by Marcelo Guimarães Lima
A review of:
Peter McLaren –
Che Guevara, Paulo Freire and The Pedagogy of Revolution
Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, MD (USA), 2000
To many, the latest book of Canadian-American educational theorist Peter McLaren: Che Guevara, Paulo Freire and The Pedagogy of Revolution, will probably appear as a sort of “unusual conjecture”: presenting a number of “surprising”, or even, in many ways, “baffling” considerations.
On one hand, the book revisits some of the themes, works and authors related to the genealogy and the relevant issues of critical pedagogy as understood and practised in the USA by a number of educators and critics, such as McLaren himself, for over two decades now. Among the important sources of critical pedagogy we have, naturally, the works of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose significance for the contemporary debates on education in North America, as well as in other places, since the late sixties and early seventies, is constantly emphasized, with reason, by McLaren.
On the other hand, claiming the figure and symbol of Che Guevara as relevant to the understanding of the theory and practice of a pedagogy for social change today in the North American context, is, apparently, a much less evident proposition, one that may be met with a certain degree of uneasiness or even with frank disbelief. Is it possible, or even necessary or desirable, to put together a Latin-American revolutionary and a Latin-American educator to construe a critical understanding of education today in order to build a revolutionary pedagogy for our time?
And certainly, the present time is a time of triumphant capitalism, or rather, of super-capitalism, and consequently not only of intensified, global exploitation of workers, that is, of all of those who have to sell their labour power in the market place for a living, but a time in which the commodification of all spheres of life and of all the domains of human activities, including Education, has reached proportions that perhaps, one is tempted to say, not even the early Marxist cultural-political critics of capitalism in the early part of the 20th Century, such as Lukacs, Gramsci, Korsch and others, for all their radical insights on the capitalist lebenswelt, could imagine. The novelty of the present context is precisely the urgent need of a radical and practical critique of the status quo, experienced as the lack of such a critique: a double need and double absence, opening a gap between the present and the not so distant past in which historical consciousness meant the possibility of historical invention, in which as Benjamin once observed, historical recollection could open the way to the imagination of the future, and memory could represent the poetical key to a redemption of history and from it. Double lack better understood perhaps by Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the contemporary “alienation from alienation”.
Che Guevara, Paulo Freire and The Pedagogy of Revolution is a book that plays at different levels. In many ways it can be said to constitute the project or first essay of a book, or rather, a group of works, yet to be written. The project of a revolutionary pedagogy for the present time is one faced with plenty of difficulties. Educators are faced with the daily degradation of their working conditions and of their works, with the devaluation of their profession, in spite of all ideological fanfare around the “importance of education nowadays”, with the devaluation therefore of their skills and knowledge. Faced with the unrelenting, shameless and increasingly authoritarian subordination of educational goals and processes to the “logic of the marketplace”, that is, in plain language: the transformation of a social-cultural process of crucial importance for society as a whole into a “business like any other”, commanded by profit making goals and strategies, with the reduction of Education to a “consumer’s good”, educators may feel that to affect real changes that will benefit their students and themselves more is needed than occasional “educational reforms” that, most of the times, in fact increase rather than abate the educational malaise and contribute to the persistent loss of autonomy of the educational process, of its institutional basis and of its practitioners. In such a context, the social-political grounds of the institution of Education may be quite clearly apprehended, in a more or less explicit way, even if not always as clearly expressed, by many, or most, of its practitioners. From here to the grounding of a critical social-political project of Education, however, the road is less clearly seen.
In this respect, if anything, what the experience of progressive Education, that is, of Education for social justice and democratic praxis, in Brazil, in Latin America and in the Third World as a whole (of which the work of Paulo Freire constitutes a specific moment), has shown, and continues to show today, is that the effectiveness of educational programs and projects is directly related to their embedding (through specific forms of mediation) in social movements of change in determined historical contexts of transformation, to which they present their specific contributions and from which they take their energies, impulse and general goals. In these historically specific contexts the autonomy of Education becomes a product of its mediation by the transformative movements in society and in turn it mediates social change in the larger perspective of reconstruction, reproduction and renewal of social relations.
We can observe that the correct understanding of critical pedagogy in its “First World” context, that is, in the North-American context, would imply also and fundamentally the understanding of, for instance, American Education in relation to the social forces at work at the present time in American society, including the forces and social movements directed to challenge and change the status quo with the aim of building democratic participation (by no means a given or “unproblematic reality” in the self-proclaimed “Great Democracy of the North”) and those forces that oppose it. It is within specific contexts that the works of critical educators have to be analysed in order to better understand their contributions, their limits and the possible or actual relations between, for instance, the experiences of popular democratic movements for progressive education in Latin America and in the US.
One could expect that, due to its subject, Che Guevara, Paulo Freire and The Pedagogy of Revolution would sketch the beginnings of such an analysis, that is, regarding central aspects of the sociology and the political economy of Education. There are reasons, or so we believe, why it does not. Reasons that may clarify the present turn of critical pedagogy itself, of which the work, or rather the works, of Peter McLaren, a major player in the North American developments of critical pedagogy, is both a source, in a way a sort of “emblem” and, at the same time, in what regards the analysis of the theoretical-practical conjuncture, a “symptom”.