Recently, our friend the radical educationist Peter McLaren has come under attack from the rightwing National Association of Scholars for his links to the thought of “Paolo Freire, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Che Guevara,” as can be seen in NAS’s Dec. 15 polemic against Marxist influences in schools of education and especially the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies.
We firmly oppose such McCarthyite attacks and express our solidarity with McLaren and other critics of capitalism mentioned in the NAS polemic.
For McLaren’s own position on these matters, see his 2007 response to Bill Ayres, a leftist critic, in Teachers College Record. Writing from an empiricist position, Ayres had attacked McClaren for resorting to a philosophically based critique of education, claiming that this is a distraction from radical activism.
rightwing National Association of Scholars for his links to the thought of “Paolo Freire, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Che Guevara,” as can be seen in NAS’s Dec. 15 polemic against Marxist influences in schools of education and especially the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies. We firmly oppose such McCarthyite attacks and express our solidarity with McLaren and other critics of capitalism mentioned in the NAS polemic.
For McLaren’s own position on these matters, see his 2007 response to Bill Ayres, a leftist critic, in Teachers College Record. Writing from an empiricist position, Ayres had attacked McClaren for resorting to a philosophically based critique of education, claiming that this is a distraction from radical activism.
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