REINVENTING PAULO FREIRE. By Antonia Darder. Westview Press pound;18.99

The centrepiece of Life in Schools is a collection of diaries written by Peter McLaren, as a beginning teacher in the 1970s in a school outside Toronto. McLaren, described with some justification as “the poet laureate of the educational Left”, has been at the forefront of the field for many years. A compelling read, the diaries detail the tribulations of a teacher struggling to make a difference to the lives of children in a run-down inner-city area.

The great strength of Reinventing Paulo Freire is the way in which Antonia Darder, a prolific writer and leader in the field, brings together theory and practice through the articulation of radical interpretations of education and society, which are given flesh by the narratives of classroom teachers.

In Life in Schools, McLaren manages to instil great hope for the future, particularly in parts one and four. In the former, he provides a devastating critique of contemporary global capitalism and a brilliant, readable and informative exposition of Marxism and its relationship to education. In the latter, he applies Marxist analysis to his diaries. Lest the mention of Marxism conjure up images of an outmoded and irrelevant analysis of a bygone era, Life in Schools does not fall into that category. Its major strength is the convincing case it makes for Marxism’s continuing and increasing relevance as a way of understanding the relationship between capitalism and education, and of envisaging a possible future. As McLaren puts it, while “not suggesting that young people today can’t be found palavering happily with their friends in front of mind-numbing television game shows”, he is “more convinced than ever that the dialectical contradictions and internal relations of capitalism are becoming more glaring and less accepted by young people as an historical inevitability”.

These books have in common their authors’ indebtedness to the pedagogy of the great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, who died on May 2, 1997. A pedagogy which was “anti-authoritarian, dialogical and interactive, and put power into the hands of students” and, most important, “put social and political analysis of everyday life at the centre of the curriculum”. Both books give practical examples of how this can be achieved today.

Freire was guided by strong feelings of love. But, as Darder points out, this is neither “a liberal, romanticised, or merely feel-good notion of love that so often is mistakenly attributed to this term, nor the long-suffering and self-effacing variety associated with traditional religious formulation”. It is, in Freire’s words, an “armed love - the fighting love of those convinced of the right and the duty to fight, to denounce, and to announce”.

Freire was insistent that he should not be made an icon for teachers, but that his ideas should be reinvented, built upon, transformed, understood as historical contributions of a particular moment in time and should lay foundations for the children of the future. That future must be one that transcends capitalism (the root of inequalities) and is rooted firmly, in Darder’s words, in “that authentic democratic socialism of our dreams”. This is not a case for making schools arenas of propaganda, or moving schools into the realm of politics, as, and Freire is adamant about this, “education has always been a political act”. It is rather, as McLaren concludes, ceasing to define schools as extensions of the workplace or as frontline institutions in the battle for international markets and foreign competition.

Freire urged teachers to detach themselves and their students from the idea that they are agents of capital, where banking education (the teacher deposits information into an empty account) is the norm, and to reinvent schools as democratic spheres where meaningful dialogue can take place. The secret, he argues, is to begin with the students’ comprehension of their daily life experiences.

From their earliest years, children’s self-concepts are tainted by cultures of inequality. By starting from their description of these experiences, we are able to ground our teaching in concrete reality, then to transcend common sense and to move towards a critical scientific understanding of the world. This is the process by which teachers can support the self-empowerment of tomorrow’s children. As Darder puts it, “empowermentI entails participation in pedagogical relationships in which students experience the freedom to break through the imposed myths and illusions that stifle (them) and the space to take individual and collective actions that canI transform their lives”.

Mike Cole is senior lecturer in education at the University of Brighton