This work by one of North America's leading educational theorists and cultural critics culminates a decade of social analyses that focuses on the political economy of schooling, Paulo Freire and literacy education, hip-hop culture, and multicultural education. Peter McLaren also examines the work of Baudrillard as well as Bourdieu's reflexive sociology.Always in McLaren's work is a profound understanding of the relationship among advanced capitalism, the politics of knowledge, and the formation of identity. One of the central themes of this volume is the relationship between the political and...

Henry A. Giroux is one of the most respected and well-known critical education scholars, social critics, and astute observers of popular culture in the modern world. For those who follow his considerably influential work in critical pedagogy and social criticism, this first-ever collection of his classic writings, augmented by a new essay, is a must-have volume that reveals his evolution as a scholar. In it, he takes on three major considerations central to pedagogy and schooling.The first section offers Giroux's most widely read theoretical critiques on the culture of positivism and...

Widely misunderstood and misinterpreted at its most basic level, critical pedagogy provides a lens through which educators and students are better able to examine and interact with the real, underlying power relationships that structure our world. These educational politics determine how we make meaning of commonplace events, the purpose and goals of public education, the structure of our schools, the preparation our teachers receive, the way students are perceived and treated, and the curricula our schools employ.Taking up the ever-shifting cultural and political landscape in the United...

With the ever-growing proliferation of electronic and other popular media, the complexity of relationship between what students see and hear, what they believe and how they interact with one another underscores now, more than ever, the need for across-the-curriculum teaching of critical thinking, critical reading, and critical viewing skills. The emerging consensus is that teaching critical viewing skills bolsters students' abilities in traditional disciplines, combats problems of youth apathy, violence, and substance abuse, and improves students', parents, and teachers' attitudes' toward...