Life in Schools (Translated from English by O. Fadina)

Abstract

A complete overview of the controversy about education equality would necessarily include the works of Marxist educators. It turns out that quite a few researchers in Western universities who, having not been vaccinated by classes on «scientific communism», are still trying to use the Marxist approach to analyze the current difficult situation in education. The neo-Marxist strain in Western pedagogical thought is often called critical pedagogy. One of the most prominent representatives of this approach is Peter McLaren, a UCLA professor. His book Life in Schools was published in the mid 1990s. It describes the author’s difficult experiences of teaching at a school in an underprivileged neighborhood in a Canadian city. The book has become extremely popular, partly because the author presented very firmly and lucidly the principal tenents of critical pedagogy. We are publishing a fragment from this book, in order to include an important voice in the controversy on equality. The complete Russian translation of Life in Schools will appear in the series «Education. World Bestsellers» published by the Prosveschenie publishers in cooperation with the National Foundation for Workforce Training and the Moscow School for Social and Economic Sciences.