Schools resemble the culture of prisons.

As the humanities and liberal arts are downsized, privatized, and commodified, higher education finds itself caught in the paradox of claiming to invest in the future of young people while offering them few intellectual, civic, and moral supports.

We need to remember that education can be both a basis for critical thought and a site for repression, which destroys thinking and leads to violence.

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.

The 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.

Any 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.

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.