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.
WHERE DOES CRITICAL PEDAGOGY LIVE NOW?
1. Critical pedagogy has long imagined the classroom as a space of emancipation. But many young people today encounter politics primarily through algorithms, short-form outrage, influencer culture, and digital propaganda rather than classrooms. In such a world, where does critical pedagogy live now? Can the classroom still compete with the emotional machinery of the internet?
McLaren: Critical pedagogy has traditionally imagined the classroom as a space where students learn to question assumptions, interrogate power, and develop the critical capacities necessary for democratic citizenship. But we must recognize that the educational terrain has changed dramatically. Today, many young people encounter politics less through classrooms than through algorithms, influencers, social media feeds, digital spectacles, and what I have elsewhere called the emerging culture of post-digital fascism.
The crucial question is therefore not whether the classroom can compete with the internet. The question is whether critical pedagogy can expand beyond the classroom and confront the new pedagogical forces shaping consciousness in the digital age.
One of the central mistakes made by many educators is to assume that platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, X, and other social media ecosystems are merely technologies of communication. They are not. They are pedagogical machines. They teach continuously. They teach values, identities, desires, fears, habits of attention, and modes of political engagement. They shape how people understand themselves and the world.
The contemporary digital landscape functions as an enormous educational apparatus operating largely outside democratic accountability. Algorithms decide what receives visibility and what disappears into obscurity. Outrage is rewarded. Nuance is penalized. Emotional intensity travels farther than careful reasoning. The result is a culture increasingly organized around spectacle, speed, and affect.
This is one reason I have written about post-digital fascism. Unlike the authoritarian movements of the twentieth century, contemporary forms of domination operate through sophisticated digital infrastructures that shape consciousness long before explicit political messages appear. Power increasingly works through algorithms, data extraction, surveillance technologies, influencer cultures, affective manipulation, and attention economies that reward grievance, resentment, and polarization.
The danger is not simply misinformation. The danger is the transformation of subjectivity itself. Digital technologies increasingly function as what I have called factories of affect. They organize emotions before they organize ideas. They shape how people feel before they shape what people think. Fear, outrage, humiliation, resentment, and anxiety circulate through networks at extraordinary speed, generating what might be called affective publics—communities held together less by shared analysis than by shared emotional intensities.
Authoritarian movements understand this terrain remarkably well. They communicate not primarily through rational argument but through spectacle. They mobilize identities, fears, and fantasies. They create digital ecosystems in which grievance becomes a source of belonging and outrage becomes a form of political participation. The far right often understands the emotional architecture of digital culture far better than liberal institutions that continue to believe politics is primarily a matter of policy debate.
The challenge for critical pedagogy is therefore immense. Yet I do not believe it is hopeless. The classroom remains important, but it can no longer be understood as the exclusive site of critical education. Critical pedagogy must become a broader democratic project operating across cultural, political, and digital spaces. It must help students understand not only texts but platforms, not only ideologies but algorithms, not only institutions but infrastructures of perception.
Students today need forms of critical literacy capable of revealing how digital systems shape attention, manufacture desire, monetize outrage, and normalize particular visions of reality. They need to understand how surveillance capitalism transforms human experience into data and how algorithmic systems increasingly influence what societies remember, forget, fear, and desire.
At the same time, critical pedagogy must offer alternatives. It cannot survive as a language of critique alone. It must help create what might be called alternative cognitive ecologies—spaces where dialogue, reflection, solidarity, and democratic imagination can flourish outside the imperatives of digital extraction and commodification.
This may take the form of reading groups, community organizations, independent media projects, digital commons, cultural movements, artistic collaborations, and new forms of democratic association. The goal is not to retreat from technology but to democratize our relationship to it.
Paulo Freire taught us that education is fundamentally about learning to read the world critically. Today, the world increasingly arrives through screens. To read the world critically now requires reading algorithms, platforms, data systems, and digital infrastructures as carefully as previous generations learned to read newspapers, governments, and institutions.
The struggle before us is therefore not merely educational. It is civilizational. The question is whether digital technologies will continue to function as instruments of surveillance, commodification, distraction, and authoritarian manipulation, or whether they can become part of a democratic project grounded in dialogue, solidarity, justice, and collective flourishing.
I remain hopeful because authoritarianism ultimately depends upon closing down human possibility. Critical pedagogy begins from the opposite premise. It insists that human beings are unfinished, that history remains open, and that new futures can still be created.
The classroom alone cannot compete with the emotional machinery of the internet. But critical pedagogy was never meant to remain confined to classrooms. It lives wherever people gather to question, to learn, to imagine, to remember, and to struggle collectively for a more democratic world. In the age of post-digital fascism, that mission becomes more urgent than ever.