Schools resemble the culture of prisons.

Economics now drives politics. This gives us a system in which the relationship between power and politics is no longer fused. Power is global. We have an elite that now floats in global flows. It could care less about the nation-state, and it could care less about traditional forms of politics. Hence, it makes no political concessions whatsoever. It attacks unions, it attacks public schools, it attacks public goods. It doesn't believe in the social contract.

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.

The structures of neoliberal violence have put the vocabulary of democracy on life support, and one consequence is that subjectivity and education are no longer the lifelines of critical forms of individual and social agency.

State violence operating under the guise of personal safety and security, while parading as a bulwark of democracy, actually does the opposite and cancels out democracy as the incommensurable sharing of existence that makes the political possible.

The degree to which fear now becomes an organizing principle of society is enormous compared to what it was like in the past.

Historical memory is a potent weapon in fighting against the desert of organized forgetting and implies a rethinking of the role that artists, intellectuals, educators, youth and other concerned citizens can play in fostering a reawakening of America's battered public memories.