America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth by Henry A. Giroux (review)

Vintage Henry giroux. Giroux provides perhaps his best case yet for the urgency of a critical pedagogy to challenge the hubris of American marketplace ideology, an ideology which threatens the very fabric of our world and hopes for a better future. Although he focuses on the United States, his words reverberate throughout a world having thrust on it the American images and languages of “freedom” as defined by neoliberalism. Giroux issues a challenge to all “thinkers,” but particularly to teachers and academics, to accept their public responsibilities of teaching the knowledge and skills, advocating for and providing the conditions, displaying the attitudes and moral imagination and indignation which make democracy even thinkable, perhaps even possible and more likely. In short, he calls on all of us to take a stand for humanity and humankind.

Hannah Arendt once remarked that, even in dark times, one could expect that a few good people would care enough to speak up on behalf of everybody, particularly those deemed redundant, disposable, or superfluous to the functioning of society. Invoking the term “dark times,” she spoke of a time when, even though atrocities were occurring in full public view, those atrocities eluded the moral consciousness of most people. It is into just such a time Giroux is inserting his voice of political insight, intellectual reason, and ethical outrage on behalf of the ideal of democracy and the young who are about to inherit the folly of our neglectful ways. He does so by shining a light on the threat of market mentality to democracy and its underpinnings in public education.

Giroux begins his rant against our current state of affairs by explaining how we, the many and the public, have been coerced or seduced into substituting capitalism with its penchant for individualism, authoritarianism, consumerism and privatism for democracy and its inclusive spaces, public institutions, mutuality, and reciprocity. He then explains how corporate fundamentalism in four distinguishable but co-joined forms – market, religion, education, and military – conspire to undermine our democratic inclinations and institutions with their anti-intellectual, anti-educational interests. In short, the war on the human person and the common good, waged by the corporation-as-person, has resulted in a war on public schools and teachers, and indeed on the very ideals of education which have inspired and encouraged our public discourses in the past. Using a vast and stunning array of resources, he respectively enumerates and mourns the consequences and prospects for our society of demonizing not only our fellow public labourers but also the systems and institutions where they work.

This book is the story of humankind in the early 21st century, wracked as it is by realities of social exclusions of every imaginable type fueled by an American hubris which displaces republican democracy with “casino capitalism.” (10) Giroux clearly indicates his view that we are all implicated, by our silence and acquiescence, in the pending democratic suicide in which we are engaged. In my view, this is one of the strengths of this book. Clearly we must share the blame for this state of affairs – particularly true for public intellectuals and teachers, who still have a voice and the spaces in which to practice it – if we, in our collective silence, allow democracy to slip our grasp with barely a whimper, let alone a robust protest. Giroux has given us a way to think about our world in crisis, given us a language for expressing our worst fears and, at the same time, has provided some hope for the retrieval of a kinder, gentler more responsible time.

Giroux finds hope in the episodic, sometimes occasional, outbursts of freedom and action in civil society, his example being the Occupy movement which began in the United States but quickly spread throughout the Western world. This book, and certainly a follow-up book, would certainly benefit from the collation of such “moments” of freedom and might certainly include movements like Idle No More...