Henry A. Giroux > Quotes

“Today, in the age of standardized testing, thinking and acting, reason and judgment have been thrown out the window just as teachers are increasingly being deskilled and forced to act as semi-robotic technicians good for little more than teaching for the test...”
― Henry A. Giroux

“In an alleged democracy, the image of the public sphere with its appeal to dialogue and shared responsibility has given way to the spectacle of unbridled intolerance, ignorance, seething private fears, unchecked anger, along with the decoupling of reason from freedom. … What this decline in civility, the emergence of mob behavior …suggests is that we have become one of the most illiterate nations on the planet. I don't mean illiterate in the sense of not being able to read … The new illiteracy is about more than learning how to read the book or the word; it is about learning how not to read the world. … As a result of this widespread illiteracy that has come to dominate American culture we have moved from a culture of questioning to a culture of shouting, and in doing so have restaged politics and power in both unproductive and anti-democratic ways.”
― Henry A. Giroux

“It's easier to imagine the death of the planet than it is to imagine the death of capitalism.”
― Henry Giroux

“Democratic ideas cannot exist without the public spheres that make them possible.”
― Henry A. Giroux, Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism

“For the ancient Greeks, the ultimate test of the educational system was the moral and political quality of the students that it produced”
― Henry A. Giroux, Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning

“Americans need to continue to develop broad-based movements that reject the established political parties and rethink the social formations necessary to bring about a radical democracy. We see this in the Black Lives Matter movement as well as in a range of other movements that are resisting corporate money in politics, the widespread destruction of the environment, nuclear war and the mass incarceration state.”
― Henry A. Giroux, America at War with Itself

“We live in a time that demands a discourse of both critique and possibility, one that recognizes that without an informed citizenry, collective struggle, and viable social movements, democracy will slip out of our reach and we will arrive at a new stage of history marked by the birth of an authoritarianism that not only disdains all vestiges of democracy but is more than willing to relegate it to a distant memory.”
― Henry A. Giroux, Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism

“Within the last thirty years, the United States under the reign of market fundamentalism has been transformed into a society that is more about forgetting than learning, more about consuming than producing, more about asserting private interests than democratic rights.”
― Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education

“critical pedagogy becomes a project that stresses the need for teachers and students to actively transform knowledge rather than simply consume it.”
― Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy

“As a predatory competition for hoarding profit, neoliberalism produces massive inequality in wealth and income, shifts political power to financial elites, destroys all vestiges of the social contract, and increasingly views “unproductive” sectors—most often those marginalized by race, class, disability, resident status, and age—as suspicious, potentially criminal, and ultimately disposable. It thus criminalizes social problems and manufactures profit by commercializing surveillance, policing, and prisons.”
― Henry A. Giroux, The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America's Disimagination Machine

“Torture when inflicted on children
becomes indefensible. Even among those who believe that torture is a defensible
practice to extract information, the case for inflicting pain and abuse upon children
proves impossible to support.”
― Henry A. Giroux, Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism

“America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam war. —John Le Carré”
― Henry A. Giroux, The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America's Disimagination Machine

“Children have fewer rights than almost any other group and fewer institutions protecting these rights. Consequently, their voices and needs are almost completely absent from the debates, policies, and legislative practices that are constructed in terms of their needs.”
― Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy

“Not surprisingly, the all-powerful evocation of terrorism is reserved only for those acts that threaten the government-sponsored status quo, but not that perpetrated by the state or corporations against the population. So, for example, the ugly history of white people lynching, bombing, and killing Blacks in the United States is not understood, taught, or remembered as a part of the homeland’s history of terrorism.”
― Henry A. Giroux, America at War with Itself

“Ultimately, these acts of abuse and aggression offer evidence of a new reality emerging in the United States that enshrines a politics of disposability, in which growing numbers of people are considered to be a dispensable drain on the economy and thus an affront to the sensibilities of the rich and powerful.”
― Henry A. Giroux, The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America's Disimagination Machine

“Pedagogy is always about power, because it cannot be separated from how subjectives are formed, desires mobilized, how some experiences are legitimized and others are not, or how some knowledge is considered acceptable while other forms are excluded from the curriculum.”
― Henry A. Giroux, America at War with Itself

“Under the notion that unregulated market-driven values and relations should shape every domain of human life, the business model of governance has eviscerated any viable notion of social responsibility while furthering the criminalization of social problems and cutbacks in basic social services, especially for young people, the elderly, people of color, and the impoverished.36 At this historical juncture there is a merging of violence and governance along with the systemic disinvestment in and breakdown of institutions and public spheres that have provided the minimal conditions for democracy. This becomes obvious in the emergence of a surveillance state in which social media not only become new platforms for the invasion of privacy but further legitimate a culture in which monitoring functions are viewed as both necessary and benign. Meanwhile, the state-sponsored society of hyper-fear increasingly regards each and every person as a potential terrorist suspect.”
― Henry A. Giroux, The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America's Disimagination Machine

“critical pedagogy illuminates how classroom learning embodies selective values, is entangled with relations of power, entails judgments about what knowledge counts, legitimates specific social relations, defines agency in particular ways, and always presupposes a particular notion of the future.”
― Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy

“Teaching has to deal not so much with lack of knowledge as with resistances to knowledge. Ignorance, suggests Jacques Lacan, is a “passion.” Inasmuch as traditional pedagogy postulated a desire for knowledge, an analytically informed pedagogy has to reckon with the passion for ignorance.22 Felman elaborates further on the productive nature of ignorance, arguing: “Ignorance is nothing other than a desire to ignore: its nature is less cognitive than performative … it is not a simple lack of information but the incapacity — or the refusal — to acknowledge one’s own implication in the information.”
― Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy

“resistance often lacks an overt political project and frequently reflects social practices that are informal, disorganised, apolitical, and atheoretical in nature. In some instances it can reduce itself to an unreflective and defeatist refusal to acquiesce to different forms of domination; on some occasions it can be seen as a cynical, arrogant, or even naive rejection of oppressive forms of moral and political regulation”
― Henry A. Giroux

“of oppressive state power. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony as a form of cultural pedagogy is also invaluable as an element of critical educational thought. By emphasizing the pedagogical force of culture, Gramsci expands the sphere of the political by pointing to those diverse spaces and spheres in which cultural practices are deployed, lived, and mobilized in the service of knowledge, power and authority. For Gramsci, learning and politics were inextricably related and took place not merely in schools but in a vast array of public sites.”
― Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy

“How else to explain the right-wing charge that the poor, disabled, sick, and elderly are moochers and should fend for themselves? This is not simply an example of a kind of hardening of the culture, it is also part of a machinery of social and civic death that crushes any viable notion of the common good, public life, and the shared bonds and commitments that are necessary for community and democracy.”
― Henry A. Giroux, The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America's Disimagination Machine

“People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence. —James Baldwin”
― Henry A. Giroux, The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America's Disimagination Machine

“Walt Disney, because of his fervent anticommunism, developed a cordial relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its director, J. Edgar Hoover. Herbert Mitgang goes so far as to argue that 'from 1940 until his death in 1966 [Walt Disney served] as a secret informer for the Los Angeles office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
― Henry A. Giroux, The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence

“Behind the magical name of Disney and the public spaces it represents lurks the power of a multinational conglomerate that has little regard for free speech and public criticism.”
― Henry A. Giroux, The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence

“Disney's theme parks function like the suburban mall, offering middle-class families an escape from crime, pollution, immigrants, the homeless, transportation problems, and work. Managed exoticism, safety, the packaged tour, and the fantasy of consumption cancel out diversity, innovation, imagination, and the uncharted excursion.”
― Henry A. Giroux, The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence

“Far from representing a benign cultural force, Disney's theme parks offer prepackaged, sanitized versions of America's past, place a strong emphasis on the virtues of the individual as an essentially consuming subject, trans- form the work of production into the production of play, and ignore the exclusionary dynamics of class and race that permeate Disney culture.”
― Henry A. Giroux, The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence

“how do we reassert the primacy of a non-dogmatic, progressive politics by analyzing how culture as a force for resistance is related to power, education, and agency? This project suggests the need to understand how culture shapes the everyday lives of people: how culture constitutes a defining principle for understanding how struggles over meaning, identity, social practices, and institutional machineries of power can be waged while inserting the pedagogical back into the political and expanding the pedagogical by recognizing the “educational force of our whole social and cultural experience [as one] that actively and profoundly teaches.”
― Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy

“invierten en las universidades para obtener ganancias y ejercer su influencia en todos los ámbitos, desde el modo de dirigir estas instituciones y de definir su misión hasta lo que enseñan y la forma en que tratan al profesorado y a los estudiantes.”
― Henry A. Giroux, La guerra del neoliberalismo contra la educación superior