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, show more 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. show less

Giroux begins Border Crossings with developing an exigence for the cultural work he proposes: citizenship is being reduced to consumerism, obsessions with the private are harming public life, and the war on terrorism is being waged as a war against dissent, immigrants, and democracy (2-4). Giroux proposes drawing on postcolonial theory in order to challenge and change politics and because it helps to question binary oppositions (13). He proposes a "border pedagogy" that recognizes margins, show more helps students "to understand otherness in its own terms," and creates borderlands that helped to create new identities (20). Giroux understands pedagogy as both a demystification process and a process of student textual and cultural production (22). Giroux draws on the discourses of modernism (understanding a commitment to critical reason), postmodernism (challenging totalizing narratives and focusing on the local and contingent), and feminism (which questions margin and center and offers voice that links the personal and political) (66). Giroux's border pedagogy is important for anti-racist work, he argues, because it "offers students the opportunity to engage the multiple references that constitute different cultural codes, experiences, and languages" so that students are "media-literate in a world of changing representations" (108). Additionally, we need to understand that racism cannot simply be analyzed, but that narratives are taken up and deployed with "an investment of feeling, pleasure, and desire" (109).

Giroux also draws on cultural studies, showing what it offers critical pedagogy: a focus on language, knowledge, and power that offers a "basis for creating new forms of knowledge" (140); an understanding of culture as "contested terrain" (141); a complication of notions of difference and subjectivity within social groups (141); and an understanding of pedagogy as cultural production and not simply dissemination of knowledge (142).

Giroux also argues that many radical educators have ignored the power of popular culture and the affective attachments to popular culture. For Giroux, pedagogy is not something that solely happens in school, but is cultural production (158). Popular culture needs to be understood as productive, "a site of struggle and possibility," and as "persuasive" (169). Popular culture persuades citizens for consent, through "investments in particular relations of meaning constructed through popular form" (170).

Susan Searls Giroux joins Henry Giroux in a later chapter arguing that one of critical pedagogy's goals should be to confront neoliberalism, the dominant ideology that divorces education from politics, reduces social relations to "supper and customer," fights the welfare state and public good, and limits public spheres (209-212). show less

Henry Giroux’s ground-breaking and timeless entry, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex, could be the single reason why “higher” education might be saved from the hands of corporatization and militarization. Giroux, a leading figure in education, media studies, cultural studies, and critical theory, begins the book with one of the most profound questions I have ever come across. “What is the task of educators at a time when the forces of show more democracy appear to be in retreat and the emerging ideologies and practices of militarization, corporatism, and political fundamentalism bear down on every aspect of individual and collective experience” (p. 1)? Is it our task as educators to roll-over and allow military and corporate influence to rule academia with no regulation or limits in sight? If so we are doomed to see departments of critical thought marginalized, if not closed down, with faculty forced to refocus their intellectual interests or to simply find a new job.

Further, as Giroux explains, we are already seeing education, which is the most important tool for freedom and democracy, become increasingly difficult to afford. If one decides to attend college they are forced into debt for most, if not all, of their life. Education is at risk of becoming entirely a privilege for the financial elite to be educated not on issues of freedom, peace, and citizenship, but profit, control, and domination; not to run businesses, but countries as corporations who are backed by the military.

The first chapter, Arming the Academy, discusses how in this corporatized society campuses are putting profit as a priority and becoming increasingly militarized. With funding coming directly from the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and intelligence agencies, we are signing over our syllabi of critical thinking for a commitment of educating on “… war, violence, fear, surveillance, and the erosion of civic society more generally” (p. 22). By proclaiming that everything done there is in the name of education, academia has become the ultimate training ground and method of developing legitimacy for future warlords to carry out the protection of capitalism and corporatization.

While we do not see the affects of this in our classrooms yet, when the war is over and with the economy in a heap of trouble, we will see our military and mid-level management going back to college not for education, but for skills to enter the workforce in order to make money. This will be possible because the tenure-track positions are very strategically being given to non-academics such as CEOs of fallen banks and former military and government leaders such as Condoleezza Rice. This, along with the now common hiring of adjuncts instead of full-time tenured faculty, is weakening the protection of critical thinking. By demanding more full-time positions, not only the faculty is protected, but so are the fundamental principles of academia. Critical thinking scholars must understand that the fight is not between tenured and adjuncts, but between protecting intellectual freedom from this capitalist corporatization and militarization of campuses.

University in Chains provides crucial insights and an antidote to the state of universities today that those concerned with human rights, anti-war, critical pedagogy, and freedom of critical thought in higher education will find of great value. Giroux’s brilliant design of the book, from the development of corporate universities to the relationship between military and academia, ends not in hopelessness, but in a call to break the chains of these dominating industrial complexes, and to proclaim that the protection of academia is the most important battle that students, faculty, and staff must unite together to fight for!

Reviewed by Anthony J. Nocella, II show less

This book was quite interesting, but I found it hard to keep up as it was written in such dense, academic text. (I am far better suited to reading science-type books of this nature, and not much else. It reads too much like work.)

The author covers how Disney, as a giant, multi-faceted, multi-national corporation, exerts great control over what children (and adults) not only consume, but also how and what they learn. The author first shows how Disney World and Disneyland's images of innocence show more and nostalgia (which is why many people, including myself, have enjoyed visiting the parks, and millions travel there every year) are tarnished, if you look a bit deeper, by their totalitarian hiring and employment practices, anti-labor standpoint, and whitewashing of American history throughout the parks. I found this to be quite fascinating and would be interesting in reading another book on the topic.

The author then goes on to critique Celebration, Disney's own "city," and the interesting way that the pubic has been privatized so that Disney can exert maximum control over every aspect of public life, from the public school, to what sort of topiaries residents can display, to the terms and conditions residents have to follow when/if they decide to leave.

Finally, the author goes over two of Disney's films, Good Morning, Vietnam and Pretty Woman, to show how Disney movies (which are viewed by a vast majority of people at least in the US) teach racism, sexism, colonialism, and pro-capitalism messages. show less