September 9, 2005
McLaren, Peter and Ramin Farahmandpur. Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005.
In this book McLaren and Farahmandpur pose a Marxist critique of postmodern, liberal pedagogy, arguing that its emphasis on “diversity” and “multiculturalism” obscures underlying class issues. McLaren and Farahmandpur believe that in an age of global capitalism and neo-imperialism it has become critical for educators on all levels to acknowledge and resist capitalism in their classrooms: “In the space that follows, we attempt to sketch out in broad strokes the key characteristics of a socialist working-class pedagogy that attempts to move beyond liberal and Left-liberal efforts at making capitalist schooling less barbaric and more democratic. The democratic working-class pedagogy that we envision here agitates on behalf of pedagogical practice connected to a larger socialist project” (52).
McLaren and Farahmandpur begin by critiquing the spread of global capitalism and the Bush administration’s neo-imperialist agenda (the most recent evidence of which is the war in Iraq). McLaren and Farahmandpur believe that education—and, in particular, a form of Marxist or “contraband” education—is one of the most powerful ways to oppose these late capitalist and neo-conservative forces.
According to McLaren and Farahmandpur, liberal or progressive education (or “postmodern pedagogy”) not only refuses to acknowledge global capitalism in the classroom; it also obscures class issues by focusing instead on identity politics and multiculturalism. In the new critical pedagogy that McLaren and Farahmandpur propose, which is based on the critical pedagogy developed by Paulo Friere, issues like race and gender are understood through their relation to global capitalism. McLaren and Farahmandpur explain that, “Class analysis needs to be deepened along the lines of its Marxist predecessors in order to explain contemporary connections among race, class, gender and disability. This is, however, a far cry from the postmodern claim that ‘class’ is just another one of many identities by which people represent themselves” (88).
According to McLaren and Farahmandpur this new critical pedagogy “supports the practice of students and workers reflecting critically not only on their location in the world and against the world but also on their relationship with the world” (53). They place this kind of pedagogy in stark contrast to mainstream pedagogy, explaining that, “While capitalist schooling provides students with basic knowledge and skills that increase their productivity and efficiency as future workers and that subsequently reproduce class relations, critical pedagogy works toward the revolutionary empowerment of students and workers by offering them opportunities to develop critical social skills that will assist them in gaining an awareness of—and a resolve to transform—the exploitative nature of capitalist social and economic relations of production” (53).
McLaren and Farahmandpur also focus more specifically on the U.S. public education system, criticizing increased corporate involvement in public universities and high schools and the implementation of national standardized testing. They critique Bush’s No Child Left Behind act, writing that, “The imposition of testing and accountability regimes that depend upon failing schools, the corporate and faith-based sponsorship of public education, the instructional mandates serving corporate interests rather than those of students, and the forced militarization of public high schools demonstrate that education no longer exists as we once knew it. No Child Left Behind is correct in at least one regard: no child will be left behind the neoliberal autocracy of the U.S. government unless critical educators, students, and families halt the aggression” (231).
In their final chapter, McLaren and Farahmandpur discuss the September 11 World Trade Center bombings and the subsequent “militarization” of schools. Part of Bush’s No Child Left Behind act, they explain, requires public schools to hand over student contact lists to military recruiters (272). McLaren and Farahmandpur insist that schools should be military-free zones, places that allow and encourage the kinds of critical, subversive thinking that can lead to social change.
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I agree wholeheartedly with McLaren and Farahmandpur’s suggestions not only that we encourage students not only to be in the world and against the current hierarchys embeded in it’s political systems, but with the world. By encouraging students to become critical, subversive, and active we can give them the tools to change the world and not be either a silent willing accomplice to a system they dare not upset for a few cheap material items, or alienated and deprived of their own humanity in an underclass that is increasingly unable to make ends meet outside of black market systems which victimize those with the least power most.
We grow up in this world hoping to make a difference to the environmental devastatation and starvation, mental and physical, which occur on this planet, but so few of us are really willing to take a risk to affect this change. I do not mean as educators we should allow our reputations to be destroyed, because than we are ineffective, but we need to take risks if any of the ideas of critical and constructivist, for that matter, are to survive in the global marketplace.
In fact not only are our schools through systematic testing and busy work becoming more and more factory model institutions of productivity in hopes of following the “business model” but critical thinking skills which enable workers to even join the managerial class are swiftly being undercut in our nation’s school system (U.S.) to make way for a more desperate and willing labor market.
We need to see more critical educators such as McLaren and Farahmandpur take the willing challenge to strive ahead for social justice and social change in a New World Order that would leave our children unable to develop a conclusive arguement against a corrupt system of goverence.