“Americans live in a historical moment
that annihilates thought. Ignorance now provides a sense of community; the
brain has migrated to the dark pit of the spectacle; the only discourse that
matters is about business; poverty is now viewed as a technical problem;
thought chases after an emotion that can obliterate it. The presumptive
Republican Party presidential nominee, Donald Trump, declares he likes ‘the
uneducated’ and boasts that he doesn't read books. Fox News offers no apologies
for suggesting that thinking is an act of stupidity.
“A culture of cruelty and a
survival-of-the-fittest ethos in the United States is the new norm and one
consequence is that democracy in the United States is on the verge of
disappearing or has already disappeared! Where are the agents of democracy and
the public spaces that offer hope in such dark times? Many are in public
schools -- all the more reason to praise public school teachers and to defend
public and higher education as a public good.
“For the most part, public school
teachers and higher education faculty are a national treasure and may be one of
the last defenses available to undermine a growing authoritarianism, pervasive
racism, permanent war culture, widening inequality and debased notion of
citizenship in US society. They can't solve these problems but they can educate
a generation of students to address them.
“Yet, public school teachers, in
particular, are underpaid and overworked, and lack adequate resources. In the
end, they are unjustly blamed by right-wing billionaires and politicians for
the plight of public schools. In order to ensure their failure, schools in many
cities, such as Detroit and Philadelphia, have been defunded by right-wing
legislators. These schools are dilapidated -- filled with vermin and broken
floors -- and they often lack heat and the most basic resources. They represent
the mirror image of the culture of cruelty and dispossession produced by the
violence of neoliberalism.
“Under the counterfeit appeal to
reform, national legislation imposes drill-and-test modes of pedagogy on
teachers that kill the imagination of students. Young people suffer under the
tyranny of methods that are forms of disciplinary repression. Teachers remain
powerless as administrators model their schools after prisons and turn students
over to the police. And in the midst of such egregious assaults, teachers are
disparaged as public servants.
“The insecure, overworked adjunct
lecturers employed en masse at most institutions of higher education fare no
better. They have been reduced to an army of indentured wage slaves, with
little or no power, benefits or time to do their research. Some states, such as
Texas, appear to regard higher education as a potential war zone and have
passed legislation allowing students to carry concealed weapons on campus.
“That is certainly one way to convince
faculty not to engage in controversial subjects with their students. With the
exception of the elite schools, which have their own criminogenic environments
to deal with, higher education is in free fall, undermined as a democratic
public sphere and increasingly modeled after corporations and run by armies of
administrators who long to be called CEOs.
“All the while the federal government
uses billions of dollars to fuel one of the largest defense and intelligence
budgets in the world. The death machine is overflowing with money while the
public sector, social provisions and public goods are disappearing. At the same
time, many states allocate more funds for prisons than for higher education.
Young children all over the country are drinking water poisoned with lead,
while corporations rake in huge profits, receive huge tax benefits, buy off
politicians and utterly corrupt the political system. Trust and compassion are
considered a weakness if not a liability in an age of massive inequities in
wealth and power.
“In the midst of what can only be
viewed as a blow against democracy, right-wing Republicans produce slash-and-burn
policies that translate into poisonous austerity measures for public schools
and higher education. As Jane Mayer points out in Dark Money, the Koch
brothers and their billionaire allies want to abolish the minimum wage,
privatize schools, eliminate the welfare state, pollute the planet at will,
break unions and promote policies that result in the needless deaths of
millions who lack adequate health care, jobs and other essentials.
“Public goods such as schools,
according to these politicians and corporate lobbyists, are financial
investments, viewed as business opportunities. For the billionaires who are the
anti-reformers, teachers, students and unions simply get in the way and must be
disciplined.
“Public schools and higher education
are ‘dangerous’ because they hold the potential to serve as laboratories for
democracy where students learn to think critically. Teachers are threatening
because they refuse to conflate education with training or treat schools as if
they were car dealerships. Many educators have made it clear that they regard
teaching for the test and defining accountability only in numerical terms as
acts that dull the mind and kill the spirit of students.
“Such repressive requirements undermine
the ability of teachers to be creative, engage with the communities in which
they work and teach in order to make knowledge critical and transformative. The
claim that we have too many bad teachers is too often a ruse to hide bad
policies and to unleash assaults on public schools by corporate-driven
ideologues and hedge fund managers who view schools strictly as investment
opportunities for big profits.
“We need to praise teachers, hold them
to high standards, pay them the salaries they deserve, give them control over
their classrooms, reduce class sizes and invest as much, if not more, in
education as we do in the military-industrial complex. This is all the more
reason to celebrate and call attention to those teachers in Chicago, Detroit
and Seattle who are collectively fighting against such attacks on public
schools.
“We need to praise them, learn from
them and organize with them because they refuse to treat education as a
commodity and they recognize that the crisis of schooling is about the crises
of democracy, economic equality and justice. This is not a minor struggle
because no democracy can survive without informed citizens...”
For the complete article, click here.
Henry A. Giroux currently
is the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and
The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. He also is a
Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University. His most recent books
include The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights, 2014), Dangerous
Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015) and co-authored
with Brad Evans, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of
Spectacle (City Lights, 2015). Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board
of Directors. His website is www.henryagiroux.com.
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