Henry Giroux
America is at war with itself because it's basically declared war not only on any sense of democratic idealism, but it's declared war on all the institutions that make democracy possible. And we see it with the war on public schools. We see it with the war on education. We see it with the war on the healthcare system.Collection: War
While the universities are increasingly corporatized and militarized, their governing structures are becoming more authoritarian, faculty are being devalued as public intellectuals, students are viewed as clients, academic fields are treated as economic domains for providing credentials, and work place skills, and academic freedom is under assault.Collection: Academic Freedom
Where I grew up, learning was a collective activity. But when I got to school and tried to share learning with other students that was called cheating. The curriculum sent the clear message to me that learning was a highly individualistic, almost secretive, endeavor. My working class experience...was disparaged.Collection: Cheating
With the rise of new technologies, media, and other cultural apparatuses as powerful forms of public pedagogy, students need to understand and address how these pedagogical cultural apparatuses work to diffuse learning from any vestige of critical thought. This is a form of public pedagogy that needs to be addressed both for how it deforms and for how it can create important new spaces for emancipatory forms of pedagogy.Collection: Powerful
The United States has degenerated into a social order that is awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat. Not only is this obvious in the presence of a celebrity culture that embraces the banal and idiotic, but also in the prevailing discourses and policies of a range of politicians and anti-public intellectuals who believe that the legacy of the Enlightenment needs to be reversed.Collection: Believe
History remains an open horizon that cannot be dismissed through appeals to the end of history or end of ideology.Collection: Horizon
War provides jobs, profits, political payoffs, research funds, and forms of political and economic power that reach into every aspect of society.Collection: Jobs
As modern society is formed against the backdrop of a permanent war zone, a carceral state and hyper-militarism, the social stature of the military and soldiers has risen.Collection: Military
The war on terror, rebranded under Obama as the "Overseas Contingency Operation," has morphed into war on democracy.Collection: War
Only a well-organized movement of young people, educators, workers, parents, religious groups and other concerned citizens will be capable of changing the power relations and vast economic inequalities that have generated what has become a country in which it is almost impossible to recognize the ideals of a real democracy.Collection: Country
These anti-public intellectuals are part of a disimagination machine that solidifies the power of the rich and the structures of the military-industrial-surveillance-academic complex by presenting the ideologies, institutions and relations of the powerful as commonsense.Collection: Powerful
What social safety net does is provide a glimmer of hope for what a democratic socialist society might look like. It makes the claim that without social provisions, without a welfare state, without a social contract, society can't survive. We need a foundation for people - economically, politically, and socially - where what the Right considers "entitlements" are really rights.Collection: People
Where neoliberalism thrives is in having done something that we haven't seen before. There is a merging of culture, politics, and power under neoliberalism that's unprecedented. They control the cultural apparatuses. And what I mean by "cultural apparatuses" is all those institutions that are about the production of knowledge, values, dispositions, and subjectivities. They control them.Collection: Mean
We have in this country something remarkable. We have the local version of the Soviets' Pravda. It trades in ignorance and lies and opinions, and makes the claim that they are "truth," and it does so with people who are stupid, who don't know anything, and are basically entertainers. It merges a fundamentalist ideology with celebrity culture.Collection: Country
I think neoliberalism is vulnerable to protest. And it's under protest because people are beginning to realize that these austerity policies are really market-driven policies designed to punish the poor, the working classes, and the middle classes by simply distributing wealth upwards.Collection: Thinking
We're talking about race. It's ideology, it's a mode of policy. It's a practice. And it intertwines with class in a very specific way to create something very distinctive that we see now being legitimated in the United States by fascists who absolutely are unapologetic about what they're saying.Collection: Race
All of this in [Donald] Trump now has become so overt that it's difficult when we talk about repression not to talk about white supremacy, not to talk about its legacy, from slavery to lynching to mass incarceration, and what it has developed into.Collection: Lynching
I mean, we're not talking about simply racism, we're taking about white supremacy.Collection: Mean
Under a neoliberal regime, the language of authority, power and command is divorced from ethics, social responsibility, critical analysis and social costs.Collection: Responsibility
The Left doesn't realize that unless you create a formative culture and a critical consciousness capable of changing the way people think about the common sense assumptions that drive their lives, then you've got an ideological foundation for totalitarianism that not only destroys the capacity to think critically, it destroys the capacity to have convictions at all.Collection: Thinking
Young people, under the social contract, suggest a long term investment. What we have today is a government that believes that young people - since they are a long term investment - are a liability. This is system that only believes in short-term investments.Collection: Believe
You can't wait neoliberalism out, because the class war will become more consolidated; the punishing state will increase. They'll increasingly solve problems by putting more people in jail and by criminalizing all kinds of behaviors and by appealing to racist attitudes about immigrants, blacks, minorities. They'll just intensify class warfare, that's all. It'll get to the point where the true nature of the authoritarian state will be obvious.Collection: Attitude
I think that contradictions, unless they're understood, unless they're analyzed, unless they're thoughtfully probed, unless people have a sense of what those contradictions mean - there's just as much of a chance that they'll move into embracing fascism as there is that they'll move into a more radical conception of democracy itself.Collection: Moving
Neoliberalism eats its own children. Disposability is central to how neoliberalism functions. I would not like to romanticize that, though, by suggesting that it creates dreamers. I would like to suggest that the radical imagination is so powerful, when employed collectively, that people will attempt to find solutions in ways that challenge the very conditions that made them disposable. That's where this sort of thing becomes interesting. We need to be careful about the dreaming quality here.Collection: Dream
The war being waged against the radical imagination, particularly around young people, is just startling. Young people are laboring under a burden of debt that so ties them to a survivalist mode of existence that it's impossible for them to dream anymore. Trying to recognize what the forces are that actually squelch the imagination is a lot more interesting to me than people who go and "find themselves" because they're no longer on the grid.Collection: Dream
Informing people about the world's problems opens up the possibility to address them and change them. Anything else is simply willful ignorance. I mean, what the hell should we do? Sit around blowing up balloons? Watching Disney-sponsored movies? I don't think so.Collection: Ignorance
I mean, think of Flint. I mean, think of the lead poisoning of thousands of poor and black children across the United States.Collection: Children
Education as a democratic project always presupposes a vision of the future in its introduction to, preparation for, and legitimation of particular forms of social life. It is utopian in its goal of expanding and deepening the ideological and material conditions that make a democracy possible. As a moral and political practice, education produces the modes of literacy, critique, sense of social responsibility, and civic courage necessary to imbue young people with the knowledge and skills needed to enable them to be engaged critical citizens willing to fight for a sustainable and just society.Collection: Responsibility
It says anybody can make it, because we're all on a level playing field. But we're not on a level playing field. That 's precisely the point, and that's what the rich don't want to look at. They don't want to recognize that they're not producing wealth at all. They're hoarding wealth. That's different.Collection: Different
When you look at the Koch brothers, who make three million dollars an hour on their dividends alone, you begin to get a sense of what we're talking about. The estimates now are that the upper 1% control something like 40% of all wealth. Eighty families in the world control as much as half the world's population. These figures are being produced every day. We need to put a human face to these figures. We need to make clear that something is being taken from the vast majority of people, and is causing an enormous amount of suffering.Collection: Brother
I think we can see violence in a whole range of realms. We certainly see it in the media, where extreme violence is now so pervasive that people barely blink when they see it, and certainly raise very few questions about what it means pedagogically and politically. Violence is the DNA, the nervous system of this system's body politic.Collection: Mean
Increasingly, poor minority and white youth are being funneled directly from schools into prison.Collection: School
All that young people are promised today are the rewards of a shallow materialism and a degree that is defined primarily as a job credential, one that ironically does not even live up to its own claims of guaranteeing either decent employment or a better way of life.Collection: Jobs
Students, in particular, now find themselves in a world in which heightened expectations have been replaced by dashed hopes.Collection: Expectations
Violence now becomes the only tool by which we can actually mediate social problems that should be dealt with in very different ways.Collection: Different
There is a need for subjects who find intense pleasure in commodification of violence and a culture of cruelty.Collection: Needs
If the ongoing struggles waged by young people are to matter, demonstrations and protests must give way to more sustainable organizations that develop alternative communities, autonomous forms of worker control, collective forms of health care, models of direct democracy and emancipatory modes of education.Collection: Struggle
Students being miseducated, criminalized and arrested through a form of penal pedagogy in prison-type schools provide a grim reminder of the degree to which the ethos of containment and punishment now creeps into spheres of everyday life that were largely immune in the past from this type of state violence. This is not merely barbarism parading as reform - it is also a blatant indicator of the degree to which sadism and the infatuation with violence have become normalized in a society that seems to take delight in dehumanizing itself.Collection: School
Ruling elite have think tanks, they have research institutes, they've invaded universities, they've monopolized the cultural apparatuses.Collection: Thinking
Any dominant ideology operates off the assumption that what it has to say is unaccountable and unquestionable.Collection: Assumption
Capitalism, in my estimation, is not about democracy. I think we're beginning to see an understanding of this. We see it in the Black Lives Matter movement. We see it among black youth who are now struggling and trying to make connections internationally with other groups and trying to figure out what's going on in the world and the ways things like police violence and systemic violence all come together under neoliberalism.Collection: Struggle
Today's neoliberalism has a number of byproducts. We have massive forms of inequality developing because there are no longer any concessions. There's a war being waged on democracy and all social spheres and institutions that tend to defend it.Collection: War
Progressive visions pale and are smashed next to the normalization of market-driven government policies that wipe out pensions, eliminate quality health care, punish unions, demonize public servants, raise college tuition, and produce a harsh world of joblessness - all the while giving billions and huge bonuses, instead of prison sentences... to those bankers and investment brokers who were responsible for the 2008 meltdown of the economy and the loss of homes for millions of Americans.Collection: Home
Trump provides a more direct and arrogant persona that produces the ugliness of a society ruled entirely by finance capital and savage market values, one that prides itself on the denigration of others as well as of justice, passion, and equality.Collection: Passion
In authoritarian societies, control over the production, distribution, and circulation is generally in the hands of the government, or what might be termed traditional modes of political sovereignty. But in neoliberal societies, sovereignty is often in the hands of major corporations that now have power over not only the production of knowledge but also over the implementation of policies that bear down on matters of life and death, living and surviving.Collection: Life And Death
Widespread violence now functions as part of an anti-immune system that turns the economy of genuine pleasure into a mode of sadism that creates the foundation for sapping democracy of any political substance and moral vitality. The predominance of the disimagination machine in American society, along with its machinery of social death and historical amnesia, seeps into in all aspects of life, suggesting that young people and others marginalized by class, race and ethnicity have been abandoned.Collection: Race
We need to figure how to defend higher education as a public good. If we can't do that, we're in trouble.Collection: Needs
War has become a mode of sovereignty and rule, eroding the distinction between war and peace.Collection: War
When the dominant media invites the torturers on their programs to defend the nature of torture and then label that as "just another position," these media apparatuses have really sunken into hell. They've become something really vile and despicable. And yet they do it with a smile.Collection: Hell