They're rights that should be endemic to any democracy. The right to a free quality education, from elementary school right through higher education. The right to have a decent social wage. The right to a decent job. Political rights; the right to vote. These are all parts of the social contract, from the New Deal onwards, that never went far enough.
Henry GirouxThe promises of modernity regarding progress, freedom and hope have not been eliminated; they have been reconfigured, stripped of their emancipatory potential and relegated to the logic of a savage market instrumentality.
Henry GirouxThe architecture of war and violence is now matched by a barrage of goods parading as fashion.
Henry GirouxStudents need to learn how to unlearn those elements of a market driven society that deform their sense of agency, reducing them to simply consumers or even worse to elements of a disposable population. So we need to understand who controls the means of public education and the larger forms of what Raymond Williams called the cultural apparatuses of permanent education both in terms of the dangers they pose and the possibilities they harbor.
Henry GirouxCollective freedom provides the basic conditions for people to narrate their own lives, hold power accountable, and embrace a capacious notion of human dignity.
Henry GirouxNeoliberalism eats its own children. Disposability is central to how neoliberalism functions. I would not like to romanticize that, though, by suggesting that it creates dreamers. I would like to suggest that the radical imagination is so powerful, when employed collectively, that people will attempt to find solutions in ways that challenge the very conditions that made them disposable. That's where this sort of thing becomes interesting. We need to be careful about the dreaming quality here.
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