Henry Giroux
I think the very idea of the social contract is in disarray.Collection: Thinking
The rise of globalization, the rise of finance capital, the elimination of the manufacturing base, the decimation of the working class, particularly in terms of those who had some comforts that approximated what the middle class had.Collection: Class
FDR was enormously influenced by this, and afraid. I mean, his intervention was to save capitalism. It wasn't to basically appease the workers. And I think that today you don't have those movements.Collection: Mean
Young black men in America have an identity ascribed to them that is a direct legacy of slavery.Collection: Men
In some cities such as Washington, DC, that 75 percent of young black men can expect to serve time in prison.Collection: Men
Justified by the war on drugs, the United States is in the midst of a prison binge made obvious by the fact that since 1970, the number of people behind bars... has increased 600 percent.Collection: War
You had workers' movements. You had left organizations, the Communist Party, that were mobilizing in profoundly powerful ways to basically address the great injustices of capitalism.Collection: Powerful
The degree to which fear now becomes an organizing principle of society is enormous compared to what it was like in the past.Collection: Past
I also think that one of the things we often fail to realize is that that kind of violence is now legitimated in multiple public spheres.Collection: Thinking
We no longer have the public spheres available to be able to contest that violence. We don't see it in the mainstream media, we no longer see it in the schools. I mean, this endless criminalization, militarization, of every form of behavior, I mean, strikes me as one of the most dangerous and one of the most ever-growing threats to the United States, of which that speech exemplifies perfectly, and which [Donald] Trump exemplifies with the endless call for law and order.Collection: School
Very little appears to escape the infantilizing and moral vacuity of the market.Collection: Littles
I mean, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, the Black Lives Movement, it's very difficult to, in a sense, especially since the 1980s, to talk about what the social contract is and what it means, and what it means to celebrate public goods, what it means to make, create social investments.Collection: Mean
Job insecurity, debt servitude, poverty, incarceration and a growing network of real and symbolic violence have entrapped too many young people in a future that portends zero opportunities and zero hopes. This is a generation that has become the new register for disposability, redundancy, and new levels of surveillance and control.Collection: Jobs
Neoliberal ideology is enormously powerful.Collection: Powerful
We need to make clear that the economic crisis has to be matched by a crisis of ideas. That's the problem, right? The economic crisis is not matched by a crisis of ideas. That's where the war is going to be fought.Collection: War
The real nightmare resides in a society that hides behind the mutually informing and poisonous notions of colorblindness and a post-racial society, a convenient rhetorical obfuscation that allows white Americans to ignore the institutional and individual racist ideologies, practices and policies that cripple any viable notion of justice and democracy.Collection: Real
I think we're in a very distinctively different historical moment. I mean, I think that you had two things that were operating in the 1930s that seem to be, in many ways, to have been weakened or disappeared. And of course the beginning of the 21st century, I mean, you have - at one level you had massive social movements.Collection: Mean
Young people increasingly have become subject to an oppressive disciplinary machine that teaches them to define citizenship through the exchange practices of the market and to follow orders and toe the line in the face of oppressive forms of authority. They are caught in a society in which almost every aspect of their lives is shaped by the dual forces of the market and a growing police state.Collection: Order
There is no genuine democracy without an informed public. While there are no guarantees that a critical education will prompt individuals to contest various forms of oppression and violence, it is clear that in the absence of a formative democratic culture, critical thinking will increasingly be trumped by anti-intellectualism, and walls and war will become the only means to resolve global challenges.Collection: Wall
Violence maims not only the body but also the mind and spirit. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, it lies "on the side of belief and persuasion." If we are to counter violence by offering young people ways to think differently about their world and the choices before them, they must be empowered to recognize themselves in any analysis of violence, and in doing so to acknowledge that it speaks to their lives meaningfully.Collection: Lying
Public values are not only under attack in the United States and elsewhere but appear to have become irrelevant just as those spaces that enable an experience of the common good are now the object of disdain by right-wing and liberal politicians, anti-public intellectuals and an army of media pundits.Collection: Army
There is more to the culture of cruelty than simply ethically challenged policies that benefit the rich and punish the poor, particularly children, there is also the emergence of a punishing state, a governing through crime youth complex, and the emergence of the school-to-prison pipeline as the new face of Jim Crow.Collection: Children
Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, schools are feeding our prisons.Collection: School
Against the tyranny of forgetting, educators, young people, social activists, public intellectuals, workers and others can work to make visible and oppose the long legacy and current reality of state violence and the rise of the punishing state. Such a struggle suggests not only reclaiming, for instance, education as a public good but also reforming the criminal justice system and removing the police from schools.Collection: Struggle
There is a need to employ public memory, critical theory, and other intellectual archives and resources to expose the crimes of those market-driven criminogenc regimes of power that now run the commanding institutions of society, with particular emphasis on how they have transformed the welfare state into a warfare state.Collection: Running
A discourse for broad-based political change is crucial for developing a politics that speaks to a future that can provide sustainable jobs, decent health care, quality education and communities of solidarity and support for young people.Collection: Jobs
Marginalized youth, workers, artists and others are raising serious questions about the violence of inequality and the social order that legitimates it. They are calling for a redistribution of wealth and power - not within the old system, but in a new one in which democracy becomes more than a slogan or a legitimation for authoritarianism and state violence.Collection: Artist
There is the emergence of a militarized society that now organizes itself for the production of violence. A society in which the range of acceptable opinion inevitably shrinks.Collection: Violence
With no adequate role to play as consumers, many youth are now considered disposable, forced to inhabit "zones of social abandonment" extending from homeless shelters and bad schools to bulging detention centers and prisons.Collection: School
As the pleasure principle is unconstrained by a moral compass based on a respect for others, it is increasingly shaped by the need for intense excitement and a never-ending flood of heightened sensations.Collection: Principles
The social media not only become new platforms for the invasion of privacy, but further legitimate a culture in which monitoring functions are viewed as benign while the state-sponsored society of hyper-fear increasingly defines everyone as either a snitch or a terrorist.Collection: Media
Schools resemble the culture of prisons.Collection: School
Youth no longer inhabit the privileged space, however compromised, that was offered to previous generations. They now occupy a neoliberal notion of temporality of dead time, zones of abandonment and terminal exclusion marked by a loss of faith in progress and a belief in those apocalyptic narratives in which the future appears indeterminate, bleak and insecure.Collection: Loss
It's much better to talk about the media as a system of propaganda and abuse, of manufactured consent, than it is to claim it's some kind of democratizing force that is not responsible for what it does. The notion that the media simply reflects reality is an argument that justifies its flight from responsibility.Collection: Responsibility
The pedagogy of authoritarianism is alive and well in the United States, and its repression of public memory takes place not only through the screen culture and institutional apparatuses of conformity, but is also reproduced through a culture of fear and a carceral state that imprisons more people than any other country in the world.Collection: Country
Historical memory is a potent weapon in fighting against the desert of organized forgetting and implies a rethinking of the role that artists, intellectuals, educators, youth and other concerned citizens can play in fostering a reawakening of America's battered public memories.Collection: Memories
The ideology of neoliberalism, with its privatization, its deregulation, its emphasis on consumption, its elimination of basically apparatuses that can provide alternative points of view, has been so powerful and so normalized.Collection: Powerful
The media is almost entirely about defining the subject, defining the citizen, as one of three things: a consumer, a threat in this new age of surveillance, or as utterly disposable. Excess.Collection: Age
The prevailing move in American society to a permanent war status does more than promote a set of unifying symbols that embrace a survival of the fittest ethic, promoting conformity over dissent, the strong over the weak, and fear over responsibility, it also gives rise to what David Graeber has called a "language of command" in which violence becomes the most important element of power and mediating force in shaping social relationships.Collection: Strong
Everywhere we look we see the encroaching shadow of the police state.Collection: Police
We have never seen the isolation of the rich to the degree that we see it now. They're global. They travel all over the world. They're not in any way - it seems to me - committed to any one place. So it's easy for them to say, "We don't see this. We don't see poverty. We don't think it's that bad. We think wealth is really being distributed in ways that are fair."Collection: Thinking
State violence, particularly the use of torture, abductions, and targeted assassinations are now justified as part of a state of exception in which a political culture of hyper-punitiveness has become normalized. Revealing itself in a blatant display of unbridled arrogance and power, it is unchecked by any sense of either conscience or morality.Collection: Political
Higher educating is defaulting on its obligations to offer young people a quality and broad-based education. This is true in part because the liberal arts and humanities have fallen out of favor in a culture that equates education with training.Collection: Art
Everyone is now a customer or client, and every relationship is ultimately judged in bottom-line, cost-effective terms. Freedom is no longer about equality, social justice, or the public welfare, but about the trade in goods, financial capital, and commodities.Collection: Justice
Politicians such as Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich along with talking heads such as Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck and Anne Coulter are not the problem, they are symptomatic of a much more disturbing assault on critical thought, if not rational thinking itself.Collection: Thinking
The media is not about responding to the wishes of people. All you have to do in the United States is turn on the national news at six-thirty, and watch big pharma intervene between the news stories, trying to tell people what drugs they should buy. That's not a reflection of anything. That's an attempt to promote a particular kind of consumer logic that basically abuses people.Collection: Reflection
Neoliberalism is going to fail by being replaced. The system is entirely broken. Whenever you have a system that equates a market economy with a market society and claims that capitalism is democracy, you've not only got a massive lie being imposed on the people, but you've got the foundation for a form of authoritarianism and a much more intensive form of class warfare.Collection: Lying
The pessimism of the intellect is the starting point for struggle. It's not the end point, it's the starting point. You have to make something critical to make it meaningful, to make it transformative.Collection: Meaningful
The Obama administration doesn't see schools as a public good. It doesn't see schools as places where basically we can educate students in a way to take democracy seriously and to be able to fight for it. It sees them as basically kids who should be part of the global workforce.Collection: School