Stricken by the influenza epidemic that had spread across the world in the wake of the First World War—the military conflagration that ironically both ruined his “reputation and elicited prophetic words that have the greatest claim on our imaginations today”[1]—Randolph S. Bourne died on a dreary December day in 1918.[2] Dead at 32, Bourne left behind a legacy of social and Continue Reading …
Lessons on Social Justice from an Unexpected Source
What the Left—and Everyone Else—Can Learn from the Public Pedagogy of Jordan Peterson A professor who instructs people to clean their rooms in lieu of protesting emerged in the fall of 2016 as an unlikely hero among many millennials—especially among young adult males who like YouTube. Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, became a Continue Reading …
Paulo Freire’s Philosophy of Education and Our Ontological Incompleteness
Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, perhaps best known for his work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and for popularizing the practice of “critical pedagogy,” also wrote passionately and profoundly about what it means to be human. In fact, both Freire’s critique of oppression and his ideas about education were informed by how he posed the problem of being human. Problematizing Continue Reading …
Remediating Marcuse: Recovering Humanity through Aestheticized Technology
Of all the first-generation Frankfurt School writers, Herbert Marcuse offered the kind of Critical Theory most concerned with revolution. It should come as no surprise, then, that Marcuse generated condemnation from across the political spectrum. In his infamous memo to the US Chamber of Commerce, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell Jr. warned of college campuses Continue Reading …