Book Review: Pedagogy of insurrection, by Peter McLaren. 2015. Publisher: Peter Lang.: McLaren’s pedagogy of insurrection and the global murder machine in education in ‘Austerity Ireland’

In this article, I review central concepts and ideas in the theoretical framework for education and democracy presented in McLaren’s (2015) Pedagogy of Insurrection against a backdrop and global policy context of competitive individualism in education and the contemporary framing of democracy as participatory democracy for compliance within a fixed and immutable social and political order (McLaren, 2015). The framework is then briefly used to conduct a critical overview of a policy matrix of reforms in education and teacher education in ‘Austerity Ireland’ since 2011. The review draws from Padraig Pearse’s seminal essay in 1916, The Murder Machine, an essay about the loss of soul in an Irish education system under British colonial rule – a deficit schooling system designed for machine efficiency (Pearse, 1976). Pearse is a renowned Irish national hero, school master, poet and signatory of the Proclamation for Irish Freedom in 1916, whose memory is evoked as Ireland celebrates its 100^th anniversary of nationhood in 2016. McLaren’s (2015) Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy framework is a powerful explanatory framework to make meaning of the rapid policy changes in education in ‘Austerity Ireland’ and to understand the contemporary economic colonisation of education for a new type of neutered democracy bereft of discursive struggle and critical thinking in public spaces and education’s role as a moral and political shaper of societal change for democracy, human emancipation and equity.