by Jeff Noonan
The person who loves to think is critically minded. That person is not an undisciplined skeptic, but one who can detect contradictions between principle and practice, and between principles and the values to which they purportedly lead as means. Continue reading Taking notes 58: For the love of thinking: eleven theses
by Henry A. Giroux
The forces of free-market fundamentalism are on the march ushering in a terrifying horizon of what Hannah Arendt once called “dark times.” Continue reading The curse of totalitarianism and the challenge of critical pedagogy
by Henry A. Giroux
In the current historical moment in the United States, the emptying out of language is nourished by the assault on the civic imagination. One example of this can be found in the rise of Donald Trump on the political scene. Donald Trump’s popular appeal speaks to not just the boldness of what he says and the shock it provokes, but the inability to respond to shock with informed judgement rather than titillation Continue reading Donald Trump and the ghost of totalitarianism
by Thorstein Veblen In the working theory of the modern civilized community, — that is to say in the current common-sense apprehension of what is right and good, as it works out in the long run, — the university is … Continue reading “The Governing boards”: a memorandum on the conduct of universities by business men
by Henry A. Giroux We now live at a time in which institutions that were meant to limit human suffering and misfortune and protect the public from the excesses of the market have been either weakened or abolished.[1] The consequences … Continue reading Higher education and the politics of disruption
by Henry A. Giroux What happens to the memory of history when it ceases to be testimony? – James Young[1] At a time when both political parties, anti-public intellectual pundits and mainstream news sources view the purpose of higher education … Continue reading Higher education and the promise of insurgent public memory
by Henry A. Giroux In 2015 both the US Senate and House of Representatives will be controlled by the Republican Party, one of the most extremist political parties in US history.[1] Coupled with the empty centrism of the Democratic … Continue reading Barbarians at the gates: authoritarianism and the assault on public education
by Henry A. Giroux Across the globe, a new historical conjuncture is emerging in which the attacks on higher education as a democratic institution and on dissident public voices in general – whether journalists, whistleblowers or academics – are intensifying … Continue reading Higher education and the new brutalism
by Henry A. Giroux Thinking is not the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway. As long as it doesn’t break off, thinking has a secure hold on possibility. . . . Open thinking points beyond itself. — Theodor Adorno … Continue reading Thinking dangerously in an age of political betrayal
by Henry A. Giroux Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. –– Nelson Mandela Guy Debord once argued that the spectacle suggests society’s desire for sleep.[1] He was enormously prescient, and his words and work are more important today than when they were first written. The spectacle has been energized and reworked under the forces of neoliberalism and now promotes a mix of infantilism, brutality, disposability and lawlessness. As the visibility of extreme violence is endlessly reproduced in various cultural apparatuses and screen cultures, it functions increasingly, alongside a range of other economic and political … Continue reading Radical democracy against cultures of violence
Philosophers for Change 