Rejecting the notion that democracy and markets are the same, young people are calling for an end to the poverty, grotesque levels of economic inequality, the suppression of dissent and the permanent war state.

Pedagogy is not about training, it is about critically educating people to be self reflective, capable of critically address their relationship with others and with the larger world. Pedagogy in this sense provides not only important critical and intellectual competencies; it also enables people to intervene critically in the world.

The present generation has been born into a throwaway society of consumers in which both goods and young people are increasingly objectified and disposable.

The war being waged against the radical imagination, particularly around young people, is just startling. Young people are laboring under a burden of debt that so ties them to a survivalist mode of existence that it's impossible for them to dream anymore. Trying to recognize what the forces are that actually squelch the imagination is a lot more interesting to me than people who go and "find themselves" because they're no longer on the grid.

In some cities such as Washington, DC, that 75 percent of young black men can expect to serve time in prison.

There is no genuine democracy without an informed public. While there are no guarantees that a critical education will prompt individuals to contest various forms of oppression and violence, it is clear that in the absence of a formative democratic culture, critical thinking will increasingly be trumped by anti-intellectualism, and walls and war will become the only means to resolve global challenges.

The historical legacies of resistance to racism, militarism, privatization and panoptical surveillance have long been forgotten and made invisible in the current assumption that Americans now live in a democratic, post-racial society.