Born in 1948, Canadian educator, writer, and academic Prof. Peter McLaren is one of the world’s leading theorists in the field of critical pedagogy. He is known for his Marxist educational theory, cultural studies, and education approach based on social justice.
After many years of teaching in the United States, he served as a professor at institutions such as the University of Los Angeles and Chapman University. Influenced by thinkers like Karl Marx, Paulo Freire, and Antonio Gramsci, McLaren views education not merely as the transmission of knowledge but as a tool for social transformation.
Through his approaches of “critical pedagogy” and “revolutionary pedagogy,” he advocates for students to develop critical consciousness and achieve liberation. His work has influenced academic circles across a wide geography — from Latin America to Europe, the Middle East to Asia. His most well-known work, Life in Schools (1989), is considered one of the cornerstones of critical pedagogy literature.
The first part of Prof. McLaren’s interview with ANF can be read here.
Below is the second and final part of the interview.
Öcalan advocates the idea of “democratic modernity” as an alternative to capitalist modernity. In what ways do you think this idea intersects with critical pedagogy and emancipatory education?
Öcalan’s call for the PKK to lay down its arms has unfolded like a tremor beneath the mountains — a sound that could be the echo of peace or the prelude to another storm. His voice, carried from the silence of Imrali, has stirred the Kurdish horizon from the Qandil peaks to the plains of Rojava and Erbil. Across these lands, weary leaders like Masoud Barzani have lifted their eyes toward the fragile dawn of dialogue, while Ankara has listened with one hand on the sword. Yet the path ahead remains tangled in thorns: Turkish warplanes still circle over the KRI and NES, even as Kurdish fighters declared a ceasefire. The PKK demanded to see the face of their imprisoned founder before surrendering their weapons, knowing that too often in history the promise of peace has been buried beneath the rubble of betrayal. Meanwhile, new treaties reshape Syria’s future — deals inked in Damascus and Erbil that trade Kurdish autonomy for central control, handing oil fields and borderlands back to the state while leaving communities divided and uncertain. In Sinjar, the ghosts of displacement and unhealed war still haunt the earth, their presence complicating every gesture toward reconciliation. Thus, Öcalan’s vision of disarmament glimmers like a candle against a tempest. For peace to take root, words must be made flesh—something that I have called “enfleshment” in my own work: laws must shield the disarmed, nations must restrain their fire, and those long estranged — Turkey, the KRG (Kurdistan Regional Government), Damascus, and the Kurds themselves — must learn to speak again not as conquerors or supplicants, but as kin seeking to end an ancient night. As to Öcalan’s idea of democratic modernity, it is profound. As someone who makes no claim to be an authority on Kurdish resistance, the greatest obstacle to Öcalan’s peace proposal seems to be not only political but pedagogical. The walls of Imrali are not just the boundaries of a prison — they represent the architecture of a world order that fears consciousness itself, that fears the ability to think critically. By the term ‘thinking critically’ I mean by unpacking the impact of capitalist social relations of production and the value form of labor on democratic institutions and human volition. The architecton, and I am using this term in the Aristotelean sense, is the capitalist who is responsible for the production of value. By “production of value,” Marx did not speak merely of numbers in a ledger, but of the hidden alchemy by which human life is transmuted into profit. Value, for him, was not born in the marketplace but in the pulse of living labor — in the hands that cut, forge, weave, and build. It is time itself, human time, distilled and measured according to the cruel arithmetic of what he called socially necessary labor. Labor is the hidden fire that animates the world of commodities, yet the flame is dimmed, its light expropriated. What we need in order to liberate ourselves from the commodification of our subjectivity is the cultivation of what I call ‘protagonistic agency’, the ability to write our own narratives, our own stories rather than having the apparatuses of the state write them for us.
Let me draw from Marx here. In every product lies a ghost: the surplus labor that was given but never returned, the unpaid portion of life that capital seizes and calls its own. The wage covers only the worker’s survival, not their contribution; the rest — the excess, the unacknowledged — becomes the lifeblood of profit. Thus the value of a commodity is not simply what it costs to make, but the quiet theft embedded in its making. Behind every price tag hums the rhythm of exploitation, the unending conversion of living breath into dead capital, of human possibility into the currency of power.
Öcalan’s isolation mirrors the captivity of our collective imagination under capitalist modernity, a system that educates us to obey, to consume, and to mistake domination for order. What he calls “capitalist modernity” is, in truth, a vast schooling in servitude — a global curriculum that teaches humanity to forget its own dignity.
It is here that Öcalan’s thought converges so deeply with the tradition of critical pedagogy. Paulo Freire taught us that the oppressed must become subjects of history rather than objects of policy. Öcalan extends that principle to entire civilizations. His vision of democratic modernity is, at its core, a pedagogy of reawakening — a call to unlearn hierarchy, to relearn solidarity, to recover the ability to name the world instead of being named by it. Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed” and Öcalan’s “democratic confederalism” both emerge from the same moral geography: the conviction that liberation must be learned into being. That is why we Freireans here in the United States are attacked so viciously by the capitalist state. Why the recently assassinated Charlie Kirk put us on his Professor Watchlist. Why we are seen as the “enemies of the people” by the ruling class, those billionaire oligarchs packed into the Republican Party like sardines in a can.
Both thinkers recognize that education is never neutral. It either domesticates or liberates. For Freire, the classroom was a site of transformation; for Öcalan, the commune and the assembly become classrooms where people learn the difficult art of freedom. Both confront the same enemy: the mechanized consciousness of capitalist modernity that turns human beings into instruments of profit and obedience.
This is why the state fears them. Erdoğan’s government, like so many regimes before it, seeks to silence Öcalan not only because of his political vision but because of his pedagogy — because he teaches people to think, to question, to participate. That is far more dangerous to authoritarianism—to fascism—than any weapon. The suppression of Öcalan’s voice is the suppression of our collective capacity to imagine peace. Jair Bolsonaro, past president of Brazil and friend of Trump, was no admirer of Freire. During his 2018–2019 campaign and early presidency Jair Bolsonaro repeatedly vowed to purge Paulo Freire’s influence from Brazil’s education system, famously boasting he would “enter the Education Ministry with a flamethrower to remove Paulo Freire.”
Bolsonaro and his allies labeled Freire a “Marxist” and blamed him for what they called poor educational outcomes. After taking office, his government and parliamentary allies pushed measures to downplay Freire’s status (including proposals to replace Freire as Brazil’s patron of education) and spoke publicly of removing Freirean approaches from curricula.
Paulo always told me not to transport his theories to other countries but to encourage teachers from other countries to reinvent his ideas in the context of their own struggles. President Chavez respected critical educators from other countries but maintained that education reforms that were imported from other countries need to be adapted in ways that served the needs of the Venezuelan people.
In the end, what is at stake in Öcalan’s vision is nothing less than the recovery of our humanity. His writings, like Freire’s, remind us that peace cannot be imposed from above; it must be learned and lived from below. They share a faith in the oppressed — in the moral intelligence of ordinary people to transform their conditions once they awaken to their own power. This faith is revolutionary because it rejects cynicism and fatalism. It insists that the act of thinking is itself an act of resistance, that the creation of knowledge is the creation of freedom.
We now inhabit a planet where catastrophe has become curriculum — where war, inequality, and ecological collapse teach us daily lessons in despair. Öcalan and Freire remind us that another kind of education is possible: one rooted in dialogue, in mutual care, in the pedagogy of love. To teach critically, to organize collectively, to act with conscience — these are not academic gestures; they are forms of rebellion.
Öcalan’s peace proposal, read through the lens of critical pedagogy, is not merely a political document. It is a curriculum for human renewal — a summons to reclaim the moral and spiritual imagination that capitalism has exhausted. Both Freire and Öcalan teach us that the liberation of a people and the liberation of the mind are the same revolution spoken in different tongues. And in that shared language of freedom, we find the beginnings of peace.
You have developed an emancipatory pedagogy inspired by Paulo Freire. Do you see parallels between Öcalan’s principles of “self-governance” and “democratic confederalism” and your own pedagogical approach?
Democratic confederalism is Öcalan’s vision of freedom rooted in the soil of communities, where power flows through councils and assemblies. Rejecting the hierarchy of the state and the cold logic of capitalism, it cultivates a society where women, minorities, and local communities shape their own destiny, guided by principles of feminism, ecological care, and a cooperative economy. Once the dream of Kurdish liberation, it has grown into a blueprint for human self-determination everywhere — a stateless, participatory democracy where freedom is not granted from above but cultivated from the ground up. My own work resonates with these ideas, though I focus less on reimagining the state and more on schools organized as communes or communal institutions. In this particular domain, Öcalan’s vision remains far more detailed and far-reaching than my own.
My work over the past several years has been primarily defending education from attacks by far-right operatives who rail against diversity, equity and social justice, considering them to be efforts at “reengineering the human soul”. Think about that statement, that teaching students to think critically is destroying the “souls” of children. Gaslighting attacks like this are destroying education throughout the United States.
Thinking critically is described as “woke”—in fact, any effort to help students become politically aware and fight against oppressive institutions and far-right ideological imperatives is considered “woke”. These far-right attacks in the United States have also become templates for leaders in other countries. Now, fascist leaders are using similar arguments to denounce wokeness in education. A dark tide is sweeping across classrooms from Budapest to Buenos Aires, from Rome to the mountains of the mind itself. Governments in Hungary, Italy, and Argentina brandish “anti-woke” education as a weapon, seeking to erase the language of gender, diversity, and critical thought. Ministries are shuttered, programs dismantled, universities recast as instruments of indoctrination, and students rise, their voices clashing against the machinery of erasure.
In Argentina, Milei vows to burn the “ideological edifice of sickly wokeism,” cutting funding and silencing the structures that defend women and minorities. In Hungary, Orbán closes universities and bans discussion of LGBTQ+ lives in schools, framing his assault as a culture war against “globalist indoctrination.” In Italy, Meloni champions tradition, seeking to mold families and classrooms alike, curtailing education on gender and sexuality.
Across these nations, the storm is not merely political but existential: a battle to seize the imagination of youth, to replace inquiry with orthodoxy, dialogue with decree. Yet even under this shadow, sparks of resistance flare — in student protests, in whispered discussions, in the persistent pulse of critical thought that refuses to be extinguished. Even as the storm of erasure rages, the sparks of critical inquiry leap from classroom to classroom, refusing to be swallowed by the night.
Do you believe that peace processes are built solely through political agreements, or do they also require a kind of “moral rebirth”?
Peace processes are never forged by treaties alone; they demand a kind of moral rebirth, a quiet alchemy of conscience that transforms negotiation into genuine reconciliation. They require epiphanic moments, flashes of recognition that the path toward peace is itself sacred work. In this light, the life of Maximilian Kolbe stands as a luminous example: his courage, selflessness, and faith illuminate how true peace is as much an inner revolution as a political accord, a testament to the human capacity to choose love and justice even amid the machinery of oppression. During Father Maximilian Kolbe’s imprisonment in Auschwitz, the camp was gripped by the terrifying law of ten lives-for-one—the Sippenhaft—after a prisoner had escaped. Crowds of prisoners pressed against walls and huddled in corners, seeking invisibility under the scorching sun, while the guards’ footsteps and orders fell like hammers and lightning, each glance a verdict of annihilation.
SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch selected ten prisoners for execution, including Franciszek Gajowniczek, a Polish sergeant who had fought bravely in the defense of Wieluń and Modlin Fortress, survived capture, endured seven months of Gestapo torture, and joined the resistance before being sent to Auschwitz. Gajowniczek’s desperate cries for his wife and children were answered by Father Kolbe, who stepped forward and offered his life in the man’s place—a supreme act of selfless love that Fritzsch permitted.
Gajowniczek had already narrowly escaped death multiple times: he had been chosen for execution in retaliation for partisans destroying a train and later survived a typhus infection with help from fellow prisoners and a military doctor. He later reflected that Kolbe’s sacrifice had given him strength to live, protect his family, and ensure that the priest’s life had not been wasted.
Kolbe, along with nine other prisoners, was confined in the starvation bunker of Block 11, the “Death Block,” a death-like space — a site of executions and Zyklon B testing. Stripped of light, air, and hope, hunger and thirst gnawed at them, yet Kolbe’s voice rose above the void with psalms, prayers, and assurances of mercy, sustaining the others spiritually. Remarkably, Kolbe survived in this hellish cell for two full weeks, sustaining the other nine prisoners in song and prayer. Ultimately, he was killed with an injection of carbolic acid, completing his ultimate act of love.
The man Kolbe gave his life to save, Franciszek Gajowniczek, survived the war, carrying Kolbe’s gift of life forward. Decades later, in 1982, he witnessed Kolbe’s canonization as a saint of the Catholic Church.
Does peace require moral rebirth? Yes—profoundly so. For peace is not born of treaties alone, but of transformation. If Father Maximilian Kolbe could light a sanctuary in a starvation cell—if he could make hope rise from the ashes of atrocity—then surely we, too, can awaken the moral imagination that gives peace its soul. Peace demands that the people, united in conscience and courage, ignite again the flame of truth and justice before it is extinguished, before it fades like a child’s cry lost beneath the goose-stepping thunder of hobnailed boots on the road to perdition.
When peace and democracy enter into covenant, hope itself takes root—for where they dwell together, justice will not perish from the earth. And as the old truth reminds us: when injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.
You have said, “Democracy is not the property of the powerful, but the shared promise of humanity.” What responsibilities do peoples and governments have today to keep that promise alive?
Peace and democracy will not endure through words alone; in the case of the Kurdish struggle, it demands that Ankara turn promise into law. That is a prime responsibility. The Kurdish call is clear: amnesty for those who once bore arms, the freedom to speak and teach in their own tongue, and the release of the imprisoned voices who dared to dream of equality. These are not concessions—they are the foundations of trust.
The promise of democracy is not kept by signatures on parchment but by the vigilance of conscience. Governments bear the solemn responsibility of justice—to transform the machinery of power into an instrument of dignity, to remember that peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of fairness, truth, and inclusion. Peoples, too, must guard the flame: to resist apathy, to demand accountability, to see the humanity even in those once called enemies. For when peace is born, it is an infant—fragile in the arms of both rulers and citizens alike—and if either turns away, it will wither back into dust.
To keep that promise alive is to act each day as if the world depends upon our courage to listen, to reconcile, to forgive—to remember that democracy itself is the daily labor of peace.
Yet in the Turkish state, beneath this fragile dawn, lie shadows that refuse to fade. Let’s face it, the soil is thick with distrust, the promises of reform still unfulfilled, and the winds of regional conflict—blowing from Syria and Iraq—threaten to scatter the embers before they can kindle into flame. Erdoğan’s gamble balances on a knife’s edge, between nationalist wrath and Kurdish hope, between power’s instinct to preserve itself and peace’s plea to be born.
And so, Turkey stands at a crossroads once more. The guns may have fallen silent, but the greater struggle now begins: to transform silence into trust, and trust into the architecture of justice—a peace not written in treaties, but in the moral rebirth of a state that has too long spoken only in the language of war. But what about states that do not want democracy or peace? I am thinking of Russia, I am thinking of the United States. Not all powers welcome the labor of peace or the vigilance of conscience. Some states, wedded to their own dominance, see democracy as a threat and justice as a constraint. Russia, for instance, moves with the weight of history and ambition, its fist raised where dialogue should be, its shadow stretching across borders, reminding the world that the path to freedom is never free of obstruction. It’s my view that Putin plans to reclaim countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. Even the United States—once a herald of democracy—has under Trump’s clown show, stumbled under the weight of self-interest and political calculation, its actions betraying the fragile covenant between power and principle. That covenant has been shattered. My adopted country lies slumped in a cesspool of Trump’s malignant narcissism.
This should warn us that peace is not a natural inheritance but a struggle, and democracy a constant experiment. The world’s conscience must act as both witness and counterweight, pressing against the brute gravity of authoritarianism and fascism, and insisting that the promise of justice, though resisted, cannot be erased. For where power refuses accountability, hope must burn brighter, its flame sustained by courage, conscience, and the unwavering conviction that no tyranny can extinguish the human demand for dignity.
Do you think nationalism is one of the main obstacles to peace, both in Turkey and around the world?
Yes, I do. Absolutely. I have criticized Christian nationalism and Catholic Integralism in particular. And I am a Catholic. I take the position that the Church and State should be separate. The role of the Church in fascist dictatorships taught me that lesson. Nationalism is a serious problem in the world because it turns loyalty into a cage and channels the energy of communities against themselves. It dresses power in the robes of virtue, convincing people to fight imagined enemies and to ignore the deeper injustices that shape their lives. It carves the world into “us” and “them,” narrowing empathy to borders drawn by fear and ideology, and blinds us to our shared human stakes.
We see its effects everywhere: in education, media, and politics, where it discourages questioning, undermines dialogue, and replaces care with conformity. When nationalism rises unchecked, it diverts the human spirit toward division and the perpetuation of power, rather than toward justice, freedom, and collective responsibility. That’s why I believe it is one of the greatest obstacles to building peace and sustaining democracy in the world today.
You wrote, “The world must not turn away from this.” What are your thoughts on the international community’s indifference to peace struggles in the Middle East, particularly regarding the Kurdish question?
When it comes to the Kurdish question, the world’s indifference is both strategic and deliberate. The struggles of the Kurds do not align neatly with the geopolitical or economic interests of powerful states, particularly the United States, and so they are often sidelined while other conflicts receive attention and resources. Oil, alliances, and regional calculations dictate where international eyes fall, leaving the Kurds to navigate violence and oppression largely alone. This selective attention reveals that indifference is not ignorance—it is a choice, a cold calculation that values power over justice. Again, this selective indifference is not accidental; it is a deliberate choice, a reflection of global power structures that value stability and profit over justice and human dignity. And yet, the courage and resilience of the Kurdish people demand that we bear witness, even when the world looks away.
Where do you place the Kurdish question within the broader struggles for global justice and freedom?
I would begin by placing at the center of the challenge ahead, a vision of the Kurdish struggle as a crucible, a laboratory of possibility, a space where the human spirit tests the very bounds of freedom and imagination. This is no reckless tossing of lives into the wind; it is a deliberate, almost sacred experiment, an unfolding of Abdullah Öcalan’s vision where politics is not merely strategy, but the living pulse of direct democracy and the unshackled functioning of society’s moral and political institutions—the very essence of freedom made flesh.
At the core of this vision burns women’s liberation, for Öcalan sees the oppression of women as the shadow at the root of all other dominations. Any true revolution must rise from this heart, for the emancipation of women is the keystone of human liberation itself. Alongside this, he casts an ecological imagination, what critical pedagogy refers to as ‘eco-pedagogy’, envisioning a society where technology, economy, and human endeavor coexist in harmony with the earth—a rebellion against the destructive industrialism that has scarred modernity.
Öcalan confronts the ghosts of failed socialism, those 20th-century experiments crushed beneath the weight of nation-states and industrial mimicry of capitalist empires, and reclaims socialism as a moral and political lifeworld—a lifeworld rooted in democratic modernity, in radical decentralization, in the careful orchestration of human capacities to navigate regional differences.
Thus, the Kurdish struggle becomes more than survival, more than identity—it becomes a laboratory of robust democratic imagination, a test of whether a society can breathe freely, balancing justice, equality, and ecological wisdom. It is an existential experiment in the moral and political potential of humanity, where courage, responsibility, and imagination are inseparable, and where the horizon of possibility stretches beyond the familiar and the known. That the international community is incapable—or perhaps unwilling—to seize upon these possibilities only confirms the truth of Öcalan’s analysis. It is a stark reminder that moral and political imagination is fragile in a world driven by power and calculation. This is why we must call the international community to account, before such experiments are lost to neglect, before revolutionaries like Öcalan are reduced to relics of the past—erased by indifference, rendered invisible, turned into nothing more than museum pieces in the corridors of history.
If you had the opportunity to speak directly with Abdullah Öcalan, what would you want to discuss with him?
I would ask what he thinks must be done next, what paths he sees to draw humanity together, to carry forward what he has begun. To ask this is to confront the urgent task of sustaining a vision that challenges the world to remember its capacity for justice, equality, and freedom and to confront both the peril and the possibility of our time, reminding those indifferent to change, that even in the shadow of complacence, the work of humanity—of rebuilding, of imagining, of acting—cannot be abandoned.