Current "Reforms" Attempt to Drive Young People Out of Democracy

[marmar]

from truthout:


Henry Giroux: Current "Reforms" Attempt to Drive Young People Out of Democracy

Henry Giroux teaches at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, and has written several books about youth, democracy and public education. In this interview with Camilla Croso, coordinator of the Latin-American Campaign for the Right to Education (CLADE), Giroux talks about corporate interests in the privatization of education, attacks on the importance of schooling and the marginalization of youth under the current political and economic system.

.....(snip)......

Henry Giroux: Every country has its own context, but I think that what we have seen since the 1980s is the recognition on the part of the right that the educative nature of politics is really crucial and important. They want to take control of those institutions that produce particular kinds of subjects, dispositions, attitudes, particular modes of desire that are compatible with market values and market social relationships. So the school becomes a reproductive tool that aligns itself with the belief that the market has the ability to govern all of social life.

Schools are public spaces and by default, they are at odds with a market rationality. The people who control corporate power globally, today, have no interest in the public, public values or public goods. Actually, the public as a democratic public sphere that encourages critical dialogue and an engaged citizenry is the enemy of the market for them because it's a non-commoditized sphere that basically can produce all those things that are considered hazardous to corporate interests. That is, it produces people who can imagine otherwise and hence act otherwise; it can produce people who believe in thoughtfulness, critical exchange, civic courage [and] social responsibility, and are more than willing to hold power accountable. Public spheres are places in which thinking becomes dangerous and, in that sense, they have to be shut down.

Furthermore, there is an enormous effort on the part of the right, all over the globe, to privatize these public spheres and to turn them into risk-free investments for accumulating capital and profits for the relatively few, for the rich, for politicians, all of whom then can make enormous amounts of money off them. They can disempower faculty, they can treat students as consumers and they can basically use them as a way to accumulate capital.

How do you think corporate power can be constrained?

Right off, it is crucial to make corporate power and its effects visible. And that means not just material relations of power but also the ideologies that legitimate corporate power. This means that it is crucial to recognize that there is no correlation between corporate power and democracy. When corporate power speaks in the name of democracy, it basically lies and the ideological assumptions that drive corporate power have got to be challenged. Let's talk about three of them. First of all, the notion that the only obligation of citizenship is consumerism is morally bankrupt and politically reactionary. It is degrading to claim that people simply need to be shoppers to fulfill their role as citizens. This ideological monstrosity both undermines any viable notion of citizenship and makes a mockery of democracy.

Secondly, the apostles of neoliberalism argue that the only notion of agency that matters is a kind of extreme radical individualism in which self-interest and the ethos of unbridled competition are the only motives that drive people. Self-interest, carried to extremes, undermines modes of solidarity that are absolutely essential to any society that wants to survive. And extreme competition breeds a survival of the fittest way of life that generates a society that celebrates violence, war and a culture of cruelty. A society that does not care to exercise a certain kind of compassion for other people is in trouble. It is a society that not only kills the radical imagination; it promotes a form of civic and political death. Equally important, hyper individualism feeds the myth that people are responsible for all of the problems they face thus downplaying or making invisible the broader systemic and structural problems that plague neoliberal societies that extend from massive poverty, unemployment, and inequality in wealth and income to the defunding of the welfare state. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/27617-henry-giroux-marginalized-youth-must-challenge-the-system-that-oppresses-them

[potone]

1. Thanks for the thread!

It is a good article.