Occupy U: The Timely Call of Henry A. Giroux's On Critical Pedagogy

In 2011, the Protestor was named as Time magazine's person of the year; 2011 saw resistance movements reach boiling points and regime-changing protests appear around the world, including the emergence of Occupy protests in the United States, which then spread to almost a thousand cities worldwide (#occupytogether). Henry A. Giroux's latest book, On Critical Pedagogy, could alternatively be titled Occupy Education, or Occupy University. Indeed, after this work's release, Giroux produced (at least) two articles that explicitly consider the intersection of Occupy resistance movements and educational policy. In this 183-page collection, Giroux presents a series of his own essays collected from across forty years that share the beliefs and values upon which Occupy movements are built. On Critical Pedagogy is a valuable monograph-anthology that charts arguments for critical pedagogy in order to demonstrate how the privatization of education is steadily moving toward the degradation of institutional investments in the public. In other words, this work is rhetoric writ large; it is a collection that connects our classrooms with the politics that subtend them and seeks to question the implications and results of education. Giroux's pieces, when taken together, are a careful map of what education "does."

The title of the included introductory essay signals clearly the premise of the text itself: this work really is about "Critical Pedagogy in Dark Times." In the first pages of the text, Giroux demonstrates how current problems facing education in the United States are laced with material, social, and ethical contradictions similar to those dealt with in the work of John Dewey, Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, and Edward Said. Using these writers' work, Giroux continues earlier conversations between Paulo Freire and Ira Shor with added emphasis on the systemic, rhetorical production of our classrooms and pedagogies. Yet this book is not simply a call to dust off our copies of Freire and Dewey but instead is a call for a reimagining of these writers' ideals applied to the contemporary evidence of a floundering democracy. Giroux situates us on a precarious ledge with such clarity that he is worth quoting at length:

If the commercialization, commodification, privatization, and militarization of public and higher education continue unabated, then education will become yet another casualty among a diminishing number of institutions capable of fostering critical inquiry, public debate, human acts of justice, and common deliberation. The calculating logic of an instrumentalized, corporatized, and privatized education does more than diminish the moral and political vision necessary to sustain a vibrant democracy and an engaged notion of social agency; it also undermines the development of public spaces where matters of dissent, public conscience, and social justice are valued and offered protection against the growing anti-democratic tendencies that are enveloping much of the United States and many other parts of the world.

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As we might expect from Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy is radically political and takes its subject very seriously. It is not a text that outlines pedagogy through specific classroom practices but instead supplies the exigency and implications of a liberatory pedagogical philosophy. While this book is supportive of those turning theory into praxis and highly useful for theorizing critical pedagogies, this book is, ultimately, a work of advocacy and a historical map of critical pedagogy's theoretical evolution. In other words, this book is much more about "why" than "how."

On Critical Pedagogy is the first book in the Critical Pedagogy Today series from the Continuum International Publishing Group. The series offers a comprehensive reinvestment in Freire that traces his influence across disciplines and classroom practices. Giroux's contribution contains nine titled pieces (eight articles and an interview) broken up into five themed sections offering, in order, an introduction to the value and stakes of critical pedagogy, an analysis of the political implications of critical pedagogy in the United States, insight into the particular plight of youth culture, an implementation of Freire's work as public pedagogy, and a consideration of future possibilities...