Schooling as a Ritual Performance

by Peter McLaren

One of the most compelling ethnographies of school ever written, "Schooling as a Ritual Performance" has for over a decade made its mark among educators, sociologists, and those seeking to understand the cultural meaning of classroom practices. Written by one of the major world figures on the educational left, "Schooling as a Ritual Performance" is a pioneering study of the partnership between capitalism and religion and the educational offspring it produces. Not since Paul Willis' "Learning to Labor" has an educational ethnography about schooling so pushed the limits of current social theory.

Now, in a new edition to this classic text, McLaren engages with some of the latest anthropological thinking and presents readers with a powerful manifesto for critical ethnography in the coming millennium.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction

430 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles (United States). He is the author and editor of forty-five books and hundreds of scholarly articles and chapters. His writings have been translated into 20 languages.

He 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. He has developed a reputation for his uncompromising political analysis influenced by a Marxist humanist philosophy and a unique literary style of expression. His scholarship and political activism have taken him throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

Reviews

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

An detailed, ethnographic study to examine rituals in Catholic school students that transfer back and forth from street-corner and student states in Toronto schools in the early 80s. Great book for understanding the transformative dynamics that students embody as they enter in and out of structured settings.