Product Description

This text is a provocative investigation of the political, social, and economic factors underlying classroom practices, offering a unique introduction to the contemporary field of critical pedagogy. Life in Schools features excerpts from the author's best-selling work, Cries from the Corridor: The New Suburban Ghetto. The text provokes analytic discussion of social problems and a theoretical framework for formulating potential solutions (Parts III & IV). It also includes a new discussion of race and class, a chapter on the social construction of whiteness, and a new chapter that challenges current domestic and foreign policies of the current White House administration (including the No Child Left Behind Act) and their impact upon American public schooling.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42057 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From the Back Cover

“There really is no second choice. I don’t see any book on the market that gets at the issues McLaren does. I have used this text since it first came out and will continue to use it.”

                        ­--Sandy M. Grande, Connecticut College

This text is a provocative investigation of the political, social, and economic factors underlying classroom practices, offering a unique introduction to the contemporary field of critical pedagogy.

Life in Schools features excerpts from the author's best-selling work, Cries from the Corridor: The New Suburban Ghetto. The text provokes analytic discussion of social problems and a theoretical framework for formulating potential solutions (Parts III & IV). It also includes a new discussion of race and class, a chapter on the social construction of whiteness, and a new chapter that challenges current domestic and foreign policies of the current White House administration (including the No Child Left Behind Act) and their impact upon American public schooling.

New To This Edition:

• Contains a new concluding chapter that challenges the current neo-conservative White House administration and looks at liberal individualism from a critical perspective.  This chapter includes a discussion of alternatives to capitalist society and how teachers can help bring about a new society by becoming philosophers of PRAXIS and educational activists.
• Includes new critical categories and new discussions of race and class, the No Child Left Behind Act, the role of Right Wing think tanks in the academy, and the work of Paulo Freire.
• Includes a new Foreword by Joe L. Kincheloe.

About the Author:  [Insert Author Photo]

Peter McLaren is known worldwide in the education and social justice community.  He is  Professor of Urban Schooling at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.  As a ‘philosopher of praxis’ and social and political activist, he is considered one of the primary architects of what has come to be known as critical pedagogy.  An award winning author and editor, Professor McLaren has published over forty books on a wide range of educational subjects.  He lectures worldwide and his works have been translated into fifteen languages.  Professor McLaren is the inaugural recipient of the Paulo Freire Social Justice Award from Chapman University.  His work has been the subject of numerous international conferences and recently a group of educators in Mexico established La Fundacion McLaren de Pedagogia Critica in order to advance the work of critical pedagogy throughout the Americas.  Life in Schools was recently named by an international panel of experts as one of the world’s twelve most important educational texts.

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Customer Reviews

Critical Pedagogy: Alive and Kicking
For too long, one-trick theoretical "experts" (tearing down the work of others) on the educational left have reduced students to passive consumers of knowledge-leaving them fatigued and disillusioned. I think it is safe to say that McLaren's body of work does not fall into this category-as it is never dull or predictable. Blending theory with biography and history at the intersection of where students/teachers construct themselves subjectively within schools, McLaren's book Life in Schools offers a real-and-imagined "pedagogy of hope" (Friere's words) or--as he prefers to term it--a "revolutionary critical pedagogy." Mollifying the gnashing anti-theory critics, McLaren acts as our anti-tour guide of capitalist schooling through a dialectical process reflection and critique upon his own unique experience as an elementary school teacher in Canada. By situating this critique (which is at the core of a revolutionary critical pedagogy) not in the space of the self but in the revolutionary site of the social, McLaren puts the ideology of capitalist knowledge industry permanently on the defensive. He achieves this by providing the reader with theoretical and empirical tools to both understand and intervene in emerging global structures that are increasingly organizing and regulating everyday practices of schooling. Offering new insights into the re-enchanted field of "revolutionary critical pedagogy," (e.g., Paula Allman, Dave Hill and Glenn Rikowski), McLaren's book Life in Schools is a must read for hope-deprived students and teachers struggling against the neo-liberal model of education, which is immune to the plight of millions of the world's poorest children.

A must read for students
I am a student teacher (who has returned to college in his 30s) and highly recommend this book to anyone about to enter the classroom. Unlike one of the reviews I read posted on this site, I did not find McLaren's writing style difficult read. In fact, many of the central concepts, themes and issues that I have struggled to understand were clearly defined for the first time in my training and the book also provided a helpful overview of key players in the field (yes, the first section provides excepts of his journal as a teacher in Canada but the second section is where the action takes place, at least for someone like myself, who is trying to get beyond writing the umbiquitous and annoying confessional style "journals" that I am required to produce in the assembly-line production model of teacher education, without any adequate exposure to the various theories that might help me to make sense of my experience within the larger "system" that McLaren spotlights in this book). Obviously, McLaren is a controversal figure and his writings cause people to get stirred up and to disagree with him. However, I found his writing style to be inspiring! Within the current political climate, I know that some days it is hard to even drag myself out of bed but I really don't want to join a generation of weary, disillusioned "leftists," whose politics go no deeper than a Nation subscription. McLaren's book is a call to action and as huge an undertaking as it appears to me right now I hope that I can make some sort of a difference in the classroom.

The Good and the Bad of Pete McLaren
Peter McLaren's expanded and revised text on education gives a lot of insight into his life, conditions in inner-city Canadian schools (it's not just hockey and bacon curing!) and the need to adopt a new educational paradigm based more on respect for the induvidual needs of students. With a keen eye and a compassionate soul, McLaren chronicles the lives of his students, their families, and the world they live in. As a teacher, I can attest that this section is not only moving, but can make one a better educator if it is reflected on and the lessons from it implemented.

However, the impenetrable political/educational diatribe that consumes the latter part of the book could and should have been left on the editing room floor. McLaren, angrily, indignantly, and with the use of WAY too many vocabulary words, twists Marxism into knots trying to show how it would be better for students, teachers, all mankind and the little fishes too if we adopted socialist principles. (Okay, the little fishes part I made up but you get it.) It's unfortunate that this odd fusion of chronicles and politics must be, and one wonders why Allyn and Bacon doesn't remarket the book with the first part expanded and the second part dropped. But who are we to wonder at the ways of the mighty publishing gods? We can only offer our burned out lightbulbs and worn bookmarks as tribute, and hope that they will be kind.