This book is a major contribution to the radical literature on culture, identity, and the politics of schooling. It addresses the challenge and the promise of school and social reform through what the author calls a critical multiculturalism'. Peter McLaren's approach to what he calls predatory culture' and his exploration of recent debates over the role of public institutions and the state within such culture offers the discerning reader a unique combination of neo-Marxist and post-structuralist theory - referred to by the author as resistance of postmodernist critique'. Readers are invited to construct a politics of resistance at the level of everyday institutional life and within other public spheres. Such a politics of resistance is discussed in detail as a form of critical pedagogy which the author develops from the work of the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, and from a range of theorists and practitioners on the educational left including Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard. Critical pedagogy is seen as a means of investing desire in a project of the possible. Written by one of the pioneers of critical pedagogy in North America, this book presents a unique and far-reaching challenge for educators, cultural workers, researchers and social theorists.