Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution

280 Pages·2000·1.47 MB·English

by  McLaren

M
ORE PRAISE FOR
CHE GUEVARA, PAULO FREIRE.ANDTHE PEDAGOGY OF
REVOLUTION
by Peter McLaren
"A must read for all those who dare embrace a truly revolutionary pedagogy of
the oppressed."—Donaldo Macedo, University of Massachusetts, Boston, author
of Literacies of Power
"In this lucid and theoretically informed reappraisal of the legacies of Che and
Freire, Peter McLaren has made a significant contribution to a renewed Marxist
theory. Where critiques of capitalism seem to be out of fashion, this volume
engages the lives of two great revolutionaries in the context of 'globalization' and
increasing class inequality."—Rodolfo D. Torres, University of California,
Irvine, co-author of Latino Metropolis
"A sweeping and provocative work that raises pedagogical theory to new
heights."—Carl Boggs, author of The Two Revolutions: Gramsci and the
Dilemmas of Western Marxism
"A book on Che Guevara and Paulo Freire? Once again Peter McLaren has asked
scholars and educators to confront our own political limitations and imagine the
unimaginable: Educational revolution is achievable."—Louis F. Miron,
University of California, Irvine, author of The Social Construction of Urban
Schooling
"McLaren's exploration into the similar and divergent theoretical positions of
Che and Freire's contributions to our understanding of a revolutionary socialist
vision is impeccable. McLaren assists educators to engage more profoundly with
the current crisis of global capitalism, in order to construct a renewed socialist
project for the new millennium."—Antonia Darder, Claremont Graduate
University, author of Culture and Power in the Classroom
". . . eloquently sums up for the next millennium what critical pedagogy inspired
by the life-works of Che and Freire has to offer. . . . We have much to learn from
the visionary reason of these two great heroic 'guerrillas' of the much maligned
'third world.' "—E. San Juan, Jr., Washington State University, author of Beyond
Postcolonial Theory
C E S
ULTURE AND DUCATION ERIES
Series Editors: Henry A. Giroux, Pennsylvania State University
Joe L. Kincheloe, Pennsylvania State University
Race-ing Representation: Voice, History, and Sexuality edited by Kostas
Myrsiades and Linda Myrsiades, 1998
Between the Masks: Resisting the Politics of Essentialism by Diane DuBose
Brunner
The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence, 1999 by Henry
Giroux
Schooling as a Ritual Performance: Toward a Political Economy of Educational
Symbols and Gestures, 1999 by Peter McLaren
Literacy as a Moral Imperative: Facing the Challenges of a Pluralistic Society
by Rebecca Powell
None of the Above: Behind the Myth of Scholastic Aptitude, Updated Edition by
David Owen with Marilyn Doerr
The Ethics of Writing: Derrida, Deconstruction, and Pedagogy by Peter Trifonas
Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture edited by Imre Szeman and Nicholas
Brown
Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution by Peter McLaren
Forthcoming:
Cutting Class: Social Class and Education edited by Joe L. Kincheloe and
Shirley R. Steinberg
Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical
Trauma edited by Roger I. Simon, Sharon Rosenberg, and Claudia Eppert

This book is dedicated to Jennifer McLaren, in unyielding devotion.
This One
Copyrighted image removed by Publisher
FOREWORD
Joe L. Kincheloe
The beginning of the twenty-first century—especially as it coincides with the
publication of this book—is probably a good time to proclaim Peter McLaren the
poet laureate of the educational left. No one operating in critical education has
Peter's capacity to turn a phrase, to focus our attention on the relationship
between pedagogy and injustice, or to make us chuckle while moving us to see
anew. I am pleased to be privy to Peter's critical humor, unparalleled
phraseology, and brilliant insights into the world of the political, cultural, and the
pedagogical. These qualities are present throughout this volume—maybe Peter's
best work ever.
Only Peter could conjure the following McLarenisms:
The Shroud of Turin: "From the days in 1855 when Sir John Bowrigg, the
Victorian bureaucrat, proclaimed 'Free Trade is Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ is
Free Trade' to the current era where Christian fundamentalists such as the
Reverend Jerry Falwell proclaim capitalism, democracy, and Jesus to be as
seamlessly connected as the Shroud of Turin and equally as mystical, there has
been a willful ignorance surrounding the paralyzing effects that the victorious
embrace of capitalism has had on the powerless and destitute of the world."
Bargain-basement capitalism: "Enduring imbalances in the 'globalitarian
world'—the worldwide problem of overcapacity, the random destruction of the
ecosystem by unregulated markets accompanying the new bargain-basement
capitalism, the imposition of exchange values upon all productions of value, the
creation of a uniform culture of pure consumption or Wal-Martization of global
culture, the vampirism of Western carpetbaggers sucking the lifeblood from the
open veins of South America, opportunistic politicians, assaults on diasporic
cultures, and new waves of xenophobia—have brought about a serious political
inertia within the United States Left in general, and within the educational Left
in particular."
No-fault apostasy: "And why now, at a time when the marketplace has
transformed itself into a deus ex machina ordained to rescue humankind from
economic disaster, and when voguish theories imported from France and
Germany can abundantly supply North American radicals with veritable
plantations of norisk, no-fault, knock-off rebellion? Why should North American
educators take seriously two men who were propelled to international fame for
their devotion to the downtrodden of South America and Africa?"
Sunday School proselytizing: "The conceptual net known as critical pedagogy
has been cast so wide and at times so cavalierly that it has come to be associated
with anything dragged up out of the troubled and infested waters of educational
practice, from classroom furniture organized in a 'dialogue-friendly' circle to
'feel-good' curricula designed to increase students' self-image. It has become, in
other words, repatriated by liberal humanism and been transformed to a
combination of middle-brow, town-hall meeting entrepreneurship and Sunday
School proselvtizing."
These, of course, are only a few examples—there are countless more
throughout the book—of what we have come to expect from Peter. He is
undoubtedly one of a kind, as Nita Freire illustrates so profoundly in her tender
comments printed here. When Natalie Merchant and her Ten Thousand Maniacs
sing about Jack, Alan, Bobby, and the rest of the beat boys howling at night, they
can now add a new verse about Peter. Perhaps the funny and loving stories Jenny
McLaren can tell about his howl. Nita understands Peter, focusing on his
passionate identification with Paulo Freire and Che Guevara and their ability to
love. Always devoted to the work and now the memories of Freire and Guevara,
Peter, like Nita, recognizes the magical possibilities such a radical love open up
for those exposed to it. I have learned enough from Paulo to understand that the
critical revolutionary is directed by an irrepressible radical love. Peter makes this
point time and again in this work.
The fusing of reason and emotion and the necessity of teaching the mind and
heart evoke Peter's passion for Che Guevara and Paulo Freire. In their lives he
finds the conceptual ore that transports him to the next evolutionary stage of
critical pedagogy. The Freire and Guevara that Peter presents speak to us from
beyond the grave about a type of love that serves as a generator of critical action.
As an inspired hermeneutic medium, Peter interprets their messages in a variety
of ways. Using verbal pictures of Guevara's martyred, rough, and severed hands
and Paulo's tender and bold ones, to their shared visions of what the world could
become, Peter analyzes the contemporary meanings of their lives. The insight of
Peter's comparisons of Freire to Martin Luther King and Guevara to Malcom X
adds new dimensions to our understanding of the man with the long gray beard
and the man in the black beret. The dialectical interplay between Freire and
Guevara along with these images of them can no doubt help us formulate both
new ways of understanding twenty-first century globalization and fresh methods
of resisting its socioeconomic cancers.
Here emerges the central question, the purpose of the book: Why should we
take Freire and Guevara so seriously now? Another question is for North
American readers: Why should gringos pay such close attention to these two
men who worked so hard for the oppressed of South America and Africa? Peter
uses these queries to fashion the following pages, as he struggles to make sense
of the world these visionaries left behind. In this context Peter encounters
something that I believe will play a central role in twenty-first century
pedagogies and politics of social justice: a radical ontology. Freire and Guevara
not only help us understand and change the world, but they provide insights into
new ways of being and becoming human. My own work is profoundly
influenced by the spirit of human possibility that Freire, Guevara, and Peter offer
us here.
New ways of being, however, cannot be separated from the socioeconomic
and the political—as Peter well knows and as many in the educational and
psychological avant garde have forgotten. The world Freire and Guevara left
behind is a frightening place. Salaries for executives explode in the transnational
corporations while worker wages are driven down as companies find cheaper
labor in poor nations. Indeed, it is fascinating to watch the U.S. stock market fall
whenever there is the slightest rise of wages for the poorest workers in the
American economy. In Freire and Guevara's beloved Latin America and Africa,
the news is not good, as poverty continues to expand into the twenty-first
century.
Monitoring these trends, Peter describes the globalitarian world with its
unacceptable and increasing disparity of wealth. In this context he documents the
economic and environmental effects of NAFTA on the Mexican people—
disease, birth defects, and an intensification of poverty. All of this is occurring at
the same time that many political and educational leaders are proclaiming the
virtues and victory of the unfettered free market. In the name of freedom they
demand that the peoples of the world submit to the demands of the market. As
the U.S. government provides grants of public money to corporations, budget
cuts gut programs designed to help the victims of unregulated capital. As Freire
and Guevara so well understood, such a reality cannot continue indefinitely
without some type of violent explosion. We all pray that it will not take a major
human tragedy to awaken citizens of the United States to the horror that current
policies are producing among the "have nots" at home and around the globe.
Peter admonishes those academics who, in the name of transgression, promote
trendy social theories while ignoring the suffering of the lived world. Taking his
cue from Freire, Peter points out the ways that some social theory labeled as
postmodern often ignores the brute realities many working people face around
the world. As Paulo often maintained, reconceptualizing the categories
employed to analyze the world has value only when such efforts are part of a
larger struggle to change the world. With this in mind, Peter delineates a
pedagogy in which students confront knowledge that is not only contemplative
but sensual. In one of the book's most powerful passages, Peter calls for critical
educators to engage students in the lives of the poor. As he puts it:
"Opportunities must be made for students to work in communities where they
can spend time with ethnically diverse populations in the context of community
activism and participation in progressive social movements. Students need to
move beyond simply knowing about critical, multicultural practice. They must
also move toward an embodied and corporeal understanding of such practice and
an effective investment in such practice at the level of everyday life such that
they are able to deflect the invasive power of capital and the defrauding,
ideologically self-interested reporting on national and international events by the
mainstream U.S. media, a reporting that serves to protect through its journalistic-
industrial complex the corporate interests of the state. As such, critical pedagogy
should put ideology-critique at its center of gravity."
Peter fights to prevent Freire and Guevara's legacy from being so diluted that
they appear merely a warm and fuzzy teacher with creative methods (Freire) and
a depoliticized cartoon action figure (Guevara). We must never allow the world
to forget what Freire and Guevara's struggle was for and the ways the
mainstream reacted to them during their lives. Freire's evisceration shows up
time and time again in my own attempts to teach and write about him and the
issues for which he fought. I recently finished a book on teaching that was
conceptually founded on the struggle for social justice, the act of problematizing
the knowledge of schooling, and other Freirean principles. My editor was not
happy with the book, asserting that in no way could a general audience
understand issues of epistemology, ideology, hegemony, discursive analyses and
their relation to the teaching act.
In order to "save" my book, he directed me to follow the lead of an author
who had just written a book on a critical Freirean pedagogy for the editor's
company. I dutifully read the manuscript, hoping to pick up hints that would help
me make my book more readable—a goal I work to achieve in all my writing.
Before I was halfway through the text, I began to sense something quite strange