The Giroux Reader (review)

Christopher G. Robbins opens his introduction to The Giroux Reader with the following:

In an age where irrelevance is fashionable and low expectations dominate public discourse, Henry A. Giroux's work is an anomaly. It refuses to be inconsequential or strive for mediocrity. Giroux's wide-ranging studies of education, politics, culture and society are not only engaging and challenging—sometimes even disturbing—they are, more fundamentally, crucial resources for educators, parents, young people, and other citizens concerned with reclaiming and revitalizing democratic public life and its supporting institutions, practices and languages.

(vii)

I agree, and would argue that The Giroux Reader provides vital information to both novice Giroux readers and those who have studied him for years. Robbins states, "Giroux's work is instructive for citizens concerned with the question of how and where to begin building a political culture, and educating its agents, in ways that can offset a fundamentally reordered, mass-mediated, market-driven, and globalized world in the interests of a social order that is more humane, less exclusionary—more democratic in form, content, function, and effects" (vii). Giroux himself notes, "as citizenship becomes increasingly privatized and students are increasingly educated to become consuming subjects rather than critical social agents, it becomes all the more imperative for critical educators to rethink how the educational force of culture works to both secure and resist particular identities and values" (237). Indeed.

When reading an anthology, one might be tempted to skip the introduction and dive straight into the content chapters, but that would be a mistake with The Giroux Reader. In the introduction—"Reading Henry Giroux: Critique, Possibility, and the Promise of Democracy"—Robbins provides a map to help the reader contextualize a career of "40 authored, coauthored, edited, and coedited volumes, 280 scholarly popular press articles, and 154 contributions to edited collections, in addition to a highly regarded teaching career and frequent public speaking engagements" (vii). Robbins begins with his personal story of meeting and working with Giroux in order to anchor the "Learning Giroux" subsection, where the reader is presented with a sketch of Giroux as a person, a mentor, a researcher, and a teacher. Then, in the "Reading the Giroux Reader" subsection, Robbins outlines six major categories of Giroux's work: the sociology of education, cultural studies and cultural politics, the war against youth, critical and public pedagogies, the politics of public education, and the work of public intellectuals. "I wish to leave readers mobilized," Robbins closes, "[by an] openness, criticality, and language of possibility . . ." (xxiv). I believe that he succeeds.

The six parts of The Giroux Reader that follow the introduction contain thirteen articles: 1983 and 1988 research in the sociology of education, 1993 and 1994 reflections on cultural studies and cultural politics, 1998 and 2001 investigations of the war against youth, three entries on critical pedagogy and public pedagogy (from 1999, 2004, and 2006), 2000 and 2003 articles on the politics of higher education, and two musings on public intellectuals and their work (from an article originally published in 1992 and one work in progress [as of 2006]). In the 2006 article in the critical and public pedagogies section where Manuela Guilherme interviews Giroux, she argues, "Giroux has indeed advanced a new school of thought and inspired both educational theorists and practitioners into action with his powerful, vibrant and committed voice" (182). By the end of The Giroux Reader many would concur.

As can be seen in the above summary of the anthology's contents, The Giroux Reader draws from a wide range of Giroux's opus, including an early career research article (1983) and one from the publication year of the collection (2006). Given that there are only thirteen chapters to cover this twenty-three-year period, there will necessarily be omissions that readers might question. For example, I would have expected the inclusion of at least one chapter where Giroux explicitly interrogates the effects of 9/11 on American society, such as in the introduction to his Public Spaces, Private Lives: Democracy...