Honour for Peter McLaren
Revolutionary US educationalist Peter McLaren, who wrote the foreword to A World to Win, has been honoured by the Bolivarian University of Venezuela at Los Chaguaramos by having a Catedra (professorship) named after him. The McLaren Chair is now part of the formal programme of the university, a type of permanent course that serves as an umbrella for seminars, for visiting international scholars to come and give talks and for McLaren to visit each year and give a seminar.
It is unusual for such a chair to be named after a living scholar.
McLaren continues to be targetted, along with other colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, for his anti-government stance by the “alternative” McCarthyite Bruini Alumni Association run by president Andrew Jones. He founded the right-wing association to fight what he calls a “cancer of political radicalism” among professors and administrators. Jones’ website operates a vicious “hit-list” called “The Dirty Thirty, Ranking the Worst of the Worst” and offers “free advice in reporting, documenting, and publicising abusive professor behaviour in past or current classes” – in other words, help in fingering professors who don’t toe the government line. McLaren has the distinction of being at the top of the list.
Links to reviews of Peter McLaren’s writings on AWTW website:
- Red Seminars: Radical Excursions into Educational Theory, Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy
- Capitalist & Conquerors. A Critical Pedagogy Against Empire
- Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy
- Che Guevara, Paolo Freire and the pedagogy of revolution
