Interview Peter McLaren on Critical Pedagogy and Adult Education

Adult education is crucial in the formation of revolutionary critical pedagogy, especially at this particular historical juncture, especially when it seems as though we are living inside a revolving world-historical kaleidoscope steadily turned by the Angel of History, forcing us continually to refocus our imagination as our world converges into yet another entangled pattern of challenges: social, cultural, economic, spiritual.

Yes, I do use the word “Bildung”, mostly from Hegel and in the tradition of German idealism and humanism, and of course referring to the tradition of self-cultivation or self-formation and self-determinism (as well as self-determination) — and associated in some limited sense with what Foucault terms ‘the practice of the self’ — because of course I am interested in the dialectic of self-and-social transformation, linking education to a philosophy of praxis which in turn is connected to Raya Dunayevskaya’s reading and understanding of Hegel’s concept of absolute negativity. In my use of bildung, I do not want to help to harmonize the heart and mind within capitalist society but to disturb any such harmonization, even challenging the presumption that such harmonization is even possible, and I do this mainly through a Hegelian-Marxist approach to the relationship of youth to the systems of mediation and social relations of production within neoliberal capitalism, but I also augment this Hegelian-Marxist approach through liberation theology, mainly the pastoral tradition of the social gospel that has arisen from the ashes of the oppression of the poor in America Latina. I use the term bildung in terms of the formation of a critical subjectivity or what I have called proletarian agency through the absolute negativity of permanent revolution. I have in mind not only the work of Hegel but also the way my German friend, Heinz Sünker, uses the term to define the German enlightenment in its approach to education and philosophy. I don’t deal so much directly with the ideas of Dilthey, Gadamer, Heidegger, Humbolt, Schiller, Adorno, Horkheimer and Heydorn or formally approach the concept of bildung, but use the term very loosely as a metaphor for youth consisting of an ensemble of social relations.  My objective is to challenge this self-and-social formation so as to create the conditions of possibility for the socially conscious individual — as in Che’s concept of the new socialist individual fighting for the universal emancipation of the worker. It’s connected to Marx’s concept of species-being, of course, and the flourishing of humankind’s creative powers and potential and the creation of a pluriverse of subjectivities all connected by an interest in and commitment to democracy.  Of course, the literary expression of my approach to bildung can be found in the genre of the German Bildungsroman.

With the ascendancy of neoliberalism as a political and economic doctrine and the consequent decline of the public sphere and civil society, we need to examine how the self is formed within current historical juncture which I liken to an dystopian disjuncture. I am interested not only in the broad categories of the Entwicklungroman but of course the Bilungsroman and the way in which the latter novels foreground the relationship between society and the individual. Dystopian novels and films can help provoke students to ask questions about present and possible future developments of neoliberal capitalism and thereby participate pedagogically in unsettling hegemonic attempts at harmonizing the hearts and minds of youth within the larger optic of neoliberal capitalism and social and educational policy.

Yet it is not simply the world that is changing, it is the different ways in which we conceive of our positioning in our cosmic voyage through the messy materiality of everyday life.  Life does not unfold as some old sheet strewn across a brass bed in the dusky attic of history; our destinies as children, parents, and teachers do not flow unilaterally toward a single vertigo-inducing epiphany, some pyrotechnic explosion of iridescent and refulgent splendor where we lay becalmed, rocking on a silent sea of pure bliss, or where we are held speechless in some wind-washed grove of cedars,  in the thrall of an unbridled, unsullied and undiluted love of incandescent intensity.  Rather, we sling ourselves nervously back and forth across the great Manichean divide of the drab of everyday existence, where, in our elemental contact with the world,  our human desires, for better or for worse, tug at us like some glow-in-the-dark hustler in a carnival midway.  As critical educators we take pride in our search for meaning, and our metamorphosis of consciousness has taken us along different paths, to different places, if not in a quest for truth, then at least to purchase a crisper and more perspicuous reality from which to begin a radical reconstruction of society.

But in our protestations against the loss of the fellowship of humanity against whose separation from ourselves we are reacting, we are joined in a common struggle. Those of us who have for some time now rested uneasily with the idea that economic growth and ‘progress’ has brought about a fully formed democracy of inclusion and human and economic rights have revised our view of democracy from a template steeled in the struggle for economic justice and rekindled by new social movements such as Occupy Wall Street, the indigenous struggles of Idle No More, the Zapatistas, the Indignados of Spain, and the Bolivarian revolution brought to the fore by the late Hugo Chavez; we fight now at the headwaters of capitalist production so that the children of the future can be free later on from the overwhelming challenges and obstacles faced by our current generation.   By contrast, on the other side of the political aisle, we find those who believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and who struggle to maintain at all costs the status quo, drawn toward the core notion that we need less regulation of the economy and insisting (often through political sideshows such as Fox News and the Right Wing hate media, especially talk radio) that those ‘liberals’ who seek to change the system are the very ones responsible for most of the problems faced in the United States.

Regardless of what position one takes, few would argue against the idea that today we face an apocalyptic challenge. The challenge is not so much one of the end-of-times drawn forth by the Four Horsemen, harbingers of the last judgment upon humankind, but rather the end of human freedom and creativity brought about by our acquiescence to the social and economic conditions of our own immiseration. We acquiesce to allowing our world to become transformed into a heap of cinders, not because we are willfully ignorant or cowardly quislings with our tails between our legs or because our sapiental compass has been has been broken but because of our ideological immurement in a thicket of organized stupidity, courtesy of what Althusser (1971) referred to as the ideological state apparatuses.  The idea of the ideological state apparatuses is grounded in the contention that ideology represents “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” and that ideology has a material existence in that it consists of actions and behaviors governed by their disposition within certain configurations of social forces and institutionalized relations grounded in capitalist relations of exploitation. Individuals, Althusser contends, are “interpellated” or always-already constituted by subjects ideologically through the process of identity-construction by means of various discourses that ‘speak’ to — or ‘hail’  the subject. In the United States, such discourses are provided by the media, religious organizations, the family, the media, and political affiliations.  We affirm ourselves as individual agents through an overarching structure in which we are already positioned as subjects by certain totalizing forces outside of our conscious consideration.

The all-important implication of this is that we are facing a choice between socialism or barbarism.  In a world in which morality and politics seemingly cannot go together in what has become in our own country a dime store democracy with quick drying ideas, a counterfeit public sphere where we gleefully disregard our duty to countenance and cure the everyday depredations of capitalist society — poverty, hunger, racism, violence — education remains in crisis.  It can be reconstituted out of the debris left by efforts to privatize, corporatize and demoralize it only if the social, political and economic conditions of the larger society significantly change.

(written as a contrubution for SCHULHEFT, a translated version will be published there. the tranlsation was supported by Knowledgebase Erwachsenenbildung)