Curry Malott

Derek R. Ford

Tyson E. Lewis

From Colonization and Slavery to the Decline of US Imperialism

History of Education for the Many

Derek R Ford

Revolutionary Education, Theory and Practice for Socialist Organizers Promoting socialist consciousness is one of the central tasks of building a revolutionary movement in the U.S. This requires the organized and intentional efforts of an expansive base of militant organizers equipped to intervene in a variety of campaigns and movements. Such organizers are not only activists but also educators. Revolutionary Education will help facilitate the training of such revolutionary organizers and educators. The chapters in this book address a range of themes in Marxist educational praxis, touch on diverse historical movements and provide examples of how they can inform our own practices today in pre-revolutionary times. Two appendices provide a series of tactics for facilitating the study, discussion and teaching of revolutionary ideas. Teachers and organizers strike a common stance: one foot grounded in the mud and the muck of the world as it is, the other foot striding toward a world that could be, but is not yet. When we knock on a door, organize a meeting or encounter our students, we see, not a collection of deficits and deficiencies, but sparks of meaning-making energy, agents with the power and the potential not only to understand the world, but, if they choose, to collectively transform it. ﻿Revolutionary Education - part credo and manifesto, part road map, part strategy and tactics - connects the dots. An indispensable text. - Bill Ayers, author of "Demand the Impossible," "Public Enemy" and "Teaching Toward Freedom" Revolutionary Education is an incredible book for activists and educators alike, especially those looking for concrete tools to organize in classrooms, community centers and shop floors. In pulling together this book, Liberation School has done a great service for the socialist movement. - Wayne Au, Professor, University of Washington Bothell; Editor, "Rethinking Schools"

Theory and Practice for Socialist Organizers: Theory

Revolutionary Education

Brad J. Porfilio

Tricia M. Kress

This year (2012) marks ten years of No Child Left Behind and the U.S. federal government’s official designation of what qualifies as “scientifically based research” (SBR) in education. Combined, these two policies have resulted in a narrowing of education via standardization and high stakes testing (Au, 2007) as well as the curtailment of forms of inquiry that are deemed legitimate for examining education (Wright, 2006). While there has been much debate about the benefits and limitations of the NCLB legislation (e.g., Au, 2010) and SBR (e.g., Eisenhart & Towne, 2003), critical researchers have held strong to their position: The reductionistic narrowing of education curricula and educational research cannot solve the present and historical inequities in society and education (Shields, 2012). Contrarily, reductionism (via standardization and/or methodological prescription) exacerbates the challenges we face because it effectively erases the epistemological, ontological, and axiological diversity necessary for disrupting hegemonic social structures that lie at the root of human suffering (Kincheloe, 2004). Not only has NCLB proven incapable of overcoming inequalities, but there seems to be sufficient evidence to suggest it was never really intended to eliminate poverty and human suffering. That is, it seems NCLB, despite its lofty title and public discourse, is actually designed to advance the agenda of handing public education over to for-profit corporations to manage and privatize thereby intensifying the capitalist class’ war on those who rely on a wage to survive (Malott, 2010). In the present ethos, reductionism upholds and retrenches the status quo (i.e. the basic structures of power), and it puts at risk education and educational research as means of working toward social justice (Biesta, 2007). Because social justice can be interpreted in multiple ways, we might note that we understand critical social justice as oriented toward action and social change. Thus, critical education and research may have potential to contribute to a number of social justice imperatives, such as: redistributing land from the neo-colonizing settler-state to Indigenous peoples, halting exploitative labor relations and hazardous working conditions for wage-earners, and engaging in reparations with formerly enslaved communities.

New Directions in Critical Research

Challenging Status Quo Retrenchment

Marc Pruyn

Luis Huerta-Charles

Whereas This Fist Called My Heart, the first Peter McLaren reader (2016), offers a window into the development and reorientation of McLaren’s work over time, Tracks to Infinity emphasizes the significance of orientation in his contemporary work. McLaren’s earlier work was oriented toward the idea of a contradictory postmodern subjectivity located outside the increasingly fragmented, indeterminate late capitalist society. If the concept of the critical subject or change agent is perceived to be simultaneously located both inside and outside of the world that exists, however mundane, it begins to appear as a utopian or idealist construction. While discourse is indeed important, locating the revolutionary potential exclusively within the abstract realm of language or the sign can lead to a disconnected relationship with the concreteness of everyday struggle. As the fog of the disembodied, postmodern subject began to lift, McLaren reoriented his engagement with and gaze toward the concrete value-creating laborer as the active agent of revolutionary educations’ process of becoming—collectively becoming something other than abstract labor. This volume is filled with deep engagements with the concreteness of lived experience juxtaposed next to the bourgeois propaganda of the capitalist class political establishment as manifested in the Trump era. Praise for Tracks to Infinity... “There is no masking the profound legacy of Peter McLaren for those of us honored to be counted among his many students and friends. To me, his revolutionary teachings amount to a raging bonfire of praxis for the cognitively weary...and while fire's nature burns and is dangerously beyond our control, historically speaking, fire is also the Promethean foundation stone for the humanization of the world. Herein, then, is a truly infernal collection of writing and ideas on education and politics—or perhaps just enough to thaw the numerous minds and hearts that have grown deadly cold from the icy spiritual hell that is our time of masterful warfare, an age when the beloved community is daily being stripped naked, shot and then laid out on a press table like a macabre photograph of the supposedly dead Ché.” Richard Kahn Core Faculty in Education, Antioch University, Los Angeles “Peter McLaren is one of the most innovative and resourceful advocates of critical pedagogy originating from Gramsci and Freire. What distinguishes his work is the nuanced dialectical interweaving of national/ethnic struggles and global imperialist hegemony, exposing the limits of transnationalist-cosmopolitanist postmodernism (eliding the reality of finance capitalism) and covertly racialized globalism functioning as a decoy for white supremacy. This volume represents cuttingedge praxis in historical-materialist research and application.” E. San Juan, Jr. Fellow of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas “Huerta-Charles, Marc Pruyn & Curry S. Malott have given birth to Volume II of THE first ever Reader of Peter McLaren’s expansive works. As a leading scholar and activist of our time, this groundbreaking text showcases a range of his punchy insights into multi-culturalism, imperialism, methodology and revolution. The book is unrivalled for anybody wanting to understand education and society, and do something serious about its ills.” Alpesh Maisuria Senior Lecturer in Education Studies, University of East London Co-Deputy Editor, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies Co-Convener , Marxism and Education: Renewing Dialogues (MERD) Seminar Series

The Peter McLaren Reader, Volume II

Tracks to Infinity, The Long Road to Justice

This book simultaneously provides multiple analyses of critical pedagogy in the twenty-first century while showcasing the scholarship of this new generation of critical scholar-educators. Needless to say, the writers herein represent just a small subset of a much larger movement for critical transformation and a more humane, less Eurocentric, less paternalistic, less homophobic, less patriarchical, less exploitative, and less violent world. This volume highlights the finding that rigorous critical pedagogical approaches to education, while still marginalized in many contexts, are being used in increasingly more classrooms for the benefit of student learning, contributing, however indirectly, to the larger struggle against the barbarism of industrial, neoliberal, militarized destructiveness. The challenge for critical pedagogy in the twenty-first century, from this point of view, includes contributing to the manifestation of a truly global critical pedagogy that is epistemologically democratic and against human suffering and capitalist exploitation. These rigorous, democratic, critical standards for measuring the value of our scholarship, including this volume of essays, should be the same that we use to critique and transform the larger society in which we live and work.

A New Generation of Scholars

Critical Pedagogy in the Twenty-First Century

A Call to Action challenges current and future teachers to take seriously the philosophical implications of being an educator on land indigenous to a particular human group with both Native and non-Native students. Readers are introduced to the interrelated histories of education, philosophy, and Native and non-Native peoples in North America. These discussions point to the advancement of a critical pedagogy for Native North America. This book should be read by any teacher or student who is or will be involved with cultural studies, especially in the area of Native Americans.

An Introduction to Education, Philosophy, and Native North America

A Call to Action

Milagros Peña

For punk rockers, music and art have often been used as tools for resisting and accommodating the interests of society's dominant classes. During the late 1970s, a predominantly white, male working/middle-class counterculture began to develop what is now known as punk rock. This book shows how punk rock serves to both subvert and accommodate the interest of late-capitalist American society by looking at the trends in the ideas, values, and beliefs transmitted through punk lyrical messages, specifically through the content of three punk record labels and how they have evolved over time. The impact of punk will continue because it is a product of the changing face of alternative cultural spaces - spaces that impact and are impacted by increasingly hostile and exploitive relationships between and within oppressor and oppressed groups.

Curry Malott

About

Books

Join the club