Within the United States especially, the often violent response to nonviolent forms of youth protests must be analyzed within the framework of a mammoth military-industrial state and its commitment to war and the militarization of the entire society.

The 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.

Violence comes in many forms and can be particularly disturbing when confronted in an educational setting if handled dismissively or in ways that blame victims.

If American society wants to invest in its young people, it has an obligation to provide them with an education in which they are challenged, can learn to take risks, think outside the boundaries of established ideologies, and expand the far reaches of their creativity and critical judgment. This demands a pedagogy that is complicated, taxing and disruptive.

Symptoms of ethical, political and economic impoverishment are all around us.

Social solidarities are torn apart, furthering the retreat into orbits of the private that undermine those spaces that nurture non-commodified knowledge, values, critical exchange and civic literacy.

Where neoliberalism thrives is in having done something that we haven't seen before. There is a merging of culture, politics, and power under neoliberalism that's unprecedented. They control the cultural apparatuses. And what I mean by "cultural apparatuses" is all those institutions that are about the production of knowledge, values, dispositions, and subjectivities. They control them.