Conservative and liberal politicians alike now spend millions waging wars around the globe, funding the largest military state in the world, providing huge tax benefits to the ultrarich and major corporations, and all the while draining public coffers, increasing the scale of human poverty and misery, and eliminating all viable public spheres - whether they be the social state, public schools, public transportation or any other aspect of a formative culture that addresses the needs of the common good.
Henry GirouxThere is a need for subjects who find intense pleasure in commodification of violence and a culture of cruelty.
Henry GirouxThere appears to be no space outside the panoptican of commercial barbarism and casino capitalism.
Henry GirouxYoung black men are guilty of criminal behavior not because of the alleged crimes they might commit but because they are the product of a collective imagination paralyzed by the racism of a white supremacist culture they can only view them as a dangerous nightmare.
Henry GirouxThe production of knowledge in schools today is instrumental, wedded to objective outcomes, privatized, and is largely geared to produce consuming subjects. The organizational structures that make such knowledge possible enact serious costs on any viable notion of critical education and critical pedagogy. Teachers are deskilled, largely reduced to teaching for the test, business culture organizes the governance structures of schooling, knowledge is viewed as a commodity, and students are treated reductively as both consumers and workers.
Henry GirouxThe 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.
Henry GirouxWe 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."
Henry Giroux