Peter McLaren

Peter McLaren (born 1948) is a Canadian-American scholar and Emeritus Professor of Urban Education at the University of California, Los Angeles, having taught at UCLA from 1993 until 2013. Prior to that, he taught at Miami University of Ohio (1985-1993). Most recently, he served as a Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies at Attallah College of Educational Studies, Chapman University (2013-2023) until his retirement, where he was Co-Director of the Paulo Freire Democratic Project and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice. He is the Honorary Director of the Center for Critical Studies in Education at Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China. According to Stanford University's database, McLaren belongs to the top 2% of the world’s most influential scientists.

McLaren is the author and editor of over forty-five books and hundreds of scholarly articles and chapters. His writings have been translated into over 20 languages. He is married to Yan Wang from Northeast China. They currently live in Orange, California. He has a son and daughter from previous marriages.

McLaren is known as one of the leading architects of critical pedagogy, and for his scholarly writings on critical literacy, the sociology of education, cultural studies, critical ethnography, and Marxist theory. Paulo Freire, a founding figure of critical pedagogy, stated: "Peter McLaren is one among the many outstanding 'intellectual relatives' I 'discovered' and by whom I, in turn, was 'discovered.' I read Peter McLaren long before I ever came to know him personally. ... Once I finished reading the first texts by McLaren that were made available to me, I was almost certain that we belonged to an identical 'intellectual family'."

During a keynote address at Chapman University on October 25, 2014, Nita Freire, eminent educational scholar and widow of Paulo Freire, remarked: "It is ... a huge thrill for me to see Peter McLaren and Donaldo Macedo, who ever since through discussions and dialogue became old friends of work and friendship, partners of ideological and theoretical ideas of Paulo. They along with Henry Giroux formulated the critical pedagogy as we know of today." McLaren is also the recipient of the 2023 Paulo Freire SIG Legacy Award.

McLaren has met with Abahlali baseMjondolo, in South Africa; the landless workers' movement, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra – MST, in Brasil, the Zapatistas in Mexico, and members of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela, and with the left education workers union in Turkey where amid a demonstration he was teargassed and hurled to the ground by a police's riot shield.

McLaren is a faculty member at the Institute of Critical Pedagogy at The Global Center for Advanced Studies and lectures worldwide on education's politics. In Finland, he gave an Opening Lecture at Paulo Freire Center–Finland on November 20, 2007. La Escuela Normal Superior de Neiva in Colombia has named one of its buildings after Peter McLaren.

, McLaren is ranked in the top 15 percent of all social science and humanities scholars in the world, based on his D-index (Discipline H-index); he is ranked 217 in the United States and 428 in the world.

Peter McLaren made his debut in Juli Kang’s 16-minute short film The Liberation of Everyday Life (2004) with Brian Diamond and Marielle Heller. McLaren's prose was featured in Richard Davies and Glen Kirkland's student textbook, Connections 2 by Gage Educational Publishing Company, among such authors as John Updike, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Agatha Christie, Robert Browning, Gordon Lightfoot, Langston Hughes, Alice Munro and Al Purdy.

Life


Peter McLaren was born in Toronto, Ontario, on August 2, 1948, and raised in Toronto and also, for four years, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is the only child of Frances Teresa Bernadette McLaren and Lawrence Omand McLaren, from Canada. McLaren's early family life was working-class until his father, a Second World War war veteran with the Royal Canadian Engineers, returned from battle in Europe and began work as a television salesman, eventually rising to the rank of General Manager of Phillips Electronics, Eastern Canada. McLaren's mother was a homemaker before working as a telephone operator.

McLaren used to read voraciously in literature, philosophy, poetry, social theory, and literary and art criticism, was making creative 35 mm movies at 16, and dreamt of being an artist or film director. McLaren's father had one sister, Bonnie, who married Terry Goddard, a Second World War Royal Navy pilot credited with helping sink the German battleship Bismark. McLaren's mother had four sisters and two brothers. McLaren compensated for being an only child by spending time with his many cousins and engaging in creative writing. McLaren's first writing award was during middle school, where he won top writing honours by producing a science fiction story.

At 19, McLaren hitchhiked throughout the US, met with Black Panthers in Oakland, lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where he participated in anti–Vietnam War protests, met with Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg and began writing poetry and short stories. His first commercial publication was about his great Aunt, Irma Wright, who won the world's fastest typist competition in 1928.

He earned a Bachelor of Arts in English literature at University of Waterloo in 1973 (specializing in Elizabethan drama), attended Toronto Teachers College, and went on to earn a Bachelor of Education at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Education, a Masters of Education at Brock University's College of Education, and a Ph.D. at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), the University of Toronto where he worked with the late Richard Courtney, a leading international authority in children's drama.

McLaren taught elementary and middle school from 1974-1979. Most of that time was spent teaching in Canada's largest public housing complex in Toronto's Jane-Finch Corridor. Cries from the Corridor, McLaren's book about his teaching experiences, made the Canadian bestseller list and was one of the top ten bestselling books in Canada in 1980 (Maclean's magazine, the Toronto Star), initiating a country-wide debate on inner-city schools. Later, McLaren would harshly criticize this book and go on to transform it into the highly acclaimed pedagogical text, Life in Schools.

When McLaren was a doctoral student at the OISE, his first advisor was Professor Fred Rainsberry, head of Children’s Broadcasting for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, who created a show called Misterogers that later became a famous American show called Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Rainsberry, who had a special interest in communication theory and curriculum development and was part of the Royal Commission on Violence in the Communications Industry, advised McLaren to work with Marshall McLuhan as part of his doctoral research, but the year McLaren entered the program, in 1979, McLuhan suffered a stroke. Rainsberry invited McLaren to develop a children’s television show, Kidding Around. The idea was to visit a different ethnic enclave of the city each week, interview regular folks, and get a sense of their everyday lived experiences. McLaren couldn’t find sponsors, and the show never got past the pilot.

After earning his doctorate in 1983, he served as a Special Lecturer in Education at Brock University, where, as a one-year sabbatical replacement, he specialized in inner-city education and language arts. After the Dean did not follow through on his promised extension of McLaren's contract, McLaren decided to pursue an academic appointment in the United States. However, he remains on good terms with the faculty at Brock University, with whom he remains in a relationship of solidarity and friendship.

McLaren left Canada in 1985 to teach at Miami University's School of Education and Allied Professions, where he spent eight years working with colleague Henry Giroux during a time when the epistemology known as critical pedagogy was gaining traction in North American schools of education. McLaren also served as Director of the Center for Education and Cultural Studies and held the title of Renowned Scholar-in-Residence at Miami University before being recruited by the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, in 1993.

In 2013, McLaren was appointed Distinguished Fellow in Critical Studies at Chapman University, Orange, California.

In 2019, The Griffith Journal of Law and Human Dignity, affiliated with the top-ranked law school in Australia, published an extensive interview with McLaren. And the same year the OC Weekly featured commentary on two articles featured by McLaren on the fight against fascism in the United States, and McLaren published a graphic novel of his life with an artist Miles Wilson.

First phase, 1980–1993
The theoretical orientations of the first ten years of McLaren's research and writing can be traced to his early undergraduate work in Elizabethan drama and theater arts and his graduate studies in symbolic anthropology, critical ethnography, and social semiotics. As a young man, McLaren had always admired the life and work of William Morris, author, poet, artist and craftsman, printer and calligrapher, formidable socialist and activist, businessman, and private individual. At the time that he enrolled in doctoral studies at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (Institut d'Etudes Pedagogiques de L'Ontario), Victor Turner, the world-renowned symbolic anthropologist, was conducting path-breaking transdisciplinary work at the University of Virginia, bringing dramaturgical theory and anthropology into close collaboration, particularly as this applied to the study of ritual. McLaren soon became a scholar of Turner's work. After auditing a course at the Toronto Semiotics Institute taught by philosopher Michel Foucault and another by Umberto Eco, McLaren began to develop a transdisciplinary approach to the study of ritual. He found a rich transdisciplinary milieu in which to conduct his studies at Massey College, University of Toronto. Modeled after Balliol College, Oxford University, England, Massey College facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration among high-achieving graduate students from various departments on campus. Looking back at his educational experiences at Massey, it is not surprising that the work of performance theorists, political economists, anthropologists, dramaturgical theorists, literary critics, and symbolic interactionists informed the theoretical basis of his first major scholarly publication, Schooling as a Ritual Performance Towards a Political Economy of Educational Symbols and Gestures (first edition, Routledge, 1986; revised editions, 1994, 1997) which was based on his Ph.D. dissertation.

McLaren's early work from 1984 to 1994 spanned diverse intellectual and empirical terrains. He remained steadfast in his interest in the contemporary themes of the Frankfurt School: social psychology in the context of a lack of revolutionary social protest in Europe and the United States, a critique of positivism and science, developing a critical theory of art and representation; an interrogation of the mass media and mass culture; investigating the production of desire and identity; and the globalization of capitalism and forms of integration in neoliberal societies. In other words, when viewed against the major themes of the Frankfurt School, there was a fundamental coherence to his work as a whole. Further, each of McLaren's scholarly projects attempted to explore the construction of identity in school contexts within a neo-liberal society. This meant engaging in numerous critical projects: exploring the debilitating effects of logical positivism in the social sciences and the assault on critical theory and critical ethnography; exploring the increasing colonization of the lifeworld by the mass media and developing a critical pedagogy of media literacy and political aesthetics of pedagogical experience; analyzing the decline of critical rationality in postmodern societies and the development of critical literacies; advancing in specific pedagogical terms the struggle to redefine the meaning of liberation and empowerment in an age of despair and cynicism; investigating the politics of post-liberal societies with specific reference to the practices of cultural racism and sexism, and developing an analysis of the production, distribution, consumption, and exchange of cultural objects in schools and larger social sites with an emphasis on the social construction of subjectivity.

In this early period, McLaren's research emphasized the development of critical emancipatory consciousness, self-conscious reason, and the centrality of nonidentity thinking towards a non-essentialist view of revolutionary consciousness grounded in a theory of intersubjective understanding through language. Practically, his work attempted to create an oppositional cultural politics that enabled teachers and students to analyze how the dominant and negotiated meanings that inform classroom texts were produced and to uncover the ideological and political meanings that circulated within them. Through critical reading strategies, McLaren attempted to illuminate the dominant pedagogical codes of teachers and the normative codes within classroom cultures of students. His purpose was to create alternative readings as well as new pedagogical practices. In this sense, as McLaren was formulating it, critical pedagogy attempted to reengage a social world that operates under the assumption of its collective autonomy and remains resistant to human intervention.

In his early work, McLaren engaged four main strands in educational theory and studies: critical ethnography, critical pedagogy, curriculum studies, and critical multiculturalism.

Second phase, 1994–present
McLaren's work during the past several decades is not so much a break from his early work as an extension of it. A discernible shift occurred in the sense that he now focuses more on a critique of political economy. But his early work also included a critique of capitalism, except during that time McLaren operated from primarily a Weberian understanding of class and was concerned at that time with the politics of consumption and lifestyle/identity. McLaren's new turn saw him focus on the social relations of production and its relation to the production of subjectivity and protagonist agency. Between 1994 up to the present, McLaren's work is less directed at the classroom per se, and more focused on issues such as a critique of political economy, cultural contact and racial identity, anti-racist/multicultural education, the politics of white supremacy, resistance and popular culture; the formation of subjectivity, the coloniality of power and decolonial education; revolutionary critical pedagogy informed by a Marxist humanist analysis and liberation theology.

During this time McLaren began spending time in Latin America – working with Chavistas in Venezuela and with labor and union leaders in Mexico and Colombia and becoming more interested in Marxist critique of political economy. McLaren came to believe that postmodern theory could be quite a reactionary approach in so far as it failed to challenge with the verve and sustained effort that is demanded of the times the social relations of capitalist production and reproduction. While McLaren adopted the term, critical postmodernism, or resistance postmodernism, to describe his work up until the late 1990s, he recognized that he needed to engage the work of Karl Marx and Marxist thinkers.

The more McLaren began engaging in the work of Marx, and meeting social activists driven by Marxist anti-imperialist projects throughout the Americas, he no longer believed that the work on "radical democracy" convincingly demonstrated that it was superior to the Marxist problematic. It appeared to McLaren that, in the main, such work had despairingly capitulated to the inevitability of the rule of capital and the regime of the commodity. That work, along with much of the work in post-colonialist criticism, appeared to McLaren as too detached from historical specificities and basic determinations. McLaren believed that Marxist critique more adequately addressed the differentiated totalities of contemporary society and their historical imbrications in the world system of global capitalism. Rather than employ the term critical pedagogy, McLaren now uses the term that the British educator Paula Allman has christened revolutionary critical pedagogy. McLaren describes his current work as Marxist humanist, a term developed by Raya Dunayevskaya, who once served as Trotsky's secretary in Mexico and who developed the tradition of Marxist humanism in the US. McLaren's work constitutes counterpoint to the way social justice is used in progressive education by inviting students to examine critically the epistemological and axiological dimensions of democracy in the light of a Marxist critique of political economy and the coloniality of power (a term developed by Anibal Quijano). McLaren's work today comprises poetry, reflections on his activist work in Venezuela, Mexico, and other countries, contributions to critical theory, and Marxist analysis as applied to current educational policy and reform initiatives.



Although McLaren's theoretical work has developed in these stages, the preface to the most recent compilation of his oeuvre argues that these phases aren't distinguished by theoretical breaks but by political "maturation." This latest interpretation argues that there are two continuities throughout his phases. The first is his effort to create new temporalities, spatialities, subjectivities, and modes of production that don't entail exploitation and oppression. Second, this pursuit has always been "rooted not in the transcendence of the ideal, but in the immanence of corporeal reality."

With his comrades worldwide, Peter McLaren has searched for justice and thirsted for peace since the 1980s. He has learned from brave and visionary comrades in Mexico who never give up fighting for justice, from the fearless revolutionaries in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, Turkey, and in all the other countries where teachers, other transformative intellectuals, and ordinary people never give up hope such as his native Canada and adopted home of the United States, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, England, China, Croatia, Serbia, Peru, Spain, Portugal, New Zealand, Thailand, Japan, Korea, Pakistan, Israel, Palestine and Australia. Peter McLaren has received numerous invitations from different countries over the years, but his physical disability has prevented him from accepting most of them since the 2020s. In his Pedagogy of Insurrection, he mapped his journeys as follows:

"The different pathways I have trodden in my intellectual as well as my activist work have taken me to the rare book collections of libraries throughout the world, to radical bookshops selling cheap plaster busts of Marx, to coffee shops where stacks of second-hand anarchist works were free for the taking, to streets convulsed in tear gas and chants demanding freedom, to the favelas and barrios of grassroots activists, to meeting places in communities where the land had been seized by the campesinos, to South African classrooms in shack dweller communities, to alternative community centers in Roma neighborhoods, to education conferences in Muslim and Hindu countries, to schools where martyred teachers adorn the murals on the walls, to universities occupied by radical students and to the mahogany and brass offices of university administrators. Peter McLaren and AMLO.png Our journey has also taken us along different spiritual pathways no less important to us. It has taken me from Buddhist temples in Thailand, to Taoist temples in China, to Shinto temples in Japan, to Christian churches throughout Europe, to the Vatican, to Maori whare whakairo in New Zealand, to Santeria ceremonies in Havana, to Umbande and Candomblé terreiros in Bahia, Brazil, to Hare Krishna temples, to an abbey in Ireland, to the Self-Realization Fellowship temple of Paramahansa Yogananda and to evangelical churches in the U.S. where the Lord is praised in whoops and hollers. This sojourner thirsting for salvation and social justice has taken off his thirsty boots in decrepit hostels in Mexico, rested his feet on the mini-bars of luxury hotels in Spain, and boarded for the night in rooming houses in Caracas while supporting the Bolivarian revolution. Over the years, I have joined groups of religious pilgrims on a spiritual path. This has been as important to me as my scholarship and political activism. To me, they go hand-in-hand. Together, we have tried to break through all the barriers that constrain us from realizing the Kingdom of God, not realizing that it is already upon us. We have tried to make our own consciousness the object of our thought. We have tried to bolster our potential to think about thought itself. We have tried to blast open the continuum of history in order to arrive at Benjamin’s messianic “now-time,” at Leary’s “white light,” at Suzuki’s satori, seeking our “profane illumination” as we smashed our fists through the prison doors of homogeneous, empty time, searching for that flashpoint moment where the temporal-ontological distance between the past, present and future vanishes and we are engulfed by an orgasm of history. We have been crazy fools and holy fools both. Some of us have found in revolutionary critical pedagogy an opportunity to bring together our spiritual and political struggles. Forces busy at work disabling our quest are neither apparent nor easily discerned and critical educators have managed to appropriate many different languages with which to navigate the terrain of current educational reform."

McLaren's Critical Pedagogy
McLaren's work has broken new ground in education. He is considered one of the architects of critical pedagogy, having been influenced early in his career by Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux. He also has been credited with laying the groundwork for performance studies in education by publishing his book, Schooling as a Ritual Performance. The Peter McLaren Upstander Lecture was announced as part of the Annual International Critical Research in Applied Theater Symposium in Auckland, New Zealand. The lecture will be presented each year by a graduate student in education from the School of Critical Studies in Education at the University of Auckland.

McLaren is known as one of the leading exponents of revolutionary critical pedagogy, an approach to everyday life influenced by Marxist humanist philosophy, also known as a "philosophy of praxis." McLaren's work is controversial for its uncompromising politics of class struggle. McLaren is also a gifted orator and social activist, and his academic writing has been both praised and criticized for its unique blend of poetry and literary tropes and cutting-edge theoretical analysis. At least one documentary is in the planning about McLaren's life. David Geoffrey Smith has described McLaren's critical pedagogy as follows: "As a former theologian, I judge Peter McLaren to be a prophet, and prophets are seldom recognized in their own countries except when they tear away the veils of hypocrisy, and then ...?"

McLaren approaches critical pedagogy as a praxiological effort to develop a politics of everyday life in a number of ways. First, it situates its critical analyses within the realms of popular culture. Secondly, it pays close theoretical attention to how everyday discourses and social practices constitute and reinforce relations of power and serve as sites for struggle, resistance, and transformation. Thirdly, as developed by McLaren, critical pedagogy attempts to seize opportunities to make links between new social movements and the networks of power associated with "school life." It attempts to link the micropolitical (everyday lives of teachers and students) with the macropolitical (larger economic, cultural, social, and institutional structures).



As McLaren develops it, critical pedagogy seeks to analyze the possibilities for the resistance and transformation of social life, both individual and collective, personal and macropolitical. It engages in such an analysis by attempting to understand how wider relations of power are played out in the agential spaces of classroom and community life but also by attempting to investigate how broader structures of mediation at the level of the economy are able to "take root" in the everyday lives of students and teachers who operate at the level of common sense actions. This means constantly reflecting on the cultural construction of teachers, students, and researchers' identities and connecting such critical reflection to a broader terrain of political action and class struggle. McLaren takes critical pedagogy beyond discursive politics, which sees politics as merely a text to be deconstructed and interpreted. Instead, McLaren approaches cultural politics as a terrain that operationalizes the textuality of political life by linking textuality to materiality. That is, McLaren seeks to make connections between the texts that we read (cultural artifacts) and those that read us (the realm of language and discursive structures in general) in light of current modes and social relations of production and the political consequences that these connections bring about in our pedagogies, curricula, and policies.

Since 1994, McLaren revised and extended some of his earlier insights in Schooling as a Ritual Performance, Life in Schools, and other works by engaging with Marx and leading Marxist philosophers and theorists.

While anti-capitalist struggle and Marxist analysis have an indistinct and relatively undigested place in the field of educational theory, there is some movement towards Marx in the social sciences here in North America. Marx is being revisited by social scientists of all disciplinary shapes and sizes – even, and perhaps most especially and urgently today, when capitalism is in a state of severe crisis. While hardly on their way to becoming entrenched and pervasive, Marx's ideas are taking their significance most strikingly from the particular and varied contexts in which his ideas are being engaged. Marx's ideas are gaining traction in education thanks to McLaren's work.

In McLaren's post-1994 phase, Marxist theory has provided McLaren with a fundamentally necessary approach to praxis to contextualize changes in the socio-political and economic sphere related to education. Through McLaren's current re-engagement with Marx and the tradition of historical materialism, McLaren supports the work of colleagues who pave the way for new generations of educationalists to encounter Marx. Marx is being reevaluated on numerous fronts today: sociology, political science, philosophy, economics, ethics, history, and the like.

Highlighting the dialogical nature of McLaren's critical pedagogy, he and Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon Smith, known for his transformative work on trust and trade, engaged in a profound and respectful dialogue at Chapman University in 2017. Despite their apparent ideological differences – McLaren, a Marxist humanist, and Smith, a libertarian – the exchange revealed common ground. The scholars from working-class backgrounds explored topics from early careers to influences like liberation theology and economic necessity. Their six-day, 12,000-word email exchange showcased that differences need not hinder meaningful dialogue.

McLaren converted from his Anglican roots to Roman Catholicism when he was 35 and completing his dissertation. Subsequently, McLaren became interested in Catholic social justice teaching and liberation theology. Since then, McLaren’s work has been expressly Catholic, and his eschatological position is that the eschaton has already arrived and that humanity is called to respond to the injunction by Christ to love our neighbor and bring justice to the world. McLaren's work is critical of Christians who postpone the eschaton, thus failing to heed Christ's call to social justice In the here and now. Those theologies that do not accept the eschaton as having arrived are tools deliberately used by the masters of this world to prevent Christ's message from revolutionizing the world and bringing about the messianic kingdom on earth.

McLaren has also been compared to Francis of Assisi. In another instance, it has been stated that McLaren work is "a testimony to an examined life in the service of humanity" and he follows Jesus, who chose the path of non-violence. McLaren pointed out that ”all acts of violence generate forms of evil” and through evil and violence there can not be the Kingdom of God.

James Pew of Wokewatch Canada asserts that the "Three Musketeers" of critical pedagogy—Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux, and Joe Kincheloe—may be considered "Canada's second most successful academic influence internationally, with Jordan Peterson being the first." Pew further contends that a significant distinction between Peterson's influence and that of the three pedagogical "Musketeers" lies in their target audiences. Peterson's work primarily addresses young adults and older, whereas critical pedagogy is imposed on children from kindergarten through 12th grade. Pew suggests that when viewed from this perspective, McLaren, Giroux, and Kincheloe might ultimately prove to be even more influential than Peterson.

McLaren Versus the Far-Right
McLaren’s work is popular among progressive and leftist North and South America constituencies. His North American critics often focus only on the first of his over forty-five books, which was on the life and teachings of Che Guevara and Paulo Freire, the latter of whom was a friend and mentor of McLaren. Furthermore, his critics often fail to engage his work on Catholic social teaching and liberation theology. McLaren’s work has been greatly influenced by Mexican Christian communist militant and Jesuit theologian José Porfirio Miranda, who believed that the eschaton, or the Last Judgement, had already arrived. McLaren believes the same; his work is best understood in this context.

Peter McLaren has faced criticism and attacks from right-wing circles for years. His work challenges dominant power structures and advocates for social justice, equity, and transformative education. As a result, he has often been a target of conservative commentators, policymakers, and institutions who oppose his perspectives and the changes he advocates for in education and society. As a result, McLaren has faced not only intellectual criticism but also personal attacks and attempts to discredit his work and character.

An example is a fake video posted anonymously on YouTube with false and made-up captioning designed to discredit McLaren. However, despite these challenges, he remains a resilient advocate for transformative education and social justice, inspiring and influencing scholars, educators, and activists worldwide.

Another case is right-wing Catholic Christopher Rufo, a leading critic of Critical Race Theory, who is closely aligned to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, has accused McLaren of “the ruthless application of politics to the most intimate recesses of the human spirit” in his book, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.

McLaren has responded to Rufo in two ripostes accusing him of pseudo-intellectualism, a failure to understand the fundamentals of critical theory and critical pedagogy and attempting to create moral panic around critical pedagogy that resembles the “Red Scare” tactics of the 1950s. McLaren has also described Rufo’s attacks on critical race theory as embedded in “a hermeneutics of evil.” Professor John Baldacchino has described McLaren as “a Mannerist—equally Catholic, yet unlike Illich, he is shy of any sense of liberal Protestantism by which grace could be mistaken for being simply predestined and one’s behavior justified. If I were to place McLaren’s depiction, I would say that it claims its humanist origin in the Late Renaissance, by which it then acclaims the radicalism of a Caravaggio and Tintoretto, loudly claiming redemption by means of its stark realism.”

McLaren has been a fierce critic of Trumpism, stating that "Trump has put democracy on the slaughter bench of history." McLaren characterizes Trumpism as follows:


 * "The fidelity to Trumpism by his base has a lot to do with the ways in which media technology have fostered present-day ideological affiliations and are forcing the remaining remnants of American democracy into a political dumpster filled with the stinking rot of Trumpism. American fascism is a type of blended plutocracy where the global scope of capitalist rationalization is seamlessly integrated into the bureaucracy, technology, hierarchy, and institutional and political structures, whose power is camouflaged by the banality of its appearances and especially because it is draped in the fleshy propaganda of freedom and democracy."

In January 2006, McLaren was caught up in the Bruin Alumni Association's controversial "Dirty Thirty" project, which listed UCLA's most politically extreme professors. The list was compiled by a former UCLA graduate student, Andrew Jones, who had previously been fired by his mentor David Horowitz for pressuring "students to file false reports about leftists" and for stealing Horowitz's mailing list of potential contributors to fund research for attacks on left-wing professors. The Association offered students up to $100 for tapes of lectures that show how "radicals" on the faculty are "actively proselytizing their extreme views in the classroom." McLaren topped the list at number one; Doug Kellner, also in the School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, was number three.

The Los Angeles Times reported: "On one of its websites, the Bruin Alumni Group names education professor Peter McLaren as No. 1 on its “The Dirty Thirty: Ranking the Worst of the Worst.” It says “this Canadian native teaches the next generation of teachers and professors how to properly indoctrinate students.” McLaren called the alumni group’s tactics “beneath contempt” and said that “Any sober, concerned citizen would look at this and see right through it as a reactionary form of McCarthyism. Any decent American is going to see through this kind of right-wing propaganda. I just find it has no credibility.”

Honorary doctorates
Peter McLaren was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Lapland, Finland, in 2004, by Universidad del Salvador, Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2010, by the Universidad Nacional de Chilecito in La Rioja, Argentina, and the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos de Educación Inclusiva (CELEI), Chile, in 2021. He also received the Amigo Honorifica de la Comunidad Universitaria de esta Institucion by La Universidad Pedagogica Nacional, Unidad 141, Guadalajara, Mexico.

La Fundacion McLaren de Pedagogía Critica
In 2005, Professor Sergio Quiroz Miranda established La Fundacion McLaren de Pedagogía Critica along with Peter McLaren to develop a knowledge of critical pedagogy throughout Mexico and to promote projects in critical pedagogy and popular education throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. On September 15, 2006 the Catedra Peter McLaren was inaugurated at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela.

Awards
Peter McLaren has received numerous awards in his career among them the following: a Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the Pedagogy and Theater of the Oppressed, Inc. and Miami University of Ohio, The Central New York Peace Studies Consortium Lifetime Achievement Award in Peace Studies, the 2013 Award of Achievement in Critical Studies by the Critical Studies Association (Athens, Greece), the First Annual Social Justice and Upstander Ethics in Education Award presented by the Department of Education, Antioch University, Los Angeles, the inaugural Social and Economic Justice in Public Education Award presented by the Marxian Analysis of Society, Schools and Education, a special interest group of the American Education Research Association, the Paulo Freire International Social Justice Award presented by the Paulo Freire Research Center, Finland, and The Ann-Kristine Pearson Award in Education and Economy presented by The University of Toronto’s Center for the Study of Education and Work, the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar Award presented by The American Education Research Association, the International Award in Critical Pedagogy presented by the government of Venezuela’s Ministry of Education, the First International Award for Social Justice and Equity through Education award, presented by the Instituto Universitario Internacional de Toluca (Mexico), the National Conference on Equity and Social Justice in Education award presented by the founding members of the conference, the “Friend in Solidarity with the Struggle of Mexican Teachers” award presented by the National Union of Educational Workers (Michoacan), and the “Distinción Académica Educación, Debates e Imaginario Social” from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. In addition, the Higher Council of Community Government, the Council for Civil Affairs, and the Education Commission of Cheran, Michoacan, presented McLaren with the Defence of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Award commemorating the second anniversary of the defense of the forests. Professor McLaren was awarded Westchester University’s First Annual Excellence in Anti-Global-Capitalist and Activism Award by the conference founders of Critical Theories in the 21st Century: A Conference of Transformative Pedagogies. Most recently, Professor McLaren received the 2013 “Academia Honor Award” from the Education and Science Workers’ Union for his work in social sciences and his struggle in labor and democracy at Ankara University Turkey, and the “Award of Honor in Critical Pedagogy” from the Department of Adult Education and Lifelong Learning, Ankara University, Turkey. He also received the Outstanding Educator of America Award for 2013 from the Association of Educators of Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2014, he received the title Honorary Global Ambassador of Critical Pedagogy and Global Ethics from the Instituto de Ciencias de la Educación. Universidad Autónoma “Benito Juárez” de Oaxaca. Oaxaca, México.