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Critical pedagogy in uncertain times:

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Terrenda C. White a

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BOOK REVIEW

Critical pedagogy in uncertain times: hope and possibilities, by Sheila L.Macrine, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 226 pp., US$85 (hardcover), ISBN978-0-230-61320-1

Before there can be an education for democracy, there must be a democracy foreducation. (Basil Bernstein, 1990)

Several years ago, in the thick of high-stakes testing regimes, I left theclassroom. Despite several years teaching and tutoring in racialised working-class communities across the USA, I took a much needed respite from therepertoire of reform that seemed a frenzied push for students to regurgitateinformation on standardized tests in hopes of proving themselves and theirschools ‘successful’. But while my departure from the classroom waschosen, many of my colleagues’ departures were not. Indeed, the variedschool-communities in which they have worked – including the multiethnicimmigrant enclaves of Harlem in New York, the proud Chicano/a communi-ties of East LA in Southern California, the historic neighbourhoods of the‘Black Metropolis’ in Chicago’s Southside and even my own working-classSouthern Baptist community of metropolitan Atlanta –have all teeteredchronically on the edge of the forbidden ‘Needs Improvement’ label of NoChild Left Behind (NCLB). In many instances, my colleagues’ schools havebeen closed all together or ‘turned-around’ in swiftly charterised processesinvolving new management by for-profit and non-profit enterprises that seemto have no place for unionised veteran labour.

Most disturbing, however, is that in addition to our troubled schools, mycolleagues and I have witnessed the urban landscapes in which our schoolsexist undergo profound changes due to three decades of de-industrialisation,increasingly bifurcated and unstable employment options, predatory lendingand mass housing foreclosures and alarming rates of incarceration, all culmi-nating in deep structural and demographic transformations. Public servicesand entitlement programs, furthermore, have dried up, as welfare has turnedto ‘workfare’ and measures to enforce so-called personal responsibility havereplaced state forms of social protection and security. Indeed, as the punitivestructures of our schools took shape in the first decade of this century, itseemed that whole neighbourhoods and communities also witnessed a reper-toire of policies resulting in structural divestment, displacement, dispossession

International Studies in Sociology of EducationVol. 21, No. 4, December 2011, 331–340

ISSN 0962-0214 print/ISSN 1747-5066 onlinehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09620214.2011.638540http://www.tandfonline.com

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and disfranchisement. These forces have put indescribable stress on thechildren and families we serve.

Although the teachers I worked with have operated in very differentschool settings, across multiple districts, cities and even regions of the USA,each of them, like me, struggled to teach in spite of the public crisis engulf-ing communities, seeking ‘good’ instructional practices that were conduciveto ‘success’ for our students. But where our definitions of good pedagogycame from, what standards were used to judge our students as successfuland why dominant measures of success seemed constantly out-of-reach inthe context in which our students lived and learned were unresolvedquestions for us and for many who continue to teach.

Perhaps now with Critical pedagogy in uncertain times: Hope and possi-bilities, a seminal work edited by Sheila Macrine that combines the greatestminds and imaginations of critical pedagogy, educators can better connectthe regimented texts that our students consume to the regimented context inwhich they live. With this book, many of us can more critically read theword and the world in which both our students and ourselves live and learn,an existence characterized by a deepening ‘culture of terror’ and a ‘terror ofdissent’. With political movements already in place across various parts ofthe USA, such as Madison, Wisconsin, and New Orleans, Louisiana, per-haps now educators and students together can wage a more formidable waragainst the new giant in the land – the leviathan of market rationality andneoliberal hegemony – publicly denouncing its production of insecurity (atbest) and despair (at worst) and its ‘changing-same’ (Collins 2009) paradoxof shifting social policies and rigid social relations of power and inequality.

In Critical pedagogy, the grip of market forces in urban education is notonly well documented as a dominant internationalized policy, whichultimately serves the restoration of capitalist class power, the book also criti-cally analyses neoliberalism as a normative and constructivist projectextending to institutions of socialisation, such as schools, and hostile to pub-lic spaces in which the democratic ethos of critical engagement and collec-tive action is cultivated. With prominent authors contributing key chaptersin this edited volume – including Henry Giroux, Kenneth Saltman, PeterMcLaren, Nathalia Jaramillo, Donaldo Macedo, Ramin Faramandpur, SheilaMacrine, Maxine Greene, Antonia Darder, Noah Lissovoy and a newlytranslated text from Paulo Freire himself – the book reminds us that teach-ers’ pedagogical dilemmas go deeper than the struggle to find instructionaltechniques that yield high test scores, jobs for students or even prescriptionsfor critical and reflective classroom activities. Instead, pedagogy today,perhaps now more than ever, is about imagination and transformation in theface of market forces. As the late Basil Bernstein (1996) noted, teaching isfundamentally a cultural device, shaping the terms of what is thinkable,imaginable and possible and defining the nature and condition of what isworth knowing in this new era. It is also embedded with race and social

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class assumptions about how the what should be taught and, if unexamined,reproduces the very unequal relations of power that many teachers claim tobe personally committed to eradicating.

While the book gives close theoretical interpretations of neoliberalismand lays out important political developments in the past three decades, bothhere and abroad, it stays true to the goals of a critical praxis by resisting thetendency to dichotomise theory and practice (see Macedo, Chapter 4) bysituating neoliberalism within a structuralist and Marxist analysis of classstruggle (see Farahmandpur and Darder, Chapters 5 and 8, respectively) andby rejecting exclusionary academic jargon, which all too often renders criti-cal texts inaccessible to those most capable and best positioned to heed thecall to action – teachers, students and community activists (see Giroux,Chapter 1). In this way, Critical pedagogy, as it should be, is fundamentallya revolutionary call to democratic commitment, public imagination andpolitical action for social justice (see Freire, Chapter 9).

The book is divided into two parts. Borrowing from the conceptual anal-ysis of contributor Ramin Farahmandpur, part I of the book, entitled ‘Uncer-tain times: Exploring the costs of neoliberalism’, can be thought of as thedenouncing of existing free-market policies and the oppressive and unjustimpact on education reform. Part II of the book, entitled ‘Critical pedagogy:A source of hope and possibility’, is the announcing of a more just andhumane world via the political and pedagogical work of critical educatorswith the courage to imagine the future anew.

Part I begins with a chapter by Henry Giroux, which traces the incursionof market fundamentalism – along with religious extremism, corporatepower and state-sponsored terrorism – into higher education, appropriatelyentitled ‘The attack on higher education and the necessity of critical peda-gogy’. Giroux notes that ‘in an age of money and profit, academic subjectsgain status almost exclusively through their exchange value on the market’(16). He warns that the humanistic knowledge and values of the universityare threatened by corporate culture, which strips education of its democraticvalues and views young people as fodder for the corporate workforce.Hence, in this new era the ‘subordination of higher education to capital’ isno longer hidden but celebrated as ‘everyone in the university is transformedinto entrepreneur, customer, or client, and every relationship is ultimatelyjudged in bottom line, cost-effective terms’ (16).

Though institutions of higher education are driven by corporate interestsand market rationales, Giroux maintains that academics can look to theexemplary models of many public intellectuals whose engagement with pub-lic life and politics outside the academy is steadfast, representing theembodiment of a true critical praxis that blurs the often forged separationbetween theory and practice. WEB Du Bois, listed among such publicintellectuals, though not quoted by Giroux, is perhaps a great example of apublic defender of humanistic democratic higher education. Addressing the

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expansion of technical and vocational education in the late-nineteenth andearly-twentieth centuries, a policy that was narrowly prescribed to newlyfreed Black Americans and heralded by industrial elites as a suitableeducation for their ‘place’ in the Gilded Age, he noted:

If we make money the object of training, we shall develop money-makers but notnecessarily men [or women]. . . . Men and Women we shall have only as we makepersonhood the object of the work of the schools – intelligence, broad sympathy,knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it – this is thecurriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life. On this foundationwe may build bread winning, skill of hand and quickness of brain, with never a fearthat the child and man mistake the means of living for the object of life. (Du Bois1903)

Of course the current context in which higher education exists is nolonger the industrialising system faced at the time of Du Bois’ writing. Yetthe post-industrial, corporate culture of market fundamentalism today hasgiven rise to a new Gilded Age and, once again, led by an equally dauntingforce of elites and shaped by values which threaten democratic goals under-lying higher education. To avoid the production of mere ‘money makers’that Du Bois warned of over a century ago, Giroux reminds us of PierreBourdieu’s urging that educators ‘break with the “new faith in the historicalinevitability professed by the theorists of [neo]liberalism [in order] to inventnew forms of collective political work” capable of confronting the corporatemarch of power’ (16–17).

Part I proceeds to an even closer examination of the neoliberal project athand. In Chapter 2, ‘Schooling in disaster capitalism: How the political rightis using disaster to privatize public schooling’, Kenneth Saltman exploresthe tendency of market reformers to capitalize on disaster, known as ‘disas-ter capitalism’ (Klein 2008) or ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey2005). This important piece leaves the reader with a deeper analysis ofneoliberalism as both a class struggle and a cultural pedagogical project, theformer aimed at restoring capitalist class power in light of populist move-ments in the 1960s and recessions in the 1970s, which threatened theeconomic dominance of elites, and the latter aimed at extending aneconomic common sense in which the idealization of markets is propagatedas a moral ethos, even as it disables democratic rationales of critical engage-ment, collective deliberation and participation.

Of all the chapters in this volume, Saltman’s gives perhaps the deepestanalysis of neoliberalism proper, as he grounds his analysis of disaster capi-talism in a close reading of David Harvey’s (2005) A brief history of neolib-eralism. Saltman is right, for instance, to note that the very crisis of capitalitself is the force shaping the ascendency of neoliberal policies and is indeedthe ultimate source of chronic insecurity in this new era. During therecessions of the 1970s, for example, Milton Friedman and his students (akathe ‘Chicago Boys’) seized on the crisis of capital at home to discredit

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long-held Keynesian economic policies that were rooted in a philosophy of‘embedded liberalism’,1 cheerleading the implementation of free-market eco-nomic policies long rejected by US leaders. More sinister, however, is that20 years after such fiscal reforms, the concentration of wealth has increaseddramatically, giving weight to Harvey’s argument that neoliberalism isindeed a restoration of capitalist class power.

And while rejection of neoliberalism has occurred among the new Leftleaders in several South American countries, signalling the failures of neo-liberal market fundamentalism, one would expect deregulation to be a dirtyword by now in the USA (especially in light of the enduring 2008 recessionand its deepening grip on the economy, reflected in the dramatic drop of thestock market, downgrade of US credit ratings and national unemploymentrates above 7%). To the contrary, Saltman notes that the structural problemsassociated with deregulation of the global economy have yet to be rectifiedby national leaders. Instead, the reform put forth by capitalists to address‘the crisis of overproduction’ that has driven down prices and wages hasbeen more ‘primitive accumulation’ or ‘accumulation by dispossession’ –privatisation practices that transform publicly controlled goods and servicesinto private ones. Saltman notes that ‘around the world, disaster is providingthe means for business to accumulate profit’ and offers several examples,from ‘the Asian tsunami of 2005 that allowed corporations to seize covetedshoreline properties for resort development to the multibillion dollar no-bidreconstruction contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and from the privatizationof public schooling following Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast’ (27).And rightly extending such logic to NCLB, Saltman problematises the wayits punitive structure sets already troubled schools up for failure only to bedismantled and made into investment opportunities for entrepreneurs (28).

Complementing Saltman’s in-depth look at the exploitative pursuits ofneoliberal reformers, Donaldo Macedo’s ‘Unmasking prepackaged democ-racy’ in Chapter 4 links US foreign policy to the support of authoritariandictators and antidemocratic forces in other countries – support that champi-oned free-market policies even if it meant crushing democracy (e.g. HenryKissinger’s support of dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile and the removalof democratically elected Salvador Allende). Thus, contrary to the rhetoricof ‘bringing democracy’ to troubled regions of the world, US foreign policyhas been guided by, and its powerful resources marshalled in response to,neoliberal reforms and not democratic movements. With this historical sensi-bility, Macedo confronts the deep contradictions of the US’ ‘war on terror’and the shameful history of supporting state terrorism throughout the world.Though difficult to accept, it is important to understand Macedo’s key point:authoritarianism used to crush democracy’s threat to neoliberalism abroadhas indeed come home to roost, albeit in relatively milder forms. The sanc-tioned norms of racial profiling and religious discrimination associated withmilitarism to fight the ‘war on terror’, the Patriot Act’s curtailing of

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democratic rights through imposed censorship and denial of civil rights andthe disinformation campaigns of a corporate-controlled media that appeals tocitizens as consumers and celebrates their individual competition andaccumulation, have each worked to discourage substantive dialogue anddissent as well as collective participation and action.

In light of these trends on the local and global level, Noah De Lissovoy’sfinal chapter ‘Toward a critical pedagogy of the global’ considers what itmeans to organise effective responses to such formidable and hyper-capital-ist economic and political arrangements. Lissovoy argues that, ‘In the faceof insatiable power and the incessant expansiveness of capital, people world-wide also share in the common experience of subjugation to the same freemarket fundamentalism’ (190). This experience allows more and more forthe development of new forms of oppositional identity. Indeed the experi-ence of being ‘left behind’ by neoliberalism, according to Lissovoy, ‘ispotentially the banner of a powerful new social subject’ (193). Yet theemerging identity of neoliberalism’s marginalised subjects is more than the‘cosmopolitanism’ of cultural difference or the benefits of the ‘flat world’(Friedman 2005). According to Lissovoy, the latter is an optimism rootedmore in the ‘intellectual’s leisurely appreciation for the variety of humanexperience’, while the former is more reflected in ‘the peasant’s suddenapprehension of a neoliberalized economy that forces him or her out of alivelihood’ (193). Nonetheless, Lissovoy urges educators to take heed of thepossibility and power of protest on a global scale.

To cultivate transnational opposition, however, a consciousness of thecommon experience and identification of those outside neoliberalism’s vastaccumulation of wealth is needed, as well as appropriation of popular cul-ture around the world, telecommunications and the Internet. Indeed, whiletechnology is to some degree the tool of the powerful, Lissovoy reminds usthat it are also available for global social justice movements. In this vein,Lissovoy ponders the crucial role of young people, as they are the force bestprimed to counter threats to democracy posed by neo-liberalism’s appetitefor more and more. Thus, in light of twenty-first-century social transforma-tions, Lissovoy argues that critical pedagogy as such is insufficient and mustbe re-conceptualized in fundamental ways. What he argues is the need for acritical pedagogy of the global. Lissovoy believes that a pedagogy of theglobal must be able ‘to reckon with the fundamental transformations ofconsciousness, experience, and identity that are central to the shift to thehistorical condition of globality’ (191).

In keeping with Lissovoy’s call for a critical pedagogy of the global, thecontribution of Ramin Farahmandpur’s Chapter 5, ‘A critical pedagogy ofhope in times of despair’, warns that educators must link their classroompedagogy to anti-oppressive struggles in both the local and global arena,connecting their own struggles in schools to the fundamental battle betweenlabour and capital worldwide. Similar to Farahmandpur, the authors of

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Chapter 3 also approach the elements of uncertainty in today’s neoliberalera by grounding their critique in a Marxist analysis of class struggle andpolitical economy. In Chapter 3, ‘Critical pedagogy, Latino/a education, andthe politics of class struggle’, Peter McLaren and Nathalia Jaramillo connectthe capitalist system of exploitation of human labour and the distribution ofprivate property to the assault and dispossession of civil rights directed atLatina/o populations. Thus, the authors ground their assessments of themarginalising policy practices targeted toward Latinos/as in a much neededcritique of both white supremacy and capitalist patriarchy.

Race and class struggle are discussed further in Antonia Darder’s analy-sis ‘Imagining justice in a culture of terror: Pedagogy, politics, and dissent’.In Chapter 8, Darder reminds us of the inseparability of racism and classstruggle to capitalism, urging those committed to civil rights and racialjustice to remember the economic imperative fundamental to unequal distri-butions of wealth and asymmetrical relations of power. While a ‘race rela-tions’ paradigm in education reform undergirded court battles to desegregateschools in the 1960s and 1970s, economic injustice was often camouflagedas larger structural conditions of inequality were left unchanged. Darder’surging to imagine paths toward social justice grounded in the inseparabilityof race and class struggle reminds of us the Dreamer himself, Dr. MartinLuther King, Jr., whose assassination came after his turn toward structuralcritiques of poverty, unemployment and worker exploitation.

Dreamers like King, though slain prematurely and whose radical legacyhas been watered down for mass appeal and commercial consumption withinthe USA, follow a hauntingly familiar tale of other great revolutionaries –including Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba and Malcolm X. In Chapter 9,the late Paulo Freire adds one more to this list of legendary dreamers –Amilcar Cabral. In ‘Amilcar Cabral: Pedagogue of the revolution’, Freirepieces together the praxis of the Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verdean agro-nomic engineer, writer, Marxist and leader in the independence movementfor Guinea-Bissau. Based on remarkable stories from his comrades and theirexperiences with Cabral in the jungles of war for liberation, Freire learnsthat Cabral held the ‘capacity to know beyond his immediate surroundingsand to imagine the not yet’ (171). Because of his ability to think yearsahead of himself while also possessing a historical sensibility, as well as hispenchant for holding dialogic seminars in jungle clearings, even removingsoldiers from the battlefront to go to school, Freire asserts that Cabralperfectly embodied praxis as ‘the dream of liberation of his people and thepolitical and pedagogical procedures to realize the dream’ (169).

Though the challenges we face today, in this era of neoliberal exploita-tion, demand political and pedagogical fronts far removed from the junglesof revolutions past, in Cabral we are reminded nonetheless of what a criticalpraxis can sound like in the thickest of subjugation. It is fundamentally thecapacity to hold fast to dreams of the ‘not yet’ that go beyond the present

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moment of oppression. It is the courage to speak to and with others to carryout those dreams – perhaps even imagining our classrooms as dialogic semi-nars in jungle clearings, politically strategising our way back to humaneforms of living, teaching and learning. In this way we, too, build the futurein the process of a radical transformation of today, joining Cabral and hiscompany of pedagogues of the revolution.

In lieu of this understanding, it is crucial that educators no longerapproach teaching as a process ‘in spite of’ the crises engulfing their com-munities. We must stand politically and pedagogically in solidarity with thefight for a more humane and democratic existence. As Maxine Greenreminds us in her chapter ‘Teaching as possibility: A light in dark times’,because pedagogy is part and parcel of this dark anti-democratic moment itmust therefore be part of our community’s struggle for illumination out ofit. As she notes, ‘There is a profound sense that a curriculum in the makingis part of a community in the making’ (146). Thus, we must think of ourwork as a kindling of light toward democratic hope and transformation. Inthis way, schools can once again be visions of public spaces where readingof the word is situated and contexts are held in mind.

Of all the chapters in this volume, it is fitting to conclude this reviewwith an overview of editor Sheila Macrine’s chapter, ‘What is critical peda-gogy good for? An interview with Ira Shor’. This chapter provides the mostdetailed breakdown of what critical pedagogy, and critical literacy, entailsfor teachers and students. According to Shor, democratic practices must bebuilt into the learning process, not as mere goals, sentiments or activities,but where the very social relations of classroom life are democratised. Shoralso affirms the dialectical starting point for critical pedagogy, noting that‘both students and teachers come to class at more than zero and less thanzero at the same time’ (italics in original). Shor explains, ‘Students andteachers both bring knowledge-making assets to class for critical study whileboth bring anti-critical liabilities as well’ (125–6). In a critical paradigm,therefore, Shor acknowledges that all parties are agents with potentials toenable or to disable the process.

Given the competitive individualism and accumulation rooted in neolib-eral’s cultural ethos, as well as its hostility for all collectivities and publicspaces, the next phase of critical pedagogy must involve the reconsolidationand solidarity of teachers themselves. Shor argues that together, in unionsolidarity and action, teachers can best address the decline in conditions forteaching and learning. In a sobering caveat Shor notes that ‘even if criticalpedagogy in particular and education in general cannot by themselvesreverse these conditions, they can break the silence moving us into the worstworld possible’ (126). Nonetheless, Shor urges that educators like myself‘interfere by teaching your heart out’ and to use our classrooms as publicspaces that ‘shine bright lights on the obscured mechanisms of power’(emphasis added, 126–7). In this way, never again might educators confuse

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‘good’ pedagogy as that which instructs ‘in spite of’ the neo-liberalizingdespair currently engulfing poor and racialized working-class communities.Instead, a critical pedagogy is understood as one that ‘connects the readingand writing of words’ to ‘the changing of worlds’ (126).

Given the highly politicized moment in which teachers work, the signifi-cance of this book rests in its timing. It appears at the very moment thatStanley Aronowitz declares in his Forward as one ripe for a project of free-dom to emerge. Indeed, this year alone many watched on television as thou-sands of teachers in the state of Wisconsin rallied and canvassed to recallpoliticians who supported policies that violated their rights to collectivelybargain as workers. Teachers in New York petitioned for the removal of aschool chancellor whose mayoral appointment violated all protocols of pub-lic deliberation and marked the naked elevation of private-sector experienceas the sole qualifier for leading public schools. In Washington, DC, andother cities across the nation, teachers were joined by parents and studentsto protest the mass closing of their schools and top-down reformers who didnot value democratic processes of deliberation and dialogue. In eachinstance, teachers engaged in concrete political struggle against challengesnot simply to their individual work in classrooms but to their democraticrights as public servants. The current moment is ‘eminently political’ asAronowitz presciently noted and disappointment with the leadership of cen-trist Democrats has revealed the need for a new educational Left.

In each instance, however, I doubt that the teachers involved regardedthemselves as critical pedagogues. If they are like me, they reserve that labelfor what Gustavo Fischman in his Afterword calls the idealised ‘super-hero’teacher or the ‘super-conscious’ organic intellectual. If their experiences inhigh-stakes environments are anything like mine, then the toll on their phys-ical bodies, their emotional and psychological well-being and their economicsecurity means they have little time for keeping up on the latest reading incritical theory. And it is unlikely that they collectively name their struggleas one of ‘evil Neoliberalism versus good social democracy’ (213).

Yet Fischman reminds us of Freire’s caution long ago – that one doesnot have to be already critically self-conscious in order to struggle, but bystruggling one becomes conscious. This means that the conditions of exis-tence for countless teachers right now – a moment of uncertainty in whichmany are engaging in concrete political struggle – are the grounds for poten-tial conscientisation. The most effective use of this book, therefore, is per-haps to affirm the many local expressions of oppression teachers experiencedaily and to provide context for their critical intuitions that markets anddemocratic education may be incompatible. Books such as this one mightalso expand definitions of critical pedagogy to include the work of ordinaryteachers whose everyday political struggle counts in the long journey towardconscious reflection and collective transformation.2

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Notes1. According to David Harvey (2005), a philosophy of ‘embedded liberalism’ meant

that market processes and entrepreneurial and corporate activities ‘were sur-rounded by a web of social and political constraints and a regulatory environ-ment that sometimes restrained but in other instances led the way in economicand industrial strategy’ (11).

2. A paperback version of Macrine’s Critical pedagogy in uncertain times will beissued, making it more widely accessible to readers.

ReferencesBernstein, B. 1990. Class, codes and control. Vol. 4: The structuring of pedagogic

discourse. New York: Routledge.Bernstein, B. 1996/2000. Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory,

research, critique. Rev. ed. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.Collins, P.H. 2009. The new politics of community. American Sociological Review

75, no. 1: 7–30.Du Bois, W.E.B. 1903/1969. The talented tenth. In The Negro problem: A series of

articles by representative American Negroes of to-day, ed. Pratt James, 33–75.Miami, FL: Mnemosyne Publishing.

Friedman, T. 2005. The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century.New York: Ferrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Harvey, D. 2005. A brief history of neoliberalism. New York: Oxford UniversityPress.

Klein, N. 2008. The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. New York:Picador.

Terrenda C. WhiteTeachers College, Columbia University, USA

tcw2108@columbia.edu! 2011, Terrenda C. White

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