Unusual Pussus

ENGAGING PETER McLAREN AND THE NEW MARXISM IN EDUCATION

David Geoffrey Smith

Interchange, Vol.40/1, pp.93-117 (2009) 

David Geoffrey Smith has written a very interesting and useful article in the latest issue of Interchange. Not only does he review Peter McLaren’s Rage + Hope: Interviews with Peter McLaren on War, Imperialism, & Critical Pedagogy (Peter Lang Publishing, 2006), but he also explores the New Marxism in Education, or the New Marxist Educational Theory (as it is sometimes called). Thus, he examines the impact of McLaren’s work along with other writers on the New Marxism in Education: Paula Allman, Glenn Rikowski, Mike Cole and Dave Hill.

He does spell my name wrong, though: having ‘Glen’ rather than ‘Glenn’ Rikowski. But that’s easily forgivable as Smith has produced an enlightening article. 

You can view the article at: http://www.springerlink.com/content/858j592687nt2554/fulltext.pdf

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Roger Scruton makes a distinction I recognize —            http://spectator.org/archives/2009/03/10/the-new-humanism

The old humanism was not a pleasure-seeking, still less a pleasure-loving philosophy. It took its inspiration from Enlightenment philosophers, from Milton, Blake, and D. H. Lawrence, and from the legacy of Western art. The humanist who most influenced me at Cambridge believed that in no works had humanity been more blessed by true ideals than in the St. Matthew Passion of Bach and the Tristan und Isolde of Wagner, the one a work of Christian devotion, the other a work that makes no mention of God or gods, but simply dwells on the exalted nature of erotic love when tied to mutual sacrifice. Although I was skeptical toward that kind of humanism, I never doubted its nobility of purpose. It was devoted to exalting the human person above the human animal, and moral discipline above random appetite. It saw art, music, and literature not simply as pleasures, but as sources of spiritual strength. And it took the same view of religion. Humanists of the old school were not believers. The ability to question, to doubt, to live in perpetual uncertainty, they thought, is one of the noble endowments of the human intellect. But they respected religion and studied it for the moral and spiritual truths that could outlive the God who once promoted them.

Observing the new humanism from my old perspective I am struck not only by its lack of positive belief, but also by its need to compensate for this lack by antagonism toward an imagined enemy. I say “imagined,” since it is obvious that religion is a declining force in Britain. There is no need to consult the pronouncements of the Archbishop of Canterbury: the response to the bus campaign abundantly proves the point. But a weak enemy is precisely what these negative philosophies require. Like so many modern ideologies, the new humanism seeks to define itself through what it is against rather than what it is for. It is for nothing, or at any rate for nothing in particular. Ever since the Enlightenment there has been a tendency to adopt this negative approach to the human condition, rather than to live out the exacting demands of the Enlightenment morality, which tells us to take responsibility for ourselves and to cease our snivelling. Having shaken off their shackles and discovered that they have not obtained contentment, human beings have a lamentable tendency to believe that they are victims of some alien force, be it aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, capitalism, the priesthood, or simply the belief in God. And the feeling arises that they need only destroy this alien force, and happiness will be served up on a plate, in a garden of pleasures. That, in my view, is why the Enlightenment, which promised the reign of freedom and justice, issued in an unending series of wars.

I never thought, when I finally put the old humanism behind me, that I would ever feel nostalgia over its loss. But now I recognize that it was not only noble in itself, but was also a serious attempt to retain the belief in nobility without the theological vision on which that belief had once depended. It was, in effect, a proof of the ideal that it proposed: an example of how human beings can provide themselves with values, and then live up to them.

Ny allround Spin Doctor påvej

Den Nye Spin Doctor kommer hjem til ministrene til jul. Han har vist sine evner, og han ejer vist indtil videre mest blandt de nyrige og pengeudstedere.

Sammen med den evige denske arketype Lunte alias Flemming Tonight Jensen Skattely i monopolforretningen skal Stein Bagger inc. – det helt nye efter Californiatrippet – styre den samlede forretning i en periode, mens stats- og udenrigsministrene forsøger pr. fly at piske klodetemperaturen til at stige en anelse inden Connies Klimatopmøde næste år.

Husk luderne, de kan vist ikke længere hentes i Sverige og Norge, som I plejer, og København har ikke ludere nok til en sådan verdenskomsammen, det er blevet bevist adskillige gange tidligere – sidst da ‘Verdens Sult’ var på tapetet. Det kan være Polen og Ungarn, der må holde for som nye fuldgyldige partnere i projektet. 

Popup: Hvor mon krigens anden part hvidvasker? Det er altså for ringe og typisk tegn på uligheden og racismen, hvis ikke de også har tilsvarende hvidvaskningsorganer til midlerne, som de tjener på at slå os ihjel.

Har I hørt det: Dødstrusler en masse …fra udlændinge, og pengevask for henved 1 mia. Andre får de samme dødstrusler fra udlændinge uden pengevask eller anden kriminalitet. Det kan være et spørgsmål om holdning, og virkningen er vist den samme.

Du tror da ikke

Medierne tager pis på dig. Meningen er du skal identificere finanskrisen med Stein Bagger og IT Factory. Du skal ikke grave selvstændigt endsige udvide dit forståelsesfelt. Det er sikrest for de ansvarlige med en mystisk udlægning.

Revisorernes pris, revisorernes kontrol, revisorernes manglende kontrol, revisorernes kritik, mere end stjernerne eller sortehullerne Finn Nørbygaard  og Bjarne Riis kunne gennemskue, stur, stur nummer, manglende tilbundsgående undersøgelser, mange år i Politiets søgelys. Hvem er det lige det holder med?

Så er det bedre med æstetikeren Jørgen Leth. Han kan sit krammeri, kammerateri. 3,5 mille, så vi alle kan se ham råpule et fattiglem på Slavernes Ø, hvor han har sit skattely. Det var noget af prisen, som statsministeren – d.v.s. dansken – måtte betale ved sit fravær kombineret med en flak ministerudnævnelse.

Jørgen: Man skal kende sin besøgelsestid.

………………………….

Har du hørt om håndholdt, bevidst rystet kameraføring? Har du hørt om brain scrambling? Scrambled eggs, ja, det er noget andet, men lidt i den retning. Har du hørt om attitude-træning via arketypers teen sig i studiet og på films? Du har da bemærket underlægningshymnerne til lighterlysene i dit indre? Så har du set den nye akulturelle (Miss.) Jane Marple i skildpaddeudgaven?

Nej vel. Du kan i hvert fald ikke huske, om du har (p.g.a. scramlingen).

Popup: Du bliver hvad de tænker, fes den ind, Karoline, et klokkefår.

Smid skidtet ud. DET KAN IKKE BRUGES TIL NOGET. 

Bagger er landet i Business-Class, nej undskyld, i First Class

Herre Djævel, 1 mia. Han gjorde det alsammen for vores skyld. 

Danmark er virkelig blevet bedraget

Sonia

Very strong and totally documented contributions that contains all what has been exposed in Fitna (fragments) Fitna the Movie (the entire film), but much more in super-qualified short lectures that are intelligible to everybody interested in their own or the future of their children – the political international elites are also indirectctly exposed for their calming ignorance or lies documentated by their own words:

What the West Needs To Know (20 fragments in English)

What The West Needs To Know (the entire 1½ hours film in English)

Obsession – Radical Islams War Against The West (9:37 minuts of fragments in English)

Obsession – Radical Islams War Against The West (the entire 1 hours film in English)

Uddrag fra: http://kommentar.weblog.dk/2007/11/28/habermas-tager-bladet-fra-munden/

“I fredags gav Tysklands kendteste og vel også betydeligste filosof Jürgen Habermas udtryk for sin fortvivlelse over sendrægtigheden i EU, som verden og vi har mere brug for end nogensinde…”

[...]

“Habermas er så nedtrykt over den tiltagende europæiske nationalisme, over den manglende integration af fremmede kulturer i Europa og over vores afmagt over for vor tids måske største katastrofe, den fremadskridende udhuling af menneskeværdige sociale standarder, at han i fredags gik så demonstrativt vidt, at han endte med at sætte sin sidste lid til det ældste demokrati på kloden, hvis der overhovedet skal udvikles, hvad Habermas kalder “en verdensindenrigspolitik”…”

Sonia

Om “68-generationens forlygte”, nu placeret i en af EU’s tænketanke, supplement: http://danmark.wordpress.com/2006/08/21/ringen-er-sluttet-2#ha

Ideology has replaced reality – and very soon you shall have an example of an ideological end in Denmark

- Even the news make distance to reality and misses their contents

07/17/2007 on http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1195 Fjordman claimed as following:

“American military historian and columnist Victor Davis Hanson http://www.victorhanson.com/ talks about how mass immigration is the product of a de facto alliance between the Libertarian Right and the Multicultural Left. The economic Libertarians can be represented by Swedish writer Johan Norberg, author of the book In Defence of Global Capitalism. Norberg can have valuable insights into the flaws of the Scandinavian welfare state model. However, his commitment to a “free market, open border” ideology blinds him to the threat posed by Muslim immigration, an ideological blind spot that is almost as big as the ones we find in Marxists. According to him, “at the moment there is a problem. The right supports one part of globalisation — the free movement of capital and goods – while the left tends to support another part, the free movement of people.”

An ideologist as you here see Fjordman does certainly not understand reality; or it is simply not his intentions to do so as far as I can judge. In a Libetarian’s limited vector-space of a certain number of variables culture and religion for example may have no impacts on the teoretical model – mostly because they have not found suitable ways to measure the possible teoretically impacts from religion and culture in a meaningful way. For example reality then has been drawn psychedelically in the model, and thereby perhaps it replaces real life, but this does not matter, as long the model of life definitely has priority one. And that is the point: Next to perhaps the well-being of the ideological followers, death (to the dissidents) gets priority number two.

Take welfare as an explicit example from reality today but evolved/developed from an pure ideological concept by substituting wealth for welfare:

You cannot talk about a taxfinanced welfare in a society without allowing fertility to drop, and as an implication of this also accept the distribution of ages to change, if you base your model of more than 1-2 generations. The selfishness in the ideological top http://danmark.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/top-and-buttom/ has been described, and don’t ever believe this selfishness range at a lower priority than one. It is easy to make another priority in the model of life, but it is impossible to go on for more two generations on ideological agenda in reality once it has stepped into reality. Basicly because man is involved.

All ideologies have the same ends in both theory and reality: Joined happiness for the camp followers and death to the dissidents. All ideologists Fjordman included are bound to express their potential warnings against things they have not understood themselves, because they do not allow logic to enter before ideology. You could with Soeren Kierkegaard claim essense before existense to correct them.

Islam, a lot of Libertarians and a lot of multicultural Internationalists are still on that same lime twig.

‘Liberalists’ lost – ‘internationalists’ won‘

On ideology and why it goes wrong

J. E. Vig, 28. november 2007

IPCC (intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change) offentligjort den fjerde del af sin beretning i Valencia. Den viser en slags sammenfatning af de første tre dele. Der bliver afsluttende endnu engang slået fast, at klimaændringer forårsages af menneskene og truer planeten jorden for mennesker og miljø.

Der kommer kritik fra USA. Man henviste derfra til at der ikke findes nogen entydig videnskabelig definition på risiciene ved klimaændringerne. Konklusionen i beretningen var at man står over for en politisk stillingtagen. Om kritikken fra USA nyder stor bevågenhed er nok usandsynligt.

Allerede den 3. december indledes forhandlinger på Bali, for at få en ny klimabeskyttelsesprotekol besluttet, som skal afløse Kyotoprotekollen. Sidstnævnte var bl.a. ikke underskrevet af Kina og USA.

Såvidt Tageschau, ARD & ZDF TV, Tyskland, 25. november 2007

————–
Dette var en særdeles underspillet beretning i forhold til virkeligheden, der om umuligt er endnu mere transformeret i den tyske offentligheds bevidsthed end tilfældet er i Danmark.

Blandt andre afhoppere fra Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tager bladet fra munden: http://danmark.wordpress.com/2007/03/31/global-opvarmnings-svindelen-2007-paa-dokumentar-video-1time-15min/

Ny Blog: EU tjener styrtende på klima-fup: http://euro-med.dk/?p=62

Sonia

Socrates called them Sophists

Theory is a logic system based on hypotheses. If you (as a Post- or a Transmodernist) are so engaged in reaching the clouds from where reality is impossible to recognize that you forget to check the hypotheses, you shall not even reach the sky, and never really understand anything at all. And if you do after all, you shall not even be able to see or listen to the ground the ground.

Its main ideologic forces of the today’s transmodernists following the postmodernist are among others: Frankfurterskolen, Habermas, Foucault, Derrida, Wittgenstein, metaphor teori, metaforteori, diskursanalyse, Studium Generale

Den med en times lyseslukkeri er smart, for man kan jo ikke godt lave en spørgeundersøgelse
om emnet: Tror du på menneskeskabt CO2 påvirker klimaet?
De, der ikke tror på det, ved måske at det er ren svindel sat op for at samle magten yderligere, og så er spørgsmålet ikke længere i kategorien ‘transmoderne ny-etik’ til fastlæggelse af den stadigt udviklende politiske korrekthed, for så bliver det kontroversielt og dermed politisk ved en offentliggørelse af undersøgelsesresultaterne.
Og det går jo ikke. Så kunne det næste jo blive, at vi skal til at stemme om 2-tabellens gyldighed og eventuelt dens alternative indhold. Kender man f.eks. til ’statistisk korrelation’ formodes man at tilhøre gruppen, der holder kæft, fordi man enten er med på vognen eller optræde 100 pct. tillukket om dette spørgsmål, som det i øvrigt er kutyme blandt naturvidenskabsmænd. Det var netop en udbrydergruppe af disse forskere, der satte sig for at dokumentere, at sammenhængen mellem menneskeskabt CO2 og temperaturændringer eksisterer lige så meget som sammenhængen mellem tyggegummiforbruget i Italien i 1950erne og antallet af lokomotiver i England i 1870erne.

CO2 skabt af menneskene skaber
ingen temperaturstigning, men den
forløjede teori forarmer 3.verdenen
og fastholder og uddyber denne
forarmelse.

Blandt andre afhoppere fra Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tager bladet fra munden: http://danmark.wordpress.com/2007/03/31/global-opvarmnings-svindelen-2007-paa-dokumentar-video-1time-15min/

http://danmark.wordpress.com/2007/07/12/tak-til-dr2-tv-for-udsendelsen-den-store-loegn-om-global-opvarmning/

Sonia