in dark times
TEACHERS MATTER
by
HENRY A. GIROUX
__________________________________________
Henry
A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair
Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural
Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship
at Ryerson University. He is the author of more than 50 books
including The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth
and Zombie
Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.
Many of his essays, including The Spectacle of Illiteracy, appear
on his website at www.henryagiroux.com.
His interview with Bill
Moyers is must viewing.
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YOUR
COMMENTSAmericans live in a historical moment that
annihilates thought. Ignorance now provides a sense of community;
the brain has migrated to the dark pit of the spectacle; the
only discourse that matters is about business; poverty is now
viewed as a technical problem; thought chases after an emotion
that can obliterate it. The Republican Party presidential nominee,
Donald Trump, declares he likes "the uneducated" --
implying that it is better that they stay ignorant than be critically
engaged agents -- and boasts that he doesn't read books. Fox
News offers no apologies for suggesting that thinking is an
act of stupidity.
A culture
of cruelty and a survival-of-the-fittest ethos in the United
States is the new norm and one consequence is that democracy
in the United States is on the verge of disappearing or has
already disappeared. Where are the agents of democracy and the
public spaces that offer hope in such dark times? Many are in
public schools -- all the more reason to praise public school
teachers and to defend public and higher education as a public
good.
For
the most part, public school teachers and higher education faculty
are a national treasure and may be one of the last defenses
available to undermine a growing authoritarianism, pervasive
racism, permanent war culture, widening inequality and debased
notion of citizenship in US society. They can't solve these
problems but they can educate a generation of students to address
them. Yet, public school teachers, in particular, are underpaid
and overworked, and lack adequate resources. In the end, they
are unjustly blamed by right-wing billionaires and politicians
for the plight of public schools. In order to ensure their failure,
schools in many cities, such as Detroit and Philadelphia, have
been defunded by right-wing legislators. These schools are dilapidated
-- filled with vermin and broken floors -- and they often lack
heat and the most basic resources. They represent the mirror
image of the culture of cruelty and dispossession produced by
the violence of neoliberalism.
Under
the counterfeit appeal to reform, national legislation imposes
drill-and-test modes of pedagogy on teachers that kill the imagination
of students. Young people suffer under the tyranny of methods
that are forms of disciplinary repression. Teachers remain powerless
as administrators model their schools after prisons and turn
students over to the police. And in the midst of such egregious
assaults, teachers are disparaged as public servants.
The
insecure, overworked adjunct lecturers employed en masse at
most institutions of higher education fare no better. They have
been reduced to an army of indentured wage slaves, with little
or no power, benefits or time to do their research. Some states,
such as Texas, appear to regard higher education as a potential
war zone and have passed legislation allowing students to carry
concealed weapons on campus. That is certainly one way to convince
faculty not to engage in controversial subjects with their students.
With the exception of the elite schools, which have their own
criminogenic environments to deal with, higher education is
in free fall, undermined as a democratic public sphere and increasingly
modeled after corporations and run by armies of administrators
who long to be called CEOs.
All
the while the federal government uses billions of dollars to
fuel one of the largest defense and intelligence budgets in
the world. The death machine is overflowing with money while
the public sector, social provisions and public goods are disappearing.
At the same time, many states allocate more funds for prisons
than for higher education. Young children all over the country
are drinking water poisoned with lead, while corporations rake
in huge profits, receive huge tax benefits, buy off politicians
and utterly corrupt the political system. Trust and compassion
are considered a weakness if not a liability in an age of massive
inequities in wealth and power.
In
the midst of what can only be viewed as a blow against democracy,
right-wing Republicans produce slash-and-burn policies that
translate into poisonous austerity measures for public schools
and higher education. As Jane Mayer points out in Dark Money,
the Koch brothers and their billionaire allies want to abolish
the minimum wage, privatize schools, eliminate the welfare state,
pollute the planet at will, break unions and promote policies
that result in the needless deaths of millions who lack adequate
health care, jobs and other essentials. Public goods such as
schools, according to these politicians and corporate lobbyists,
are financial investments, viewed as business opportunities.
For the billionaires who are the anti-reformers, teachers, students
and unions simply get in the way and must be disciplined.
Public
schools and higher education are ‘dangerous’ because
they hold the potential to serve as laboratories for democracy
where students learn to think critically. Teachers are threatening
because they refuse to conflate education with training or treat
schools as if they were car dealerships. Many educators have
made it clear that they regard teaching for the test and defining
accountability only in numerical terms as acts that dull the
mind and kill the spirit of students. Such repressive requirements
undermine the ability of teachers to be creative, engage with
the communities in which they work and teach in order to make
knowledge critical and transformative. The claim that we have
too many bad teachers is too often a ruse to hide bad policies
and to unleash assaults on public schools by corporate-driven
ideologues and hedge fund managers who view schools strictly
as investment opportunities for big profits.
We
need to praise teachers, hold them to high standards, pay them
the salaries they deserve, give them control over their classrooms,
reduce class sizes and invest as much, if not more, in education
as we do in the military-industrial complex. This is all the
more reason to celebrate and call attention to those teachers
in Chicago, Detroit and Seattle who are collectively fighting
against such attacks on public schools. We need to praise them,
learn from them and organize with them because they refuse to
treat education as a commodity and they recognize that the crisis
of schooling is about the crises of democracy, economic equality
and justice. This is not a minor struggle because no democracy
can survive without informed citizens.
Neoliberal
education is increasingly expressed in terms of austerity measures
and market-driven ideologies that undermine any notion of the
imagination, reduce faculty to an army of indentured labour
and burden students with either a mind-numbing education or
enormous crippling debt or both. If faculty and students do
not resist this assault, they will no longer have any control
over the conditions of their labour, and the institutions of
public and higher education will further degenerate into a crude
adjunct of the corporation and financial elite.
Clearly,
it is time to revisit Mario Savio's famous speech at Berkeley
in 1964 when he called for shutting down an educational system
that had become odious. In his own words:
Savio's
call to resistance is more relevant today than it was then.
Public schools not only mimic the injustices of an oppressive
economic system, but also funnel poor youth of colour into the
criminal legal system. The good news is that there is an echo
of outrage and resistance now emerging in the United States,
especially among young people such as those in the Black Lives
Matter movement.
If
the major index of any democracy is measured by how a society
treats its children, the United States is failing. Fortunately,
more and more people are waking up and realizing that the fight
for public schooling is not just about higher salaries for teachers;
it is about investing in our children and in democracy itself.
At the same time, we live in what author Carl Boggs and others
have called a permanent warfare state, one in which every space
appears to be a battlefield, and the most vulnerable are viewed
not only as an imminent threat, but also as the object of potential
violence. This suggests that the battle of education must become
part of a wider political struggle. This is a struggle that
connects assaults on education with the broader war on youth,
police violence with the militarization of society and specific
instances of racist brutality with the unchecked exercise of
the systemic power of finance capital. But the struggle will
not be easy.
Beneath
all of the current brutality, racism and economic predation,
there is some hope inspired by the generation of young people
who are protesting police violence and the attack on public
and higher education and working hard to invent a politics that
gets to the root of issues. There is also a glimmer of possibility
in those youth who have supported Bernie Sanders but are really
demanding a new and more radical definition of politics: Their
vision far surpasses that of the left-centrists and liberals
of the Democratic Party.
Elections
are the ruse of capitalism, and that has never been more clear
than at the present moment. On the one side we have Hillary
Clinton, a warmonger, a strong supporter of the financial elite
and a representative of a neoliberalism that is as brutal as
it is cruel. On the other side we have Donald Trump, a circus
barker inviting Americans into a den of horrors. And these are
the choices that constitute democracy? I don't think so.
Collective
self-delusion will only go so far in the absence of an education
system that offers a space for critical learning and dissent,
and functions as a laboratory for democracy. There is a tendency
to forget in an age dominated by the neoliberal celebration
of self-interest and unchecked individualism that public goods
matter, that critical thinking is essential to an informed public
and that education at the very least should provide students
with unsettling ruptures that display the fierce energy of outrage
and the hope for a better world.
But
a critical education has the capacity to do more. It also has
the power not only to prevent justice from going dead in ourselves
and the larger society, but also, in George Yancy's poetic terms,
to teach us how to "love with courage." Hopefully,
while education cannot solve such problems, it can produce the
formative cultures necessary to enable a generation of young
people to create a robust third party -- a party fuelled by
social movements demanding the economic and political justice
that could allow a radical democracy to come to life.
