Henry Giroux
Henry Giroux
Henry Giroux, is an American and Canadian scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory. In 2002 Routledge named Giroux as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth18 September 1943
CountryUnited States of America
Cynicism, disillusionment, and a dispiriting sense of purposeless has cast a shadow over American society seriously draining it of any language or vision that might imagine a different sort of society from the dysfunctional, militarizing, and deeply unequal social order that marked the current historical period.
With the rise of new technologies, media, and other cultural apparatuses as powerful forms of public pedagogy, students need to understand and address how these pedagogical cultural apparatuses work to diffuse learning from any vestige of critical thought. This is a form of public pedagogy that needs to be addressed both for how it deforms and for how it can create important new spaces for emancipatory forms of pedagogy.
I mean, we're not talking about simply racism, we're taking about white supremacy.
Collective freedom provides the basic conditions for people to narrate their own lives, hold power accountable, and embrace a capacious notion of human dignity.
Where I grew up, learning was a collective activity. But when I got to school and tried to share learning with other students that was called cheating. The curriculum sent the clear message to me that learning was a highly individualistic, almost secretive, endeavor. My working class experience...was disparaged.
The freedom and human capacities of individuals must be developed to their maximum but individual powers must be linked to democracy in the sense that social betterment must be the necessary consequence of individual flourishing.
Any dominant ideology operates off the assumption that what it has to say is unaccountable and unquestionable.
Today, in the age of standardized testing, thinking and acting, reason and judgment have been thrown out the window just as teachers are increasingly being deskilled and forced to act as semi-robotic technicians good for little more than teaching for the test...
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.
The new illiteracy is about more than not knowing how to read the book or the word; it is about not knowing how to read the world...
The degree to which fear now becomes an organizing principle of society is enormous compared to what it was like in the past.