Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture

This book contributes to the literature on culture, identity and the politics of schooling. It addresses the challenge and the promise of school and social reform through what the author calls a "critical multiculturalism".
This book contributes to the radical literature on culture, identity and the politics of schooling. It addresses the challenge and the promise of school and social reform through what the author calls a "critical multiculturalism". Peter McLaren's approach to what he calls "predatory culture" and his exploration of recent debates over the role of public institutions and the state within such culture offers the reader a combination of neo-Marxist and post-structuralist theory - referred to by the author as "resistance of postmodernist critique". Readers are invited to construct a politics of resistance at the level of everyday institutional life and within other public spheres. Such a politics of resistance is discussed in detail as a form of critical pedagogy which the author develops from the work of the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, and from a range of theorists and practitioners on the educational left - including Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard. Critical pedagogy is seen as a means of investing desire in a project of the possible.