Critical pedagogy

Educated Hope in Dark Times: The Challenge of the Educator/Artist as a Public Intellectual

Henry Giroux

By: Dr. Henry Giroux

Introduction By: Jaroslav Anděl

This first roundtable in the series What Education Do We Need? comprises two parts. Part one features a lead essay by Henry A. Giroux titled “Educated Hope in Dark Times: The Challenge of the Educator/Artist as a Public Intellectual”; the second part includes four responses by thinkers from different backgrounds: Nicolas Buchoud and Lan-Phuong Phan (France and Vietnam), Yaacov Hecht (Israel), Thomas Krüger (Germany), and Helena Singer (Brazil).

Education impacts everything else and makes us who we are as individuals, communities, and society. Exclusion in education impoverishes the human mind and diminishes humanity. To quote Comenius, the father of modern education: “The school is the manufactory of humanity… the whole is not the whole if any part is lacking… whoever then does not wish to appear a half-wit or evil-minded, must wish good to all men, and not only to himself, or only to his own near ones, or only to his own nation.”

While we have deemed those tenets self-evident, various leaders and movements have recently emerged who wish good firstly to themselves, or only to their near ones, or only to their own nation. The first roundtable on Democracy and Education opens with Henry Giroux’s essay, in which he addresses this particular challenge personified by the presidency of Donald Trump.

Trump’s presence in American politics has made visible a plague of deep seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system, and a contempt for reason; it also points to the withering of civic attachments, the collapse of politics into the spectacle of celebrity culture, the decline of public life, the use of violence and fear to numb people into shock, and a willingness to transform politics into a pathology.

Giroux situates Trump’s presidency in a broader socio-political context of neoliberal ideology that has instrumentalized education and art by turning them into commodity. He emphasizes the necessity of reclaiming the primary mission of pedagogy as a political and moral practice, as educated hope that provides a counterweight and resistance to a growing authoritarianism.

Pedagogy is not a method but a moral and political practice, one that recognizes the relationship between knowledge and power, and at the same time realizes that central to all pedagogical practices is a struggle over agency, power, politics, and the formative cultures that make a radical democracy possible. This view of pedagogy does not mold, but inspires, and at the same time it is directive, capable of imagining a better world, the unfinished nature of agency, and the need to consistently reimagine a democracy that is never finished.

In its closing section, Giroux is challenging artists and educators to engage in a practice that addresses the possibility of interpretation as intervention in the world. He demands to reposition “pedagogy as a central category of politics itself,” and hence defines the artist and educator as a public intellectual who understands pedagogy as central to politics. He points out that when progressive artists and activists present “what might be called a barrage of demystifying facts and an aesthetics of transgression,” they fail to address the crises of imagination and agency. In the last paragraph, Giroux outlines a series of tasks that educators and artists as public intellectuals face today:

Pressing the claim for economic and political justice means working hard to develop alternative modes of consciousness, promote the proliferation of democratic public spheres, create the conditions for modes of mass resistance, and make the development of sustainable social movements central to any viable struggle for economic, political, and social justice. No viable democracy can exist without citizens who value and are willing to work towards the common good. That is as much a pedagogical question as it is a political challenge.

Increasingly, neoliberal regimes across Europe and North America have waged a major assault on critical pedagogy, public pedagogy, and the public spheres in which they take place. For instance, public and higher education are being defunded, turned into accountability factories, and now largely serve as adjuncts of an instrumental logic that mimics the values of the market. But, of course, this is not only true for spaces in which formal schooling takes place, it is also true for those public spheres and cultural apparatuses actively engaged in producing knowledge, values, subjectivities, and identities through a range of media and sites. This applies to a range of creative spaces including art galleries, museums, diverse sites that make up screen culture, and various elements of mainstream media.[1] What the apostles of neoliberalism have learned is that artistic production and its modes of public pedagogy can change how people view the world, and that pedagogy can be dangerous because it holds the potential for not only creating critically engaged students, intellectuals, and artists but can strengthen and expand the capacity of the imagination to think otherwise in order to act otherwise, hold power accountable, and imagine the unimaginable.

Pedagogies of repression…further a modern-day pandemic of loneliness and alienation.

Reclaiming pedagogy as a form of educated and militant hope begins with the crucial recognition that education is not solely about job training and the production of ethically challenged entrepreneurial subjects and that artistic production does not only have to serve market interests, but are also about matters of civic engagement and literacy, critical thinking, and the capacity for democratic agency, action, and change. It is also inextricably connected to the related issues of power, inclusion, and social responsibility.[2] If young people, artists, and other cultural workers are to develop a deep respect for others, a keen sense of the common good, as well as an informed notion of community engagement, pedagogy must be viewed as a cultural, political, and moral force that provides the knowledge, values, and social relations to make such democratic practices possible. In this instance, pedagogy needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom and liberation for the most vulnerable and oppressed, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles into public issues. Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must overcome the image of education as purely instrumental, as dead zones of the imagination, and sites of oppressive discipline and imposed conformity.

Pedagogies of repression do more than impose punishing forms of discipline on students and deaden their ability to think critically, they also further a modern-day pandemic of loneliness and alienation. Such pedagogies emphasize aggressive competition, unchecked individualism, and cancel out empathy for an exaggerated notion of self-interest. Solidarity and sharing are the enemy of these pedagogical practices, which are driven by a withdrawal from sustaining public values, trust, and goods and serve largely to cancel out a democratic future for young people. This poses a particular challenge for educators and other cultural workers who want to take up the role of engaged public intellectuals because it speaks less to the role of the intellectual as a celebrity than it does to the kind of pedagogical work in which they engage.

At stake here is the need for artists, educators, and others to create pedagogical practices that create militant dreamers, people capable of envisioning a more just and democratic world and are willing to struggle for it. In this instance, pedagogy becomes not only central to politics but also a practice dedicated to creating a sense of belonging, community, empathy, and practices that address changing the way people think and navigate conflicts emotionally—practices that awaken passion and energize forms of identification that speak to the conditions in which people find themselves. In the shark-like world of neoliberal-driven values, excessive competition, uncertainty, and deep-seated fears of the other, there is no room for empathetic conversations that focus on the common good, democratic values, or the pedagogical conditions that would further critical dialogue and the potential for students to learn how to hold power accountable.

Critical pedagogy…should be cosmopolitan and imaginative…

Domination is at its most powerful when its mechanisms of control and subjugation hide in the discourses of common sense, and its elements of power are made to appear invisible. Public intellectuals can take up the challenge of not only relating their specialties and modes of cultural production to the intricacies of everyday life but also to rethinking how politics works, and how power is central to such a task. Bruce Robbins articulates the challenge well in both his defense of the intellectual and his reference to how other theorists such as Michel Foucault provide a model for such work. He writes:

But I also thought that intellectuals should be trying, like Foucault, to relate our specialized knowledge to things in general. We could not just become activists focused on particular struggles or editors striving to help little magazines make ends meet. We also had a different kind of role to play: thinking hard, as Foucault did, about how best to understand the ways power worked in our time. Foucault, like Sartre and Sontag and Said, was an intellectual, even at some points despite himself. He helped us understand the world in newly critical and imaginative ways. He offered us new lines of reasoning while also engaging in activism and political position-taking. Why, then, is there so much discomfort with using the term “intellectual” as an honorific?[3]

But power is not just a theoretical abstraction, it shapes the spaces in which everyday life takes place and touches peoples’ lives at multiple registers, all of which represent in part a struggle over their identities, values, and views of others and the larger world. Critical pedagogy must be meaningful in order to be critical and transformative. That is, it should be cosmopolitan and imaginative—a public affirming pedagogy that demands a critical and engaged interaction with the world we live in, mediated by a responsibility for challenging structures of domination and for alleviating human suffering. This is a pedagogy that addresses the needs of multiple publics. As an ethical and political practice, a public pedagogy of wakefulness rejects modes of education removed from political or social concerns, divorced from history and matters of injury and injustice. This is a pedagogy that includes “lifting complex ideas into the public space,” recognizing human injury inside and outside of the academy and using theory as a form of criticism to change things.[4] This is a pedagogy in which artists, educators, and other cultural workers are neither afraid of controversy nor a willingness to make connections between private issues and broader elements of society’s problems that are otherwise hidden. Nor are they afraid of using their work to address the challenges of the day.

As the practice of freedom, critical pedagogy arises from the conviction that artists, educators and other cultural workers have a responsibility to unsettle power, trouble consensus, and challenge common sense. This is a view of pedagogy that should disturb, inspire, and energize a vast array of individuals and publics. Critical pedagogy comes with the responsibility to view intellectual and artistic work as public, assuming a duty to enter into the public sphere unafraid to take positions and generate controversy, functioning as moral witnesses, raising political awareness, making connections to those elements of power and politics often hidden from public view, and reminding “the audience of the moral questions that may be hidden in the clamor and din of the public debate.”[5]

…our responsibilities as cultural workers cannot be separated from the consequences of the knowledge we produce, the social relations we legitimate, and the ideologies and identities we offer…

Pedagogy is not a method but a moral and political practice, one that recognizes the relationship between knowledge and power, and at the same time realizes that central to all pedagogical practices is a struggle over agency, power, politics, and the formative cultures that make a radical democracy possible. This view of pedagogy does not mould, but inspires, and at the same time it is directive, capable of imagining a better world, the unfinished nature of agency, and the need to consistently reimagine a democracy that is never finished. In this sense, critical pedagogy is a form of educated hope committed to producing young people capable and willing to expand and deepen their sense of themselves, to think the “world” critically, “to imagine something other than their own well-being,” to serve the public good, take risks, and struggle for a substantive democracy that is now in a state of acute crisis as the dark clouds of totalitarianism are increasingly threatening to destroy democracy itself on a global scale.[6]

Pedagogy is always the outcome of struggles, especially in terms of how pedagogical practices produce particular notions of citizenship and an inclusive democracy. Pedagogy looms large in this instance not as a technique or a prioriset of methods but as a political and moral practice. As a political practice, pedagogy illuminates the relationship among power, knowledge, and ideology, while self-consciously, if not self-critically, recognizing the role it plays as a deliberate attempt to influence how and what knowledge and identities are produced within particular sets of social relations. As a moral practice, pedagogy recognizes that what cultural workers, artists, activists, media workers and others teach cannot be abstracted from what it means to invest in public life, presuppose some notion of the future, or locate oneself in a public discourse.

The moral implications of pedagogy also suggest that our responsibilities as cultural workers cannot be separated from the consequences of the knowledge we produce, the social relations we legitimate, and the ideologies and identities we offer up to students. Refusing to decouple politics from pedagogy means, in part, that teaching in classrooms or in any other public sphere should not only simply honor the experiences people bring to such sites, including the classroom, but should also connect their experiences to specific problems that emanate from the material contexts of their everyday life. Pedagogy in this sense becomes performative in that it is not merely about deconstructing texts but about situating politics itself within a broader set of relations that addresses what it might mean to create modes of individual and social agency that enables rather than shuts down democratic values, practices, and social relations. Such a project recognizes not only the political nature of pedagogy, but also situates it within a call for artists, intellectuals, and others to assume responsibility for their actions, to link their teachings to those moral principles that allow us to do something about human suffering, as Susan Sontag once suggested.[7] Part of this task necessitates that cultural workers anchor their own work, however diverse, in a radical project that seriously engages the promise of an unrealized democracy against its really existing and radically incomplete forms. Of crucial importance to such a project is rejecting the assumption that theory can understand social problems without contesting their appearance in public life. Yet, any viable cultural politics needs a socially committed notion of injustice if we are to take seriously what it means to fight for the idea of good society. I think Zygmunt Bauman is right in arguing that “If there is no room for the idea of wrong society, there is hardly much chance for the idea of good society to be born, let alone make waves.”[8]

“left intellectuals must recognize that the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical, and lie on the side of belief and persuasion.”

Artists and other cultural workers should consider being more forceful, if not committed, to linking their overall politics to modes of critique and collective action that address the presupposition that democratic societies are never too just or just enough, and such a recognition means that a society must constantly nurture the possibilities for self-critique, collective agency, and forms of citizenship in which people play a fundamental role in critically discussing, administrating and shaping the material relations of power and ideological forces that bear down on their everyday lives. At stake here is the task, as Jacques Derrida insists, of viewing the project of democracy as a promise, a possibility rooted in an ongoing struggle for economic, cultural, and social justice.[9] Democracy in this instance is not a sutured or formalistic regime, it is the site of struggle itself. The struggle over creating an inclusive and just democracy can take many forms, offers no political guarantees, and provides an important normative dimension to politics as an ongoing process of democratization that never ends. Such a project is based on the realization that a democracy that is open to exchange, question, and self-criticism never reaches the limits of justice.

Theorists such as Raymond Williams and Cornelius Castoriadis recognized that the crisis of democracy was not only about the crisis of culture but also the crisis of pedagogy and education. Cultural workers would do well to take account of the profound transformations taking place in the public sphere and reclaim pedagogy as a central category of politics itself. Pierre Bourdieu was right when he stated that cultural workers have too often “underestimated the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle and have not always forged appropriate weapons to fight on this front.”[10] He goes on to say in a later conversation with Gunter Grass that “left intellectuals must recognize that the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical, and lie on the side of belief and persuasion. Important to recognize that intellectuals bear an enormous responsibility for challenging this form of domination.”[11] These are important pedagogical interventions and imply rightly that critical pedagogy in the broadest sense is not just about understanding, however critical, but also provides the conditions, ideals, and practices necessary for assuming the responsibilities we have as citizens to expose human misery and to eliminate the conditions that produce it. Matters of responsibility, social action, and political intervention do not simply develop out of social critique but also forms of self-critique. The relationship between knowledge and power, on the one hand, and creativity and politics, on the other, should always be self-reflexive about its effects, how it relates to the larger world, whether or not it is open to new understandings, and what it might mean pedagogically to take seriously matters of individual and social responsibility. In short, this project points to the need for cultural workers to address critical pedagogy not only as a mode of educated hope and a crucial element of an insurrectional educational project, but also as a practice that addresses the possibility of interpretation as intervention in the world.

Graziela Kunsch, Escolas [Schools], 2016. Video, 3:45, 1920 x 1080, 16:9, NTSC, color, no sound. Courtesy of the artist and featured in the exhibition, Back to the Sandbox: Art and Radical Pedagogy at the Western Gallery, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA.

Critical pedagogy can neither be reduced to a method nor is it non-directive in the manner of a spontaneous conversation with friends over coffee. As public intellectuals, authority must be reconfigured not as a way to stifle the curiosity and deaden the imagination, but as a platform that provided the conditions for students to learn the knowledge, skills, values, and social relationships that enhance their capacities to assume authority over the forces that shape their lives both in and out of schools. Power and authority are always related, but such a relationship must never operate in the service of domination or the stifling of autonomy but in the service of what I have called the practice of freedom. The notion that authority is always on the side of repression and that pedagogy should never be directive is for all practical purposes a political and theoretical flight from the educator assuming a sense of moral and political responsibility. For artists and educators to be voiceless, renounce the knowledge that gives them a sense of authority, and to assume that a wider public does not need to be exposed to modes of knowledge, histories, and values outside of their immediate experience is to forget that pedagogy is always about the struggle over knowledge, desire, identity, values, agency, and a vision of the future. Critical pedagogy for public intellectuals must always be attentive to addressing the democratic potential of engaging how experience, knowledge, and power are shaped in the classroom in different and often unequal contexts, and how teacher authority might be mobilized against dominant pedagogical practices as part of the practice of freedom, particularly those practices that erase any trace of subaltern histories, historical legacies of class struggles, and the ever persistent historical traces and current structures of racial and gender inequalities and injustices. In this sense, teacher authority must be linked both to a never-ending sense of historical memory, existing inequities, and a “hopeful version of democracy where the outcome is a more just, equitable society that works toward the end of oppression and suffering of all.”[12] As I have said elsewhere:

Authority in this perspective is not simply on the side of oppression, but is used to intervene and shape the space of teaching and learning to provide students with a range of possibilities for challenging a society’s commonsense assumptions, and for analyzing the interface between their own everyday lives and those broader social formations that bear down on them. Authority, at best, becomes both a referent for legitimating a commitment to a particular vision of pedagogy and a critical referent for a kind of autocritique.[13]

Any viable understanding of the artist and educator as a public intellectual must begin with the recognition that democracy begins to fail and civic life becomes impoverished when pedagogy is no longer viewed as central to politics. This is clearly the case as made visible in the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Trump’s claim that he loves the uneducated appears to have paid off for him just as his victory makes clear that ignorance rather than reason, emotion rather than informed judgment, and the threat of violence rather than critical exchange appear to have more currency in the age of Trump. In part, this political tragedy signifies the failure of the American public to recognize the educative nature of how agency is constructed, to address the necessity for moral witnessing, and the need to create a formative culture that produces critically engaged and socially responsible citizens. Such a failure empties democracy of any meaning. Such actions represent more than a flight from political and social responsibility; they also represent a surrender to the dark forces of authoritarianism. Democracy should be a way of thinking about education in a variety of spheres and practices, one that thrives on connecting equity to excellence, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of the public good.[14] The question regarding what role education and pedagogy should play in democracy becomes all the more urgent at a time when the dark forces of authoritarianism are on the march all over the globe. Public values, trust, solidarities, and modes of education are under siege. As such, the discourses of hate, humiliation, rabid self-interest, and greed are exercising a poisonous influence in many Western societies. This is most evident at the present moment in the discourse of the right-wing extremists vying to consolidate their authority within a Trump presidency, all of whom sanction a war on immigrants, women, young people, poor Black youth, and so it goes. Under such circumstances, democracy is on life support. Yet rather than being a rationale for cynicism, radical democracy as both a pedagogical project and unfinished ideal should create an individual and collective sense of moral and political outrage, a new understanding of politics, and the pedagogical projects needed to allow democracy to breathe once again.

If the authoritarianism of the Trump era is to be challenged, it must begin with a politics that is comprehensive in its attempts to understand the intersectionality of diverse forces of oppression and resistance.

Trump’s presence in American politics has made visible a plague of deep-seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system, and a contempt for reason; it also points to the withering of civic attachments, the collapse of politics into the spectacle of celebrity culture, the decline of public life, the use of violence and fear to numb people into shock, and a willingness to transform politics into a pathology. Trump’s administration will produce a great deal of violence in American society, particularly among the ranks of the most vulnerable: poor children, minorities of colour, immigrants, women, climate change advocates, Muslims, and those protesting a Trump presidency. What must be made clear is that Trump’s election and the damage he will do to American society will stay and fester for quite some time because he is only symptomatic of the darker forces that have been smoldering in American politics for the last 40 years. What cannot be exaggerated or easily dismissed is that Trump is the end result of a longstanding series of attacks on democracy and that his presence in the American political landscape has put democracy on trial. This is a challenge that artists, educators, and others must address. While mass civil demonstrations have and continue to erupt over Trump’s election, what is more crucial to understand is that something more serious needs to be addressed. We have to acknowledge that at this particular moment in American history the real issue is not simply about resisting Donald Trump’s insidious values and anti-democratic policies but whether a political system can be reclaimed in which democracy is not on trial but is deepened, strengthened and sustained. This will not happen unless new modes of representation challenge the aesthetics, culture, and discourse of neo-fascism. Yet, under a Trump presidency, it will be more difficult to sustain, construct, and nurture those public spheres that sustain critique, informed dialogue, and a work to expand the radical imagination. If democracy is to prevail in and through the threat of “dark times,” it is crucial that the avenues of critique and possibility become central to any new understanding of politics. If the authoritarianism of the Trump era is to be challenged, it must begin with a politics that is comprehensive in its attempts to understand the intersectionality of diverse forces of oppression and resistance. That is, on the one hand, it must move towards developing analyses that address the existing state of authoritarianism through a totalizing lens that brings together the diverse registers of oppression and how they are both connected and mutually reinforce each other. On the other hand, such a politics must, as Robin D.G. Kelley has noted, “move beyond stopgap alliances”[15] and work to unite single issue movements into a more comprehensive and broad-based social movement that can make a viable claim to a resistance that is as integrated as it is powerful. For too long progressive cultural workers and activists have adhered to a narrative about domination that relies mostly on remaking economic structures and presenting to the public what might be called a barrage of demystifying facts and an aesthetics of transgression. What they have ignored is that people also internalize oppression and that domination is about not only the crisis of economics, images that deaden the imagination, and the misrepresentation of reality, but also about the crisis of agency, identification, meaning, and desire.

The crisis of economics and politics in the Trump era has not been matched by a crisis of consciousness and agency. The failure to develop a crisis of consciousness is deeply rooted in a society in that suffers from a plague of atomization, loneliness, and despair. Neoliberalism has undermined any democratic understanding of freedom, limiting its meaning to the dictates of consumerism, hatred of government, and a politics in which the personal is the only emotional referent that matters. Freedom has collapsed into the dark abyss of a vapid and unchecked individualism and in doing so has cancelled out that capacious notion of freedom rooted in bonds of solidarity, compassion, social responsibility, and the bonds of social obligations. The toxic neoliberal combination of unchecked economic growth and its discourse of plundering the earth’s resources, coupled with a rabid individualism marked largely by its pathological disdain for community and public values, has weakened democratic pressures, values, and social relations and opened the door for the election of Donald Trump to the American Presidency. This collapse of democratic politics points to an absence in progressive movements and among various types of public intellectuals about how to address the importance of emotional connections among the masses, take seriously how to connect with others through pedagogical tools that demand respect, empathy, a willingness to listen to other stories, and to think seriously about how to change consciousness as an educative task. The latter is particularly important because it speaks to the necessity politically address the challenge of awakening modes of identification coupled with the use of language not merely to demystify but to persuade people that the issues that matter have something to do with their lived realities and daily lives. Pressing the claim for economic and political justice means working hard to develop alternative modes of consciousness, promote the proliferation of democratic public spheres, create the conditions for modes of mass resistance, and make the development of sustainable social movements central to any viable struggle for economic, political, and social justice. No viable democracy can exist without citizens who value and are willing to work towards the common good. That is as much a pedagogical question as it is a political challenge.

[1] Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011).

[2] On this issue, see Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education(Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2014); Susan Searls Giroux, “On the Civic Function of Intellectuals Today,” in Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, eds. Education as Civic Engagement: Toward a More Democratic Society (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2012), pp. ix-xvii.

[3] Bruce Robbins, “A Starting Point for Politics,” The Nation, (October 22, 2016). Online: https://www.thenation.com/article/the-radical-life-of-stuart-hall

[4] Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Vintage, 2000) p. 7.

[5] Edward Said, “On Defiance and Taking Positions,” Reflections On Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 504.

[6] See, especially, Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

[7] Susan Sontag, “Courage and Resistance,” The Nation (May 5, 2003), pp. 11-14.

[8] Zygmunt Bauman, Society under Siege (Malden, MA: Blackwell: 2002), p. 170.

[9] Jacques Derrida, “Intellectual Courage: An Interview,” trans. Peter Krapp, Culture Machine, Volume 2 (2000), pp. 1-15.

[10] Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 11.

[11] Pierre Bourdieu and Gunter Grass, “The ‘Progressive’ Restoration: A Franco-German Dialogue,” New Left Review 14 (March-April, 2002), P. 2

[12] Richard Voelz, “Reconsidering the Image of Preacher-Teacher: Intersections between Henry Giroux’s Critical Pedagogy and Homiletics,” Practical Matters (Spring 2014), p. 79.

[13] Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy (New York: Continuum, 2011) p.81.

[14] Henry A. Giroux, Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism(New York: Routledge, 2015).

[15] Robin D. G. Kelley, “After Trump,” Boston Review (November 15, 2016). Online: http://bostonreview.net/forum/after-trump/robin-d-g-kelley-trump-says-go-back-we-say-fight-back

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Education & Democracy

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When Schools Become Dead Zones of the Imagination: A Critical Pedagogy Manifesto

Henry Giroux

By. Henry Giroux

calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

If the right-wing billionaires and apostles of corporate power have their way, public schools will become “dead zones of the imagination,” reduced to anti-public spaces that wage an assault on critical thinking, civic literacy and historical memory.1 Since the 1980s, schools have increasingly become testing hubs that de-skill teachers and disempower students. They have also been refigured as punishment centers where low-income and poor minority youth are harshly disciplined under zero tolerance policies in ways that often result in their being arrested and charged with crimes that, on the surface, are as trivial as the punishment is harsh. 2 Under casino capitalism’s push to privatize education, public schools have been closed in cities such as, Philadelphia, Chicago and New York to make way for charter schools. Teacher unions have been attacked, public employees denigrated and teachers reduced to technicians working under deplorable and mind-numbing conditions. 3

Corporate school reform is not simply obsessed with measurements that degrade any viable understanding of the connection between schooling and educating critically engaged citizens. The reform movement is also determined to underfund and disinvest resources for public schooling so that public education can be completely divorced from any democratic notion of governance, teaching and learning. In the eyes of billionaire un-reformers and titans of finance such as Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, the Walton family and Michael Bloomberg, public schools should be transformed, when not privatized, into adjuncts of shopping centers and prisons. 4

Like the dead space of the American mall, the school systems promoted by the un-reformers offer the empty ideological seduction of consumerism as the ultimate form of citizenship and learning. And, adopting the harsh warehousing mentality of prison wardens, the un-reformers endorse and create schools for poor students that punish rather than educate in order to channel disposable populations into the criminal justice system where they can fuel the profits of private prison corporations. The militarization of public schools that Secretary Arnie Duncan so admired and supported while he was the CEO of the Chicago School System was not only a ploy to instill authoritarian discipline practices against students disparagingly labeled as unruly, if not disposable. It was also an attempt to design schools that would break the capacity of students to think critically and render them willing and potential recruits to serve in senseless and deadly wars waged by the American empire. And, if such recruitment efforts failed, then students were quickly put on the conveyor belt of the school-to-prison pipeline.  For many poor minority youth in the public schools, prison becomes part of their destiny, just as public schools reinforce their status as second-class citizens. As Michelle Alexander points out, “Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, [they] are feeding our prisons.” 5

Market-driven educational reforms, with their obsession with standardization, high-stakes testing, and punitive policies, also mimic a culture of cruelty that neoliberal policies produce in the wider society. They exhibit contempt for teachers and distrust of parents, repress creative teaching, destroy challenging and imaginative programs of study and treat students as mere inputs on an assembly line. Trust, imagination, creativity, and a respect for critical teaching and learning are thrown to the wind in the pursuit of profits and the proliferation of rigid, death-dealing accountability schemes. As John Tierney points out in his critique of corporate education reforms in The Atlantic, such approaches are not only oppressive – they are destined to fail. He writes:

Policies and practices that are based on distrust of teachers and disrespect for them will fail. Why? ‘The fate of the reforms ultimately depends on those who are the object of distrust.’ In other words, educational reforms need teachers’ buy-in, trust, and cooperation to succeed; ‘reforms’ that kick teachers in the teeth are never going to succeed. Moreover, education policies crafted without teacher involvement are bound to be wrongheaded. 6

The situation is further worsened in that not only are public schools being defunded and public school teachers attacked as the new welfare queens, but social and economic policies are being enacted by Republicans and other right-wingers to ensure low-income and poor minority students fail in public schools. For instance, many Tea Party-elected governors in states such as Wisconsin, North Carolina and Maine, along with right-wing politicians in Congress, are enacting cruel and savage policies (such as the defunding of the food stamp program) that directly impact on the health and well-being of poor students in schools. 7 Such policies shrink, if not destroy, the educational opportunities of poor youth by denying them the basic provisions they need to learn and then utilizing the consequent negative educational outcomes as one more illegitimate rationale for turning public schools over to private interests.

To read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.

When billionaire club members, such as Bill Gates and right-wing donors such as Art Pope, are not directly implementing policies that defund schools, they are funding research projects that turn students into test subjects for a world that even George Orwell would have found hard to imagine. 8 For instance, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has provided a $500,000 grant to Clemson University to do a pilot study in which students would wear galvanic skin bracelets with wireless sensors that would track their physiological responses to various stimuli in the schools. A spokesperson for the foundation argues in defense of this creepy obsession with measuring students’ emotional responses by claiming that the biometric devices are a help to teachers who can measure “‘real-time’ (reflective feedback), kind of like a pedometer.” 9

It is not the vagueness of what this type of research is trying to achieve that is the most ludicrous and ethically offensive part of this study: It is the notion that reflective feedback can be reduced to measuring emotional impulses rather than produced through engaged dialogue and communication between actual teachers and students. How can bracelets measure why students are acting out if they are hungry, bored, fearful, sick or lack sleep because their parents might be homeless? How do such studies address larger structural issues such as the 50 million people in the United States who go hungry every night, one-third of whom are children?  And how do they manage to ignore their own connection to the rise of the surveillance state and the ongoing destruction of the civil rights of children and others? Research of this kind cannot speak to the rise of a Jim Crow society in which the mass incarceration of poor minorities is having a horrible effect on children. As Michelle Alexander points out, these are children “who have a parent or loved one, a relative, who has either spent time behind bars or who has acquired a criminal record and thus is part of the under-caste – the group of people who can be legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives.” 10 And the effect of such daily struggle is deadly. She writes:

. . . For these children, their life chances are greatly diminished. They are more likely to be raised in severe poverty; their parents are unlikely to be able to find work or housing and are often ineligible even for food stamps. For children, the era of mass incarceration has meant a tremendous amount of family separation, broken homes, poverty, and a far, far greater level of hopelessness as they see so many of their loved ones cycling in and out of prison. Children who have incarcerated parents are far more likely themselves to be incarcerated. 11

In contrast to the socially and ethically numb forms of educational research endorsed by so-called reformers, a recent study has linked high-stakes testing to lower graduation rates and higher incarceration rates, indicating that such testing plays a significant role in expanding “the machinery of the school-to-prison pipeline,” especially for low-income students and students of color.12  Most critics of the billionaires’ club ignore these issues. But a number of critics, such as New York University education professor Diane Ravitch, have raised significant questions about this type of research. Ravitch argues that Gates should “devote more time to improving the substance of what is being taught . . . and give up on all this measurement mania.” 13 Such critiques are important, but they could go further. Such reform efforts are about more than collapsing teaching and learning into an instrumental reductionism that approximates training rather than education. As Ken Saltman points out, the new un-reformers are political counter-revolutionaries and not simply misguided educators. 14

Noam Chomsky gets it right in arguing that we are now in a general period of regression that extends far beyond impacting education alone. 15 This period of regression is marked by massive inequalities in wealth, income and power that are fueling a poverty and ecological crisis and undermining every basic public sphere central to both democracy and the culture and structures necessary for people to lead a life of dignity and political participation. 16 The burden of cruelty, repression and corruption has broken the back of democracy, however weak, in the United States. America is no longer a democracy, nor is it simply a plutocracy. It has become an authoritarian state steeped in violence and run by the commanding financial, cultural and political agents of corporate power. 17

Corporate sovereignty has replaced political sovereignty, and the state has become largely an adjunct of banking institutions and financial service industries. Addicted to “the political demobilization of the citizenry,” the corporate elite is waging a political backlash against all institutions that serve democracy and foster a culture of questioning, dialogue and dissent. 18 The apostles of neoliberalism are concerned primarily with turning public schools over to casino capitalism in order to transform them into places where all but the privileged children of the 1% can be disciplined and cleansed of any critical impulses. Instead of learning to become independent thinkers, they acquire the debilitating habits of what might be called a moral and political deficit disorder that renders them passive and obedient in the face of a society based on massive inequalities in power, wealth and income. The current powerful corporate-based un-reform movement is wedded to developing modes of governance, ideologies and pedagogies dedicated to constraining and stunting any possibility for developing among students those critical, creative, and collaborative forms of thought and action necessary for participating in a substantive democracy.

At the core of the new reforms is a commitment to a pedagogy of stupidity and repression that is geared toward memorization, conformity, passivity, and high stakes testing. Rather than create autonomous, critical, and civically engaged students, the un-reformers kill the imagination while depoliticizing all vestiges of teaching and learning. The only language they know is the discourse of profit and the disciplinary language of command. John Taylor Gatto points to some elements of this pedagogy of repression in his claim that schools teach confusion by ignoring historical and relational contexts. 19  Every topic is taught in isolation and communicated by way of sterile pieces of information that have no shared meanings or context.

A pedagogy of repression defines students largely by their shortcomings rather than by their strengths, and in doing so convinces them that the only people who know anything are the experts – increasingly drawn from the ranks of the elite and current business leaders who embody the new models of leadership under the current regime of neoliberalism. Great historical leaders who exhibited heightened social consciousness such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, John Dewey, Paulo Freire and Mahatma Ghandi are relegated to the dustbin of history. Students are taught only to care about themselves and to view any consideration for others as a liability, if not a pathology. Ethical concerns under these circumstances are represented as hindrances to be overcome. Narcissism along with an unchecked notion of individualism is the new normal.

Under a pedagogy of repression, students are conditioned to unlearn any respect for democracy, justice, and what it might mean to connect learning to social change. They are told that they have no rights and that rights are limited only to those who have power. This is a pedagogy that kills the spirit, promotes conformity, and is more suited to an authoritarian society than a democracy. What is alarming about the new education un-reformers is not only how their policies have failed, but the degree to which such policies are now embraced by liberals and conservatives in both the Democratic and Republican Parties despite their evident failure. 20 The Broader, Bolder Approach to Education study provides a list of such failures that are instructive. The outcomes of un-reform measures noted in the study include:

Test scores increased less, and achievement gaps grew more, in “reform” cities than in other urban districts. Reported successes for targeted students evaporated upon closer examination. Test-based accountability prompted churn that thinned the ranks of experienced teachers, but not necessarily bad teachers. School closures did not send students to better schools or save school districts money.  Charter schools further disrupted the districts while providing mixed benefits, particularly for the highest-needs students. Emphasis on the widely touted market-oriented reforms drew attention and resources from initiatives with greater promise.  The reforms missed a critical factor driving achievement gaps: the influence of poverty on academic performance. Real, sustained change requires strategies that are more realistic, patient and multipronged. 21

The slavish enthusiasm of the cheerleaders for market-driven educational policies becomes particularly untenable morally and politically in light of the increasing number of scandals that have erupted around inflated test scores and other forms of cheating committed by advocates of high stakes testing and charter schools. 22 David Kirp offers an important commentary on the seriousness and scope of the scandals and the recent setbacks of market-oriented educational reform. He writes:

In the latest Los Angeles school board election, a candidate who dared to question the overreliance on test results in evaluating teachers and the unseemly rush to approve charter schools won despite $4 million amassed to defeat him, including $1 million from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and $250,000 from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Former Atlanta superintendent Beverly Hall, feted for boosting her students’ test scores at all costs, has been indicted in a massive cheating scandal. Michelle Rhee, the former Washington D.C. school chief who is the darling of the accountability crowd, faces accusations, based on a memo released by veteran PBS correspondent John Merrow, that she knew about, and did nothing to stop, widespread cheating. In a Washington Post op-ed, Bill Gates, who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting high-stakes, test-driven teacher evaluation, did an about-face and urged a kinder, gentler approach that teachers could embrace. And parents in New York State staged a rebellion, telling their kids not to take a new and untested achievement exam. 23

While pedagogies of repression come in different forms and address different audiences in various contexts, they all share a commitment to defining pedagogy as a set of strategies and skills to use in order to teach prescribed subject matter. In this context, pedagogy becomes synonymous with teaching as a technique or the practice of a craft-like skill. There is no talk here of connecting pedagogy with the social and political task of resistance, empowerment or democratization. Nor is there any attempt to show how knowledge, values, desire and social relations are always implicated in power.  Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must reject such definitions of teaching and their proliferating imitations even when they are claimed as part of a radical discourse or project.  In opposition to the instrumentalized reduction of pedagogy to a mere method that has no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility or the demands of citizenship, critical pedagogy works to illuminate the relationships among knowledge, authority and power. 24 For instance, it raises questions regarding who has control over the conditions for producing knowledge such as the curricula being promoted by teachers, textbook companies, corporate interests or other forces?

Central to any viable notion of what makes a pedagogy critical is, in part, the recognition that pedagogy is always a deliberate attempt on the part of educators to influence how and what forms of knowledge and subjectivities are produced within particular sets of social relations. In this case, critical pedagogy draws attention to the ways in which knowledge, power, desire, and experience are produced under specific conditions of learning, and in doing so rejects the notion that teaching is just a method or is removed from matters of values, norms, and power – or, for that matter, the struggle over agency itself and the future it suggests for young people. Rather than asserting its own influence in order to wield authority over passive subjects, critical pedagogy is situated within a project that views education as central to creating students who are socially responsible and civically engaged citizens. This kind of pedagogy reinforces the notion that public schools are democratic public spheres, education is the foundation for any working democracy and teachers are the most responsible agents for fostering that education.

This approach to critical pedagogy does not reduce educational practice to the mastery of methodologies. It stresses, instead, the importance of understanding what actually happens in classrooms and other educational settings by raising questions such as:  What is the relationship between learning and social change?  What knowledge is of most worth?  What does it mean to know something? And in what direction should one desire?  Yet the principles and goals of critical pedagogy encompass more. Pedagogy is simultaneously about the knowledge and practices teachers and students might engage in together and the values, social relations and visions legitimated by such knowledge and practices. Such a pedagogy listens to students, gives them a voice and role in their own learning, and recognizes that teachers not only educate students but also learn from them.

In addition, pedagogy is conceived as a moral and political practice that is always implicated in power relations because it offers particular versions and visions of civic life, community, the future, and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment.  Pedagogy provides a discourse for agency, values, social relations, and a sense of the future. It legitimates particular ways of knowing, being in the world, and relating to others. As Roger Simon observed, it also “represents a version of our own dreams for ourselves, our children, and our communities. But such dreams are never neutral; they are always someone’s dreams and to the degree that they are implicated in organizing the future for others they always have a moral and political dimension.” 25 It is in this respect that any discussion of pedagogy must begin with a discussion of educational practice as a particular way in which a sense of identity, place, worth, and above all, value is informed by practices that organize knowledge and meaning.

Central to my argument is the assumption that politics is not only about power, but also, “has to do with political judgements and value choices,” 26 indicating that questions of civic education and critical pedagogy (learning how to become a skilled citizen) are central to the struggle over political agency and democracy.  Critical pedagogy rejects the notion of students as passive containers who simply imbibe dead knowledge. Instead, it embraces forms of teaching that offer students the challenge to transform knowledge rather than simply “processing received knowledges.” 27 Under such circumstances, critical pedagogy becomes directive and intervenes on the side of producing a substantive democratic society. This is what makes critical pedagogy different from training. And it is precisely the failure to connect learning to its democratic functions and goals that provides rationales for pedagogical approaches that strip what it means to be educated from its critical and democratic possibilities. 28

Critical pedagogy becomes dangerous in the current historical moment because it emphasizes critical reflection, bridging the gap between learning and everyday life, understanding the connection between power and difficult knowledge, and extending democratic rights and identities by using the resources of history.  Rather than viewing teaching as technical practice, pedagogy in the broadest critical sense is premised on the assumption that learning is not about memorizing dead knowledge and skills associated with learning for the test but engaging in a more expansive struggle for individual rights and social justice. The fundamental challenge facing educators within the current age of neoliberalism, militarism, and religious fundamentalism is to provide the conditions for students to address how knowledge is related to the power of both self-definition and social agency. In part, this suggests providing students with the skills, ideas, values and authority necessary for them to nourish a substantive democracy, recognize antidemocratic forms of power and fight deeply rooted injustices in a society and world founded on systemic economic, racial and gendered inequalities.

Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must be understood as central to politics itself and rather than disconnect public education from larger social, economic and political issues, it must connect them to such forces as part of a wider crisis of both education and democracy. At the very least, education must be viewed as part of an emancipatory project that rejects the privatization and corporatization of public schools and the tax and finance forces that support iniquitous schools systems. For pedagogy to matter, it must support a culture and the relations of power that provide teachers with a sense of autonomy and control over the conditions of their labor. Teachers must be viewed as public intellectuals and a valuable social resource, and the conditions of their labor and autonomy must be protected. In this instance, the fight to preserve labor unions must be viewed as central to preserving the rights and working conditions necessary for public school teachers to teach with dignity under conditions that respect rather than degrade them.

Critical pedagogy must reject teaching being subordinated to the dictates of standardization, measurement mania and high stakes testing. The latter are part of a pedagogy of repression and conformity and have nothing to do with an education for empowerment.  Central to the call for a critical pedagogy and the formative and institutional culture that makes it possible is the need to reconfigure government spending and to call for less spending on death and war and more on funding for education and the social programs that make it possible as a foundation for a democratic society. Schools are about more than measurable utility, the logic of instrumentality, abject testing, and mind-numbing training. In fact, the latter have little to do with critical education and pedagogy and must be rejected as part of an austerity and neoliberal project that is deeply anti-intellectual, authoritarian, and antidemocratic.

As a moral and political project, pedagogy is crucial for creating the agents necessary to live in, govern and struggle for a radical democracy.  Moreover, it is important to recognize how education and pedagogy are connected to and implicated in the production not only of specific agents, a particular view of the present and future, but also how knowledge, values and desires, and social relations are always implicated in power. Power and ideology permeate all aspects of education and become a valuable resource when critically engaged around issues that problematize the relationship between authority and freedom, ethics and knowledge, language and experience, reading texts differently, and exploring the dynamics of cultural power. Critical pedagogy address power as a relationship in which conditions are produced that allow students to engage in a culture of questioning, to raise and address urgent, disturbing questions about the society in which they live, and to define in part the questions that can be asked and the disciplinary borders that can be crossed.

Education as a democratic project is utopian in its goal of expanding and deepening the ideological and material conditions that make a democracy possible. Teachers need to be able to work together, collaborate, work with the community, and engage in research that informs their teaching.  In this instance, critical pedagogy refuses the atomizing structure of teaching that informs traditional and market-driven notions of pedagogy. Moreover, critical pedagogy should provide students with the knowledge, modes of literacy, skills, critique, social responsibility, and civic courage needed to enable them to be engaged critical citizens willing to fight for a sustainable and just society.

Critical pedagogy is a crucial antidote to the neoliberal attack on public education, but it must be accompanied and informed by radical political and social movements willing to make educational reform central to democratic change. 29 The struggle over public education is inextricably connected to a struggle against poverty, racism, violence, war, bloated defense budgets, a permanent warfare state, state sanctioned assassinations, torture, inequality, and a range of other injustices that reveal a shocking glimpse of what America has become and why it can no longer recognize itself through the moral and political visions and promises of a substantive democracy. And such a struggle demands both a change in consciousness and the building of social movements that are broad-based and global in their reach.

The struggle to reclaim public education as a democratic public sphere needs to challenge the regressive pedagogies, gated communities, and cultural and political war zones that now characterize much of contemporary America. These sites of terminal exclusion demand more than making visible and interrogating critically the spectacle of cruelty and violence used to energize the decadent cultural apparatuses of casino capitalism. They demand an encounter with new forms of pedagogy, modes of moral witnessing, and collective action, and they demand new modes of social responsibility. As Martin Luther King, Jr. insisted, “We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.” 30  We can update King’s speech to encompass the weak, voiceless, and victims of our nation who are now represented by the low-income and poor minority youth who inhabit both the public schools and increasingly the prisons. These are the throwaway youth of an authoritarian America; they are the excess who painfully remind the elite of the need for social provisions, the viability of the public good, and those principles of economic life in need of substantial rethinking.

Under neoliberalism, it has become more difficult to respond to the demands of the social contract, public good, and the social state, which have been pushed to the margins of society – viewed as both an encumbrance and a pathology. And yet such a difficulty must be overcome in the drive to reform public education. The struggle over public education is the most important struggle of the 21st century because it is one of the few public spheres left where questions can be asked, pedagogies developed, modes of agency constructed and desires mobilized, in which formative cultures can be developed that nourish critical thinking, dissent, civic literacy and social movements capable of struggling against those antidemocratic forces that are ushering in dark, savage and dire times. We are seeing glimpses of such a struggle in Chicago and other states as well as across the globe and we can only hope that such movements offer up not merely a new understanding of  the relationship among pedagogy, politics, and democracy, but also one that infuses both the imagination and hope for a better world.


[1] I have taken this term from David Graeber, “Dead Zones of the Imagination,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2012): 105-128.

[2] I address this issue in great detail in Henry A. Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability (New York: Palgrave, 2010).

[3] See Michael D. Yates, “Public School Teachers: New Unions, New Alliances, New Politics,” http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/17756-public-school-teachers-new-unions-new-alliances-new-politics Truthout (July 24, 2013). Online: See also the June 2013 special issue of Monthly Review, edited by Michael Yates, on “Public School Teachers Fighting Back.”

[4] For an excellent critique of this type of corporate educational un-reform, see Kenneth J. Saltman, The Failure of Corporate School Reform (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2013).

[5]  Jody Sokolower, “Schools and the New Jim Crow: An Interview with Michelle Alexander,” Truthout (June 4, 2013). Online:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/16756-schools-and-the-new-jim-crow-an-interview-with-michelle-alexander.  These themes are more fully developed in Michelle Alexander, Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness(New York: New Press, 2012).

[8] For two examples of the appropriation of culture by corporate power and their donors and foundations, see Katherine Stewart, “The Right-wing Donors Who Fuel America’s Culture Wars,” The Guardian (April 23, 2013), online:   http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/23/rightwing-donors-fuel-america-culture-wars; and John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney, Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America (New York: Nation Books, 2013).

[10]     Sokolower, “Schools and the New Jim Crow.”

[11] Sokolower, “Schools and the New Jim Crow.”

[14] Kenneth Saltman, The Gift of Education: Public Education and Venture Philosophy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

[17] See, more recently, Norman Pollack, “Toward a Definition of Fascism,” CounterPunch (August 6, 2012), online: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/06/toward-a-definition-of-fascism/

[18] Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton University Press, 2008), p. ix.

[19] John Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, second revised edition (Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2002).

[20] On the predatory nature of such reforms, see Henry A. Giroux, Education and the Crisis of Public Values (New York: Peter Lang, 2012); and Michael Gecan, “How Predatory Reformers Are Destroying Education and Profiting at Our Children’s Expense,” AlterNet (June 14, 2013), online: http://www.alternet.org/education/how-predatory-reformers-are-destroying-education-and-profiting-our-childrens-expense. On the failure of such reforms, see the work of Kenneth Saltman, Diane Ravitch, Henry A. Giroux, Jonathan Kozol, Shirley Steinberg, bell hooks, and others.

[21] Elaine Weiss and Don Long, Market-oriented education reforms’ rhetoric trumps reality: The impacts of test-based teacher revaluations, school closures, and increased charter school access on student outcomes in Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C. (Washington, DC: Broader, Bolder Approach to Education (April 22, 2013). Online: http://www.epi.org/files/2013/bba-rhetoric-trumps-reality.pdf

[24]  For examples of this tradition, see Maria Nikolakaki (ed.), Critical Pedagogy in the Dark Ages: Challenges and Possibilities (New York: Peter Lang, 2012); and Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy (New York: Continuum, 2011).

[25] Roger Simon, “Empowerment as a Pedagogy of Possibility,” Language Arts 64:4 (April 1987), p. 372.

[26] Cornelius Castoriadis, “Institutions and Autonomy.” In Peter Osborne (ed.), A Critical Sense (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 8.

[27] Chandra Mohanty, “On Race and Voice: Challenges for Liberal Education in the 1990s,” Cultural Critique (Winter 1989-1990), p. 192.

[28] Amy Gutman, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

[29] Stanley Aronowitz, “Education Rediscovered,” The Indypendent, Issue #155 (September 9, 2010). Online:

http://www.indypendent.org/2010/09/09/education-rediscovered/

[30] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” Information Clearing House. Speech delivered on April 4, 1967 at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City. Online: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm

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The Vital Role of Education in Authoritarian Times

Henry Giroux

By. Henry A. Giroux

For decades, I have challenged the notion that schools are simply black boxes mired in structures of domination. While the early leftist criticism of schooling was correct in challenging the idea that schools were agencies of meritocracy and equal opportunity removed from larger structures of capitalist domination, it lacked, with few exceptions (such as Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour), any sense of resistance, and as such lacked any notion of hope. Resistance and hope, coupled with a comprehensive understanding of theory, politics and education, have played a crucial role in my later work, particularly in my later analysis of the war on youth, the centrality of pedagogy to cultural studies, neoliberalism’s assault on higher education and other related issues.

In July 2017, I was fortunate to participate in an interview that attempted to look at the totality of my work on education, cultural studies, pedagogy, youth studies and a range of other topics. The interview, captured here in a just-released film debuting on Truthout, begins with an analysis of the historical conditions that produced one of my most important books, Theory and Resistance in Education, and that had a formative influence it had on much of my of my later work.

The interview also deals with the challenges of resistance today, given the power of modes of pedagogy that exist outside of schools, particularly under the toxic regime of neoliberalism. Not only have the sites or modes of pedagogy expanded in a range of cultural apparatuses extending from digital and print culture to screen culture, but the very spaces for sustained and critical thought have been shrinking.

At the same time, new spaces of resistance have opened up in light of the emergence of new technologies, the increasing radicalization of young people and the search for a new understanding of politics, one that makes sense of the relationship between local politics and global power formations. The interview explores these new sites of hope. It also explores how both public schools and higher education have come under assault by a range of ideological, cultural and economic forces tied to a variety of right-wing and conservative ideologies and fundamentalisms — religious, market-based, military-oriented, racist and sexist. Due to all of these forces, there is an urgent need to retheorize matters of education, power and politics itself.

Capitalism no longer simply exploits as its main engine of domination; it now renders increasing numbers of people disposable.

One of the central elements of discussion in the interview is the issue of border crossing and the politics of disposability. This politics points to not only new forms of domination, but also suggests rethinking politics beyond simply questions of exploitation. In other words, capitalism no longer simply exploits as its main engine of domination; it now renders increasing numbers of people disposable — whether we are talking about Muslims, workers, youth of color, poor Black communities such as Flint, Michigan, or an increasing number of other groups. Disposability is the register of a new politics of oppression central to the emergence of financial capital, and it must be addressed as part of a new mode of politics and global resistance. Disposability points to distinct economic, political and cultural contexts in which new forms of exclusion are entangled with emerging modes of authoritarianism that are reshaping matters of ideology, knowledge and power. The logic of disposability has become the driving force of a powerful machinery of social death.

Also vital to address in these oppressive times is a narrow notion of dystopia, which is now attached to almost any form of criticism. Rather than opening a window to the need for real struggles, this notion of dystopia collapses into the discourse of cynicism. In the interview, I reject this view by making clear that criticism is the precondition for not only changing consciousness, but also making visible new forms of domination and power that have to be confronted if people are going to be able to understand the oppressive conditions in which they find themselves. Rather than insert criticism, dialogue and the social imagination within the toxic charge of a distorted and reactionary notion dystopia, the interview addresses criticism and the existing conditions of oppression as a starting point for individual and collective forms of struggle. The engagement with dystopia in this case is a precondition for developing a discourse of both critique and hope, not despair.

It is crucial for us to address this question head on: What is the role of public and higher education, especially in a time of tyranny? What does critical pedagogy look like and how is it put into play so as to make a viable and lasting connection between learning and critical thought, engaged agency and social responsibility, learning and social change? Central to this interview is the point that education is crucial to politics itself, and that any viable sense of theory, politics and resistance will have to address this issue.

Source:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/42217-the-vital-role-of-education-in-a-time-of-tyranny

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