Education as politics of hope

Culture, Power and Education

by Peter Mayo

published by Routledge, 2025

We are, once again, in the run up to Holy Week. The rituals of the passion, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ are prominently displayed, within churches and on the streets, which temporarily become an open stage. But a stage of what?

In the enduring performances from Id-Duluri to L-Irxoxt, we may be tempted to see faith first, then culture and manifestations of a desire for community. And yet, Holy Week also deserves being ‘read’ differently. With suitable guidance and awareness, we should glimpse much more.

There are the subdued roles of women; the machismo of militarism; the way in which the status quo ‘creates’ and then delivers the death penalty to terrorists; imperialism (not just of Ancient Rome); and the elevation yet accessibility of saints.

Perhaps one reason why these rituals persist and are reproduced year in year out is because their iconography and dramaturgy bear a profound message and lesson about the nature of power in and of society.

Referring to messages and lessons suggests communication and education. The interplay between power and culture through education – hence the name of the book – is the common thread that runs through this slim but profound little volume.

In its 154 pages of text and notes, Culture, Power and Education regales us with a critical review and an eclectic analysis of the seminal thoughts and writings of scholars Antonio Gramsci, Don Lorenzo Milani, Paulo Freire, Henry A. Giroux and bell hooks: luminaries in the development of ideas regarding critical pedagogy and its positioning within a broader and gendered political economy.

These pages are then followed by three, more grounded chapters by our own, Malta-born, Peter Mayo. He examines the state of play of museums, the fine arts and the Holy Week as sites and expressions of cultural politics, with their own democratic possibilities.

Thirty years is a long time in a person’s life: this book can be said to mark the evolution of ideas by Mayo between his first (1994) and second (2024) doctoral thesis.

Mayo is homing in on the capillarity of power, the manner in which it pervades and manifests itself in small details and what might appear to be petty or trivial issues. And these same piddling sites harbour kernels of counterpunch, awareness and clearer readings of what is actually going on.

Three decades and a brilliant career in academia, which has also included a prestigious UNESCO chair, the only one ever held at the University of Malta, have taken Mayo on these searches for what Berthold Brecht might call “the worker who reads”.

Such a subject has become a rare specimen, as we witness an age of neoliberal consumerism and pseudo-ethnic nationalism that would have us look askance at issues of power as manifest through gender, race, class, poverty and vulnerability.

Instead, we are being nudged to be cool by shunning ‘wokeism’ and focus instead on the trappings of conspicuous and glamorous material life. In whose interest does this playbook work?

Mayo wishes to lead us to challenge at least three ‘truths’ in this disturbing scenario: the neutrality of the classroom; the elitism of ‘high’ culture; and the AmBrit (American-British) explanation of the world.

Author Peter Mayo with his latest publication.

First, the classroom is and remains a battleground of authority and hegemony over agency in thought and action. It is a place where students are encouraged, by carrots and sticks, to consume and embrace certain types of privileged knowledge.

Second, society as a whole is a classroom on a grand scale, and those institutions deemed ‘highbrow’ are not necessarily excoriated from the potential to conscientise, or raise political awareness, among the non-high social classes.

Thirdly, so many hegemonies and ideologies that we embrace as given are products of a specific historical-geographical regimen, so heavily driven by (usually male, oldish, middle-class) scholars from the Anglo-Saxon world, mainly the United States and the United Kingdom.

The Third World is noticeably absent, and, where present, grotesquely exoticised.

How does contemporary Malta fit into all this? I am reminded in Dutch anthropologist Jeremy Boissevain who once predicted that “saints and fireworks”, like festas, would die out, hand in hand with the decline in religiosity.

But then he had to backtrack in the face of the glaring evidence. He tried to explain why tableaux like Holy Week have not just survived but become even more culturally manifest and embellished. The answer is not just about satisfying tourism demand.

Locked as we are in these rituals, Mayo reminds us of how they so demonstrably perform power relations. Just like other elements of both popular and high culture. The baroque begets baring: behind, or beneath, works of splendour, there may be woeful tales of mass human tragedy.

How then does one get to ‘look’ hard enough to see ‘what is really going on’? Wherever there is power, there is resistance.

Authority and power become consensual only when and because their ‘inter-subjectivities’ are shared.

Integrative politics finds its match in expansive democracy, allowing one to be ‘in, yet against’, the system. Those who see themselves as educators are cultural brokers and curators, but also gatekeepers to a politics of hope and discernment.  Again in this provocative book, Mayo echoes Freire, daring us to teach and not be mere ‘coddling aunts’. Let us not be like empty vessels, whereby we can make a lot of sound; but echoing what is, rather than what could be.