Henry A. Giroux

Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance by Henry A Giroux offers what one expects from one of his books: informed analysis along with ideas for improving our society. While he can often write prose that needs to be read carefully because of the ideas presented it is accessible to most readers who want to understand what he offers.

The connectedness of so many things, always the case but more so in our social media age, makes trying to sum up the arguments here difficult. It is, in fact, that connectedness and the often-ensuing confusion that authoritarians, fascists, and gangster capitalists count on to keep people following the path those in power have chosen for them, usually along with the absurd battle cry of "freedom." So while my brief summary may leave out many things, rest assured that most of those subtle nuances are covered in the book.

It has long been mentioned that a large part of the problem(s) today can be attributed to the "dumbing down" of the population. As evidenced by some GOP legislators, the dumbing down has worked amazingly well. While the ways that term gets used is often questionable the basic premise holds, the population is no longer, on the whole, being educated, they are being trained and indoctrinated. Trained for jobs but not to think critically, indoctrinated into the cult of manufactured ignorance, market mentalities and moralities, not educated to understand and appreciate human beings as valuable in and of themselves and not just for their market value.

It is in this attack on an educated populace that a radical pedagogy becomes essential to our survival as a democracy. We have to start seeing ourselves as part of a community, if not several communities, and stop internalizing the privatization that the right has used to eliminate the idea of a public good, a public space, and a public solution to a problem. As long as they can keep us thinking that all of our problems are just personal and have nothing to do with the society and the institutions that exercise power and control, they can continue destroying anything that even resembles a democracy and turn everything into a market that benefits only those already in power.

Whether you agree with what I took from this book or not, you owe it to yourself to read this and think carefully about the things Giroux discusses. Just dismissing it and my poor summation, or even agreeing without seeking the nuance, serves no purpose, you are neither actually rebutting anything nor actually agreeing to any type of action. So read this.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (more)