Henry Giroux Quotes

Given the current assault on critical education by various right-wing groups, the increasing corporatization of the university, and the growing influence of the national security state, it is increasingly important that higher education be defended as a democratic public sphere and that academics be seen and see themselves as public intellectuals who provide an indispensable service to the nation.

Remember, we live in a culture of immediacy. We live in a culture in which simplistic answers override more complicated answers. We live in a culture in which language is reduced to its bare bones. We live in a culture in which language is now in the service of violence.

The other side of this, this slow violence, is that increasingly the racism, the segregation, and the discrimination, has become intensified. We saw it particularly with the rise of ‘zero tolerance’ policies in schools, which are basically nothing more than racial codes. Schools have really become school-to-prison pipelines; they’ve become militarized and the behavior of young people — not just black and brown people, but poor white kids as well — becomes criminalized. The school becomes modeled after the prison. You have all of the accoutrements of the prison there: you have metal detectors that people have to walk through, you have security guards and police, and the school is defined in terms of the language of surveillance. This is a creeping form of punishment that is now imposed on kids and on schools through a machinery of pedagogical repression.

One of the things that neoliberalism has done is it has taken notions that are really powerful and turned them around, basically hijacking them in ways that produce misery and suffering. Freedom doesn’t simply mean ‘freedom from’ in the traditional sense of the word, it also means the ‘freedom to’ do more than just survive or wallow in your own orbits of privatization. It means that you not only have political freedoms and individual freedoms — you have economic freedoms, and social freedoms. You cannot live in a society and believe in elections (if you believe in that myth), or believe in being an agent, or believe that you can have power, or believe that you can influence events, if you’re hungry all of the time, if you have to make a choice between medicine and food, if time is no longer a luxury but it basically incapacitates you by virtue of not having the time to do anything to develop the capacities that would allow us to be political, social, and economic agents. Freedom has been utterly distorted under this authoritarian neoliberal machine because it is a notion of freedom that has been regressively individualized and refuses to acknowledge that you cannot talk about choices without at the same time talking about constraints, whether they be economic, political, or social.

All pedagogy, when it matters, is contextual. Different kids come from different neighborhoods, they come from different experiences, they come from different classes, and they come from different backgrounds. Context always matters in an educational setting and matters of difference have to be addressed if you are going to connect with young people. In order for education to work, you have to make it meaningful, to make it critical, to make it transformative.

[W]hen people can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, they can’t tell the difference between good and evil. They can’t recognize a crime when they see one or what lawlessness looks like. All standards of truth go out the window. It’s a very dangerous moment because it means that people become more susceptible to demagogues, to people like Trump, and I think that the media has played an enormous role in creating a formative culture that at its worst legitimates and at its best enables what we see happening in the United States today.

“[S]low violence” refers to our public schools being increasingly defunded, transformed into machines for teaching to the test, and reimagined not as democratic public spheres designed to produced critical citizens, but workers willing to put up with boring work and labor abuses. As they’re increasingly defunded, it’s then claimed that they’re failing, and that then becomes an excuse to either privatize them or turn them over to charter schools. In a sense what you have here is a central element of neoliberal ideology, which is an attack on the public good, an attack on any institution that supports the public good, and an attack on forms of pedagogy that teach students about the past, critical thinking, and provide them with the tools for informed decisions and engaged dialogue. In that sense, schools are a prime target.

Fascism begins with the rhetoric of dehumanization, humiliation, and reification, right? It starts with the language of brutality, which it normalizes. It legitimates hatred and racism and violence. It views certain groups through rhetoric as enemies of the American people. It operates off of the rhetoric of war, anti-intellectualism, and white supremacy. It operates off of the language of disposability. That language doesn’t just simply normalize increasingly the notions of white nationalism, white supremacy, racism, and xenophobia; it also enacts policies and it creates a culture of utter stupidity, a culture of ignorance. And, unfortunately, it functions so as to enable violence against groups labeled as dangerous, other, excess, and a threat to the whitewashed notion of citizenship.

Schools are increasingly either engaged in massive forms of pedagogical oppression and discipline or they’re basically disimagination machines — they kill the imagination of students and prepare them to work in utterly boring jobs without the slightest notion that they should resist because the implication seems to be that this is normal. They’re normalizing idiocy. They’re normalizing anti-intellectualism.

Fascism first begins with language, and then gains momentum as an organizing force for shaping a culture that legitimates indiscriminate violence against entire groups — Black people, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, and others considered “disposable.” In this vein, Trump portrays his critics as “villains,” describes immigrants as “losers” and “criminals,” and has become a national mouthpiece for violent nationalists and a myriad of extremists who trade in hate and violence. One recent example can be found in the Trump-like language used in the manifesto posted by the El Paso shooter.

Unfortunately, too many academics retreat into narrow specialisms, allow themselves to become adjuncts of the corporation, or align themselves with dominant interests that serve largely to consolidate authority rather than to critique its abuses. Refusing to take positions on controversial issues or to examine the role they might play in lessening human suffering, such academics become models of moral indifference and examples of what it means to disconnect learning from public life.

As public discourses... cultural texts can be addressed in terms of how they are constituted as objects that gain their relevance through their relationship to other social institutions, resources, and non-discursive practices.

[T]eachers have to be involved in the community and connected with parents and others who shape the lives of young people. They have to be involved with a whole range of people. They have to bring people together. They have to make sure that students in some way find that the work that they’re doing has something to do with their lives and matters.

Today freedom also means the freedom to hate, it means the freedom to say anything, it means the freedom to disparage people, to dehumanize people, to believe in the culture of cruelty, to believe that kindness is not a virtue but a liability. Freedom has been extended into a discourse of violence and hate, which is really part of a larger cultural apparatus that has so undermined the relationship between freedom and justice, freedom and equality, freedom and social responsibility that those terms drop out and freedom becomes in a sense a liability with respect to what a democratic socialist country might look like. The other side of this is that there is a really demonic notion of freedom that seems to suggest we’re all equal and we can all make all of the choices that we want — it’s up to us. In other words, it suggests that choice in this one-dimensional sense of market freedom is defined without constraints. So you are free to sleep under a bridge at night, or you’re free to sleep in the Ritz. Well, that’s just nonsense. It seems to me that choice only becomes meaningful when people have the capacity to make real choices. That’s what freedom really is about in an economic and political sense.

People are waking up. The contradictions are becoming obvious. But the problem that plagues all of these groups is that they’re individualized. They tend to be autonomous, reduced to isolated issues, and they tend not to be part of a larger social movement in which each group can both articulate its own concerns but at the same time join with others in the call for a democratic socialist mode or a democratic mode of society.