Thirty-five years ago Peter McLaren’s memoir Cries from the Corridor not only exposed the gritty underside of Canada’s inner ring suburbs, but disrupted much of the complacency afflicting education authorities everywhere. The young Toronto-born, 32-year-old teacher published his personal diaries describing, in considerable detail, his real life school experiences in “The Jungle,” as North York’s Jane-Finch corridor was labeled in those days. It was a totally authentic, brutally honest little book that attracted rave popular press reviews and was recognized as a surprise 1980 Canadian bestseller by The Toronto Star and Maclean’s magazine.
McLaren was breaking the established rules and telling tales out-of-school. Today, reading the original version, a heavily used 1981 PaperJacks edition, is to marvel at the young teacher’s graphic descriptions, searing insights and honest portrayal of life in the middle school trenches. Sensationalist magazine writers ate it up and, rather predictably, seasoned education faculty members like Gordon West pronounced the book of “limited academic utility” because it portrayed “individualized and isolated students” and stopped short of analyzing the total context of “working class life.”
McLaren’s little diary account did more to raise public consciousness about the plight of inner city schools than any Canadian education book ever written. Yet, as an aspiring academic, McLaren was troubled by the sensational media treatment labeling kids and communities as “losers” and stung by the theoreticians and what amounted to academic carping. Within five years, he had acquired a University of Toronto PhD in Education, been released from a Brock University lecturing position, and disappeared from the Canadian scene.
Writing Cries from the Corridor and pursuing graduate studies radicalized Peter McLaren and he gradually shed his reputation as a ‘hands on’ veteran inner city teacher insufficiently schooled in critical theory, Marxist literature, cultural studies, and feminist research. He was essentially rescued in 1985 by an American-born radical scholar Dr. Henry Giroux who invited him to Miami University of Ohio to help start a Cultural Studies Center dedicated to advancing “critical pedagogy”and exposing the dangers of global capitalism dressed up in the guise of “neo-liberalism.”
Gradually, McLaren was transformed from a disciple of critical postmodernism into a secular prophet of Marxist-infused revolutionary pedagogy. He renounced his original venture, Cries from the Corridor, saying that he “grew to dislike the book” and went so far as to sate that it now “disgusted” him because it totally lacked “a coherent philosophy of praxis.” For the next thirty years, through six rewrites, as a key component of a larger book, Life in Schools, he managed to expunge the bad parts and generate a radical textbook to prepare teachers for resistance against global capitalism and its attendant problems.
If Giroux was has mentor, then the Brazilian radical scholar Paulo Freire became his North Star. While at Miami University, Freire invited him to a conference in Cuba and he came into contact with Brazilians and Mexicans that shared his vision and ideas. After several sojourns to Latin America, McLaren grew disenchanted with postmodern theory and was drawn to Marxism. “I was haunted by the realization, ” he recalled in 2003, “that I had not sufficiently engaged the work of Marx and Marxist thinkers.”
Increasingly influenced by Freire and “Marxist anti-colonial projects” in the Americas, McLaren’s Marxism deepened and he saw “the Marxist critique” as the key to confronting “the differentiated totalities of contemporary society and their historical imbrications in the world system of global capitalism.” After eight years at Miami of Ohio, he taught as a Professor of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1993 to 2013 and is now Distinguished Professor and Co-Director of the Paulo Freire Democratic Project at Chapman University, Orange, CA.
Professor McLaren has lost none of his zeal and is the author of nearly 50 books and his writings have been translated into over 25 languages. Five of his books have won the Critics Choice Award of the American Educational Studies Association. His most influential text, Life in Schools: An Approach to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education, is now in its sixth edition, and contains his revised version of Cries from the Corridor. Among global radical scholars, he is now mentioned and considered alongside Freire, Ivan Illich, Pierre Bourdieu and E.P. Thompson. Much like Freire, he embraces “revolutionary critical pedagogy” and seeks to “create pedagogical spaces and contexts for the oppressed to fashion their own understandings of their shared history of struggle.”
McLaren is what university students would describe as a strange bird with the unmistakable style of an ‘aging sixties radical.’ An April 2006 UCLA News story described him as “a cross between a rock star and a motorbike enthusiast.” When a foolhardy conservative UCLA grad posted a Hit List of the “Dirty Thirty” left-wing faculty, he topped the list and achieved even greater notoriety across the United States.
McLaren is an engaged scholar who devotes his teaching life to awakening students to the potential for radical social change. His faculty office at UCLA was crammed with revolutionary memorabilia and objects of art, including busts of Lenin, Marx and Mao. His right shoulder bears a tattoo of Cuba revolutionary Che Guevera and Mexico’s Emiliano Zapata is tatooed on his left shoulder. “Both struggled for peasants,” he told a wide-eyed UCLA reporter, and “I will die with them someday.”
What if — Peter McLaren had stayed in Canada and capitalized on the public awakening unleashed by his ground-breaking 1980 book? No doubt his intellectual journey might have been different and perhaps less consumed by the internal doctrinal battles on the intellectual Left. In the company of critical education theorists Freire and Giroux his focus has shifted from the “real life experiences” of working class youth to more rarified debates over “revolutionary praxis, ” the “Achimedian fulcrum,” and enlisting educators in the “war of position.” No wonder renowned American education researcher Michael Apple finds the language of McLaren and the “critical theorists” so “abstract and confusing.”
Reading and attempting to fathom Peter McLaren’s recent writings reminded me of a critical issue raised by the late British social historian E.P. Thompson in his famous 1978 essay, The Poverty of Theory. While Thompson was responding, at the time, to Stalinism and the preponderant influence of Louis Althusser on European Marxism, he also exposed the excesses of “mechanical Marxism” and “ideological totalitarianism” that tends to obscure rather than shine light on the real lives lived in working class communities.
Working people and youth, Thompson, claimed “made their own lives” and were not simply the victims of “a series of interlocking events” that amounted to “a post-facto determinism.” Getting absorbed with dialectical materialism, according to Thompson, can become “an excuse for not studying history.” He also reminded us of one of Leon Trotsky’s philosophical gems: “an ignoramous, armed with the materialist dialectic….inevitably makes a fool of himself.”
Try to imagine what the inner city children and youth in McLaren’s Cries from the Corridor would make of some of his recent writings on “critical revolutionary pedagogy” and the “totality” of “neoliberal hegemony.” Speaking the same language might be a good starting point if we are ever to really confront the very real, deeply rooted problems facing youth in today’s inner city and rougher suburban schools.
What really happened to the Peter McLaren who wrote Cries from the Corridor? Why did he later renounce his role in producing a brutally honest, unvarnished record of a young teacher’s struggles to reach students in a tough suburban school? What if — McLaren had encountered E.P. Thompson and focused more on exposing and documenting the real lives of struggling students? Thirty years on, would McLaren have been less inclined toward guarding “proletarian science” and less absorbed the rather esoteric world of “academicism”?
I have also traveled to NYC for discussions with Girioux and Freire. I toured the Nicaraguan literacy programs to see Freire method in action.
OK students the sentence is “Somoza was a cruel and vicious dictator”. What is the subject? Correct Somoza. What is the verb? Correct was. What is the subjective completion?…you get the idea.
“Try to imagine what the inner city children and youth in McLaren’s Cries from the Corridor would make of some of his recent writings on “critical revolutionary pedagogy” and the “totality” of “neoliberal hegemony.” ”
I work with those inner-city children in Toronto, and they won’t be reading him unless he publishes a graphic novel. Critical pedagogy has overrun teacher’s colleges, and led to a generation of students who count on their fingers and can’t read.
Well said Tom.
And thanks so much Tom for all your work with these kids. You have made their futures that much brighter, something they will definitely appreciate as they get older.
The education results in Canada are not only the best in the world, they are the best in Canadian history. Time some of you got out more and looked at REAL data and worked past your confirmation bias.
Check out nro-liberal policies in Chile and Sweden. Their countries have been sinking like a stone since they implemented vouchers. Chile killed vouchers. Sweden has them under review. Google charter schools in Ohio for an eye opener.
There is a MASSIVE opt-out movement going on in the USA with regards to testing. Have ANY reform policies moved USA and UK up the PISA list? No they haven’t prompting OECD to say privatization is wrong direction to go for academic gain. Four academic studies show testing increases dropouts. NCLB a total and complete failure.
Time to take off the blinkers.
Tom prefers this type of “No Excuses” schooling. Maybe Tara as well.
https://deficitperspectivesdebunked.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/no-escape-a-brief-examination-into-the-no-excuses-philosophy-of-education-peter-anderson/
Thanks Tara. But it was only a throw-away line and Paul’s column deserves a more thoughtful comment. I have fun helping individual kids, but I’m totally failing at my bigger goal – lighting a tiny fire of ‘community literacy’. I’m now on my fourth iteration of that project and can only report total failure.
I haven’t read the ‘original’ McLaren, but our modern inner-city schools are likely worse than in his experience, we are raising a generation of the stupidest, most poorly educated Canadians ever. Doug’s comment is fairly representative of their educators, who are overwhelmingly white, privileged, and clueless. When EQAO says that half a grade-3 classroom isn’t prepared for grade-4, you can be sure that ALL of them are going to drown together. And we are watching it happen without blinking.
I’d like to say “In fairness…” and point at causes in the growing class divide (as Doug regularly does). Robert Putnam’s recent book ‘Our Kids’ is a thoroughly depressing litany of the class-based obstacles preventing kids in the inner city from succeeding, and although he writes in a US contexts, I see examples of every single factor he described in the families I work with.
Putnam claims that the class divide is really an education divide, and his evidence is convincing. Poor kids from broken homes have huge disadvantages.
BUT WE KNOW HOW TO OVERCOME THESE DISADVANTAGES. The successful model is the “No Excuses” charter schools in NYC. The thing that keeps us from helping kids in Toronto’s inner-cities is our monopolistic education industry. Those kids are failing BECAUSE of our teachers.
Our politicians love teachers, the parents love their kid’s teachers, the kids love their teachers (and certainly the teachers love to pat themselves on the back). But the respect is misguided.
I have regularly sat with inner-city grade-7 and grade-8 kids who can’t read a single page of a grade-2 chapter book. Their parents won’t hear it – because their teacher says they are doing just fine and will grow out of it (and will be passed on regardless). Their principal tells them the kids can’t miss school for tutoring because they won’t be properly socialized. The report cards don’t report anything. The kids love basketball and hanging out with their friends. Everyone is totally pleased with the current system.
It is depressing to read Paul’s stories of rural schools where class factors aren’t as much of a problem, but the education industry still runs over the kids in pursuit of monopolistic interests. I’d love to fast-forward a decade with the elementary students in Paul’s three ‘hub school’ communities who about to board the buses. How many will drop out of high school?
On the other hand, my friend’s kids are superbly educated, motivated, and unbelievably successful – they are doctors, lawyers, bankers, real-estate developers, software designers, entrepreneurs, and more. They are on the other side of Putnam’s class divide. What they have in common is a long pedigree of private schools, tutoring centres, and attentive educated parents.
Ohio charter school mess. OMG.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/06/12/troubled-ohio-charter-schools-have-become-a-joke-literally/
You are beginning to sound like a broken record, Doug. Can you relate any of this to Peter McLaren’s work or is it just another opportunity to go on record with your talking points? Let’s raise our sights and confront the larger theoretical and philosophical questions.
Tell Tara and Tom. They changed the subject.
Even as a person who has some time for Marxist analysis it has little to do with school improvement. Just a tangent.
School improvement in neighbourhood like PBMC worked comes down to 2 words -poverty mitigation.
Yeah can’t help but love those mass murderers like Mao, Stalin, and Fidel et al. who serve as McLearn’s role models.Perhaps he could re-read the history of the Soviet gulags. Of course he would deny itias he is just one of Stalin’s ‘useful idiots’
I guess pro capitalist anti Marxist Hitler would not be on your list?
Not sure why we were mentioned in Doug’s rant. If one actually read Tom’s post, it has everything to do with this discussion.
I guess this is what happens when one is ensconced in chasing constructive pedagogy all day long and removes him/herself from the reality of the classroom. Appears McLaren has lost sight of his students and their day to day in North York.
After 40 years in inner city classrooms I for one don’t take instruction from people who have never seen the inside of one.
Oh JDouglas you are just so subtle
Who brought Mao and Stalin into it?
I just get tired of nit pickers running down Canada’s education system when nobody can name one single nation -not even one, with a better OVERALL system. They want to point to one charter school somewhere or one city in one Asian nation with better math marks but in the end the goods are not there. They cannot close the deal with convincing data.
The post secondary grad rates trump all other data by a far. The reformers do not have a fig leaf to protect their position.
I’m a little surprised that no one, so far, has responded directly to my analysis of E.P. Thompson’s critique of “scientific Marxism” and “academicism.” I gleaned that by re-reading Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory with the help of some expert opinion. I still wonder what Thompson would think of McLaren’s work and whether McLaren might have made a bigger impact if he had focused more on exposing the experiences of youth in what might be termed “dead end” communities.
I guess his Life in Schools textbooks have reached thousands of uninitiated prospective teachers. Beyond that I only see a limited academic reach, parroted in Canada by Henry Giroux, E. Wayne Ross, and Tobey Steeves. That kind of critical pedagogy is so encrusted in “academicism” that it would be unintelligible to the very people they are seeking to free from oppression. It only leads to over-the-top conjecture such as Mclaren’s outrageously intemperate attacks on Barak Obama as a “war criminal”, “Wall Street toady” and “agent of global capitalism.” (Life in Schools, 2014). Under Obama, Giroux claims America has “descended into madness.” It’s clear that E.P. Thompson had little time for radical Marxists who did not speak the common language or really focus on “working class experiences.” Most of that Marxist “proletarian science” seems to lose sight of real people, individual struggles, and signs of youth resistance.
Well I generally agree with EPT and you if you agree Paul.
You are way over the heads of most of these other reformers however so you just get red baiting comments like those from edu beat.
If anyone is interested, The Poverty of Theory is posted here: http://home.ku.edu.tr/~mbaker/CSHS503/ThompsonPovertyofTheory.pdf
I don’t have much time for social theory in education, my first encounter was doing my MEd at York where I attended a lecture panel of Freudians. Later that day I tried to explain to my wife that the great unresolved trauma facing today’s students is the tearing from the womb, and she told me I would have to find something more practical.
Putnam’s book ‘Our Kids’ argues that it is education rather than capital that divides the spoils in our society, and there are ‘feedback’ elements that amplify this class divide – the well-educated rich get better-educated, the poorly-educated get poorer and less-educated.
Educators are not to blame for the societal factors, but they are complicit in preventing the poorly-educated poor from moving ahead. We know how to break this cycle, but it is inconvenient for teachers and threatening to their monopoly on education. The “No Excuses” charter model is not as comfortable as our current system which promotes well-paid mediocrity and long summer vacations.
For educators to spout Marxist theory while championing the rich and demanding monopoly rents paid by taxes on the poor is mere humbug.
The No Excuses model is massive failure.
Dying to jump into this conversation! A couple of other projects that I’m finishing up today and then I’ll be back.
I will say that, earlier this week, while reading a new PhD thesis on critical pedagogy in music education, I encountered many, many references to Peter McLaren’s writing. In fact, his was the most cited body of work. “Cries from the Corridor” was not included.
I think that this conversation has connective threads with Paul’s post earlier this week on the Ontario success narrative.
Looking forward to more on this!
No Excuses schools are dystopia nightmares. They are designed to break the spirit of students to grind them into totally compliant worker cogs in the capitalist neoliberal dystopia nation. Middle class parents would never allow their children to attend God awful schools like this.
They also push out all the square pegs.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/19/why-no-excuses-charter-schools-mold-very-submissive-students-starting-in-kindergarten/
Any no excuses schools in Finland? No because you don’t need jack boot schools for the POOR when you have almost NO POVERTY.
Hey Doug, celebrate this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQt-F2h9KN8 A student from a No-Excuses charter school in Harlem learning that she had been accepted into Princeton.
KIPP has a notorious reputation of sending kids unprepared for university so the flunk out. Dave Levin admits it. Did they not tell you in grad school that anecdotal evidence is totally meaningless? OMG.
It is macro data that matters Tom. If I sent you one poor public school kid who went to Princeton you would fall off your chair laughing. Beside she is not a Princeton grad.
Read this one and weep.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/07/06/growing-evidence-charter-schools-are-failing
Self-appointed Education Messiahs Need Severe DEFUNDING From Public Money — Part ONE
How many attendees to the forthcoming Education International 7th Global Conference in Ottawa, July 19-26, 2015 will be using their own private funds? NONE. They will be funded one way or the other from the education dollar that citizens in all countries involved pay for the “common good” of having children educated. This is a gathering of militant workers (teachers, unionists, professors, etc.) of progressivist tendencies. (BCTF does not belong to CTF – Canadian Teachers Federation – but to EI.)
The last time I saw Peter McLaren he was a prof, U of Auckland, attending the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference in Vancouver, April 2012. (13,000 delegates from 60 countries.) Besides discussions of topics he also attended the Special Interest Group (SIG) mtgs of the Marxian Analysis of Society, Schools and Education SIG. McLaren also spoke to an off site session hosted by E W Ross (UBC) on the subject of radical professors and their problems with free speech. Practically his first words were: “ I am a Marxist Humanist.”
Michael Fullan and Andrew Hargreaves of the 21st Century Transformation movement were also presenting. Tobey Steeves spoke to his paper on Critical Policy Analysis. Paul Shaker, ex-dean of Ed, SFU started another Dewey Club.
My gripe with these type of conferences and the attendance of radical education activists is that they are ripe settings not only for supposedly advancing knowledge about education but also for organizing radical activity which may be contrary to public interest. Contribution to advancing evidence of pedagogical development is questionable. It is so easy to piggyback your radical cause onto ongoing conferences.
Self-appointed Education Messiahs Need Severe DEFUNDING From Public Money — Part TWO
So much is theory, speculation, and wishful thinking about education. Much is radical social reconstruction of society and are pet themes of some who do not have general interest from the larger public. Way too much in education change these days is being done by stealth and speed and coercion.
This force-feeding results as much from radical ideological beliefs (Marxism, constructivism, etc.) as it does from the Competency Crowd (Common Core, 21st Century Learning, etc.). All say: “Trust me.” But, few proofs are offered. We, and our progeny, are being trained for blind obedience.
My solution: Start McLaren Marxist Humanist Schools. Start Fullan 8 C Competency Schools. Let people choose them voluntarily. Do not insinuate these belief systems on universal public schools where people don’t know the underlying agendas prevailing.
Thankfully, there are now arising groups of educators that are prioritizing evidence and proofs in supporting proven standard practices. (ResearchEd movement, Daisy Christodoulou and similar books)
I am alarmed when I read the title of a book by a professor that seems to justify “Social Justice Warriors” in education — Making Justice Our Project: Teachers working toward critical whole language practice, Edelsky, 1999.
A lot of this undermining of society is being done by self-appointed true-believers on the education dollar and at the expense of children’s education. Stop the questionable funding of spread of untested experimental bad ideas in education.
How could radical analysis possibly be detrimental to society?
It may stem from a lack of true understanding of all of the critical perspectives being referenced here, but I’m struck by the irony that seems to be emerging in some of ideas to which Paul is directing us.
If my read of this stream of political philosophy is correct, Marxist thinking in terms of both scientific socialism and dialectical materialism developed in reaction to some of the idealism that surrounded other approaches of the time—scientific socialism a reaction to the more Utopian thinking found in France and elsewhere and dialectical materialism responding to Hegel’s relatively abstract approaches to thinking and talking about change.
Marx seemed passionate about bringing the conversations down to street level and move from a form of idealism to something that affected the lives of everyday, working people.
The irony is that most of these conversations now take place in the type of gatherings that Tunya describes, in philosophical journals and university classrooms. Miles from the intellectual and social realities of most of us.
Marx turned He gal on his head. He gel believe the world of ideas and thinking eventually created the economic system below. Marx said no, the economic system creates the dominant ideas above.
well, quite a revealing commentary and comments. Just for the record, Marxist humanists are decidedly anti-Stalinists, always have been. The founder of Marxist-humanism, Raya Dunayevskaya, left Ukraine to escape from Stalinism. Second, I also work from the perspective of Latin American liberation theology, see forthcoming Pedagogy of Insurrection. Third, I think there should be multiple languages within education, some philosophical, others sociological, anthropological, journalistic, less so, etc. I just happened to have moved into philosophy, where I believe there is important work to be done. I became critical of Cries from the Corridor and provided a theoretical framework for the diary section in Life in Schools. From some of the comments, seems like that is some kind of a crime. I am working with others to bring Freire’s work to mainland China in Mandarin. At the same time in my own work, I am advocating that teachers engage in work done in ecopedagogy and am happy to say some of my students have been on the cutting edge of developing that field. I’m not saying that academic discourse is the only or even the most important language in teacher education. I have tried to develop my own style, which combines poetry, and the language of literary criticism, and popular culture. There are plenty of other writers who write more directly, and without the academic prose. If that’s what works for you, that’s great.
best wishes
Peter McLaren
Thank you for taking the time to contribute to this online discussion, Peter. You are indeed well positioned to straighten us out on your world view and current projects.
Thank you for engaging in my work. I work with teachers and teacher groups worldwide, but mostly in Latin America. In places like Colombia, teachers who belong to unions put themselves at risk of assassination every day. They fight for opportunities for their students to attend university, precisely so that they can wrestle with philosophical questions in a language that might not seem at first to be relevant to their everyday lives. I believe good teachers can help “translate” ideas into the languages and contexts of the everyday lives of their students. I try to take a dialectical approach to teaching, always beginning with practice, then reflecting on that practice, experience, etc., and choosing languages, ideas, and concepts that can help us deepen our understanding of our experiences, since experiences are never transparent. thanks again. Peter
Indeed, Peter, such “translation” is needed to the diverse communities we have in North America in order to have young people come to see relevance in schooling and by extension in their society/ies (imperfect as it is) in order to care enough to try to change it
The only teacher I actually adored. Wish I could find you! Think of you often. Angel Roy.
Peter was my grade six teacher back in the so called jungle. I haven’t read cries of the corridor yet but I am amosy positive I will be in that some
Part of this novel. Peter was the best teacher I ever had and have nothing negative to say about him. I truly hope he is healthy and happy. Forever in my thought. Angel Roy.
Mr. Blue Mcglaren is how I remember you.