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United States: How investing in our youngest children will help them cope with a climate crisis not of their making

By Justin van Fleet, President of Theirworld, a global children’s charity

Investing in early years care and education might not seem the most obvious way of tackling the climate crisis.

Why would investment in the world’s babies and toddlers aid efforts to mitigate the disastrous effects of climate change unfolding all around us right now? After all, it’s the very definition of a grown-up problem: urgent, life-threatening and riven with complicated political and diplomatic disputes.

The truth, however, is that no matter how great our efforts to address the crisis, the problem is an enduring emergency that is not going away any time soon. The generation that will face both the gravest consequences and the challenge of mitigating those consequences is being born now.

A global analysis showed that young children will face more extreme weather events than their grandparents’ generation: seven times as many heatwaves, twice as many wildfires and three times as many droughts, crop failures and river floods. Despite this stark reality, a recent study on climate spending found that only 2.4 % of finance from key multilateral climate funds supported projects that either addressed the risks posed to children by the climate emergency or empowered them to become agents of change.

But to build climate resilience, leaders need to prioritise investment in the full range of quality early childhood care and education programmes: access to health services, nutrition, clean water and sanitation, and a safe and protective care and learning environment.

The better educated children are, the safer they are, the healthier they and their parents and caregivers are, then the stronger their communities and societies will be. Stronger communities and societies will, in turn, be more resilient and adaptable to climate change.

That’s why as world leaders gather in New York for the UN General Assembly and Climate Week [week of September 18] it is crucial that they it is critical that they act for early years to give children the best possible start in life, and to give the planet we call home a chance of thriving in the future.

The United Nations has identified the potential of Early Childhood Development (ECD) programmes for its potential to be a “building block for climate adaptation, resilience, and sustainable development”, given that ECD cuts across several sectors and, if done properly, has the power to transform lives.

Research has suggested that universal education and health interventions can have a direct impact on climate change. The resulting reductions in emissions globally could be as high as 85.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide between 2020 and 2050, according to Project Drawdown, the equivalent of 19 billion passenger vehicles driven for a year. It was also estimated that educating girls could result in a massive reduction in emissions of 51.48 gigatons by 2050.

Ensuring that all girls and boys from the youngest age can grow, learn, and play in a healthy environment by definition includes clean energy investment in ECD infrastructure and facilities to address poor air quality and creating child-friendly green spaces.

Climate education itself should become a lasting element of early years learning. Children instinctively want to protect the planet, so by teaching them about the connections between humans and their environment, they can be the first to raise awareness about the dangers to it and to bring that knowledge to their families and communities.

Their early lives will shape the adults they become, and that may make all the difference to overcoming the climate crisis. We know that the first five to six years are a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. That is when 90% of brain development occurs and patterns of learning and behaviour are set for the future. This opportunity is being wasted for so many children on a global scale, with just a tiny proportion of international and domestic spending going to the early years.

Five years ago, the G20 members launched a new Initiative for Early Childhood Development but progress has been blown off course due to the Covid-19 pandemic and other global crises.

Giving these children the best chance of facing down the challenges of their present and later lives points to one very clear priority for decisions being debated in New York. It is vital that they push investment in early childcare and education right to the top of the agenda, and include climate financing in programs for children. In doing so, they will be setting the stage for prioritising the right strategies at the G20 talks in 2024, where the incoming chair President Lula of Brazil looks to make tackling the climate crisis a high priority.

We know which interventions and innovations will help give the world’s youngest children achieve the best possible start in life. However, good ideas will amount to nothing without the most essential change that needs to happen – a change of attitude among governments, policy-makers and donors. They must begin to see the early years not as a cost but as an investment, and one of the smartest investments that a society can make.

 

The post How investing in our youngest children will help them cope with a climate crisis not of their making appeared first on World Education Blog.

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Japan’s long-term follow-up project to study effects of early childhood education

A first for this kind of study in Japan, authorities hope to develop more effective educational programs by analysing the data.

TOKYO – The government plans to conduct a long-term project to examine the effects of early childhood education, experiential learning activities and family environment on children’s later development and life, it has been learned.

It will be the first time for such a study to be conducted in Japan.

The Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry will follow the lives of tens of thousands of preschool 5-year-olds, collating information on their academic ability, educational progress, and occupations and annual earnings after they become adults. By analyzing such data, the ministry hopes to develop more effective educational programs.

At kindergartens, day nurseries and authorized nursery schools, children are provided with early childhood education to develop curiosity, cooperativeness and other abilities through play and various experiences — elements that help to nurture their respective academic abilities.

As part of the project, the ministry will analyze the educational programs and experiential activities of targeted facilities, while monitoring each child’s home environment — including parental annual income and work type, among other elements.

The ministry also plans to continually check on the academic ability and academic paths of the children after they enter elementary school and gather information on their occupation and annual income into young adulthood and beyond.

Data will be collected annually through elementary school middle grades, then at stepped intervals thereafter.

By analyzing the data, the ministry intends to examine the effects on children’s development in various spheres, such as the nurturing of sociability in early childhood to help children adapt to new life at school, and thorough absorption in subjects to help them concentrate on classwork, with the aim of improving the overall quality of education.

Overseas precedent
The Perry Preschool Project is a well-known follow-up initiative examining the effects of early childhood education on young American children. The original project was conducted in the 1960s on kids from low-income families who were divided into two groups: those provided with early childhood education and those who were not. Even now, the project continues to track participants into the latter half of their lives.

Analysis of the data has shown that among those who received early childhood education, the percentage of people whose annual income reached $20,000 or higher at the age of 40 was 50% higher than those who were not exposed to such learning. It has also been found that the crimes-committed rate for those in the former group tends to be lower than that of the latter.

A report on the project said there was a $12.9 return for every $1.00 invested in early childhood education. The study is said to have triggered increased overseas awareness of the importance of such learning.

From next fiscal year, universities commissioned by the ministry will decide the survey methods and launch full-scale studies after conducting trial surveys.

“It’s vital to examine the most effective methods for Japan’s educational environment and to develop early childhood education based on evidence,” said University of Tokyo Prof. Emeritus Toshiyuki Shiomi, an expert on educational environments and early childhood education. “It’s important to examine family environments, but it’s also necessary to ensure that such studies don’t lead to discrimination. What’s needed is to help develop the ability of each child in a holistic manner.”

Japan’s long-term follow-up project to study effects of early childhood education

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Covid-19 and Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: Impact and the way forward

By Peter Anti Partey

Institute for Education Studies (IFEST, Accra – Ghana)

According to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UIS), Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is considered to have low learning proficiency. SSA at the same time has the highest rates of education exclusion (UIS, 2019), that is, more than 20 percent of children between ages of about 6 and 11 are out of school, with about 33% of those between 12 and 14 also not in school. Again, UIS data put the percent of the youth who are not in school in this region at 60%. In terms of gender, the exclusion rate for girls (36%) is 4% more than boys (32%). In terms of literacy rate, the region has seen a marginal increase of .53% to the current level of 65.58 (UIS, 2018) which is still low when compared to the world average of 86.3%. these few statistics paint a picture of the urgency to improve the educational system in this region.

 

However, the advent of Covid-19 seems to have worsened the state of global education but the hardest hit will be regions with less robust educational systems such as Sub-Saharan Africa. Robust educational systems are identified by their levels of literacy and numeracy rates which can be used to predict the future human capital of the country. According to the World Bank, the effect of Covid-19 on education could be felt for decades to come. They reiterate the fact that the impact transcends learning loss which is a short-term issue to a more long-term issue of diminishing economic opportunities.

 

This challenge of learning poverty brought about as a result of the continued closure of schools should engage governments and education ministries in the region. Unlike the developed world where mitigation measures such as e-learning helped to ensure continuity of education of students, the adoption of the same rather seems to have widened the inequality gap in the region. This is partly attributed to the extent of the digital divide in the region and also the level of disparities between the urban and the rural child. The level of investment of African governments into education which according to the African Economic Outlook (2020) stands at 5% of GDP which is also the second-highest of any region should yield the relevant returns. Unfortunately, that has not been the case and with Covid-19 coming into the picture, we are not going to have any tangible benefits any time soon if drastic and innovative policies are not pursued within the shortest possible time.

To start with, governments and the managers of education in the region should embark on educational system transformation. There should be a conscious effort to improve learning outcomes and make learning relevant to the student. This implies taking a second look at the entire school curriculum. It is time for governments in the region to use the school system to prepare the students to be able to contribute to the economic development of the country and also be competitive globally, this requires a complete overhaul of the school curriculum to reflect the needs and aspirations of the society in the 21st Century and beyond. Ghana has taken the lead in this direction.

 

Again, educational policies in this region are more exclusive than inclusive. An inclusive education policy allows all children to develop and succeed especially those with special needs. One of the strategic measures needed to be taken by governments in the region is inclusive education. Students should not be denied basic educational resources due to their location, socio-economic status, family background, or physical or psychological deficiencies.

 

Furthermore, to be able to bridge the learning gap and ensure that teachers are up to speed with the level of learning loss of their students, assessment techniques that are more informative and ipsative should be adopted by educational authorities and implemented in schools. In my professional opinion, countries in the region should have a nationwide assessment during the early weeks of reopening for the basic and secondary level to inform various education decisions (instructional, pedagogical, etc.) at all levels from the teacher to the ministry in charge of education.

 

The efficient and effective use of instructional time is a big issue in the region. Maximisation of contact time when schools are officially opened should be given the needed attention. Research has shown that there is always a discrepancy between actual and intended instructional times due to teacher absenteeism, breaks, lack of textbooks which results in teachers writing comprehensive notes on boards for students, etc. According to the Human Capital Index (2018), children in Ghana spend 2.7 years more in school than a child born in Sierra Leone if they all begin school at age 4. However, 5.9 years of the child in Ghana’s education life can be described as being “a waste”, implying that, the child learns for only 5.7 years out of the total 11.6 years spent in school. In the case of a child in Sierra Leone, 4.4 years can be termed as “wasted years” in the child’s education while learning occurs only 4.5 years. This is unacceptable and if governments in SSA would be able to make strides in their education after Covid-19, there is a need to eliminate the ineffective usage of instructional time.

 

Another important measure that needs attention is the capacity building of teachers. Covid-19 has exposed the inadequacies in our teacher preparation and continuing professional development programmes. Most teachers in the region are not technologically savvy making it difficult for the smooth implementation of e-learning and EdTech programmes and policies. The lack of or inadequacy of knowledge in using modern technology to deliver education should be tackled head-on from pre-service and in-service teachers’ levels. Teacher preparation at our tertiary level should encompass the use of technology in delivering education. Again, workshops, training programmes, and special courses should be organised for in-service teachers to upgrade their knowledge on e-learning systems and EdTech. Educational digital devices should be made available to all teachers during these training sessions.

 

In conclusion, it is worth noting that, Covid-19 has been a blessing in disguise and a wake-up call for the education system in Sub-Saharan Africa. It has exposed the robustness of our education to stand the test of time and revealed the inadequacies in our educational system when compared to other regions. It is solely our responsibility to face the challenges that the advent of Covid-19 presents and reset our educational system to respond to the needs and aspirations of our children and more importantly make it relevant and competitive in the global education sphere.

 

***The writer is into educational research and policy analysis. He is an education economist by profession and currently the Acting Executive Director of the Institute of Education Studies (IFEST), an education think tank in Ghana.

 

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Egypt: Education min. to integrate students with special needs in society

Asia/Egypt/05.06.2018/Source: www.egypttoday.com.

The Ministry of Education signed on Saturday a cooperative protocol with the National Union bank and Misr El Kheir Foundation (MEK) to implement the media campaign “Differently-abled” that aims to integrate students with special needs in the society.

Advisor of the Minister of Education for Marketing and Promotion, Yousra Allam, launched the biggest national campaign “Differently-abled”, focusing on psychological and educational needs of students with special needs, according the spokesman for the Ministry of Education Ahmed Khairy.

Allam remarked that the campaign will raise the awareness of the society particularly parents about the sound ways to treat their children through different kinds of media.

The Ministry of Education has taken several steps to enhance education in Egypt, which is part of Egypt’s 2030 vision to cultivate economic and social justice and revive the role of Egypt as a regional leader. Launching the first Arabic Citation Index (ARCI) worldwide comes at the top of these efforts.

First Arabic Citation Index worldwide

Minister of Education and Technical Education Tarek Shawki, a representative of the Knowledge Bank, signed on May 28 a protocol with Clarivate Analytics to launch the first Arabic citation index worldwide.

The signing ceremony was attended by Minister of Culture Inas Abdel Dayem, head of Bibliotheca Alexandrina Mostafa el Feki, public figures, members of Parliament and leaders at the Ministry of Education.

“The ARCI will be powered by the Web of Science – the world’s most trusted and only publisher – neutral citation index for researchers in Egypt and across the 22 member states of the Arab League,” according to Clarivate Analytics’ website.

The new system of education

In the same context, he mentioned that the index is included in the new system of education at the secondary school, stressing that the Ministry of Education has contracted many international entities to buy their contents and deliver them to Egyptian students, along with buying 2D and 3D films, adding that 5,700 videos in English and Arabic have been bought. He said that these movies, Al-Adwaa book and other scientific content would be put on tablets.

He stated that a random exam would be prepared every week to encourage students to come to schools.
Japanese schools

On the sidelines of the signing ceremony, the minister of education said in a press statement that the Egyptian-Japanese schools’ curriculum will be in Arabic at primary schools.

The Japanese education system, Tokkatsu, will be applied at 40 Egyptian-Japanese schools in different governorates in September.

A total of 20,000 teachers have applied to receive a training in the Japanese Tokkatsu education system in the ministry.

Shawki added that the ministry will hold a meeting on June 4 to choose 1,500 students for Japanese schools.

 

Source of the news: https://www.egypttoday.com/Article/1/51471/Education-min-to-integrate-students-with-special-needs-in-society

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South Africa: Bow tie wearing teacher tackles education inequalities

South Africa/ April 25, 2018/Source: https://www.brandsouthafrica.com

Play Your Part programme is Brand South Africa’s nationwide programme that encourages active citizenship and looks to impact the country positively in order to fulfil the bigger picture of building a positive Nation Brand.

Active citizenship means people get involved in their local communities and democracy at all levels, from towns and cities to nationwide projects and dedicating their own time/resources / talents to contribute to their local communities.

There are numerous opportunities, big and small, for each and every individual to make a positive difference in the communities in which they live and operate.

Founder of “Bow Tie Challenge”, Chris Megaffin, is a teacher who is originally from Toronto, Canada.  He is a fashion activist who is on a mission to fight for social justice and he is using bow ties to achieve this.

Earlier this year the Bow Tie Challenge was launched.  The Bowtie Challenge is a fund-raising initiative that was born as a result of his passion for teaching, interest in fashion and desire to make a difference in his local community.  Chris pledged to wear a different bow tie every day for 365 days a year starting January 1st, 2018.

“As an international teacher, I have come across educational inequalities in every country where I have taught and I have always wondered what I could do to make difference in the lives of these children”.

South Africa has some of the highest levels of socio-economic inequality in the world, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the educational system across South Africa.  Statistics South Africa also show that children from disadvantaged backgrounds spend an average of 3 years less time in school than their privileged counterparts.

Also, fewer of these children are put into early childhood development programmes – which we know to be fundamental to a child’s education and development.  The situation feeds youth unemployment, and contributes to general instability in the country, as millions of South Africans cannot afford to buy food or access healthcare, decent sanitation and other essentials of a dignified life.

Chris is using the campaign to raise awareness about the importance of education and to raise funds for Afrika Tikkun. Afrika Tikkun is a non-profit organization with a mission to provide children from underprivileged communities in South Africa with high-quality education and development from cradle to career.

Ensuring quality education is a national priority. The National Development Plan describes education as a key lever to improving the quality of life in a society. Education improves the overall skills and abilities of the workforce, leading to greater productivity which contributes to economic growth.

Chris is collaborating with some of South Africa’s up and coming designers who will help design the bow ties.  He says this is to help support local businesses and give the designers exposure.

 

Meet local designer Shwezu

Shwezu have designed a bow tie especially for the campaign in the colours of the South African flag.

“When approached with the opportunity to design and produce a range of bow ties for this initiative, we didn’t hesitate for a second. Not only is it fun, colourful, creative and inspiring but it also resonates with Shwezu.co.za‘s ultimate aim – to contribute to the growth and prosperity of our nation. For this reason, we only use local materials and producers to create our unique Shwezu Shweshwe bow ties and other products. We strongly believe that by acquiring new skills (e.g. fashion design and sewing) through a good education, the youth of South Africa have the ability to unlock countless opportunities to grow and thrive.”

Shwezu is an online store for South African inspired fashion, shoes, bags, accessories and gifts all tied together by one common denominator, Shweshwe – the iconically South African fabric.

How to get involved

  • Donate to The Bow Tie Challenge via http://thetravelingeducator.com/2017/09/the-bowtie-challenge
  • Share the Challenge on social media to raise awareness about the inequalities of education in South Africa
  • Join the challenge, upload a photo of yourself wearing a bow tie to any social media platform #bowtiechallenge

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/thebowtiechallenge/?ref=bookmarks

Twitter – https://twitter.com/bowtiechallenge

Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/the.bow.tie.challenge/

Source:

Bow tie wearing teacher tackles education inequalities

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Japan: Too much of an education could be bad for your future

Japan/April 03, 2018/By: MICHAEL HOFFMAN*/Source: https://www.japantimes.co.jp

Poverty comes in many forms but one color: gray.

There is the poverty of the poor, the poverty of the rich, the poverty of the academically under-qualified, the poverty of the academically over-qualified. The poverty of the poor pretty much speaks for itself. The riches of the rich may be deceptive.

The biggest drain on them is education for the kids. Luxuries and pleasures can be sacrificed, but to compromise where the children are concerned is (or is seen to be) to deprive them of the leg-up they need (or are seen to need) to gain a foothold in life.

What high schools are open to graduates of inferior elementary schools? Inferior ones. What universities are open to graduates of second-rate high schools? Second-rate ones. What kind of career is open to graduates of merely ordinary universities? A merely ordinary one. The consequent financial strain can be felt as a kind of poverty.

If it’s true of the rich, how much more so of the poor. The high cost of education is considered a main cause of the sunken birth rate. If educating your children as the economy demands its top tier be educated requires means beyond the average, means beyond you, childlessness might well seem the more responsible option.

There’s education and education. Motives for acquiring it vary. It can be a quest for knowledge or a quest for credentials. The former is problematic. Shukan Gendai magazine tells some cautionary tales.

“Kyoko-san,” 27, studied fine arts. It was her passion. She’d learn the subject, then teach it. Undergraduate school, graduate school, post-grad school. Hard at work on her Ph.D. thesis, she suddenly noticed something: Students graduating ahead of her weren’t getting jobs.

Stupid of her not to notice before! Absorption in your studies can blind you to earthier realities. Panicking, she put aside her thesis and threw herself into job-hunting. Nothing. Universities were over-staffed, the private sector had no room for her. She eventually landed a job at a small small-town rural arts museum. The work is routine and she feels her expert knowledge rotting within her, but at least she can feed herself.

Not every one is so lucky. “Nakamura-san,” 29, is a Ph.D. scientist struggling to repay a ¥6 million student loan on a ¥2 million-a-year salary. The good news is that his employer is a university and his job description includes the word “research” — followed, unfortunately, by the word “assistant,” which translates into part-time status and lab chores far from the cutting edge.

Maybe in 10 years he’ll get an assistant professorship. Or maybe not — in which case he’ll be 40 years old and nowhere. In the meantime, he lives in a ratty ¥40,000-a-month apartment, eats at the university cafeteria and wonders, “How long can I take this?” It’s enough to make the private sector look attractive — but an exploratory foray into it showed that the private sector did not return the compliment. Knowledge beyond a certain range of commercial exploitability, comments Shukan Gendai, is to the private sector the rough equivalent of otaku-hood.

“Takada-san,” 26, is pursuing a doctorate in literature at the University of Tokyo. He’s learning something the great books don’t teach — to wit: “To get anywhere in research you need connections. I didn’t know that when I started. You need to develop relationships with influential professors who can boost your career.

“So, I get involved in academic meetings, I help out at the reception desk, I coach visiting overseas students. … In short, I’m so busy maneuvering behind the scenes that I have no time to study.”

This is ironic, in view of the importance society attaches to education. Arrestingly symbolic, as the back-to-school season nears, is the iconic randoseru elementary school rucksack. The word, borrowed from Dutch, reflects the age and origin of the import, harking back as it does to the early 19th century, when a restricted number of Dutch traders were almost the only foreigners permitted in Japan. They bequeathed to their hosts a few European books, a smattering of the Dutch language, a bit of European science (and a hunger for more) — and the randoseru. Japanese kids have been saddled with it ever since.

It’s no light burden. And it’s gaining weight, as the Asahi Shimbun noted last week. Carrying a full load of books, lunch, gym clothes and whatnot, it can weigh nearly 10 kilograms. The 7-year-old second-grader gamely bracing against its downward thrust probably weighs little more than 20 kg him- or herself.

Why should the venerable randoseru be gaining weight? Because, the Asahi explains, textbooks are. There’s so much to learn! Never more than now, and more and more each year as knowledge, competition, pressure and standards rise. As of 2015, after six years of elementary schooling, an average child will have carried (and hopefully read) a total of 6,518 textbook pages — representing a 34 percent increase in 10 years. Moral education, a new subject swelling the curriculum beginning this year, will add, over six years, an estimated 1,067 pages to the load.

“Higher” education, meanwhile, languishes. “Higher education” used to mean, simply, college. A hundred years ago less than half the population got beyond elementary school, which alone was compulsory. College was for the lucky and gifted few.

Postwar democracy flung open the academic gates. What had been a mark of distinction became more or less a necessity to anyone with white-collar aspirations. Today, “higher education” means — if it means anything — not university education per se but learning for its own sake, and Shukan Gendai’s coverage is not encouraging.

It shows the number of Ph.D. students declining at a rate the declining student-age population only partly accounts for: 14,927 nationwide in 2016 as against 18,232 in 2003.

Philosophy remains a popular university alternative to raw science. Each year brings forth 1,000-odd newly fledged philosophers. They can’t all be professors. Most will have to leave academia and seek their fortunes in the “real world.” As what? Doing what? In an age of post-truth and artificial intelligence, who needs philosophers?

*Michael Hoffman is the author of “In the Land of the Kami: A Journey into the Hearts of Japan” and “Other Worlds.”

Source:

Too much of an education could be bad for your future

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Henry A. Giroux on Developing a Language of Liberation for Radical Transformation

By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview

What are the longer-term trends that gave rise to the presidency of Donald Trump? What will be the national and global impacts? And what do we need to do to resist? Henry A. Giroux tackles these questions in The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism. «This courageous and timely book is the first and best book on Trump’s neo-fascism in the making,» says Cornel West. To order your copy, click here and make a tax-deductible donation to Truthout now!

Confronted with the rise of an authoritarian society affecting all institutions and individuals, there is a need for resistance based on radical transformation, says Henry A. Giroux in this interview about The Public in Peril. This resistance is embodied in mass action and a vision to achieve the hope of a life beyond capitalism.

Mark Karlin: What is the impact of domestic terrorism and authoritarianism on young people?

Henry A. Giroux: Under the authoritarian reign of Donald Trump, finance capitalism now drives politics, governance and policy in unprecedented ways and is more than willing to sacrifice the future of young people for short-term political and economic gains, regardless of the talk in the mainstream media about the need to not burden future generations with heavy tuition debt and a future of low-wage jobs. American society has declared war on its children, offering a disturbing index of a social order in the midst of a deep moral and political crisis. Too many young people today live in an era of foreclosed hope, an era in which it is difficult either to imagine a life beyond the tenets of a market-driven society or to transcend the fear that any attempt to do so can only result in a more dreadful nightmare.

Young people are not only written out of the future … but are now considered a threat to the future.

Youth today are not only plagued by the fragility and uncertainty of the present, they are, as the late Zygmunt Bauman has argued, «the first post war generation facing the prospect of downward mobility [in which the] plight of the outcast stretches to embrace a generation as a whole.» It is little wonder that «these youngsters are called Generation Zero: A generation with Zero opportunities, Zero future,» and Zero expectations. Youth have become the new precariat, whose future has been sacrificed to the commands of capital and the financial elite. Moreover, as the social state is decimated, youth, especially those marginalized by race and class, are also subject to the dictates of the punishing state. Not only is their behavior being criminalized in the schools and on the streets, they are also subject to repressive forms of legislation aimed at removing crucial social provisions. At the same time, undocumented immigrant youth called Dreamers, brought to the United States by their parents as children, are now being threatened by legislation designed to expel them from the United States, the only home they have known since early childhood.

Henry A. Giroux. (Photo: Courtesy of the author)

Henry A. Giroux. (Photo: Courtesy of the author)

Beyond exposing the moral depravity of a society that fails to provide for its youth, the symbolic and real violence waged against many young people bespeaks to nothing less than a perverse collective death-wish — especially visible when youth protest their conditions. We live in an era in which there is near zero tolerance for peaceful demonstrations on the part of young and a willingness by the government to overlook the crimes of bankers, hedge fund managers, and other members of the corporate elite who steal untold amounts of wealth, affecting the lives of millions. How else to explain the fact that at least 25 states are sponsoring legislation that would make perfectly legal forms of protest a crime that carries a huge fine or subjects young people to possible felony charges?

The Trump administration needs education to fail because it fears the possibility of educated citizens developing the capacities necessary to meet the challenges of authoritarianism.

If youth were once the repository of society’s dreams, that is no longer true. Increasingly, young people are viewed as a public disorder, a dream now turned into a nightmare. Many youth live in a post-9/11 social order that positions them as a prime target of its governing through [the] crime complex. This is made obvious by the many «get tough» policies that now render young people as criminals, while depriving them of basic health care, education and social services. Punishment and fear have replaced compassion and social responsibility as the most important modalities for mediating the relationship of youth to the larger social order, all too evident by the upsurge of zero tolerance laws along with the expanding reach of the punishing state. When the criminalization of social problems becomes a mode of governance and war its default strategy, youth are reduced to soldiers or targets — not social investments. Young people are not only written out of the future … but are now considered a threat to the future. Too many youth are now removed from any discourse about democracy and increasingly fall prey to what I call the «war on youth.» The war on youth can best be understood through two concepts: the soft war and the hard war, [both] of which have been intensified under Trump’s presidency.

The soft war involves the temptation and manufactured seductions of desire, and refers to the unyielding depoliticization and commodification of youth, waged through the unrelenting expansion of a global market society. Partnered with a massive advertising machinery, the soft war targets all children and youth, treating them as yet another «market» to be commodified and exploited, and conscripting them into the system through relentless attempts to create a new generation of hyper-consumers. In this instance, young people are not only viewed as consumers but also as embodied brands. Caught in the intrusive new technologies of advertising and public relations, there is no space for young people to be free of the commercial carpet-bombing they are forced to endure. Hence, their subjectivity, desires and ways of relating to others are endlessly commodified so that their presence in the world is marked by the fact that they are either selling a product (which they inhabit) or buying one. The soft war is rooted in neoliberal disimagination zones, which makes it more difficult for young people to find public spheres where they can locate themselves and translate metaphors of hope into meaningful action. The dystopian dreamscapes that make up a neoliberal society are built on the promises of uncomplicated consumption, an assumption that is both dehumanizing and central to the war waged by an authoritarian society on critical agency, the radical imagination, and visions of a more just society. Agency and self-renewal are increasingly limited to a sphere of raw consumption and change to the empty vocabulary of fashion and lifestyles. In a society of mass consumption, shallowness becomes a strength and the mythology of American innocence becomes a blinding storm.

Under Donald Trump, the ideology and violence associated with white supremacy has been moved from the margins to the center of power in the United States.

The hard war is about coercion and is a more serious and dangerous development for young people, especially those who are marginalized by their ethnicity, race and class. The hard war refers to the harshest elements of a growing youth-crime-control complex that operates through a logic of punishment, surveillance and repression. The young people targeted by its punitive measures are often poor minority youth who are considered failed consumers and who can only afford to live on the margins of a commercial culture that excludes anyone who lacks money, resources and leisure time to spare. Or they are youth considered uneducable and unemployable, therefore troublesome. The imprint of the youth-crime-control complex can be traced to the increasingly popular practice of organizing schools through disciplinary practices that subject students to constant surveillance through high-tech security devices while imposing on them harsh, and often thoughtless, zero-tolerance policies that closely resemble measures used currently by the criminal [legal] system. In this instance, poor and minority youth become objects of a new mode of governance based on decisions made by a visionless managerial elite. Punished if they don’t show up at school, and punished even if they do attend school, many of these students are funneled into what has been ominously called the «school-to-prison pipeline.» If middle- and upper-class kids are subject to the seductions of market-driven public relations, working class youth are caught in the crosshairs between the arousal of commercial desire and the harsh impositions of securitization, surveillance and policing.

How does neoliberalism affect higher education?

Higher education in our politically desperate age is threatened by a legacy that it does not dare to name and that legacy with its eerie resonance with an authoritarian past asserts itself, in part, with the claim that education is failing and democracy is an excess. The Trump administration needs education to fail in a very particular way, because it fears the possibility of educated citizens developing the capacities, intellectual and ethical, necessary to meet the challenges of authoritarianism. Hostile to its role as a public good and democratic sphere, it is attempting to reshape education according to the market-driven logic of neoliberalism with its emphasis on privatization, commodification, deregulation, fear and managerialism. Under neoliberalism, the market becomes a template for all of social life and not just the economy. Commercial values are the only values that matter, and the only stories that matter are written in the language of finance, profit and the economy. Under such circumstances, higher education is threatened for its potential role as a public sphere capable of educating students as informed, critical thinkers capable of not only holding power accountable but also fulfilling the role of critical agents who can act against injustice and resist diverse forms of oppression. The criminogenic machinery of power has now reached the highest levels of the US government, and in doing so, it is changing not just the language of educational reform, but also making it difficult for faculty and students to resist their own erasure from modes of self-governance and a critical education.

The killing of people abroad based on race is paralleled by (and connected with) the killing of Black people at home.

New forms of exclusion, unbridled commodification, and exclusion rooted in a retreat from ethics, the social imagination, and democracy itself weakens the role higher education might take in an age of increasing tyranny. Against the force of a highly militarized mode of casino capitalism in which violence is at the center of power, higher education is being weakened in its ability to resist the authoritarian machinery of social death now shaping American society. Neoliberalism views higher education in strictly economic terms and rejects any notion of higher education as a democratic public sphere — as a space in which education enables students to be critical thinkers, learn how to take risks, hold power accountable, and develop a sense of moral and political agency through which they learn to respect the rights and perspectives of others. Under the regime of neoliberalism in the United States and in many other countries, many of the problems facing higher education can be linked to eviscerated funding models, the domination of these institutions by market mechanisms, the rise of for-profit colleges, the rise of charter schools, the intrusion of the national security state, and the slow demise of faculty self-governance, all of which make a mockery of the meaning and mission of the university as a democratic public sphere. With the onslaught of neoliberal austerity measures, the mission of higher education has been transformed from educating citizens to training students for the workforce. Students are viewed as clients and customers, and the culture of business replaces any vestige of democratic governance. At the same time, faculty are reduced to degrading labor practices and part-time contracts, administrators are reduced to a visionless managerial class, the college and university presidents inhabit the role of CEOs.

Rather than enlarge the moral imagination and critical capacities of students, too many universities are now wedded to producing would-be hedge fund managers and depoliticized workers, and creating modes of education that promote a «technically trained docility.» Strapped for money and increasingly defined in the language of corporate culture, many universities are now driven principally by vocational, military and economic considerations while increasingly removing academic knowledge production from democratic values and projects. The ideals of higher education as a place to think, to promote critical dialogue and teach students to cultivate their ethical relation with others are viewed as a threat to neoliberal modes of governance. At the same time, education is seen by the apostles of market fundamentalism as a space for producing profits and educating a supine and fearful labor force that will exhibit the obedience demanded by the corporate order. The modern loss of faith in the marriage of education and democracy needs to be reclaimed, but that will only happen if the long legacy of struggle over education is once again brought to life as part of a more comprehensive understanding of education as being central to politics, and learning as a vital component of social change.

What has been the impact of the political triumph of white supremacism and racial cleansing?

Under Donald Trump, the ideology and violence associated with white supremacy has been moved from the margins to the center of power in the United States. Trump not only courts the favor of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, militiamen and other right-wing racist groups, he panders to them as central elements of his base. How else to explain his racist travel bans, his unremitting attacks on Black athletes and his constant equating of Black communities with the culture of violence and criminality? Or, for that matter, Trump’s ramping up of the police state and his ongoing assertion that his presidency strongly endorses a platform of law and order. The current mobilization of fear and moral panics has its roots in and feeds off of a legacy of white supremacy that is used to divert anger over dire economic and political conditions into the diversionary cesspool of racial hatred. It might be best to understand Trump’s racism as part of a broader movement of white supremacy across the globe, with its attack on immigrants and its emulation of fascist ideology and social relations. Throughout Europe, fascism and white supremacy in their diverse forms are on the rise. In Greece, France, Poland, Austria and Germany, among other nations, right-wing extremists have used the hateful discourse of racism, xenophobia and white nationalism to demonize immigrants and undermine democratic modes of rule and policies.

Much of the right-wing, racist rhetoric coming out of these countries mimics what Trump and his followers are saying in the United States. One outcome is that the public spheres that produce a critically engaged citizenry and make a democracy possible are under siege and in rapid retreat. Economic stagnation, massive inequality, the rise of religious fundamentalism and growing forms of ultra-nationalism now aim to put democratic nations to rest. Echoes of the right-wing movements in Europe have come home with a vengeance. Demagogues wrapped in xenophobia, white supremacy and the false appeal to a lost past echo a brutally familiar fascism, with slogans similar to Donald Trump’s call to «Make America Great Again» and «Make America Safe Again.»

Fascism in its various forms is about social and racial cleansing.

Trump’s insistence on racial profiling echoes increasing calls among European right-wing extremists to legitimate a police state where refugees and others are viewed as a threat, unwanted and disposable. How else to explain Trump’s insistence on reintroducing nationwide «stop and frisk policies» after the demonstrations in Charlottesville, North Carolina over the police killing of an African American, Keith Lamont Scott, in September of 2016? Trump willingly reproduces similar right-wing ideologies such as those condemning and demonizing Syrian and other immigrants trying to reach Europe. He does so by producing panic-ridden taunts, tweets and executive orders whose aim is to generate mass anxiety and legitimate policies that mimic forms of ethnic and social cleansing. Trump joins a growing global movement of racial exclusion, one that is on the march spewing hatred, embracing forms of anti-Semitism, white supremacy and a deep-seated disdain for any form of justice on the side of democracy.

State-manufactured lawlessness has become normalized and extends from the ongoing and often brutalizing, and sometimes lethal, police violence against Black people and other vulnerable groups to a criminogenic market-based system run by a financial elite that strips everyone but the upper 1 percent of a future by stealing not only their possessions but also by condemning them to a life in which the only available option is to fall back on one’s individual resources in order to barely survive. At the national level, lawlessness now drives a militarized foreign policy intent on assassinating alleged enemies rather than using traditional forms of interrogation, arrest and conviction. The killing of people abroad based on race is paralleled by (and connected with) the killing of Black people at home. Trump is now a major player in shaping a world that has become a battlefield driven by racism and a stark celebration of apocalyptic nationalism — a zone of social abandonment where lethal violence replaces the protocols of justice, civil rights and democracy.

Fear is the reigning ideology, and war its operative mode of action, pitting different groups against each other, shutting down the possibilities of shared responsibilities, and legitimating the growth of a paramilitary police force that kills Black people with impunity. State-manufactured fear offers up new forms of domestic terrorism embodied in the rise of a surveillance state while providing a powerful platform for militarizing many aspects of society. One result is that [the US] has become a warrior society in which the state and civil society are organized through the practice of violence. One consequence is that Trump’s white supremacist attitudes have emboldened violence against minorities … and has given new life to neo-Nazi groups throughout the United States. As the culture of fear is racialized, compassion gives way to suspicion and a demonstration of revulsion accorded to those others who are demonized as monsters, criminals, or even worse, bloodthirsty terrorists. Under such circumstance, the bonds of trust dissolve, while hating the other becomes normalized and lawlessness is elevated to a matter of common sense.

Hannah Arendt once wrote that terror was the essence of totalitarianism. She was right, and we are now witnessing the dystopian visions of the new authoritarians who trade in terror, fear, hatred, demonization, violence and racism. Trump and his neo-Nazi bulldogs are no longer on the fringe of political life and they have no interests in instilling values that will «make America great» (code for white). On the contrary, they are deeply concerned with creating expanding constellations of force and fear, while inculcating convictions that will destroy the ability to form the formative cultures that make a democracy possible. Fascism in its various forms is about social and racial cleansing, and its end point is the prison, gated communities, walls and all the murderous detritus that accompanies the discourse of national greatness and racial purity. This will be Trump’s legacy.

What is the impact of a war culture on society?

War culture has been transformed in American culture — moving from a source of alarm to a celebrated source of pride and national identity. War has been redefined in the United States in the age of global neoliberal capitalism. No longer defined exclusively as a military issue, it has replaced democratic idealism and expanded its boundaries, shaping all aspects of society. Evidence of a war culture can be seen in the war on civil liberties, youth, voting rights, civic institutions, the poor, immigrants, Muslims and poor Black communities. The distinction between war and peace, the military and civil society, soldiers and the police, criminal behavior and military transgression, internal and external security, and violence and entertainment are collapsing.

As violence and politics merge to produce an accelerating and lethal mix of bloodshed, pain, suffering, grief and death, the US has morphed into a war culture and reached a point where politics becomes an extension of war and war culture the foundation for politics itself. The violence produced by a war culture has become a defining feature of American society, providing a common ground for the production of violence at home and abroad. Militarism now pervades American society and increasingly organizes civil society mostly for the production of violence. Entrenched militarism now exercises a powerful influence on schools, an expanding police state, airports, a ballooning military budget and a foreign policy saturated in war and violence. Even universities are now intimately linked through research with the military.

What Steve Martinot calls a «political culture of hyper punitiveness» serves not only to legitimate a neoliberal culture in which cruelty is viewed as virtue, but also a racist system of mass incarceration that functions as a default welfare program and the chief mechanism to «institutionalize obedience.» It should come as no surprise that many states, including California, spend more on prison construction than on higher education. The police state increasingly targets poor people of color, turning their neighborhoods into war zones, all the while serving a corporate state that has no concern whatsoever for the social costs inflicted on millions because of its predatory policies and practices.

At a policy level, a defense and arms industry fuels violence abroad, while domestically, a toxic gun culture profits from the endless maiming and deaths of individuals at home. Similarly, a militaristic foreign policy has its domestic counterpart in the growth of a carceral state used to enforce a hyped-up brand of domestic terrorism, especially against Black youth and various emerging protest movements in the United States. At the current moment, the United States is circling the globe with air bases and using its military power to bully and threaten other nations. War culture is the new normal, especially under Trump, and is sustained by media apparatuses that spectacularize the violence of a war culture while turning it into the defining feature of mass entertainment. At the same time, the extreme violence produced by a gun culture no longer becomes a source of alarm but is privileged as a source of profit for arms manufactures and the entertainment industries which extend from Hollywood films to the selling of violent video games to teenagers.

The US has morphed into a war culture and reached a point where politics becomes an extension of war and war culture the foundation for politics itself.

Americans are terrified by the threat of terrorism and its ensuing violence; yet, they are more than willing to protect laws that privilege the largely unchecked circulation of guns and the toxic militarized culture of violence that amounts to «58 people who die a day because of firearms.» Moreover, as the important distinctions between war and civil society collapse, contemporary institutions become more militarized. For instance, the prison becomes a model for other institutions in which the boundaries disappear between the innocent and guilty, and public safety is defined increasingly as a police matter. At the same time, policies are militarized so as to suggest that state violence is the most important way to address an increasing range of problems extending from drug addiction and homelessness to school truancy. The police are militarized and now function as soldiers; students are viewed as criminals; and cities are transformed into combat zones. Under a war culture, neoliberal society not only creates numerous spaces of repression, insecurity and violence, it also functions as a kind of delegated vigilantism policing both bodies of the Other and boundaries of thought, while limiting questions that can be raised about the use of power in the United States and its role in expanding the reach of a punishing state and domestic violence.

What do you recommend to instill courage in people who are dismayed and dejected in an age of full-blown state violence?

It is easy to despair in times of tyranny, but it is much more productive to be politically and morally outraged and to draw upon such anger as a source of hope and action. Without hope, even in the most dire of times, there is no possibility for resistance, dissent and struggle. A critical consciousness is the prerequisite for informed agency and hope is the basis for individual and collective resistance. Moreover, when combined with collective action, hope translates into a dynamic sense of possibility, enabling one to join with others for the long haul of fighting systemic forms of domination. Courage in the face of tyranny is a necessity and not an option, and we can learn both from the past and the present about resistance movements and the power of civic courage and collective struggle, and how such modes of resistance are emerging among a number of groups across a wide variety of landscapes. What is crucial is the need not to face such struggles alone, not allow ourselves to feel defeated in our isolation, and to refuse a crippling neoliberal survival-of-the-fittest ethos that dominates everyday relations.

Radical politics begins when one refuses to face one’s fate alone, learns about the workings and mechanisms of power, and rejects the dominant mantra of social isolation. There is strength in numbers. One of the most important things we can do to sustain a sense of courage and dignity is to imagine a new social order. That is, we must constantly work to revive the radical imagination by talking with others in order to rethink politics anew, imagine what a new politics and society would look like, one that is fundamentally anti-capitalist, and dedicated to creating the conditions for new democratic political and social formations. This suggests contending with and struggling against the forces that gave rise to Trump, particularly those that suggest that totalitarian forms are still with us. Rethinking politics anew also suggests the possibility of building broad-based alliances in order to create a robust economic and political agenda that connects democracy with a serious effort to interrogate the sources and structures of inequality, racism and authoritarianism that now plague the United States. This points to opening up new lines of understanding, dialogue and radical empathy. It means, as the philosopher George Yancy suggests, «learning how to love with courage.» A nonviolent movement for democratic socialism does not need vanguards, political purity or the seductions of ideological orthodoxy. On the contrary, it needs a politics without guarantees, one that is open to new ideas, self-reflection and understanding. Instead of ideologies of certainty, unchecked moralism and a politics of shaming, we need to understand the conditions that make it possible for people to internalize forms of domination, and that means interrogating forgotten histories and existing pedagogies of oppression. Recent polls indicate that two-thirds of Americans say this is the lowest point in American politics that they can recall. Such despair offers the possibility of a pedagogical intervention, one that provides a political opening to create a massive movement for resistance in the United States.

Rebecca Solnit has rightly argued that while we live in an age of despair, hope is a gift that we cannot surrender because it amplifies the power of alternative visions, offers up stories in which we can imagine the unimaginable, enables people to «move from depression to outrage,» and positions people to take seriously what they are for and what they are against. This suggests trying to understand how the very processes of learning constitute the political mechanisms through which identities — individual and collective — are shaped, desired, mobilized and take on the worldly practices of autonomy, self-reflection and self-determination as part of a larger struggle for economic and social justice.

How do we develop a new «language of liberation»?

First, it is crucial to develop a language in which it becomes possible to both imagine a future much different from the present. Second, it is crucial to develop a discourse of critique and possibility that refuses both to normalize existing relations of domination and control, and rejects the notion that capitalism and democracy are viewed as synonymous. It would be wise to heed the words of National Book Award winner Ursula K. Le Guin when she says, «We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.» Third, it is imperative to reject the notion that all problems are individual issues and can only be solved as a matter of individual action and responsibility. All three of these assumptions serve to depoliticize people and erase both what it means to make power visible and to organize collectively to address such problems. Fourth, there is a need, I believe, for a discourse that is historical, relational and comprehensive. Memory matters both in terms of reclaiming lost narratives of struggle and for assessing visions, strategies and tactics that still hold enormous possibilities in the present.

Developing a relational discourse means connecting the dots around issues that are often viewed in isolated terms. For instance, one cannot study the attack on public schools and higher education as sutured internal issues that focus exclusively on the teaching methods and strategies. What is needed are analyses that link such attacks to the broader issue of inequality, the dynamics of casino capitalism and the pervasive racism active in promoting new forms of segregation both within and outside of schools. A comprehensive politics is one that does at least two things. On the one hand, it tries to understand a plethora of problems, from massive poverty to the despoiling of the planet, within a broader understanding of politics. That is, it connects the dots among diverse forms of oppression. In this instance, the focus is on the totality of politics, one that focuses on the power relations of global capitalism, the rise of illiberal democracy, the archives of authoritarianism and the rise of financial capital. A totalizing view of oppression allows the development of a language that is capable of making visible the ideological and structural forces of the new forms of domination at work in the United States and across the globe. On the other hand, such a comprehensive understanding of politics makes it possible to bring together a range of crucial issues and movements so as to expand the range of oppressions, while at the same time, providing a common ground for these diverse groups to be able to work together in the interest of the common good and a broad struggle for democratic socialism.

Finally, any viable language of emancipation needs to develop a discourse of educated hope. Naming what is wrong in a society is important, but it is not enough, because such criticism can sometimes be overpowering and lead to a paralyzing despair or, even worse, a crippling cynicism. Hope speaks to imagining a life beyond capitalism, and combines a realistic sense of limits with a lofty vision of demanding the impossible. As Ariel Dorfman has argued, progressives need a language that is missing from our political vocabulary, one that insists that «alternative worlds are possible, that they are within reach if we’re courageous enough, and smart enough, and daring enough to take control of our own lives.» Reason, justice and change cannot blossom without hope because educated hope taps into our deepest experiences and longing for a life of dignity with others, a life in which it becomes possible to imagine a future that does not mimic the present.

 

MARK KARLIN

Mark Karlin is the editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout. He served as editor and publisher of BuzzFlash for 10 years before joining Truthout in 2010. BuzzFlash has won four Project Censored Awards. Karlin writes a commentary five days a week for BuzzFlash, as well as articles (ranging from the failed «war on drugs» to reviews relating to political art) for Truthout. He also interviews authors and filmmakers whose works are featured in Truthout’s Progressive Picks of the Week. Before linking with Truthout, Karlin conducted interviews with cultural figures, political progressives and innovative advocates on a weekly basis for 10 years. He authored many columns about the lies propagated to launch the Iraq War.

 

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