ABSTRACT
Continuing the urgency of a plea, Peter McLaren ends by arguing for a material practice of revolutionary critical pedagogy as the only viable ‘task’ of the university. The transnational consolidation of capital works by manufacturing a fiction of the market as the hope of an equitable future as well as the ubiquitous law of nature. The function of critical pedagogy, in taking off from Paulo Freire’s work, lies in enabling a movement from this false consciousness to critical self-consciousness. The critical educator – counterposed against the figure of the ‘neutral’ academic – must perform the political role of an ‘activist-interventionist’ by exposing the myth of the market as founding the default rule of inequity. Consequently, this essay insists that pedagogical insurrections within the classroom might become the condition of a return to true community – by welding theory with an immediate agenda of historical justice. The elision of social hierarchies within a humanism of individual ‘nature’, and the infinite reproduction of ‘value’ as the norm of consumption are what critical pedagogy must confront and unconceal as the structural premise of capitalist desire.
