Panayota Gounari

RETHINKING CRITICAL LITERACY IN THE NEW INFORMATION AGE

This article looks at new information and communication technologies (ICTs) as sites of public pedagogy in that they produce particular forms of knowledge and literacies and reproduce representations that are always mediated through specific social relations. Public pedagogy as a process that constitutes a broader category beyond classroom practices, official curricula, and educational canons, extends to all sectors of human life, including virtual spaces. No longer restricted to traditional sites of learning such as educational or religious sites, public pedagogy produces new forms of knowledge and apprenticeship and new narratives for agency and for naming the world. Virtual spaces as sites of public pedagogy create, in turn, forms of literacy that go against traditional understandings of what constitutes a text. The article also attempts to discuss yet unrealized alternative directions in these virtual spaces, where critical literacy becomes emancipatory and an essential and powerful tool in the project for a radical pedagogy.

Neoliberalizing Higher Education in Greece: New Laws, Old Free-Market Tricks

Amid a financial crisis that has shifted politics in Greece to conservative market-driven ideologies and policies, specific major changes are proposed by the Greek Ministry of Education for primary, secondary and higher education. With the gradual disappearance of public space and of the welfare state, under the pressure and the auspices of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), education becomes one more space quickly geared up towards privatization, marketization of learning and educational goals while the character of free public education is radically redefined. This article addresses the changes in higher education legislation and policy in Greece and analyzes the discursive constructions that legitimize such a change.

Educational reform in Greece: Central concepts and a critique

Abstract The case of Greece as the most recent neoliberal experiment can provide valuable insights not only about a generalized attack on the welfare state and the public good, but also about the radical changes in public education that are altering its public mission, vision, and goals. In this paper first we trace the educational landscape in Greece as it emerges both from the reform in primary and secondary education and from the new law 4009 on higher education. The ongoing government discourse on education is shaped and constructed along the lines of a market- driven society and unapologetically espouses the neoliberal dogma that aims to convert education into training, universities into corporations, knowledge into a service or commodity, and students into clients. We further examine the official public discourse as illustrated in government documentation in an attempt to map out the marked shift from the university as a public good to the university as corporate entity, and highlight the particular ways in which this is done. The new educational legislation sets the stage for an education where the individual will thrive through relentless competition, where collectivity is abolished, where only “useful” knowledge counts and where “quality” and “excellence” serve as the excuse for a corporate standardization of the university and the academic life and thought.

Critical Pedagogy and Peace Education: Understanding Violence, Human Rights, and the Historical Project of Militant Peace

Panayota Gounari examines some of the limits of peace (as) discourse in this chapter. By critiquing the dominant discourse on peace and human rights, she exposes some of the fundamental elements of hegemonic Western teleology. In “critiquing the discourse of peace as agency,” she proffers a critical review of what has taken place internationally during the past ten years that reveals how violent and bloody this decade has been despite a designation in 2000 by the United Nations for an International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World. Despite the hard work, strides, and achievements made by peace organizations and movements worldwide and despite the positive interventions and the increasing awareness on issues pertaining to nonviolence and peace, the history of humanity remains one of atrocities, pain, and devastation. Calling for a deeper reflection and understanding of the multiple forms of economic, political, symbolic, and discursive violence, and their very real human consequences, as well as an intensified move toward militarization worldwide, Gounari wonders how do we reconcile a decade dedicated in the “culture of peace” with the ongoing wars and aggression? Furthermore, she acknowledges a tension that exists at the discursive level, as well: through the designation of an International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World, institutions like UNESCO that are legitimized to define, process, and work on peace produce their own discourse in reports, news briefs, and other antiviolence and pro-peace material and provide specific recommendations and directives. Gounari analyzes the dominant discourse and “universal” character of peace and human rights and the way they have been used to neutralize or even promote aggression. This has been done in the context of a liberal ideology of missionary politics that promotes tolerance. She interrogates this missionary politics of tolerance and provides some thoughts on violence drawing on the seminal work of Slavoj Zizek, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt in an attempt to provide a theoretical framework of understanding the ongoing aggression worldwide. Finally, Gounari looks at peace education through the lens of critical pedagogy as a radical educational discourse and pedagogy, to suggest ways to integrate pressing questions about violence in the curriculum.

Neoliberalism as Social Necrophilia

In this paper, I am drawing on Erich Fromm’s work in order to rethink and explain the current economic, political, and humanitarian crisis in Greece and cast some light on the discussion of “what is to be done.” More specifically, I am discussing the ongoing neoliberal experiment in Greece as a case of “social necrophilia” drawing on Fromm’s work on “human destructiveness.”