Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education

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.

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.

Peter McLaren's book Life in Schools is among the very few texts in critical pedagogy that connects empirical to theoretical and everyday experiences to general ideas about schooling in an understandable manner. It builds its solid arguments in a humanist Marxist tradition, and stays firmly in our, the common people, side. It is a serious and honest book in which teacher's and student's everyday experiences are situated in a larger political context. It's a book for those of us who dare to teach, talk and think critically in these times of global terror.

Peter McLaren presents information that evokes strong feelings and inner thoughts from the reader. I am pleased with the information that he presents. However, his vocabulary forced me to bring out the dictionary to bring a better understanding to what he actually was saying. The "ethnographic" presentation of his experiences in his early years of teaching were thought provoking and at times depressing in nature. To think that children come to school with so much "baggage" is a wonder that they can learn at all. McLaren is a writer that may upset some educators. In my case he brings out the passion for continuing to teach and to help the children that are in need the most. He has allowed me to reach deep into my "teaching soul" and continue my quest for educating "all" of our children that attend our schools.