Henry A. Giroux - Fight the dictatorship of ignorance
The paramount role of violence in many countries today raises questions about the role of education, teachers and students in a time of tyranny. How might we imagine education as central to politics whose task is, in part, to create a new language for students, one that is crucial to reviving a radical imagination, a notion of social hope, and the courage to collective struggle? How might higher education and other cultural institutions address the deep, unchecked nihilism and despair of the current moment?..
At this point in the
21st century, the notion of the social and the public are not being erased as
much as they are being reconstructed under circumstances in which public forums
for serious debate, including public education, are being eroded. Reduced
either to a crude instrumentalism or business culture, or defined as a purely
private right rather than a public good, our major educational apparatuses are
being removed from the discourse of democracy and civic culture.
Under the
influence of powerful financial interests and ideological fundamentalists, we
have witnessed the takeover of public and increasingly higher education as well
as diverse media sites by a corporate logic that both numbs the mind and the
soul, emphasizing repressive ideologies that promote winning at all costs,
learning how not to question authority, and undermining the hard work of
learning how to be thoughtful, critical and attentive to the power relations
that shape everyday life and the larger world.
Viktor Orbán’s Hungary
has become the model for this type of repression, and has been praised by Donald Trump. As learning is privatized,
depoliticized, and reduced to teaching students how to be good consumers, any
viable notions of society, public values, citizenship and democracy wither and
die. Under the reign of neoliberalism with its antithesis for community,
embrace of deregulation, privatization and consumerism, individuals can only
find sanctuary in the feudal orbits of self-interest, a selfie culture, and
individualistic rather than social goals.
Critical pedagogy is dangerous to many
people and others because it provides the conditions for students and the wider
public to exercise their intellectual capacities, embrace the ethical
imagination, hold power accountable and embrace a sense of social
responsibility... read more:
