Informing people about the world's problems opens up the possibility to address them and change them. Anything else is simply willful ignorance. I mean, what the hell should we do? Sit around blowing up balloons? Watching Disney-sponsored movies? I don't think so.

Given that by age 23, almost a third of Americans are arrested for a crime, it becomes clear that in the new militarized state young people, especially poor minorities, are viewed as predators, a threat to corporate governance, and are treated as disposable populations.

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

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

There appears to be no space outside the panoptican of commercial barbarism and casino capitalism.

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.

The generation of youth in the early 21st century has no way of grasping if they will ever be free from the gnawing sense of the transience, indefiniteness, and provisional nature of any settlement.