The new illiteracy is about more than not knowing how to read the book or the word; it is about not knowing how to read the world.

Given that by age 23, almost a third of Americans are arrested for a crime, it becomes clear that in the new militarized state young people, especially poor minorities, are viewed as predators, a threat to corporate governance, and are treated as disposable populations.

You have a situation in which the U.S. is fighting three unjust wars and wasting trillions of dollars in public funds, all the while draining money from important social services and public and higher education.

The current siege on higher education, whether through defunding education, eliminating tenure, tying research to military needs, or imposing business models of efficiency and accountability, poses a dire threat not only to faculty and students who carry the mantle of university self-governance, but also to democracy itself.

With the rise of new technologies, media, and other cultural apparatuses as powerful forms of public pedagogy, students need to understand and address how these pedagogical cultural apparatuses work to diffuse learning from any vestige of critical thought. This is a form of public pedagogy that needs to be addressed both for how it deforms and for how it can create important new spaces for emancipatory forms of pedagogy.

I mean, think of Flint. I mean, think of the lead poisoning of thousands of poor and black children across the United States.

Think of the question of mass incarceration. Think of the coding that the Republican Party has used for years, whether they're talking about Obama or blacks or Willie Horton.