by:
Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed
(Image: Gottfried Helnwein)
NOTE: This article is based on the preface of Henry A. Giroux's
latest book, "Education and the Crisis of Public Values: Challenging the
Assault on Teachers, Students and Public Education" (Counterpoints:
Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education), published by Peter Lang
Publishing; First printing edition (July 30, 2011).
Since the early 1970s, the rich, corporate power brokers and right-wing
cultural warriors realized that education was central to creating a
viable populist movement that served their interests. Over the last 40
years, the financial elites and their wealthy accomplices have not only
mobilized an educational anti-reform movement in the name of "reform" to
dismantle public education and turn it over to hedge-fund managers and
billionaires; they have also taken a lesson from the muckrakers,
critical public intellectuals, left-wing journals, progressive
newspapers and educational institutions of the mid-20th century and
developed their own cultural apparatuses, talk shows, anti-public
intellectuals, think tanks and grassroots organizations. As the left
slid into organizing around mostly single-issue movements since the
1980s, the right moved in a different direction, mobilizing a range of
educational forces and wider cultural apparatuses as a way of addressing
broader ideas that appealed to a wider public and issues that resonated
with their everyday lives. Tax reform, the role of government, the
crisis of education, family values and the economy, to name a few
issues, were wrenched out of their progressive legacy and inserted into a
context defined by the values of the free market, an unbridled notion
of freedom and individualism and a growing hatred for the social
contract.
At the heart of this movement was a culture of cruelty and vulgarity
that used education to produce a new form of political illiteracy in
which there was no difference between opinions and arguments, reason and
emotion and evidence and false statements. In this culture of
illiteracy, science became a liability, thinking became an act of
stupidity, anti-intellectualism became a virtue, social protections were
described as a pathology and the social contract was dismissed as
socialism. While social critic Michael Kazin does not mention the
notions of education or public pedagogy in a recent New York Times
article, he is right in stressing the centrality of education to the
current right-wing-Christian-extremists takeover of almost every aspect
of political and economic life in America - extending from the Supreme
Court to the federal government to the dominant media-cultural
educational apparatus. He writes: "Like the left in the early 20th
century, conservatives built an impressive set of institutions to
develop and disseminate their ideas. Their think tanks, legal societies,
lobbyists, talk radio and best selling manifestos have trained,
educated and financed two generations of writers and organizers.
Conservative Christian colleges both Protestant and Catholic, provide
students with a more coherent worldview than do the more prestigious
schools led by liberals. More recently, conservatives marshaled media
outlets like Fox News and the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal
to their cause."(1)
Education has become the political weapon of choice for conservatives,
and they have had astounding success in using the mainstream and new
media to drown out the voices of more progressive critics. The evidence
is everywhere. For instance, The New York Times is currently advertising
its Watch Education Take Center Stage initiative and the keynote
address is being given by the politically and morally discredited
champion of neoliberal education, Lawrence Summers. Given his failed
presidency at Harvard, his utterly shameful role in contributing to the
financial crisis of 2008 and the failure of Obama's economic policies
and his crude instrumental view of education, why would The New York
Times select him as an educational leader and beacon of hope for any
kind of educational vision designed to address future generations? Other
speakers include the likes of Chester Finn, whose views on public
education are as politically reactionary as they are theoretically
bogus. Another example can be found in the ongoing Education Nation
series sponsored on a number of platforms by NBC. It's endorsement of
market-driven anti-public education policies are evident in its parading
of the likes of Bill and Melinda Gates and their utterly anti-public,
charter school, privatized and technocratic vision of education. Also
included are the usual list of charter school, corporate funded
anti-union, public school cheerleaders for defunding and privatizing
American education. Of course, missing from these dog-and-pony shows are
progressive public school reformers such as David Berliner, Stanley
Aronowitz, Jonathan Kozol, Marian Wright Edelman, Donaldo Macedo, and
others who have been fighting for real educational reform for the last
few decades. Nor is there any mention of the many local struggling
social movements fighting for public education and the ever-dissolving
protections of social contract inherited from the legacy of the New Deal
and the Great Society programs. Education at all levels is firmly in
the hands of the rich, reactionary and the powerful. Is it any wonder
given how invisible progressive forces are in this country that young
people are not in the streets as they were in the sixties, refusing the
future being offered to them by Wall Street and the moralizing Christian
fundamentalists?
Of course, this is not merely a debate about education; it is really
about the emergence of an anti-reform movement that wants to create
armies of low-skilled workers and consumers for the privatized,
deregulated and commodified world of the 21st century where a survival
of the fittest ethic has been elevated to the status of commonsense.
This is a world in which the culture of cruelty is now so commonplace
that audiences clap when right-wing politicians insist that people who
are terminally ill should die rather than receive government support; it
is a world in which the legacies and injustice of slavery and the Jim
Crow era now shape a criminal justice system in which capital punishment
is largely used to kill black men while, at the same time, used by
crass politicians to provoke political support and cheers from audiences
who could have once sat in the seats of Roman coliseums watching people
eaten by wild animals; the culture of cruelty is now matched by the
culture of vulgarity - reality TV shows mimic the worst values of
American life; celebrity culture is now so crude that it is worse than
illiterate, and celebrities such as Kim Kardashian become role models
for legitimating a lethal combination of vulgarity and stupidity. The
combination of vulgarity and illiteracy permeates American culture,
particularly its political class. What is one to make of the current
crop of Republic presidential candidates who claim, without irony, that
climate change is not the result of human behavior; evolution is bad
science; and in the case of the queen of idiocy, Michele Bachmann,
ignore the most obvious scientific evidence about the HPV vaccine in
order to make false claims about the value of this particular drug in
saving the lives of young girls. In all of these examples, education
becomes another way of making the larger public and young people either
stupid or mindless consumers - even worse, both.
The American public needs access to a new political and educational
vocabulary in order to fashion democratically vibrant educational
institutions; social movements; community educational centers;
bookstores; and a lively, independent press. Young people, educators,
activists, artists, parents, and others need alternative media such as
Truthout, AlterNet and CounterPunch as popular civic outlets to make
education central to building the formative culture that would create
new generations of real public intellectuals, youth activists, social
movements and a vibrant range of public spheres. I have taken up this
issue in my newest book, "Education and the Crisis of Public Values."
The book points to how educators and others can meet the current attack
on education, young people and democracy itself. It offers a new
vocabulary for better understanding the crisis of education as a crisis
of democracy and public life, and provides a number of suggestions for
what new beginnings are necessary, all of which is outlined in more
detail throughout the book. Below is an excerpt from the preface that
forecasts both the swindle of education offered by conservatives, the
billionaires and corporate power brokers and why it needs to be resisted
with as much urgency and collective power as possible.
With all due respect to Charles Dickens, it appears to be the worst of
times for public and higher education in America; public schools are
increasingly viewed as a business and are prized above all for "customer
satisfaction," and efficiency while largely judged through the narrow
lens of empirical accountability measures. When not functioning as a
business or a potentially lucrative for-profit investment, public
schools are reduced to containment centers, holding institutions
designed to largely punish young people marginalized by race and class.
No longer merely tracked into low-achieving classes, poor white, brown
and black youth are now tracked out of school into what is often called
the school-to-prison pipeline. Schools have now become stress centers
for the privileged and zones of abandonment for the poor. Public school
teachers are now viewed as the new "welfare-queens," while academics are
defined less as critical intellectuals and engaged scholars than as a
new class or professional entrepreneurs. Under strict policies imposed
in a number of states by right-wing politicians wrapping themselves in
the rhetoric of austerity, higher education at all levels is being
radically defunded while simultaneously being transformed into a
credentializing factory restructured according to the values, social
relations and governing practices of large corporations. In both public
and higher education, ignorance is not merely fostered, but embraced
through the course content whose value is almost exclusively defined
through a metaphysics in which anything that can't be quantified is
defined as useless. Corporate pedagogy has no use for critical thinking,
autonomous subjects, the stretching of the imagination, or developing a
sense of civic responsibility among students. Teachers who think and
act reflectively, ask uncomfortable questions, challenge the scripts of
official power and promote a search for the truth while encouraging
pedagogy as the practice of freedom are now viewed as suspect, if not
un-American.
At the same time, amid all of the despair and foolishness on the part
of right-wing politicians and conservative and corporate interests, it
is not entirely clear that a spring of hope is beyond reach. As I wrote
this preface, workers and young people were marching and demonstrating
all over the globe against the dictates, values and policies of a
market-driven economy that has corrupted politics, pushed democracy to
its vanishing point and undermined public values. Unions, public school
teachers, higher education, and all of those public spheres necessary to
keep civic values alive are being challenged in a way that both baffles
and shocks anyone who believes in the ideals and promises of a
substantive democracy. In the United States, union-busting politicians
such as Govs. Scott Walker (Wisconsin) and Chris Christie (New Jersey)
not only want to gut social services and sell them off to the highest
bidder, they are also symptomatic of a political fringe movement that
wants to destroy the critical culture, dedicated public servants and
institutions that give any sense of vitality, substance and hope to
public and higher education in the United States.
As the meaning of democracy is betrayed by its transformation into a
market society, corporate power and money appear unchecked in their
ability to privatize, deregulate and destroy all vestiges of public
life. America's military wars abroad are now matched by the war at home;
that is, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have found their
counterpart in the war against the poor, immigrants, young people,
unions, public-sector workers, the welfare state and schoolteachers. The
call for shared sacrifices on the part of conservatives and Tea Party
extremists becomes code for destroying the social state, preserving and
increasing the power of mega-rich corporations and securing the wealth
of the top one percent of the population with massive tax breaks while
placing the burden of the current global economic meltdown on the
shoulders of working people and the poor. Deficit reductions and
austerity policies that allegedly address the global economic meltdown
caused by the financial hawks running Wall Street now do the real work
of stripping teachers of their collective bargaining rights, dismantling
programs long associated with social services and relegating young
people to mind-deadening schools and a debt-ridden future. David
Harvey's notion of "accumulation through dispossession" has become a
basic policy of casino capitalism. How else to interpret the right-wing
call to tax the poor to subsidize tax breaks for billionaires and mega
corporations? Despair, disposability and unnecessary human suffering now
engulf large swaths of the American people, often pushing them into
situations that are not merely tragic, but life threatening. A
survival-of-the-fittest ethic has replaced any reasonable notion of
solidarity, social responsibility and compassion for the other. Ideology
does not seem to matter any longer as right-wing Republicans have less
interest in argument and persuasion than in bullying their alleged
enemies with the use of heavy-handed legislation and, when necessary,
dire threats, as when Wisconsin's Republican Gov. Scott Walker
threatened to mobilize the National Guard to prevent teachers' unions
from protesting their possible loss of bargaining rights and a host of
anti-worker proposals.
Obama has joined the Republican Party, leaving us with a Republican
Party lite and a Republican Party of extremists. We have become a
culture of forgetting, obliterating both the legacy of authoritarianism
that characterized the Bush-Cheney years, while supporting a new group
of Republican politicians who resemble Bush and Cheney on steroids. We
are more than a nation in decline; we are a nation moving toward the
bittersweet simplisms, policies and values of a new form of
authoritarianism. With any viable leadership lacking at the national
level, both young people and workers are watching the movements for
democracy that are taking place all over the globe, but especially in
the volatile Arab nations and in Western European countries such as
France, England and Germany. Struggles abroad give Americans a glimpse
of what happens when individual solutions to collective problems lose
their legitimacy as a central tenet of neoliberal ideology. Massive
demonstrations, pitched street battles, nonviolent gatherings, the
impressive use of the new media as an alternative political and
educational tool and an outburst of long-repressed anger eager for
collective action are engulfing many countries across the globe. In
smaller numbers, such protests are also taking place in a number of
cities around the United States. Many Americans are, once again,
invoking democracy, rejecting its association with the empty formality
of voting and its disingenuous use to legitimate and justify political
systems that produce massive wealth and income inequality. Democracy's
promises are laying bare the sordid realities that now speak in its
name. Its energy is becoming infectious, and one can only hope that
those who believe that education is the foundation of critical agency,
politics and democracy itself will be drawn to the task of fighting
America's move in the last 30 years to a politically and economically
authoritarian system.
At issue here is the need for a new vocabulary, vision and politics
that will unleash new democratic movements, institutions and a formative
culture capable of imagining a life and society free of the dictates of
endless military wars, boundless material waste, extreme inequality,
disposable populations and unfounded human suffering. Central to
"Education and the Crisis of Public Values" is the belief that no change
will come unless education both within and outside of formal schooling
is viewed as central to any viable notion of politics. If real reform is
going to happen, it has to put in place a viable, critical, formative
culture that supports notions of engaged citizenship, civic courage,
public values, dissent, democratic modes of governing and a genuine
belief in freedom, equality and justice. Ideas matter as do the human
beings and institutions that make them count and that includes those
intellectuals both in and out of schools who bear the responsibility of
providing the conditions for Americans of all ages to be able to think
critically so they can act imaginatively - so they can embrace a vision
of the good life as a just life, one that extends the values, practices
and vision of democracy to everyone.
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