-wing Catholic Christopher Rufo, a leading critic of Critical Race Theory who is closely aligned to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, has accused McLaren of “the ruthless application of politics to the most intimate recesses of the human spirit” in his book, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.^[23] McLaren has responded to Rufo, accusing him of pseudo-intellectualism, a failure to understand the fundamentals of critical theory and critical pedagogy and attempting to create moral panic around critical pedagogy that resembles the "Red Scare" tactics of the 1950s.^[24]

McLaren has been a fierce critic of Trumpism, stating that "Trump has put democracy on the slaughter bench of history."^[25]

In January 2006, McLaren was caught up in the Bruin Alumni Association's controversial "Dirty Thirty" project,^[26] which listed UCLA's most politically extreme professors. The list was compiled by a former UCLA graduate student, Andrew Jones, who had previously been fired by his mentor David Horowitz for pressuring "students to file false reports about leftists" and for stealing Horowitz's mailing list of potential contributors to fund research for attacks on left-wing professors.^[27] McLaren topped the list at number one; Doug Kellner, also in the School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, was number three.

McLaren is the author, co-author, editor, and co-editor of approximately forty books and monographs. His other work has appeared in scholarly journals and professional magazines internationally. His writings have been translated into over 20 languages.^[28]

Books

• The War in Ukraine and America. DIO Press, 2022.
• Critical Pedagogy Manifesto. Teachers of the World Unite. DIO Press, 2021.
• He Walks Among Us: Christian Fascism Ushering in the End of Days. DIO Press, 2020.
• Postdigital Dialogues on Critical Pedagogy, Liberation Theology, and Information Technology (with Petar Jandric). Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.
• Breaking Free: The Life and Times of Peter McLaren, Radical Educator (with M. Wilson). Myers Education Press, 2019.
• Pedagogy of Insurrection: From Resurrection to Revolution. Peter Lang, 2016.
• Revolutionizing Pedagogy: Educating for Social Justice Within and Beyond Global Neo-liberalism (with S. Macrine, S., and D. Hill, Eds). Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
• Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex (with A. Nocella, S. Best, S., Eds.) (2010). AK Press, 2010.
• Havoc of Capitalism. Educating for Social and Environmental Justice (with G. Martin, D. Houston, D., & Suoranta, J., (Eds.). Sense Publishers, 2010.
• Critical Pedagogies of Consumption: Living and Learning in the Shadow of the "Shopocalypse" (with Sandlin, J.A.). Routledge, 2019.
• Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire (with N. Jaramillo). Sense Publishers, 2007.
• Rage + Hope. Peter Lang, 2006.
• Capitalists and Conquerors. Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.
• Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism (with R. Farahmandpur). Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.
• Red Seminars: Radical Excursions into Educational Theory, Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy. Hampton Press, 2005.
• Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory (with D. Hill, M. Cole, & G. Rikowski). Lexington Books, 2002.
• Red Chalk (with M. Cole, D. Hill, and G. Rikowski). The Tufnell Press, 2000.
• Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution. Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.
• Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education, 1998.
• Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millennium. Westview Press, 1997.
• Counternarratives (with H. Giroux, C. Lankshear & M. Peters). Routledge, 1997.
• Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture. Routledge, 1995.
• Schooling as a ritual performance. Routledge, 1986.
• Cries from the corridor: The new suburban ghettos. Methuen, 1980.

Translations

• Sociedad, cultura y escuela (with Henry A. Giroux) (1988)
• Pedagogia crítica y postmodernidad (1992)
• Hacia una pedagogía crítica de la formación de la identidad posmoderna (1993)
• Pedagogía crítica, resistencia cultural y la producción del deseo (1994)
• Rethinking Media Literacy (1994)
• Multiculturalismo Critico (1997)
• Utopias Provisorias: As Pedagogias Criticas num cenario pos-colonial (1999)
• Pedagogia, poder e identidad (Spanish) (1999)
• A Pedagogia da Utopia (2001)
• Kriittinen Pedagogiikka (with Henry Giroux) (2001)
• Pedagogia Revolucionaria Na Globalizacao (with Ramin Farahmandpur) (2002)
• Pedagogia Critica: Contra o Imperio (2007)
• La Pedagogia Critica Revolucionaria: El Socialismo y los Desafios Actuales (2012)

McLaren debuted as a poet with his poem "The Despoiling of the American Mind" in MRZine.^[29]

Following Russia's military intervention in Ukraine, McLaren began publishing books and articles surrounding the war. He serves on the editorial board of the Ukrainian journal Philosophy of Education.^[30]

Peter McLaren was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Lapland, Finland, in 2004, by Universidad del Salvador, Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2010, by the Universidad Nacional de Chilecito in La Rioja, Argentina, and the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos de Educación Inclusiva (CELEI), Chile, in 2021.^[31][32] He also received the Amigo Honorifica de la Comunidad Universitaria de esta Institucion by La Universidad Pedagogica Nacional, Unidad 141, Guadalajara, Mexico.

In 2005, McLaren cofounded La Fundacion McLaren de Pedagogía Critica with Sergio Quiroz Miranda, to promote critical pedagogy in Latin America.^[33] On September 15, 2006 the Catedra Peter McLaren was inaugurated at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela.

^{[34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49]}

Peter McLaren's webpages and CV

• Official website
• Peter McLaren's testimony in the "Cold War Truth Commission" on Sunday, March 21, 2021

Peter McLaren's text

• Toward a Red Theory of Love, Sexuality and the Family by Peter McLaren and Lilia D. Monzo, Iberoamérica Social, December 2014 Issue
• Brothers and Sisters in the Struggle to Rebuild the World by Peter McLaren, Iberoamérica Social, November 2014 Issue
• Austerity/Immiseration Capitalism: What Can We Learn From Venezuelan Socialism? by Peter McLaren and Mike Cole, Iberoamérica Social, May 2014 Issue
• An American Scene by Peter McLaren, Iberoamérica Social, December 2013 Issue
• Living in the Nightwatchman State: A Riposte to Despair by Peter McLaren, Iberoamérica Social, September 2013 Issue
• Rage and Hope by Peter McLaren, Iberoamérica Social, August 2013 Issue
• Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Politics of Hope: Reclaiming Critical Pedagogy - pdf
• George Bush, Apocalypse Sometime Soon, and the American Imperium - pdf
• The Dialectics of Terrorism: A Marxist Response to September 11 - part 1 & part 2
• The Pedagogy of Oppression: A Brief Look at 'No Child Left Behind' by Peter McLaren, Monthly Review, July–August 2006 Issue
• Peter McLaren Responds to Bill Ayers: Bad Faith Solidarity January 22, 2007
• Peter McLaren on Paulo Freire in Jacobin magazine

Texts on Peter McLaren

• Peter McLaren Reflects on the Crisis of Academic Freedom by Samuel Day Fassbinder, Monthly Review, April 6, 2006
• Educating for Equality by Michael Viola, Monthly Review, November 16, 2006
• Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire by Samantha Cohen, The Humanities Review, Fall 2007 issue
• Education Professor Peter McLaren Honored with Chair and Foundation by the University of California Newsroom

Interviews

• From liberation to salvation: Revolutionary critical pedagogy meets liberation theology by Petar Jandrić, Policy Futures in Education, 15(5): 620-652, 2017
• Critical Revolutionary Pedagogy is Made by Walking: In a World Where Many Worlds Coexist by Petar Jandrić, Policy Futures in Education, 12(6): 805-831, 2014
• Critical Pedagogy Against Capitalist Schooling: Towards a Socialist Alternative
• A Radical Educator's Views on Media
• Capitalism, Critical Pedagogy, and Urban Science Education
• Educating for Social Justice and Liberation
• Peter McLaren and the Pedagogy of Liberation by Ravi Kumar, Radical Notes, February 19, 2009
• The Role of Critical Pedagogy in the Globalization Era and the Aftermath of September 11
• Towards a Critical Revolutionary Pedagogy December 9, 2003
• Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy and the Struggle against Capital Today by Derek R. Ford
• George Yancy interviewed McLaren on his mentor, Paulo Freire, September 27, 2021