The structures of neoliberal modernity do more than disinvest in young people and commodify them, they also transform the protected space of childhood into a zone of disciplinary exclusion and cruelty, especially for those young people further marginalized by race and class who now inhabit a social landscape in which they are increasingly disparaged as flawed consumers or pathologized others.
Henry GirouxAny collective struggle that matters has to embrace education as the center of politics and the source of an embryonic vision of the good life outside of the imperatives of predatory capitalism.
Henry GirouxIndividual interests now trump any consideration of the good of society just as all problems are ultimately laid at the door of the solitary individual, whose fate is shaped by forces far beyond his or her capacity for personal responsibility.
Henry GirouxAny society's insistence on how it takes democracy seriously can, in fact, be measured by the way it treats its children. And if we take that index as a measure of the United States, it's utterly failing. You have young people basically who - in schools that are increasingly modeled after prisons. You have their behavior being increasingly criminalized. And one of the most atrocious of all acts, you have the rise of debtors' prisons for children.
Henry Giroux