Diasporic Counter-Education: The Need to Fertile-Eyes the Field Richard Kahn Published online: 23 November 2007 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007 A review of Ilan Gur Ze’ev (ed) (2005). Critical theory and critical pedagogy today. Toward a new critical language in education. Haifa: Studies in Education (University of Haifa). Friends, the soil is poor, we must richly scatter seeds to produce even a modest harvest. –Novalis (quoted in O’Brien, 1995, p. 143) Ilan Gur-Ze’ev’s recent work towards the development of a diasporic counter-education emerges out of the ongoing crisis of critical pedagogy. On the one hand, critical pedagogy has never been more popular or secure of its professional standing. As an oppositional and transformative pedagogy initially developed from the margins, it has marched into the institutions, grabbed seats of power, and become important enough to be the source of global interest amongst scholars and activists. Yet, in many respects, critical pedagogy’s very success has led to a host of problems––including, to name a few: that a wide variety of pedagogical philosophies (of Left, Center, and Right persuasions) now self-professedly act under critical pedagogy’s aegis in ways that demand clarification, that critical pedagogy has become itself potentially de-historicized as a body of theory, and that a trend towards the de-radicalization of critical pedagogy into normalized forms of non-contemplative praxis and de-politicized, student-centered, constructivist curricular activities has emerged. Indeed, even one of the leading architects of critical pedagogy, Peter McLaren, has recently felt the need to question critical pedagogy’s present orientation and institutional mission. Adding the distinguishing signifier of ‘‘revolutionary’’ to his own critical peda- gogy, McLaren surmises that as critical pedagogy has begun to find a greater home within the academy it has largely succumbed to faddish valorizations of ‘‘difference’’ or has otherwise retreated in the post-9/11 era to the safe curricular territory of promoting ver- sions of state-and-class sponsored exercises in critical thinking, multiculturalism and pluralist relativism (McLaren 2005, pp. 32–33). R. Kahn (&) Educational Foundations and Research, University of North Dakota, 231 Centennial Drive, ED 305 Stop 7189, Grand Forks, ND 58202, USA e-mail: richard.kahn@und.edu 123 Stud Philos Educ (2008) 27:369–374 DOI 10.1007/s11217-007-9079-6