In any totalitarian society, dissent is viewed as a threat, civic literacy is denounced, and those public spheres that produce engage citizens are dismantled or impoverished through the substitution of training for education.

Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, schools are feeding our prisons.

Occupy did something fabulous. What Occupy made clear was that there is an inequality at the heart of American democracy that undermines it, if not ruins it. That served a purpose. It suggested that we need a new language and we need a new way of understanding exactly how politics leaves people out, particularly young people.

There is a need for educators, young people, artists and other cultural workers to develop an educative politics in which people can address the historical, structural and ideological conditions at the core of the violence being waged by the corporate and repressive state and to make clear that government under the dictatorship of market sovereignty and power is no longer responsive to the most basic needs of young people - or most people for that matter.

What they [ ruling elite] understand is that matters of desire, subjectivities, identities matter. And they take the cultural apparatuses that they control enormously, enormously, in an enormously important way.

We need to figure how to defend higher education as a public good. If we can't do that, we're in trouble.

Young people now reside in a world in which there are few public spheres or social spaces autonomous from the reach of the market, warfare state, debtfare, and sprawling tentacles of what is ominously called the Department of Homeland Security.