Henry A. Giroux

War on terror

The process of militarisation has a long history in the United States and is varied rather than static, changing under different historical conditions. Catherine Lutz defines it as ‘an intensification of the labor and resources allocated to military purposes, including the shaping of other institutions in synchrony with military goals. Militarization is simultaneously a discursive process, involving a shift in general societal beliefs and values in ways necessary to legitimate the use of force, the organization of large standing armies and their leaders, and the higher taxes or tribute used to pay for them. Militarization is intimately connected not only to the obvious increase in the size of armies and resurgence of militant nationalisms and militant fundamentalisms but also to the less visible deformation of human potentials into the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and to the shaping of national histories in ways that glorify and legitimate military action.’1 Unlike the old style of militarisation in which civil authority is made subordinate to military authority, the new ethos of militarisation is organised to engulf the entire social order, legitimising its values as a central rather than peripheral aspect of American public life. Moreover, the values of militarism no longer reside in a single group, nor are they limited to a particular sphere of society, as Jorge Mariscal points out:

Between Borders : Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies

Informed by the belief that critical pedagogy must move beyond the classroom if it is to be truly effective, this essay collection makes clear how cultural practices--as portrayed in film, sports, and in the classroom itself--enable cultural studies to deepen its own political possibilities and to construct diverse geographies of identity, representation and place. Contributors: Henry A. Giroux, Ava Collins, Nancy Fraser, Carol Becker, bell hooks, Michael Eric Dyson, Roger I. Simon, Chandra Talpede Mohanty, Simon Watney, Michele Wallace, Peter McLaren, David Trend, Abdul R. JanMohamed and Kenneth Mostern.

Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Resistance: Notes on a critical theory of educational struggle

© 2003 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK EPAT ducational Philosophy and Theory 0013-1857

Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Neo-Liberalism: Making the Political More Pedagogical

Neo-liberalism has reached a new stage in the United States, buttressed largely by the almost seamless alliances formed among the Bush administration, religious fundamentalists, neo-conservative extremists, the dominant media, and corporate elites. This article explores the various ways in which neo-liberal cultural politics works as a form of public pedagogy to devalue the meaning of the social contract, education, and citizenship by defining higher education primarily as a financial investment and learning as a form of training for the workforce. Aggressively fostering its attack on the welfare state, unions, non-commodified public spheres, and any critical vestige of critical education, neo-liberal politics makes it increasingly more difficult to address the necessity of a political education in which active and critical political agents have to be formed, educated, and socialized into the world of politics. This article explores how the intersection of cultural studies and public pedagogy offers a challenge to both the ideology and practice of neo-liberalism as a form of cultural politics. In doing, so it outlines how the pedagogical can become more political in the classroom and how the political can become more pedagogical outside of the classroom via the educational force of the wider culture.

Public pedagogy as cultural politics : Stuart Hall and the 'crisis' of culture

This article argues that Stuart Halls work provides an important theoretical framework for developing an expanded notion of public pedagogy, for making the pedagogical central to any understanding of political agency, and for addressing the primacy of public pedagogy and cultural politics in any viable theory of social change. Halls work becomes particularly important not only in making education crucial to the practice of cultural studies, but also in providing a theoretical and political corrective to recent attacks on cultural politics, which cut across ideological lines and include theorists as politically diverse as Harold Bloom, Richard Rorty and Todd Gitlin.

Social Education in the Classroom: The Dynamics of the Hidden Curriculum

Abstract This paper reviews recent studies on the relationship of classroom life to larger social/political institutions. It analyzes the phenomenon which Philip Jackson has identified as the “hidden curriculum”, that covert pattern of socialization which prepares students to function in the existing workplace and in other social/political spheres. The authors argue that this pattern has been largely ignored by social studies curriculum developers. By ignoring the values contained in the social processes of schooling, social studies developers failed to influence school programs in a fundamental way. To promote a more complete understanding of the dynamics of classroom life and its relationship to the larger society, the authors have identified social processes of school and classroom life which give specific meaning to the term hidden curriculum. They argue that a new set of processes will have to replace existing ones if the goals of social education are to be realized. In the latter part of the paper, ...

Challenging Neoliberalism's New World Order: The Promise of Critical Pedagogy

Although critical pedagogy has a long and diverse tradition in the United States, its innumerable variations reflect both a shared belief in education as a moral and political practice and a recognition that its value should be judged in terms of how it prepares students to engage in a common struggle for deepening the possibilities of autonomy, critical thought, and a substantive democracy. We believe that critical pedagogy at the current historical moment faces a crisis of enormous proportions. It is a crisis grounded in the now commonsense belief that education should be divorced from politics and that politics should be removed from the imperatives of democracy. At the center of this crisis is a tension between democratic values and market values, between dialogic engagement and rigid authoritarianism. Faith in social amelioration and a sustainable future appears to be in short supply as neoliberal capitalism performs the dual task of using education to train workers for service sector jobs and produce lifelong consumers. At the same time, neoliberalism feeds a growing authoritarianism steeped in religious fundamentalism and jingoistic patriotism encouraging intolerance and hate as it punishes critical thought, especially if it is at odds with the reactionary religious and political agenda pushed by the Bush administration. Increasingly, education appears useful to those who hold power, and issues concerning how public and higher education might contribute to the quality of democratic public life are either ignored or dismissed. Moral outrage and creative energy seem utterly limited in the political sphere, just as any collective struggle to preserve education as a basis for creating critical citizens is rendered defunct within the corporate drive for efficiency, a logic that has inspired bankrupt reform initiatives such as standardization, high-stakes testing, rigid accountability schemes, and privatization. Cornel West (2004) recently argued that we need to analyze those dark forces shutting down democracy but “we also need to be very clear about the vision that lures us toward hope and the sources of that vision” (p. 18). In what follows, we want to recapture the vital role that critical pedagogy might play as

Racial injustice and disposable youth in the age of zero tolerance

The author argues that economically, politically, and culturally the situation of youth in the U.S. is intolerable and unforgivable. Childhood has been demeaned by popular news media and no longer is regarded by society as the future of democracy. Rather, young people are increasingly isolated, treated with suspicion, and subjected to diminished rights of privacy and personal liberties. Zero-tolerance policies in communities and schools amount to the criminalization of youth, and schools grow more like prisons than institutions of education. The multiple social and political costs of negative perceptions of youth are considered. It is argued that repressive social policies and neglect of children, as evidenced by the growing state of poverty, hunger, and homelessness among Americas children, threatens the future of democracy. The author encourages policy reforms and individual and community commitment to policy reforms.

Cultural Studies as Performative Politics

This article addresses the role public intellectuals and cultural workers might play in challenging the pervasive institutional and ideological influ ence of neoliberalism as it continues to attack all public spaces and social services not governed by the logic of the market. The author takes up this challenge by articulating a relationship between the political and peda gogical that is central to any notion of cultural politics. In doing so, he attempts to foreground how the diverse forms of critical pedagogy and cul tural studies can engage in progressive cultural politics through the interre lated registers of insurgent citizenship, a performative critical pedagogy, and a contextualized notion of political agency. The interconnected con cepts of discourse, context, power, and theory are used to critique notions of textuality that refuse to link the symbolic to material relations of power and to engage the limits of dystopian performative work that fails in spite of its appeal to the transgressive to address urgent social issues. The author concludes by pointing to a number of cultural activists whose work embod ies a radical intersection of the performative and the political.

SCHOOLING, POPULAR CULTURE, AND A PEDAGOGY OF POSSIBILITY

In this paper, the authors analyze the importance of critical pedagogy by examining its potentially transformative relations with the sphere of popular culture. Popular culture is viewed not only as a site of contradiction and struggle but also as a significant pedagogical terrain that raises important questions regarding such issues as the relevance of everyday life, the importance of student voice, the significance of both meaning and pleasure in the learning process, and the relationship between knowledge and power in the curriculum. In the end of the piece, the authors raise a number of questions that suggest important inquiries that need to be analyzed regarding how teachers and others can further develop the notion of critical pedagogy as a form of cultural politics.