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CHOICE Review

A useful introduction to a critical understanding of education, this book explores how critical theory views educational practice. McLaren (Miami University, Ohio) describes social problems that beset both schools and society. Part 2, longest of the book's four sections, contains journal entries from the author's five years' experience of teaching elementary school in one of Toronto's "inner city" suburbs. After conveying a sense of the daily interaction among teachers, students, and parents, the author introduces some basic theoretical concepts with which to analyze the process of schooling. In an overview of critical pedagogy, he provides a dialectical tension among theory, practice, and experience needed for critical learning. Of the three strands of critical pedagogy--the libertarian, the radical, and the liberationist--McLaren draws mainly from the radical perspectives of such writers as Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux. This book, which should find a place in undergraduate libraries, concludes with trenchant perspectives on why disadvantaged students fail. -J. L. Susskind, Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg