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.

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.

As the welfare state is hollowed out, a culture of compassion is replaced by a culture of violence, cruelty and disposability.

The domestic war against "terrorists" [code for young protesters] provides new opportunities for major defense contractors and corporations who are becoming more a part of our domestic lives.

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.

Justified by the war on drugs, the United States is in the midst of a prison binge made obvious by the fact that since 1970, the number of people behind bars... has increased 600 percent.

Many university presidents assume the language and behavior of CEOs and in doing so they are completely reneging on the public mission of the universities. The state is radically defunding public universities and university presidents, for the most part, rather than defending higher education as a public good, are trying to privatize their institutions in order to remove them from the political control of state governments. This is not a worthy or productive strategy.