Any dominant ideology operates off the assumption that what it has to say is unaccountable and unquestionable. Henry Giroux More Quotes by Henry Giroux More Quotes From Henry Giroux 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. Henry Giroux violence remember thinking Once ignorance is weaponized, violence seems to be a tragic inevitability. Henry Giroux tragic violence ignorance Unfortunately, we live at a moment in which ignorance appears to be one of the defining features of American political and cultural life. Ignorance has become a form of weaponized refusal to acknowledge the violence of the past, and revels in a culture of media spectacles in which public concerns are translated into private obsessions, consumerism and fatuous entertainment. Henry Giroux political ignorance past There appears to be no space outside the panoptican of commercial barbarism and casino capitalism. Henry Giroux casinos barbarism space The structures of neoliberal modernity do more than disinvest in young people and commodify them, they also transform the protected space of childhood into a zone of disciplinary exclusion and cruelty, especially for those young people further marginalized by race and class who now inhabit a social landscape in which they are increasingly disparaged as flawed consumers or pathologized others. Henry Giroux space race class Violence comes in many forms and can be particularly disturbing when confronted in an educational setting if handled dismissively or in ways that blame victims. Henry Giroux blame educational violence The current siege on higher education, whether through defunding education, eliminating tenure, tying research to military needs, or imposing business models of efficiency and accountability, poses a dire threat not only to faculty and students who carry the mantle of university self-governance, but also to democracy itself. Henry Giroux accountability democracy military America is at war with itself because it's basically declared war not only on any sense of democratic idealism, but it's declared war on all the institutions that make democracy possible. And we see it with the war on public schools. We see it with the war on education. We see it with the war on the healthcare system. Henry Giroux democracy war school The ideology of neoliberalism, with its privatization, its deregulation, its emphasis on consumption, its elimination of basically apparatuses that can provide alternative points of view, has been so powerful and so normalized. Henry Giroux neoliberalism powerful views These anti-public intellectuals are part of a disimagination machine that solidifies the power of the rich and the structures of the military-industrial-surveillance-academic complex by presenting the ideologies, institutions and relations of the powerful as commonsense. Henry Giroux machines powerful military I think we're in a very distinctively different historical moment. I mean, I think that you had two things that were operating in the 1930s that seem to be, in many ways, to have been weakened or disappeared. And of course the beginning of the 21st century, I mean, you have - at one level you had massive social movements. Henry Giroux two mean thinking You had workers' movements. You had left organizations, the Communist Party, that were mobilizing in profoundly powerful ways to basically address the great injustices of capitalism. Henry Giroux party powerful organization The rise of globalization, the rise of finance capital, the elimination of the manufacturing base, the decimation of the working class, particularly in terms of those who had some comforts that approximated what the middle class had. Henry Giroux finance comfort class FDR was enormously influenced by this, and afraid. I mean, his intervention was to save capitalism. It wasn't to basically appease the workers. And I think that today you don't have those movements. Henry Giroux movement mean thinking You don't have any vestige of democracy in this country. A report recently came out of Princeton University claiming that, of all the policies that have been made in the last thirty years, 95% of them were in the interest of the rich and had nothing to do with what people wanted - basic services, roads, all of that. They called it an oligarchy. Henry Giroux democracy country people I think the very idea of the social contract is in disarray. Henry Giroux social ideas thinking I think people now live in an age in which the only thing - they don't think about getting ahead. They think about surviving. Henry Giroux age people thinking Certainly I think the state is more than willing to not only attempt to change the consciousness of people, but to employ violence in ways that make people quite fearful. Henry Giroux people way thinking The degree to which fear now becomes an organizing principle of society is enormous compared to what it was like in the past. Henry Giroux degrees principles past What many commentators have missed in the ongoing attack on Edward Snowden is not that he uncovered information that made clear how corrupt and intrusive the American government has become - how willing it is to engage in vast crimes against the American public. Henry Giroux ongoing information government
