A Note to Readers
These questions emerge from a larger concern surrounding the contemporary global assault on academic spaces such as universities, classrooms, libraries, curricula, and traditions of critical inquiry. Across different political contexts, educational institutions have increasingly become sites of political contestation, subject to efforts to discipline, defund, rewrite, surveil, or ideologically reorganize them. Many of these struggles have emerged alongside the rise of contemporary right-wing and authoritarian movements, raising broader questions about the relationship between power, knowledge, and critical thought. This conversation, therefore, is not merely about policy changes within education, but about a deeper political anxiety: why do authoritarian and right-wing projects so often perceive critical thought, collective learning, historical consciousness, and intellectual dissent as existential threats? Drawing from the work of Peter McLaren, these questions attempt to explore education not as a neutral institution, but as a contested terrain where power struggles over memory, imagination, morality, identity, and the possibility of collective emancipation unfold.
We have divided this interview into three sections, each following a different thread in our conversation with Peter McLaren. The first begins with education itself around classrooms, curricula, childhood, and the struggle over what we are allowed to know, remember, and question. The second moves into less-visible territory: how power operates through our emotions, attention, and capacity to imagine that the world could be otherwise. The final section asks where this leaves critical pedagogy today, particularly when so much of how we learn about and experience the world is shaped outside the classroom, through algorithms, social media, and digital cultures. The sections are not meant to separate these questions neatly from one another; they inevitably run into each other. Rather, they offer one way of moving through a conversation that begins with the politics of education, moves into the politics of consciousness, and ends by asking where the possibilities for critical pedagogy might lie now.
THE POLITICS OF FEELING, ATTENTION,
AND IMAGINATION
1. You have written extensively about capitalism's influence on education. Yet many contemporary struggles over universities and curricula seem to be framed less through economic arguments than through narratives of humiliation, cultural decline, national injury, moral corruption, or the feeling that a way of life is under threat. How do you understand the relationship between these emotional narratives and broader structures of political and economic power? To what extent do projects of domination operate through the management of collective emotions as much as through material conditions?
McLaren: For many years, I have argued that capitalism exerts a profound influence on education, shaping not only what schools teach but also how societies define knowledge, success, citizenship, and human worth. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that systems of domination operate primarily through economic mechanisms alone. Political and economic power must also work through culture, identity, memory, and emotion. Human beings do not live by material interests alone. We live through stories, fears, aspirations, resentments, and hopes.
This is one reason why contemporary authoritarian movements often speak less about economics than about humiliation, decline, national injury, moral corruption, or the loss of a cherished way of life. Such narratives perform important political work. They translate complex structural problems into emotionally compelling stories that identify enemies, assign blame, and promise redemption.
Periods of economic insecurity, growing inequality, precarious employment, ecological crisis, and social fragmentation create widespread anxiety. Yet the causes of these conditions are often difficult to identify and even more difficult to challenge. Rather than directing attention toward structural inequalities, concentrations of wealth, or the contradictions of capitalism itself, authoritarian movements frequently redirect these anxieties toward symbolic targets. Intellectuals, immigrants, racial minorities, journalists, teachers, feminists, LGBTQ communities, and political dissidents become convenient objects onto which social frustrations can be projected.
In this sense, emotional narratives do not replace political economy; they mediate it. They transform economic contradictions into cultural grievances. They convert structural insecurity into moral panic. They encourage people to experience systemic problems as the consequence of betrayal by internal enemies rather than as the result of unequal social relations.
What concerns me most is that these narratives often operate through the politics of dispossession. People are encouraged to believe that something essential has been stolen from them: their nation, their culture, their traditions, their status, their faith, or their future. The language of loss becomes politically powerful because it speaks to genuine experiences of uncertainty and dislocation. But instead of offering democratic solutions, authoritarian movements channel these feelings toward exclusionary and often punitive forms of politics.
The educational sphere becomes particularly important in this process because education shapes how people interpret their experiences. Schools, universities, libraries, and cultural institutions help determine whether citizens understand social problems historically and critically or through myths of national innocence and civilizational decline.
This helps explain why educational institutions have become such prominent targets across the globe. The struggle is not merely over curriculum. It is a struggle over collective memory and public consciousness. Authoritarian movements understand that if people learn to examine history critically, to recognize structures of power, and to imagine alternatives to existing arrangements, then the emotional foundations of authoritarian politics begin to weaken.
This is where concepts such as epistemicide and scholasticide become particularly important. Epistemicide refers to the destruction or erasure of entire ways of knowing. Scholasticide refers to the destruction of educational institutions, intellectual life, and the social conditions necessary for learning itself. Both involve more than attacks on knowledge. They are attacks on the collective capacity to imagine different futures. They seek to narrow the horizons of thought and feeling, making existing relations of power appear natural, inevitable, and beyond challenge.
Paulo Freire understood that domination requires more than economic exploitation. It also requires shaping consciousness. People must be persuaded that the world cannot be otherwise. They must be encouraged to internalize limits on what they believe is possible. This is why critical pedagogy places such emphasis on conscientização, or critical consciousness. The struggle for liberation is not only a struggle over material conditions. It is also a struggle over perception, meaning, and hope.
What we are witnessing today is therefore not simply a conflict between competing political programs. It is a contest over public feeling itself. Authoritarian movements seek to organize fear, resentment, nostalgia, humiliation, and grievance into political forces capable of sustaining existing hierarchies. Democratic movements, by contrast, must cultivate different emotional capacities: solidarity, compassion, critical reflection, historical memory, and hope.
Hope, in this sense, is not a sentiment. It is a political force. It is the refusal to accept that the future has already been decided. Authoritarian projects thrive when people become convinced that alternatives are impossible. Democratic education begins from the opposite assumption: that history remains open, that human beings possess the capacity to transform the conditions they inherit, and that another world remains possible.
For this reason, the struggle over education is inseparable from the struggle over collective emotions. Whoever shapes how people feel about the past, the present, and the future exercises enormous influence over political life itself. The battle is not only over institutions or resources. It is also over fear and hope, memory and imagination, despair and possibility. Ultimately, it is a struggle over how people understand themselves as historical agents capable of shaping the world they inhabit.
2. Historically, authoritarian regimes burned books because they feared dangerous ideas. Today, however, power often does not need to ban knowledge outright; it simply floods society with distraction, exhaustion, speed, and endless information. Do you think the contemporary crisis is no longer censorship in the classical sense, but the production of a population too overstimulated to think historically, ethically, or collectively at all?
McLaren: I would answer that question in the affirmative. We live in an age saturated by distraction, but distraction is not simply an accidental by-product of contemporary media culture. It increasingly functions as a political strategy.
Henry Giroux, Paulo Freire, and others have taught us that domination depends not only upon controlling what people know but also upon shaping the conditions under which they come to know it. Today, one of the greatest obstacles to critical consciousness is not censorship in its traditional form but the endless fragmentation of public attention. Citizens are bombarded by spectacles, scandals, outrages, and manufactured controversies that make sustained critical reflection increasingly difficult.
This is particularly important for understanding contemporary authoritarian politics. Such politics often flourishes through what might be called the management of attention. Public debate becomes organized around emotionally charged symbolic conflicts while deeper structural issues recede into the background. Questions of economic inequality, ecological crisis, militarization, labor exploitation, healthcare, housing insecurity, and democratic erosion are displaced by highly mediated battles over cultural symbols and identities.
This does not mean that issues involving race, gender, sexuality, or identity are unimportant. On the contrary, they are often matters of profound human dignity and social justice. What is revealing, however, is the way authoritarian movements selectively mobilize these issues through moral panic. Attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, campaigns against transgender communities, efforts to ban books, restrictions on classroom discussions of race and history, and repeated claims that schools are secretly indoctrinating children all function as emotionally charged narratives designed to generate fear, resentment, and outrage. The purpose is not necessarily to solve social problems.
The purpose is often to direct public attention toward symbolic enemies. Teachers become suspects. Universities become threats. Librarians become ideological combatants. Vulnerable minorities become objects of suspicion. Complex social realities are reduced to simplistic narratives of contamination and decline.
Donald Trump has demonstrated a remarkable instinct for operating within this environment. Throughout his political career, he has shown an extraordinary ability to dominate news cycles, redirect public attention, and transform politics into spectacle. Every controversy generates another controversy. Every scandal competes with a new spectacle. Public attention is continually pulled toward the next outrage, the next provocation, the next symbolic conflict. Politics increasingly resembles a form of permanent performance.
What makes the contemporary moment especially dangerous is that distraction has become self-replicating. We are distracted by distractions. We are drawn into endless debates over whether a particular controversy is real, manufactured, exaggerated, or strategically deployed. The result is not simply confusion but exhaustion. Citizens become trapped in an environment where attention is continuously fragmented and where the distinction between reality and spectacle grows increasingly blurred.
In such circumstances, power need not rely primarily on censorship. It can instead overwhelm the public sphere with competing narratives, perpetual outrage, and endless symbolic conflicts. The objective is not necessarily to persuade people of a single truth but to create conditions under which sustained critical attention becomes difficult to maintain. People become so consumed by reacting to events that they lose the capacity to step back and ask larger questions about who benefits, what structural interests are at work, and what broader political projects are being advanced.
The contemporary authoritarian imagination does not always seek to suppress information. Often it seeks to saturate the public sphere with information. Citizens are overwhelmed by a ceaseless flow of scandals, counter-scandals, accusations, denials, conspiracies, outrages, and distractions. Under such conditions, the problem is not ignorance but disorientation. People become trapped in what might be called a pedagogy of perpetual reaction, where attention is constantly captured but rarely sustained. They know something is wrong, yet they struggle to identify the deeper structures producing the crises they experience. The result is a form of learned political confusion that benefits those already in positions of power.
This creates a peculiar form of political illiteracy. Citizens may know more information than ever before while understanding less and less about the forces shaping their lives. They become inundated with facts, rumors, scandals, and counter-scandals but deprived of the time and space necessary for critical reflection.
The danger is that democracy depends upon the opposite of distraction. Democratic life requires attentiveness. It requires historical memory, informed judgment, and the capacity to connect personal experiences to broader social structures. Citizens must be able to distinguish between manufactured crises and genuine crises. They must be able to ask who benefits when public attention is directed toward some issues while diverted away from others.
Freire understood that critical literacy involves learning to read not only texts but the world itself. Today, that task includes learning to read the politics of distraction. We must ask why certain controversies dominate headlines while poverty, war, inequality, ecological devastation, and democratic decline receive comparatively less sustained attention. We must ask how fear is manufactured, how outrage is circulated, and how attention itself becomes a site of political struggle.
For Freire, critical consciousness begins when people learn to perceive connections between isolated events and larger structures of power. Authoritarian politics works in the opposite direction. It fragments experience into a series of disconnected spectacles. The challenge for democratic education today is therefore not only to teach people how to evaluate information but also how to reclaim their attention from forces that profit from distraction itself.
In this sense, the contemporary battle over education is also a battle over attention. Education at its best teaches people to slow down, to question appearances, to investigate underlying causes, and to resist manipulation. It nurtures the habits necessary for democratic citizenship in a culture increasingly organized around speed, spectacle, and distraction.
Authoritarian politics depend upon citizens who are perpetually reactive. Democratic politics depends upon citizens who are critically attentive. The struggle between those two possibilities may be one of the defining political and educational questions of our time.
Ultimately, the struggle over attention is inseparable from the struggle over democracy itself. Whoever controls attention exercises enormous influence over what societies remember, what they fear, what they desire, and what they imagine to be possible. Authoritarian movements understand this with remarkable clarity. They seek to colonize attention just as they seek to colonize memory and imagination. Democratic education, by contrast, seeks to cultivate attentiveness, reflection, dialogue, and hope. It reminds us that freedom requires more than access to information. It requires the capacity to think critically about that information, to connect it to larger histories and structures of power, and to imagine alternatives to the world as it is.
The battle before us is therefore not only over truth. It is over our capacity to pay attention to the truth. And in a culture organized around distraction, that capacity may become one of the most important democratic virtues we possess. Critical democracy is not merely worth defending; it is worth struggling for with every intellectual, ethical, and political resource at our disposal. This is why educators and cultural workers such as Henry Giroux remain indispensable public voices, refusing to surrender the terrain of education, culture, and civic life to the forces of authoritarianism and manufactured ignorance. At a time when authoritarian forces seek to colonize memory, fragment attention, and narrow the horizons of political possibility, critical democracy remains an indispensable challenge. Giroux continues to defend the institutions, languages, and public spaces through which citizens learn not merely to adapt to the world as it is, but to transform it into what it might yet become.