Policy Futures in Education

Volume 10 Number 6 2012

www.wwwords.co.uk/PFIE

Henry Giroux on Democracy Unsettled:

from critical pedagogy to the
war on youth – an interview

MICHAEL A. PETERS
Policy, Cultural and Social Studies in Education,
University of Waikato, New Zealand

ABSTRACT This interview conducted with Henry Giroux begins by probing Henry’s childhood,
upbringing and undergraduate years to discover where his sense of social justice took hold. It also
questions Henry about his working-class background and the major influences on his thought,
including his relationships with Paulo Freire and Howard Zinn. The interview follows an
autobiographical path to trace career highlights and contemporary interests.

Henry Giroux is one of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States and a close
friend of the late Paulo Freire. He and Freire co-edited a very influential series on education and
cultural politics for Bergin & Garvey. He is one of the leading cultural critics in the USA, grounded
in critical theory and with wide-ranging interests in youth studies, cultural studies, media studies,
higher education and public pedagogies. He has held positions at Boston University, Miami
University of Ohio, and Penn State, and currently occupies the global TV network chair in English
and cultural studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. He is a public intellectual and
has written over fifty books on forms of resistance, intellectuals, youth cultures, critical pedagogy,
neoliberalism and the university, among many other topics and themes. His first book was Ideology,
Culture and the Process of Schooling (1981). Early in his career, he collaborated with David Purple,
Stanley Aronowitz and Peter McLaren. He is the author of such classics as Theory and Resistance in
Education (2001, 2nd edn); Border Crossing: cultural workers and the politics of education (2005, 2nd edn);
Disturbing Pleasures: learning popular culture (1994); and The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the end of
innocence (1999).
He has written on democracy: Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life (2nd edn (2005); The
Abandoned Generation: democracy beyond the culture of fear (2004); and Against Terror of Neoliberalism
(2008); on authoritarianism: Against the New Authoritarianism (2005); and on pedagogy: On Critical
Pedagogy (2011); as well as on film and the new media, including Breaking in to the Movies: film and
the culture of politics (2002) and Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism: global uncertainty and the challenge of
the new media (2006). Youth, the state of America and neoliberalism have been constant themes in
his work, including the recent works Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: beyond the politics of greed
(2008); Youth in a Suspect Society: democracy or disposability? (2009); Hearts of Darkness: torturing
children in the war on terror (2010). His work has been anthologized in The Giroux Reader (2006),
American on the Edge (2006) and Reading & Teaching Henry Giroux (2006), and many of his articles and
books have been translated into Spanish, Chinese, and a number of other languages. He has won
many awards and given many interviews, and his work has been warmly received by the academic
community. He is without doubt one of the foremost critical educators of his time.

688 http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2012.10.6.688
Henry Giroux on Democracy Unsettled

Henry Giroux’s personal web site. http://www.henryagiroux.com/

Interview on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgdVCnTTqXA

*****

Michael Peters: Henry, it is a great pleasure to do this interview with you, as a colleague and friend. I
have much admired you over the years and you are someone who helped me enormously to
develop my work and professional self when I was a young academic. As a young New Zealand
academic, I remember reading your work in the 1980s. I was a graduate fresh from a philosophy
department, hungry for material that took a critical look at the world. I discovered your early work
on postmodern criticism and used the book with Stanley Aronowitz, Education Under Siege, as a text
in one of the classes I was teaching. You expressed eloquently many ideas that I was currently
grappling with and led the way I suspect for a generation when you developed as a public
intellectual and cultural critic concerned for the fate of young people. In particular, you generously
offered, mentored and supported me in publishing my first book, Education and the Postmodern
Condition (foreword by Lyotard) in your Bergin & Garvey series co-edited with Paulo Freire. The
experience really kick-started my academic career and, through your auspices, I went on to publish
some six books in your series. This was a generous and collegial act for which I am very grateful. I
know there must be many other scholars whom you mentored and helped along the way. And this
speaks to your role as a public intellectual located increasingly in a networked environment that
transforms the concept of intellectual collaboration and enhances the notions of collegiality and the
public space of knowledge development.
Let me start this interview by asking you to reflect on your childhood, upbringing and
undergraduate experience. What was it in your background that predisposed you to issues of social
justice? Tell us when and under what circumstances you felt outraged at social injustice and
became determined to do something about it.

Henry Giroux: I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in the 1950s and ’60s that was marked by
an ongoing juxtaposition of violence, loyalty and solidarity. On the one hand, it was a
neighborhood where people defined themselves in terms of specific communities, places and
spaces. The notion of the detached individual going it alone and defining his or her existence in
mostly individualistic and competitive terms was an anomaly in such a neighborhood. People
helped each other in times of need, socialized together and looked out for each other. At the same
time, there was a lot of violence in the neighborhood, often inflicted by the police and other
repressive institutions such as the schools. One could not survive in that neighborhood without
friends, without recognizing that the protections that offered one a sense of agency and freedom
came from the group, not the isolated uncommitted individual so celebrated today. Social justice
for me was forged in the bonds of solidarity, and the need to both recognize some notion of the
common good and the importance of the social.
As a working-class male in a neighborhood where masculinity was a shifting marker of
courage, brutality and identity, the body became the most resourceful tool I had. It was the
ultimate marker of agency in order to survive, ensure respect and provide a framing mechanism to
mediate between oneself and the larger world. Violence in that neighborhood was both personal
and institutional. People were poor, many unemployed and their lives were often lost before they
had any chance of maturing. Young people existed in a kind of dead time, waiting to graduate from
high school, get a job and then hope for a career as a priest, firefighter or police officer and
eventually go on disability. Gender was a dividing line and the violence that permeated our
relations with women was rarely ever physical as much as it was ideological and political. Women
just didn’t matter much outside of very traditional roles. I saw a lot of hardship and love in that
neighborhood and it affected me deeply. On a personal level, my family was very poor and my
father struggled tirelessly to feed us and make sure we had the basic necessities, though he was not
always successful. Justice came quickly in that neighborhood and it was not always on the side of
the angels. Much of my youth until I went to high school was based on getting by, surviving in a
world in which my biggest strength was talking fast rather than proving myself as a neighborhood
fighter. At six feet and 145 lbs, that wasn’t a viable option.

689
Michael A. Peters

What I lacked at that time was a language to mediate the inequalities, suffering and modes of
solidarity I saw all around me. I got a glimpse of the need for such a discourse when I went to high
school, which ironically was named Hope High School. At the time, Hope High School was
segregated along class and racial lines. Poor white and black kids were in what was labeled as the
‘junk’ courses, played sports and were seen for the most part as both deficit-ridden and delinquent.
Most of us entered the school through the back entrance; wealthy white kids came through the
front door. It was hard for me to miss the class and racial dimensions of all of this, especially as I
was a basketball player and hung out with many of the black kids on my team. Visiting their
neighborhood and playing in gyms on their turf was relatively easy, but they could not come into
my neighborhood without suffering the indignities of racial slurs or much worse. My sense of social
justice began at that moment when the lived experience of solidarity and loyalty rubbed up against
my own unquestioned racism and sexism, which had a long history in the daily encounters of my
youth. Sometimes the contradictions between solidarity and loyalty got challenged within
contradictions that unraveled the common sense of racism and sexism. Treating people as objects
or understanding them through established stereotypes was being constantly tested as I moved
through high school, met black men and women who refused those stereotypes and had the
kindness and intelligence to open my eyes through both their own lived experiences and their
access to a critical language that I lacked.
Everything changed when I went to college, at least on my second attempt. The first time I
left for college, I attended a junior college on a basketball scholarship but I was not ready for the
cultural shift. I felt terribly insecure in that space, did not know how to navigate the cultural capital
of middle-class kids and within a short time dropped out. After working for two years in odd jobs, I
got another basketball scholarship to a small school in Maine. This all took place in the sixties – a
time in which language, social relations and culture itself were changing at an accelerated rate. It
was hard to miss the changes, ignore the civil rights struggles and not feel the collective hope that
was driving student protests against the Vietnam War and middle-class mores. I got caught up in it
very quickly. Knowledge took on a new register for me, just as the changing cultural mores deeply
affected my sense of both the present and the future. Language became a weapon; knowledge was
not just power, but sexy, and social justice as a means to live in a better world was the pre-eminent
issue touching the lives of most of the people around me at the time. In college, I read avidly,
moving between Marx and James Baldwin, immersing myself in Beat literature and trying to figure
out how all of this made sense in terms of my own sense of critical agency and what role I might
play in shaping a better world. Enrolling in a teacher education program was enormously
important for me because I quickly realized the ethical and political dimensions of teaching and
how important the issue of developing a critical consciousness and formative culture was to any
viable democratic society. After graduating, I went to Appalachian State University for an MA in
history and became a research assistant for a young assistant professor named Bob Sandels. Bob
was an incredibly sharp leftist intellectual and he did more than anyone at the time to connect the
dots for me around a number of domestic and foreign policy issues in which social and economic
justice were central. Once I graduated, I ended up teaching on the high school level for a several
years and started reading Paulo Freire and Howard Zinn, both of whom eventually became close
friends. From there I was on fire and, fortunately, the fire never went out.

MP: So your working-class credentials have stayed with you. I’m interested in the tensions and
contradictions of those born into the working class who become professors. May I get you to
reflect on your own experience of education as self-transformation? I suspect the reason that Paulo
Freire and Howard Zinn resonated with you was in part because of your background. Perhaps you
could also detail the nature of your relationships with these two thinkers.

HG: Being an academic from the working class is, of course, impacted by many registers extending
from ideology and cultural capital to politics. When I first started teaching at Boston University I
did not have the knowledge, theoretical tools or the experience to move into a world largely
dominated by middle- and ruling-class cultural capital. I was constantly confronted with faculty and
students who assumed a god-given right of privilege and power, especially with regards to their
academic credentials, middle-class language skills and a lifelong experience in which people like
myself were defined through our deficits, and largely as outsiders. Or, even worse, our very

690
Henry Giroux on Democracy Unsettled

presence in the academy meant that we had to assimilate mentally to the middle class or at least act
as if we were. This often meant dressing a particular way, speaking in the elaborate code and
immersing oneself into the cultural circuits that middle-class people enjoyed. All of this was
brought home to me during my second semester. My father had just died of a heart attack and I
had just returned to the campus after attending his funeral. My dean at the time was a guy named
Bob Dentler, an Ivy League-educated scholar. I ran into him on the street shortly after my father’s
death and he said to me, ‘I am sorry to hear about your father. It must have been difficult settling
his estate?’ Estate? My father left a hundred dollars in an envelope taped behind a mirror. That was
his estate. I was immediately struck by how out of touch so many academics are with respect to
those others who are not replicas of themselves. But as I began to understand how class was
mapped onto academia, I was determined not to play the role of the subservient, aspiring-to-be-
middle-class professional. I had no intention of letting myself morph into a golf-playing suburbanite
living a politically irrelevant academic life. Nor did I feel that my cultural capital was about deficits
or lack. In fact, I had learned some time back that while my background was problematic in terms
of a range of issues extending from violence to sexism, it also provided me with a deep
commitment to solidarity and a humility that recognized that people had different capacities and
intellectual strengths. My sense of what constitutes a crisis is generally different from my peers; I
am not a prima donna, nor am I neurotic – at least not neurotic in the same way. I never bought
the arrogance and I never bought the notion that if one were educated in an Ivy League school that
guaranteed superior knowledge and set of skills. In due time, the university seemed, with some
exceptions of course, to produce academics who were uptight, conservative politically and
personally arrogant. I viewed myself on the left and my politics provided me with the tools to be
not only self-reflective, but also critical of the cultural capital that dominated the academy and
passed itself off as entirely normalized. I had no interest in narrowly defined almost-choking
specializations, stifling forms of professionalism, appeals to positivism and a politics that largely
removed the university from the society.
I was also lucky in that before I became an academic, I lived in Providence, RI and took
advantage of the many free lectures Brown University offered. Watching the radical lawyer
William Kunstler and scholar-activist Stanley Aronowitz in many ways saved my life. Here were
two working-class intellectuals whose cultural capital was unmistakable. And they knew much
more than most of the Ivy League types who invited them. They were passionate, brilliant and
spoke directly to public issues. Of course, I had a certain familiarity with the discourses of radical
education, history and the civil rights movement, having read Paulo Freire, Howard Zinn and
James Baldwin, but it was the existential grounding of such work that quickened in me a
willingness to fight for social justice that changed my life. I had been told all my life that the body
should not connect with one’s head, that passion was a liability in making an argument or taking a
position. These figures uprooted that myth very quickly and I never let go of my working-class
sensibility even though I had to learn middle-class skills and knowledge in order to be a border
crosser, to cross over into a middle-class institution such as academia without burning the bridges
that enabled me to get there.
I remember having a conversation with the late Joe Kincheloe, who had a similar
background. Joe was always such a pleasure to be around because we shared a cultural capital that
defined us both within and outside of the academy as outsiders: we were working class and
allegedly deficient, unsanctified by Ivy League degrees and harboring a pedigree that connected the
body and mind in a way that was often defined by the overly scrubbed and passionless as lacking
civility. Of course, it was this shared space that allowed us not only to reject an easy and
unproductive sense of resentment but also to interrogate the strengths of the resources hard-wired
into our working-class backgrounds along with what it meant to develop a more expansive and
democratic politics. We got along with many different kinds of people, but we were especially
sensitive to poor white and minority kids who shared our background and sometimes found a
model in what we represented that changed their lives and prepared them for the long struggle
ahead. The starting point for my politics began with questioning what the middle- and ruling-class
types alleged were working-class ‘deficiencies’. It was necessary to flip the script on this type of
stereotyping aimed at working-class kids. When accompanied by rigorous modes of reflection and
discrimination, these alleged lacks became for me a formidable resource and source of strength for

691
Michael A. Peters

a more viable sense of critical agency and democratic political commitment. Neither Joe nor I ever
faltered on this issue and I think it served us and our working-class students well.
I have often laughed over the seeming incongruity between what it meant to be a working-
class intellectual and how such a term often rubbed against the grain of many of our colleagues
whose cultural capital seemed to mark them less by what they knew than by how much they had
to unlearn. It was often difficult to listen to, experience and tolerate the pompous self-flattery, the
impenetrable discourses, the rigid specializations, the flat affect and the decidedly anti-political
posturing that characterized so many in the academy. These were academics who were both clever
and frivolous, anti-political and often indifferent to the growing plight of human suffering. Their
academic work was often utterly privatized and unconnected to important social issues and always
haughty – quite unaware of the caricatures they had become. For others, intellectual courage had
given way to the comfortable space of accommodation and the notion of the public intellectual had
been replaced by the public relations intellectual ever-present as an overheated talking head
spewing out sound bites posing as ‘scholarshit’ on various media outlets. I increasingly came to
believe that I was in an educational setting where most academics had withdrawn into a world in
which the measure of theoretical prowess was determined by the degree to which it escaped from
any sense of responsibility, or for that matter any notion of consequential thinking. Being in the
academy for me was a form of soft exile. I have always felt as if I did not belong there, though I was
far from alienated over the issue. I simply did my work, published, taught and used the academy as
a site from which to do what I was thought was important educational and democratically inspired
political work.
I realized early that coming from a working-class background gave me at least a couple of
advantages in academia. Because I did not have to unlearn all of the cultural junk that came with
middle- and ruling-class ideologies, I had more time to be reflective about my own work, politics
and the role I would play in furthering the discourses of critical agency, education, pedagogy,
politics and hope. I have generally felt isolated, if not alone, in the academy; fortunately, a number
of friends, including Joe Kincheloe, Richard Quantz, Paulo Freire, Stanley Aronowitz, Roger
Simon, Peter McLaren and Donaldo Macedo, helped me to find solidarity in often dark places.
These spaces are not as dark for me as they were when I taught at Boston University, but being an
outsider in the academy offers both the possibility for developing an opening to consider critical
insights forged within a working-class sensibility and the never ending challenge presented along
class lines.

MP: Thanks, this is exactly the kind of reflection and autobiographical detail I was hoping would
emerge. There is a need for those traditionally excluded from the academy to be able to identify
with those who have negotiated the class experience so successfully as you have. I am also
interested in your remarks about privilege and the way in which many professors simply take class
position for granted. To what extent is the university a class-based institution? One other aspect
that you allude to in your experience is the way university administrations are often out of sync
with the professoriat. I know that you have been targeted because of your beliefs. I know also that
you have theorized the institution and its development under the conditions of neoliberalism.
Please share with us your thoughts on the neoliberal and neoconservative attack on the left and the
rise of the neoliberal university.

HG: Higher education in the US has the appearance of a meritocracy, but that belies the ways in
which wealth and power shape the hierarchical nature of the system. Working-class kids in the US,
if they have aspirations of getting a college diploma, generally do not have the funds to support
such an endeavor, particularly given the spiralling tuition rates of the last few decades. And when
they do go on to some form of higher education, many of them wind up in community colleges or
technical schools. Of course, in the past we had programs like the GI Bill and other programs that
made access easier, but those days are over. Economic inequality is now hardwired into the central
core and structure of the university thanks to neoliberalization; though mass access to higher
education has always been a kind of holy grail. So access is largely a class, but also a racial issue.
Secondly, the culture of much of higher education has little to do with the histories, experiences,
languages and cultural backgrounds of many working-class kids. The middle- and upper-class
cultural capital tends to crush these kids, and the damage is inflicted more heavily when there are

692
Henry Giroux on Democracy Unsettled

no remedial programs available to compensate for the poor education they often receive in
underfunded and neglected schools that largely serve to contain and criminalize the behaviors of
the disenfranchised. For many working-class youth, time is a burden not a luxury and they have to
often work while trying to take classes and make the requisite grades. They often compete with
middle-class kids who can spend most of their time studying or attending classes. College for these
kids is an uphill battle.
The attack on higher education by right-wing ideologues and corporate power has been
going on for a long time, but at the current historical conjuncture it has gotten much worse.
Higher education is being targeted by conservative politicians and governments because it
embodies, at least ideally, a sphere in which students learn that democracy, as Jacques Rancière
suggests, is a rupture, a relentless critique and dialogue about official power, its institutions and its
never-ending attempts to silence dissent. As Ellen Schrecker points out, ‘Today the entire
enterprise of higher education, not just its dissident professors, is under attack, both internally and
externally.’ In the United States, England, and a number of other European countries, universities
and businesses are forming stronger ties, the humanities are being underfunded, student tuition is
rising at astronomical rates, knowledge is being commodified and research is valued through the
lens of an audit culture. The reach and influence of corporate-based models of education can be
seen in the rise of modes of governance, financing and evaluation that for all intents and purposes
makes higher education an adjunct of corporate values and interests. Economic Darwinism is now
undermining the civic and intellectual promises that make higher education a public good.
Delivering improved employability has reshaped the connection between knowledge and power
while rendering faculty and students as professional entrepreneurs and budding customers. The
notion of the university as a center of critique and a democratic public sphere vitally necessary in
providing the knowledge, skills and values necessary for the health of a democratic polity is giving
way to a view of the university as a marketing machine essential to the production of neoliberal
subjects. Like most neoliberal models of education, higher education matters to the extent that it
drives economic growth, technical innovation, market transformation and promotes national
prosperity.
In the United States, this neoliberal model can be understood through a number of
corporatizing tendencies. Under the call for austerity, states have begun the process of massively
defunding public universities while they simultaneously provide massive tax breaks for
corporations and the rich. At the same time, higher education in its search for funding has, as
Stanley Aronowitz points out, ‘adopted the organizational trappings of medium-sized or large
corporations’. University presidents are now viewed as CEOs, faculty as entrepreneurs and
students as consumers. Similarly, many college presidents not only align themselves with business
values, they willingly and openly associate themselves with corporate interests. It gets worse. In
some universities, new college deans are shifting their focus outside of the campus in order to take
on fund-raising, strategic planning and industry partnerships that were once the job of the
university president. Academic leadership is now defined in part through one’s ability to raise
funds, engage in strategic planning and partner up with corporate donors. Burdened by a lack of
state funding, in fact, deans are increasingly viewed as the heads of complex businesses and their
job performance ratings are dependent on their fund-raising performances. This is not meant to
wholeheartedly condemn the necessity for fund-raising, which can also be productive, as much as it
is to insist that it cannot take priority over modes of leadership rooted in more democratic,
emancipatory and non-commodified values.
As business culture permeates higher education, all manner of school practices from food
services to specific modes of instruction, the hiring temporary faculty, are now outsourced to
private contractors. Moreover, the most important value of higher education is now tied to the
need for credentials. Disciplines and subjects that do not fall within the purview of mathematical
utility and economic rationality are now seen as dispensable. In the search for adopting market
values and cutting costs, classes have ballooned in size, there is an increased emphasis on rote
learning and standardized testing, while tuition fees have skyrocketed, making it impossible for
thousands of working-class youth to gain access to higher education. One of the most serious
consequences facing higher education in the United States under the reign of neoliberal austerity
and disciplinary measures is the increased casualization of academic labor and the ongoing attacks
on tenure and academic freedom. As universities adopt models of corporate governance, they are

693
Michael A. Peters

aggressively eliminating tenure positions, increasing part-time and full-time positions without the
guarantee of tenure and attacking faculty unions. In a number of states, such as Ohio and Utah,
legislatures have passed bills outlawing tenure, while in Wisconsin, the governor has abrogated the
bargaining rights of the state’s university faculty. At a time when higher education is becoming
increasingly vocationalized, the ranks of tenure-track faculty are being drastically depleted,
furthering the loss of faculty as stakeholders. Currently, only 27 percent of faculty are either on a
tenure track or have a full-time tenure position. Similarly, many faculty have been demoted to
contingent forms of labor, losing not only their power to influence the conditions of their work,
but powerless as their workloads increase, their salaries stagnate or decreases, deprived of office
space and supplies, refused travel money and subject to policies that allow them to be fired at will.
The latter is particularly egregious because, when coupled with an ongoing series of attacks by
right-wing ideologues against left-oriented and progressive academics; many non-tenured faculty
are forced to censor themselves in their classes. At a time when critics within the academy are often
fired for their political beliefs, have their names posted on right-wing websites, are forced to turn
over their email correspondence to right-wing groups and are harassed in the conservative press, it
is all the more crucial that protections be put in place that safeguard faculty positions and the rights
of academics to exercise academic freedom.
Viewed as simply a training ground for the corporate order and the national security state,
higher education has defaulted on its promise of a democratic future for young people and its
investment in a social state. This anti-public social formation that has emerged with neoliberalism
has no interest in fostering the educational conditions in which it becomes possible for young
people to imagine another world outside of the economic Darwinism that now bears down on
every aspect of their lives. While the complexity of such struggles cannot be exaggerated, it is time
to develop a new political language that not only connects the dots between the war abroad and at
home, but also makes clear that central to the success of such an egregious assault is the
destruction of any vestige of higher education as a public good and democratic public sphere.
There is more at stake here than simply the abrogation of workers’ bargaining rights and a
gratuitous increase in university tuition rates. There is also the question of what kind of society we
want to become and what is going to have to be done to stop the arrogant and formidable assault
on all aspects of democratic life now being waged by the financial elite, corporations, conservatives,
reactionary think tanks, authoritarian politicians and a right-wing media that eschews any vestige
of honor, decency and truth. Of course, the point is for intellectuals and others to make it clear that
neoliberal and neoconservative forces are transforming the university into an anti-democratic
public sphere and to provide a discourse of possibility that challenges this terrible refiguration of
higher education. Let me mention a few possibilities informed by my own work on the
neoliberalization of the university.
First, we need to figure out how to defend more vigorously higher education as a public
good. If we can’t do that, we’re in trouble. Secondly, we need to address what the optimum
conditions are for educators, public workers, etc., to perform their work in an autonomous and
critical fashion. In other words, we need to think through the conditions that make academic labor
fruitful, engaging and relevant. Third, we need to get rid of the growing army of temporary
workers now swelling the ranks of academy. This is scandalous and weakens both the power of the
faculty and exploits these workers. Fourth, we need to educate students to be critical agents, to
learn how to take risks, engage in thoughtful dialogue and address what it means to be socially
responsible. Pedagogy is not about training; it is about critically educating people to be self-
reflective, and self-conscious about their relationship with others and know something about their
relationship with the larger world. Pedagogy in this sense provides not only important thoughtful
and intellectual competencies; it also enables people to intervene critically in the world. Pedagogy
also takes on a new dimension and impact with the rise of the new digital technologies and the
endlessly multiplying forms of screen culture, each attempting to win over new and larger
audiences and more often than not mark them as potential consumers. These new technologies
and the proliferating sites in which they are appearing constitute not only new configurations of
what C. Wright Mills termed power cultural apparatuses engaged in modes of popular education,
but represent more specifically powerful forms of public pedagogy that increasingly function to
defuse learning from any vestige of critical thought. This is a form of public pedagogy that needs to
be addressed both for how it deforms and for how it can create important new spaces for

694
Henry Giroux on Democracy Unsettled

emancipatory forms of pedagogy. Not only do we need to understand who controls these cultural
apparatuses and how it mobilizes new desires, needs, modes of identity, and social relations. We
also need to take on the new media in terms of its power and public pedagogy as a site of struggle
in which intellectuals can address broader audiences and raise in the public domain a number of
important social and political issues. The articulation of knowledge to experience, the construction
of new modes of agency, the production of critical knowledge, the recovery of critical histories, and
the possibility of linking knowledge to social change cannot be limited to the students we
encounter in our classes. We have to extend our roles as public intellectuals to other pedagogical
sites, audiences, and institutions. We need to organize a whole range of people outside of the
academy. Finally, but far from conclusive, is that we need a new political language with broader
narratives. I am not against identity politics or single-based issues, but we need to find ways to
connect these issues to broader narratives about democracy so we can recognize their strengths
and limitations in building broad-based social movements. In short, we need to find new ways to
connect education to the struggle for democracy that is under assault in ways that were
unimaginable thirty years ago.

MP: Thanks Henry, I appreciate the way in which your analysis proceeds from a combination of
personal experience and critical theory. Your works have sustained us for many decades now and
the thrusts in your work of critical pedagogy, cultural studies, youth culture and global studies in
communications provide a powerful theoretical lens and practical critique of contemporary
neoliberal society. I know these interests did not develop chronologically and there are many
overlapping characteristics. It would be interesting to hear of the evolution of your thought in
terms of these perspectives and what you think is required to be a critical thinker today, in an age
of global media.

HG: My interest in critical pedagogy grew out of my experience as a secondary school teacher. I
came of age in the 1960s as a teacher and there was a great deal of latitude in what we were
allowed to teach then. I taught a couple of seminars in social studies and focused on feminist
studies, theories of alienation and a range of other important social issues. While I had no trouble
finding critical content, including progressive films I used to rent from the Quakers (Society of
Friends), I did not know how to theorize the various approaches to teaching I tried in the
classroom. This all came to a head when an assistant principal confronted me after class once and
demanded that I not put the students in a circle while teaching the class. I really could not defend
my position theoretically. Ironically, I was introduced to Paul Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and
from then on my interest in radical pedagogy began to develop. My interest in young people also
developed during that time though I don’t believe I had any idea that it would later become a
serious object of scholarship and political intervention for me. After graduating from Carnegie-
Mellon University in 1977, I became deeply involved with the work being produced around the
sociology of education in England, the work of Bowles and Gintis on the political economy of
schooling, as well as the Marxist ethnographic work developed by Paul Willis at the Birmingham
Center for Cultural Studies. All of this scholarship was heavily influenced by various shades of
Marxism and while I learned a great deal from it, I felt that it erred on the side of political economy
and did not say enough about either resistance, pedagogy, or the importance of cultural politics.
The structural nature of this work was gloomy, over determined and left little room for seizing
upon contractions, developing a theory of power that did not collapse into domination, or
imagining a language of struggle and hope. I begin to look elsewhere for theoretical models to
develop a more comprehensive understanding of schooling and its relationship to larger social,
economic and cultural forces and found it in the work of contemporary critical theory, especially
the work of the Frankfurt School. I drew upon this work to challenge the then-dominant culture of
positivism as well as the overemphasis on the political economy of schooling. ‘Theory and
Resistance in Education’ was the most well-known outcome of that investigation. And while the
latter is considered a classic in some quarters, I must say that I had a hard time publishing my work
in the late seventies and early eighties. Work in educational theory and practice in the United States
was dominated by Routledge and was rather insular in its refusal to publish scholarship that moved
outside of the parameters of Marxism and political economy. I was fortunate at that time to meet
Roger Simon, who not only published my work in Curriculum Inquiry but also taught me a great

695
Michael A. Peters

deal about how to theorize matters of pedagogy and schooling. Roger was and is brilliant and his
work in my estimation far exceeded almost anything being published on critical education at the
time, especially his book Teaching Against the Grain. Theory and Resistance in Education would never
have been written if it had not been for my ongoing conversations with Roger. In the 1970s and
1980s I also developed a friendship with Donaldo Macedo and Paulo Freire and we soon started an
education series with Bergin & Garvey that later became the Greenwood series. It opened up a
new space for publishing a variety of work from theorists dealing with critical pedagogy and
educational theory more broadly. Crucial to my own conception of pedagogy is that I saw it as a
moral and political practice that was not only about analyzing classrooms and schools. Pedagogy
for me was central to proclaiming the power and necessity of ideas, knowledge and culture as
central to any viable definition of politics, and living in a just world with others. Pedagogy remains
a crucial political resource in theorizing the importance of establishing a formative culture
conducive to creating subjects and values that can sustain a substantive democracy.
I was deeply influenced in the 1980s by the cultural studies movement in the US and England,
particularly the work of Larry Grossberg, Richard Johnson and Stuart Hall. The early work in
cultural studies on education and youth was very important to my own theoretical development.
Not only did it emphasize the importance of pedagogy inside of the academy, but Raymond
Williams opened up the concept with an exploration of what he called ‘permanent education’ and
offered the beginning of a theoretical framework for taking seriously the educational force of the
wider culture. At that point, I attempted to revive the centrality of pedagogy for cultural studies,
particularly given that many of the theorists who followed Williams seem either to display little
interest in it or assumed that it meant teaching cultural studies in schools. Pedagogy in this case had
become the present absence in cultural studies just as youth had become the present absence
among left theorizing in general. While there was considerable talk about class, race and gender,
there were very few people writing in the US about the plight of young people and the
transformation from a society of production to a society of consumption, or, as Zygmunt Bauman
points out, the move from solid modernity to liquid modernity. Young people, especially
minorities of class and color, were under siege in a particularly harsh way at the beginning of the
1980s and there were very few people addressing what I called the ‘war on youth’. I argued then
and continue to insist that since the 1980s we have seen a series of political, economic and cultural
shifts that mark the beginning of a form of economic Darwinism on the one hand and the rise of
the punishing state on the other. And one consequence of the merging of these two moments is
this war on youth. I have attempted to chart and engage the shifting parameters of the war on
youth in a number of books, with the recent and perhaps most definitive being Youth in a Suspect
Society: democracy or disposability?
In the age of Reagan and Thatcher, neoliberalism was becoming normalized all over the
globe. This was particularly evident to me by the early 1990s as neoliberal capitalism became more
ruthless, consolidated and poisonous in its ever-expanding support for a culture of cruelty and a
survival-of-the-fittest ethic in which market-driven values and relations acted as the template for
judging all aspects of social life. By transforming society in the image of the market, the space and
conditions for thinking outside of market values and relations became more difficult, and one
particularly grim consequence was the demolition of non-market values, public spheres, and forms
of community. As democratic social forms diminished, so did social values, the public good, social
responsibility and the very nature of politics. This was a very destructive moment for both the US
and the rest of the world. Just as corporate sovereignty replaced or weakened political sovereignty,
the attack on the social state intensified, the power of capital became detached from the traditional
politics of the nation state, the punishing state was on the rise and there emerged a new set of
economic and social formations in which social protections were weakened, social problems were
increasingly criminalized and all public spheres were subjected to the forces of privatization and
commodification, especially public and higher education. Under neoliberalism, we have witnessed
the rise of an unfettered free-market ideology and economic Darwinism in which market values
supplant civic values, everything is for sale, a hyper-individualism is celebrated, profit-making is
seen as the essence of democracy and the obligations of citizenship are reduced to the practice of
consuming. This is a system in which a dehumanizing mode of consumerism and the celebration of
the accumulation of capital are matched by the endless disposing of goods and people now
rendered redundant and extraneous. This is also a system in which everything is privatized, with

696
Henry Giroux on Democracy Unsettled

one consequence being that the public collapses into the private and it becomes increasingly
difficult to translate private concerns into public issues. My work in the last decade has aimed at
connecting neoliberal forms of public pedagogy and disciplinary practices with the rise of new
modes of authoritarianism and what it means to make such forces visible in order to collectively
resist them. This project has been deeply influenced by the work of diverse figures such as Pierre
Bourdieu, Edward Said, Zygmunt Bauman, Hannah Arendt, Nancy Fraser, Stanley Aronowitz,
C. Wright Mills, and more recently David L. Clark. Bourdieu’s work on neoliberalism and
Bauman’s work on liquid modernity and the transformation of the public sphere is a treasure trove
of insight regarding the changing conditions of modernity, the politics of consumerism and the call
for new modes of ethical responsibility. Arendt’s work on authoritarianism and its potentially
recurring conditions, albeit in new forms, along with Nancy Fraser’s early brilliant work on
feminist public spheres provided me with a new language to think about the institutions and spaces
necessary for a formative culture that made democratic modes of agency and subjectivity possible.
Said’s and Bourdieu’s work on the responsibility of academics as public intellectuals had a profound
effect on my scholarship. Similarly, C. Wright Mills [along with the scholarship of Arendt, Bauman,
and Richard Sennett] has deeply influenced me on the importance of connecting private issues to
public considerations, the political centrality of what he calls the cultural apparatuses in the
transformation of political culture and the role public intellectuals might play as agents of change.
Stanley Aronowitz may be the most brilliant public intellectual in North America. His broad
understanding of various domains of knowledge and his ability to bring vastly different issues
together and to engage them in relation to a larger totality is a model for how to do scholarship
that is public, rigorous and dialectical. I would be remiss to not underscore the more recent
influence of my colleague David L. Clark. His brilliance never fails to astound me and has been
instrumental in fine-tuning my knowledge of critical theory, Derrida, and a range of other
theoretical traditions that he engages and writes about in ways that are as insightful as they are
poetic. David’s sense of solidarity and commitment is astounding in an academy that seems
addicted to the insularities of careerism, cronyism, and the need to comfort students rather than
prepare them intellectually for a world that needs to be engaged rather than merely enjoyed.
To be an intellectual in the current historical juncture is to rethink not only the profound
changes wrought by the rise and power of the new media and the ways in which it has transformed
the very concept of the social, community, and political, but to redefine what it means to be a
public intellectual capable of working across a number of disciplines and speaking to a variety of
audiences. The old model of the intellectual writing and speaking in a narrow and obtuse
theoretical language seems unproductive at this particular point in history. Theory needs to be
rigorous and accessible and it needs to address not merely the outer limits of disciplinary
scholarship, but also important social problems. Equally important, it needs to include and engage
people who are not versed in the specialized disciplinary vocabularies of the academy. Theory is
not a metaphor for scholasticism and formalism; nor is it politically irrelevant. Nor can it be
dismissed as something distinctly American (Terry Eagleton), French, or simply comparable to
something exotic or foreign. Theory is essential and inescapable and cannot be so neatly abstracted
from the responsibilities of political criticism, but how we do it and for what reason is a more
problematic and troubling issue. What does it mean to use it rather than simply apply it, as many
graduate students and assistant professors tend to do? Theory is the enemy of common sense and
hence hated by many of our newly minted anti-intellectual authoritarian populists now running
against Obama in the 2012 elections. Of course, there is the more important question of when
theory becomes toxic, an immunity against immunity, turning in on itself, functioning, to use
Derrida’s term, as kind of autoimmunity. Given the bankruptcy of the current language of anti-
intellectual politics of the self-evident, theory is all we have left and functions as a kind of tool box
to be used to break the consensus of commonsense, develop better forms of knowledge, promote
more just social relations, and search for new understandings regarding the task of developing new
modes of agency, power, and action in the service of connecting theoretical rigor with social
relevance. Clearly, matters of self-reflection, mastering broad bodies of knowledge, engaging with
the new technologies as a way to reach broader audiences all matter, just as it is only through
theory that we can recover what survives of the defeated, the repressed, the marginalised, and
those ideas relegated as obsolete, un-American, and indigestible. But there is also something more
fundamental at work in this project. The global left doesn’t need to abandon theory; it needs to find

697
Michael A. Peters

a new language in order to move away from the kinds of fractured politics that have dominated
western societies since the 1980s. The politics of identity has to guard against becoming
exclusionary and needs to be rethought as part of a much broader set of connections and projects.
In the 1980s, I believe that a group of highly influential feminist fundamentalists did a great deal of
damage politically and ethically to the understanding of both critical pedagogy and radical
education as a practice of transformation and freedom. Rather than build upon and critically
engage the complex traditions out of which this work developed, interrogating both its strengths
and weaknesses, treating it as a developing and ongoing theoretical discourse and practice, it falsely
labeled critical pedagogy as the enemy of empowerment. Operating out of comforting absolutes on
the model of us versus them, it embraced the simplism of what David Simpson, in his brilliant book
9/11: the culture of commemoration, has called ‘the neatness of rhetorically declared oppositions’
(p. 7), thus creating a manipulative discourse and a climate for blatant political binaries and political
opportunism. A crude type of essentialism and reductionism structured this work. Rather than
engage a complex tradition of work, it simply demonized it, reducing it to one side of a binarism in
which all doubt, mediation, complexity and nuance disappeared. What made this intervention even
worse was that it was followed by an endless stream of endorsements by supine white male
academics who cited this work to prove their own faux-feminist credentials. This was truly as
ideologically disingenuous as it was politically reactionary, or even worse, dangerous. This was
symptomatic of what identity politics can become when it is driven by moralism, a politics of
purity, a logic of certainty, and a disregard for critical and scholarly exchange. Fortunately, some of
this work was offset by a smaller number of feminist scholars working in critical pedagogy who
rejected this type of friend/enemy distinction. This was particularly evident at the time in work by
Linda Brodkey, bell hooks, Deborah Britzman, Sharon Todd, Chandra Mohanty, Sharon Crowley,
Lynn Worsham, and later by Robin Truth Goodman and Susan Searls Giroux. Rather than fire
missiles at each other, we need to address how we can effectively understand our differences as
part of a broader and more powerful movement for engaging in critical exchanges, pushing the
frontiers of transformative knowledge, extending democratic struggles and addressing the massive
suffering and hardships, particularly for young people, now being caused by various fundamentalist
and authoritarian institutions, policies and practices. As my partner, Susan Searls Giroux, has
recently concluded with characteristic precision, ‘As a consequence of our devastatingly misguided
priorities and our negligence we have, in short, produced smart bombs and explosive children.’
We need to make connections, build broad social movements, make pedagogy central to
politics and dismantle the reactionary forms of neoliberalism, racism and media culture that have
become normalized. We need to take up and develop more relational theories concerned with
broader totalities and the ways in which the forces of difference, identity, local politics, cultural
pedagogy and other social formations connect in ways that speak to new and more threatening
forms of global politics. Power is now free floating; it has no allegiances except to the accumulation
of capital and is not only much more destructive but more difficult to contain. Any viable notion of
politics has to be relational and connected; it has to think within and beyond the boundaries of
nation states, invent new vocabularies, invest in more broad-based groups beyond simply workers,
address the plight of young people and resurrect the power of the social state and democracy as a
radical mode of governance and politics. This suggests taking matters of specificity and context
seriously while at the same time changing the level of magnification to a more global view. One of
the most important considerations necessary for a new vision of politics is incorporating economic
rights and social protections into the political sphere. Political and personal rights become
dysfunctional without social rights. As Zygmunt Bauman has reminded us, freedom of choice and
the exercise of political and personal rights become a cruel joke in a society that does not provide
social rights - that is, some form of collectively endorsed protections that provide the time and
space for the poor to participate in the political sphere and help shape modes of governance. In
order to exercise any real sense of civic agency, people need protections from those misfortunes
and hardships that are not of their own doing. At the same time, a movement for democracy must
challenge the erosion of social bonds, the crumbling of communal cohesion and the withering of
social responsibility that has taken place under a neoliberal apparatus that promotes deregulation,
privatization and individualization. We also need to think in terms of what it means to create the
formative cultures necessary to fight racism, celebrity culture, the culture and institutions of casino
capitalism, the assault on the environment and the growing inequality in wealth and income that is

698
Henry Giroux on Democracy Unsettled

destroying every vestige of democratic politics in the world. We need a language that takes both
history and the current dangerous authoritarian period seriously, one that recognizes, as Bauman
points out, that shared humanity is the lifeboat. Too many people on the left are acting as if they
are living in the nineteenth century and are completely out of touch with the new technologies,
modes of domination and emerging social formations that are taking shape all over the world. A
viable politics in the present has to take seriously the premise that knowledge must be meaningful
in order to be critical, in order to be transformative. This is about more than reclaiming the virtues
of dialogue, exchange and translation. It is about recovering a politics that can create new public
spheres in which new subjects and identities can be produced who are capable of recognizing and
addressing the plight of the other and struggling collectively to expand and deepen the ongoing
struggle for justice, freedom and democratization. It also must be stressed that the global left needs
both a language of critique and possibility. We need to be thorough, accessible and rigorous in our
critiques, especially amid the political and cultural illiteracy produced by neoliberalism’s cultural
apparatuses. But we also need a language of hope, one that is realistic rather than romantic about
the challenges the planet is facing and yet tempered by a hope that things can be different, that
possibilities can not only be imagined but engaged, fought for and realized in collective struggles.
Opposing the forces of domination is important, but it does not go far enough. We must move
beyond a language of pointless denunciations and offer instead a language that moves forward with
the knowledge, skills and social relations necessary for the creation of new modes of agency, social
movements and democratic economic and social policies. We need to open up the realm of human
possibility, recognize that history is open, that justice is never complete and that democracy can
never be fully settled. Hopefully, in this call for critique and hope, the left can develop the public
spheres that make such possibilities possible, whether they be schools, classrooms, workshops,
newspapers, online journals, community colleges and other spaces where knowledge, power,
ethics, and justice merge to create new subjectivities, new modes of civic courage and new hopes
for the future.

MICHAEL A. PETERS is Professor of Education at Waikato University, Emeritus Professor at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Adjunct Professor in the School of Art, Royal
Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University.
He is the executive editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory and editor of two international
ejournals, Policy Futures in Education and E-Learning and Digital Media. His interests are in education,
philosophy and social policy and he has written over sixty books, including, most recently,
Education Philosophy and Politics: selected works of Michael A. Peters (2011); Education, Cognitive
Capitalism and Digital Labour (2011), with Ergin Bulut; Neoliberalism and After? Education, social policy
and the crisis of capitalism (2011); The Last Book of Postmodernism: apocalyptic thinking, philosophy and
education in the twenty-first century (2011); Bakhtinian Pedagogy: opportunities and challenges for research,
policy and practice in education across the globe (2011), with Jayne White; The Virtues of Openness:
education, science and scholarship in a digital age (2011), with Peter Roberts; Education in the Creative
Economy (2010), with D. Araya; the trilogy Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy (2009), Global
Creation: space, connection and universities in the age of the knowledge economy (2010), and Imagination:
three models of imagination in the age of the knowledge economy (2010), all with Simon Marginson and
Peter Murphy; and Subjectivity and Truth: Foucault, education and the culture of the self (2008) (AESA
Critics Book Award 2009) and Building Knowledge Cultures: educational and development in the age of
knowledge capitalism (2006), both with Tina Besley. Correspondence: [email protected]

699