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Subject file · TLI-P-0031

Peter McLaren

AKA: McLaren · Peter L. McLaren

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The Record

McLaren taught in an inner-city school in Toronto, wrote about it, and moved into the theory. Life in Schools, first published in 1989, is an introduction to critical pedagogy written for teachers in training. Five more editions followed it, and the archive now holds the first and the sixth. They do not ask for the same thing. The 1989 book wanted a new economic ethic to reshape economic policy. The 2015 edition wants a new class struggle, and says it can be won only by overthrowing capitalist society.

He is useful to this archive because he does not soften the position. Understanding lived experience is not enough, he argues. Class struggle has to go with it, reshaping the social relations that produce experience. By the sixth edition that means challenging capitalist social relations through a struggle for a socialist alternative to capitalism, a goal he says he would have ruled out when he started the first edition.

Those are the words of a teacher-training textbook stating its own end, in the edition teachers have been reading since 2015. Anyone can argue with a critic’s summary of the field. No one can argue with the field’s own standard introduction, dated and quoted from the page.

Relationship Ledger

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McLaren makes critical pedagogy a teacher-training standard
Date not recorded
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McLaren's Life in Schools, in six editions since 1989, became a standard introduction to critical pedagogy for teachers in training. Source: Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (sixth edition, 2015), Epilogue, p. 256

Documents

What Peter McLaren wrote, oldest first. The archive argues from these rather than about them, so they are listed with the standpoint and the class of each, and a reader is free to check any of it.

  1. Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (first edition, 1989)The 1989 Longman first edition. A separate work from the sixth edition of 2015, which is source 14.Longman, New YorkBookMovementPrimary text (the thinker’s own work)
  2. Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (sixth edition, 2015)The 2015 Paradigm Publishers sixth edition. A separate work from the first edition of 1989, which is source 65.Paradigm Publishers, BoulderBookMovementPrimary text (the thinker’s own work)

Referenced in

Records whose text names Peter McLaren. The list is rebuilt from the published prose and checked for drift.

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