[7] Peter McLaren was born in Toronto, Ontario, on August 2, 1948, and spent a brief time living in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

[10] In 2013, McLaren was appointed Distinguished Fellow in Critical Studies at Chapman University, Orange, California, where he worked until his retirement in 2023.

[14] After graduating, McLaren focused on educational theory, specifically exploring ethnography, pedagogy, curriculum, and multiculturalism.

His first major publication, Schooling as a Ritual Performance Towards a Political Economy of Educational Symbols and Gestures in 1986, was based on his Ph.D. dissertation.

[15] McLaren's work from 1984 to 1994 closely stuck with the teachings of the Frankfurt School of social theory and critical philosophy.

Each of McLaren's scholarly projects attempted to explore the construction of identity in school contexts within a neoliberal society.

"[21] In January 2006, McLaren was named as one of the faculty in the Bruin Alumni Association's controversial "Dirty Thirty" project, which listed UCLA's most politically extreme professors.

[22] The list was compiled by a former UCLA graduate student, Andrew Jones, who had previously been fired by his mentor David Horowitz for pressuring "students to file false reports about leftists" and for stealing Horowitz's mailing list of potential contributors to fund research for attacks on left-wing professors.