„CHOWANNA” 2020, T.

1 (54)
ISSN 2353-9682

https://doi.org/10.31261/CHOWANNA.2020.54.03
s. 1 z 12

Henry A. Giroux
McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
   https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1637-9142

Thinking Dangerously:
The Role of Higher Education in Authoritarian Times

Abstract: The notion of a neutral, objective education is an oxymoron. Educa-

tion and pedagogy do not exist outside of ideology, values and politics. Ethics,
when it comes to education, demand an openness to the other, a willingness
to engage a “politics of possibility” through a continual critical engagement
with texts, images, events and other registers of meaning as they are trans-
formed into pedagogical practices both within and outside of the classroom.
Education is never innocent: It is always implicated in relations of power and
specific visions of the present and future. This suggests the need for educators
to rethink the cultural and ideological baggage they bring to each educational
encounter. It also highlights the necessity of making educators ethically and
politically accountable for and self-reflective about the stories they produce,
the claims they make upon public memory, and the images of the future they
deem legitimate.
Keywords: higher education, democracy, democratic society, pedagogy of re-
pression, educators, politics of education

What happens to democracy when the president of the United States

labels critical media outlets as “enemies of the people” and disparag-
es the search for truth with the blanket term “fake news”? What hap-
pens to democracy when individuals and groups are demonized on the
basis of their religion? What happens to a society when critical thinking
becomes an object of contempt? What happens to a social order ruled
by an economics of contempt that blames the poor for their condition
CHOWANNA.2020.54.03
s. 2 z 12 Henry A. Giroux

and subjects them to a culture of shaming? What happens to a polity

when it retreats into private silos and becomes indifferent to the use
of language deployed in the service of a panicked rage – language that
stokes anger but ignores issues that matter? What happens to a social
order when it treats millions of undocumented immigrants as dispos-
able, potential terrorists and “criminals”? What happens to a country
when the presiding principles of its society are violence and ignorance?
What happens is that democracy withers and dies, both as an ideal
and as a reality.
In the present moment, it becomes particularly important for ed-
ucators and concerned citizens all over the world to protect and en-
large the critical formative educational cultures and public spheres
that make democracy possible. Alternative newspapers, progressive
media, screen culture, online media and other educational sites and
spaces in which public pedagogies are produced constitute the polit-
ical and educational elements of a vibrant, critical formative culture
within a wide range of public spheres. Critical formative cultures are
crucial in producing the knowledge, values, social relations and visions
that help nurture and sustain the possibility to think critically, engage
in political dissent, organize collectively and inhabit public spaces in
which alternative and critical theories can be developed.

At the core of thinking dangerously is the recognition that

education is central to politics and that a democracy cannot
survive without informed citizens.

Authoritarian societies do more than censor; they punish those who

engage in what might be called dangerous thinking. At the core of
thinking dangerously is the recognition that education is central to
politics and that a democracy cannot survive without informed citi-
zens. Critical and dangerous thinking is the precondition for nurturing
the ethical imagination that enables engaged citizens to learn how to
govern rather than be governed. Thinking with courage is fundamen-
tal to a notion of civic literacy that views knowledge as central to the
pursuit of economic and political justice. Such thinking incorporates
a set of values that enables a polity to deal critically with the use and
effects of power, particularly through a developed sense of compassion
for others and the planet. Thinking dangerously is the basis for a form-
ative and educational culture of questioning that takes seriously how
imagination is key to the practice of freedom. Thinking dangerously
is not only the cornerstone of critical agency and engaged citizenship,
it’s also the foundation for a working democracy.
 CHOWANNA.2020.54.03
Thinking Dangerously… s. 3 z 12

Education and the Struggle for Liberation

Any viable attempt at developing a democratic politics must begin to

address the role of education and civic literacy as central to politics
itself. Education is also vital to the creation of individuals capable of be-
coming critical social agents willing to struggle against injustices and
develop the institutions that are crucial to the functioning of a sub-
stantive democracy. One way to begin such a project is to address the
meaning and role of higher education (and education in general) as
part of the broader struggle for freedom.
The reach of education extends from schools to diverse cultural ap-
paratuses, such as the mainstream media, alternative screen cultures
and the expanding digital screen culture. Far more than a teaching
method, education is a moral and political practice actively involved
not only in the production of knowledge, skills and values but also
in the construction of identities, modes of identification, and forms
of individual and social agency. Accordingly, education is at the heart
of any understanding of politics and the ideological scaffolding of those
framing mechanisms that mediate our everyday lives.
Across the globe, the forces of free-market fundamentalism are
using the educational system to reproduce a culture of privatization,
deregulation and commercialization while waging an assault on the
historically guaranteed social provisions and civil rights provided by
the welfare state, higher education, unions, reproductive rights and
civil liberties. All the while, these forces are undercutting public faith
in the defining institutions of democracy.
This grim reality was described by Axel Honneth in his book Pathol­
ogies of Reason as a “failed sociality” characteristic of an increasing
number of societies in which democracy is waning – a failure in the
power of the civic imagination, political will and open democracy.1 It
is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals
and undermines any understanding of education as a public good and
pedagogy as an empowering practice: a practice that can act directly
upon the conditions that bear down on our lives in order to change
them when necessary. As Chandra Mohanty points out:

At its most ambitious, [critical] pedagogy is an attempt to get students

to think critically about their place in relation to the knowledge they
gain and to transform their world view fundamentally by taking the
politics of knowledge seriously. It is a pedagogy that attempts to link
knowledge, social responsibility, and collective struggle. And it does

1
A. Honneth: Pathologies of Reason. New York 2009.
CHOWANNA.2020.54.03
s. 4 z 12 Henry A. Giroux

so by emphasizing the risks that education involves, the struggles

for institutional change, and the strategies for challeng­ing forms of
domination and by creating more equitable and just public spheres
within and outside of educational institutions.2

At its core, critical pedagogy raises issues of how education might be

understood as a moral and political practice, and not simply a technical
one. At stake here is the issue of meaning and purpose in which ed-
ucators put into place the pedagogical conditions for creating a public
sphere of citizens who are able to exercise power over their own lives.
Critical pedagogy is organized around the struggle over agency, values
and social relations within diverse contexts, resources and histories.
Its aim is producing students who can think critically, be considerate
of others, take risks, think dangerously and imagine a future that ex-
tends and deepens what it means to be an engaged citizen capable of
living in a substantive democracy.
What work do educators have to do to create the economic, politi-
cal and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people and the
general public with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine
the unimaginable and defend education as essential for inspiring and
energizing the citizens necessary for the existence of a robust democ-
racy? This is a particularly important issue at a time when higher ed-
ucation is being defunded and students are being punished with huge
tuition hikes and financial debts, while being subjected to a pedagogy
of repression that has taken hold under the banner of reactionary and
oppressive educational reforms pushed by right-wing billionaires and
hedge fund managers. Addressing education as a democratic public
sphere is also crucial as a theoretical tool and political resource for
fighting against neoliberal modes of governance that have reduced fac-
ulty all over the United States to adjuncts and part-time workers with
few or no benefits. These workers bear the brunt of a labor process
that is as exploitative as it is disempowering.

Educators Need a New Language for the Current Era

Given the crisis of education, agency and memory that haunts the current
historical conjuncture, educators need a new language for addressing the
changing contexts of a world in which an unprecedented convergence

2
C.T. Mohanty: On Race and Voice: Challenges for Liberal Education in the 1990s.
“Culture Critique” 1989–1990, no. 14, pp. 179–208. [Online:] https://www.jstor.
org/stable/1354297?seq=1 [1.06.2017].
 CHOWANNA.2020.54.03
Thinking Dangerously… s. 5 z 12

of resources – financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military

and technological – is increasingly used to exercise powerful and diverse
forms of control and domination. Such a language needs to be self-reflec-
tive and directive without being dogmatic, and needs to recognize that
pedagogy is always political because it is connected to the acquisition of
agency. In this instance, making the pedagogical more political means
being vigilant about what Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham describe as
“that very moment in which identities are being produced and groups
are being constituted, or objects are being created.”3 At the same time it
means educators need to be attentive to those practices in which critical
modes of agency and particular identities are being denied.
In part, this suggests developing educational practices that not
only inspire and energize people but are also capable of challenging
the growing number of anti-democratic practices and policies under
the global tyranny of casino capitalism. Such a vision demands that
we imagine a life beyond a social order immersed in massive inequal-
ity, endless assaults on the environment, and the elevation of war and
militarization to the highest and most sanctified national ideals. Under
such circumstances, education becomes more than an obsession with
accountability schemes and the bearer of an audit culture (a culture
characterized by a call to be objective and an unbridled emphasis on
empiricism). Audit cultures support conservative educational policies
driven by market values and an unreflective immersion in the crude
rationality of a data-obsessed market-driven society; as such, they are
at odds with any viable notion of a democratically inspired education
and critical pedagogy. In addition, viewing public and higher education
as democratic public spheres necessitates rejecting the notion that they
should be reduced to sites for training students for the work-force –
a reductive vision now being imposed on public education by high-tech
companies such as Facebook, Netflix and Google, which want to en-
courage what they call the entrepreneurial mission of education, which
is code for collapsing education into training.4
Education can all too easily become a form of symbolic and intellectu-
al violence that assaults rather than educates. Examples of such violence
can be seen in the forms of an audit culture and empirically-driven

3
G.A. Olson, L. Worsham: Staging the Politics of Difference: Homi Bhabha’s
Critical Literacy. “JAC” 1998, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 361–391. [Online:] https://www.
jstor.org/stable/20866193?seq=1 [1.06.2017].
4
N. Singer: The Silicon Valley Billionaires Remaking America’s Schools. “The
New York Times” 2017. [Online:] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/tech
nology/tech-billionaires-education-zuckerberg-facebook-hastings.html?_r=0
[1.06.2017].
CHOWANNA.2020.54.03
s. 6 z 12 Henry A. Giroux

teaching that dominates higher education. These educational projects

amount to pedagogies of repression and serve primarily to numb the
mind and produce what might be called dead zones of the imagination.
These are pedagogies that are largely disciplinary and have little re-
gard for contexts, history, making knowledge meaningful, or expanding
what it means for students to be critically engaged agents. Of course,
the ongoing corporatization of the university is driven by modes of as-
sessment that often undercut teacher autonomy and treat knowledge as
a commodity and students as customers, imposing brutalizing struc-
tures of governance on higher education. Under such circumstances,
education defaults on its democratic obligations and becomes a tool of
control and powerlessness, thereby deadening the imagination.
The fundamental challenge facing educators within the current age
of an emerging authoritarianism worldwide is to create those public
spaces for students to address how knowledge is related to the power of
both self-definition and social agency. In part, this suggests providing
students with the skills, ideas, values and authority necessary for them
not only to be well-informed and knowledgeable across a number of
traditions and disciplines, but also to be able to invest in the reality of
a substantive democracy. In this context, students learn to recognize
anti-democratic forms of power. They also learn to fight deeply rooted
injustices in a society and world founded on systemic economic, racial
and gendered inequalities.
Education in this sense speaks to the recognition that any pedagog-
ical practice presupposes some notion of the future, prioritizes some
forms of identification over others and values some modes of knowing
over others. (Think about how business schools are held in high esteem
while schools of education are often disparaged.) Moreover, such an
education does not offer guarantees. Instead, it recognizes that its own
policies, ideology and values are grounded in particular modes of au-
thority, values and ethical principles that must be constantly debated
for the ways in which they both open up and close down democratic
relations, values and identities.
The notion of a neutral, objective education is an oxymoron. Educa-
tion and pedagogy do not exist outside of ideology, values and politics.
Ethics, when it comes to education, demand an openness to the other,
a willingness to engage a “politics of possibility” through a continual
critical engagement with texts, images, events and other registers
of meaning as they are transformed into pedagogical practices both
within and outside of the classroom. Education is never innocent:
It is always implicated in relations of power and specific visions of the
present and future. This suggests the need for educators to rethink
the cultural and ideological baggage they bring to each educational en-
 CHOWANNA.2020.54.03
Thinking Dangerously… s. 7 z 12

counter. It also highlights the necessity of making educators ethically

and politically accountable for and self-reflective about the stories they
produce, the claims they make upon public memory, and the images
of the future they deem legitimate. Education in this sense is not an
antidote to politics, nor is it a nostalgic yearning for a better time or
for some “inconceivably alternative future.” Instead, it is what Terry
Eagleton describes in his book The Idea of Culture as an “attempt to find
a bridge between the present and future in those forces within the
present which are potentially able to transform it.”5
One of the most serious challenges facing administrators, facul-
ty and students in colleges and universities is the task of developing
a discourse of both critique and possibility. This means developing dis-
courses and pedagogical practices that connect reading the word with
reading the world, and doing so in ways that enhance the capacities of
young people to be critical agents and engaged citizens.

Reviving the Social Imagination

Educators, students and others concerned about the fate of higher ed-
ucation need to mount a spirited attack against the managerial take-
over of the university that began in the late 1970s with the emergence
of a market-driven ideology, what can be called neoliberalism, which
argues that market principles should govern not just the economy but
all of social life, including education. Central to such a recognition is
the need to struggle against a university system developed around the
reduction in faculty and student power, the replacement of a culture
of cooperation and collegiality with a cut-throat culture of compe-
tition, the rise of an audit culture that has produced a very limited
notion of regulation and evaluation, and the narrow and harmful
view that students are clients and colleges “should operate more
like private firms than public institutions, with an onus on income
generation,”6 as Australian scholar Richard Hill puts it in his Arena
article “Against the Neoliberal University.” In addition, there is an ur-
gent need for guarantees of full-time employment and protections for
faculty while viewing knowledge as a public asset and the university
as a public good.

5
T. Eagleton: The Idea of Culture. Hoboken, NJ 2000.
6
R. Hill: Against the Neoliberal University. „Arena Magazine” 2016, no. 140
(February), p. 13.
CHOWANNA.2020.54.03
s. 8 z 12 Henry A. Giroux

In any democratic society, education should be viewed as a right,

not an entitlement. Educators need to produce a national conver-
sation in which higher education can be defended as a public good.

With these issues in mind, let me conclude by pointing to six further

considerations for change.
First, there is a need for what can be called a revival of the social
imagination and the defense of the public good, especially in regard
to higher education, in order to reclaim its egalitarian and democratic
impulses. This revival would be part of a larger project to, as Stan-
ley Aronowitz writes in Tikkun, “reinvent democracy in the wake of
the evidence that, at the national level, there is no democracy – if by
‘democracy’ we mean effective popular participation in the crucial de-
cisions affecting the community.”7 One step in this direction would
be for young people, intellectuals, scholars and others to go on the
offensive against what Gene R. Nichol has described as the conserva-
tive-led campaign “to end higher education’s democratizing influence
on the nation.”8 Higher education should be harnessed neither to the
demands of the warfare state nor to the instrumental needs of corpora-
tions. Clearly, in any democratic society, education should be viewed as
a right, not an entitlement. Educators need to produce a national con-
versation in which higher education can be defended as a public good
and the classroom as a site of engaged inquiry and critical thinking,
a site that makes a claim on the radical imagination and builds a sense
of civic courage. At the same time, the discourse on defining higher
education as a democratic public sphere would provide the platform
for moving on to the larger issue of developing a social movement in
defense of public goods.
Second, I believe that educators need to consider defining pedagogy,
if not education itself, as central to producing those democratic public
spheres that foster an informed citizenry. Pedagogically, this points
to modes of teaching and learning capable of enacting and sustain-
ing a culture of questioning, and enabling the advancement of what
Kristen Case calls “moments of classroom grace.” Moments of grace
in this context are understood as moments that enable a classroom
to become a place to think critically, ask troubling questions and take
risks, even though that may mean transgressing established norms and
bureaucratic procedures.
7
S. Aronowitz: What Kind of Left Does America Need. “Tikkun” 2014. [Online:]
https://www.tikkun.org/what-kind-of-left-does-america-need [1.06.2017].
8
G.R. Nichol: Public Universities at Risk Abandoning Their Mission. “The
Chronicle of Higher Education” 2008. [Online:] https://www.chronicle.com/
article/Public-Universities-at-Risk/10851/ [1.06.2017].
 CHOWANNA.2020.54.03
Thinking Dangerously… s. 9 z 12

Pedagogies of classroom grace should provide the conditions for stu-

dents and others to reflect critically on commonsense Understandings
of the world and begin to question their own sense of agency, rela-
tionships to others, and relationships to the larger world. This can be
linked to broader pedagogical imperatives that ask why we have wars,
massive inequality, and a surveillance state. There is also the issue
of how everything has become commodified, along with the wither-
ing of a politics of translation that prevents the collapse of the public
into the private. This is not merely a methodical consideration but also
a moral and political practice because it presupposes the development
of critically engaged students who can imagine a future in which jus-
tice, equality, freedom and democracy matter.
Such pedagogical practices are rich with possibilities for under-
standing the classroom as a space that ruptures, engages, unsettles
and inspires. Education as democratic public space cannot exist under
modes of governance dominated by a business model, especially one
that subjects faculty to a Walmart model of labor relations designed “to
reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility,” as Noam Chomsky
writes.9 In the US, over 70 percent of faculty occupy nontenured and
part-time positions, many without benefits and with salaries so low
that they qualify for food stamps. Faculty need to be given more secu-
rity, full-time jobs, autonomy and the support they need to function as
professionals. While many other countries do not emulate this model
of faculty servility, it is part of a neoliberal legacy that is increasingly
gaining traction across the globe.
Third, educators need to develop a comprehensive educational pro-
gram that would include teaching students how to live in a world
marked by multiple overlapping modes of literacy extending from print
to visual culture and screen cultures. What is crucial to recognize here
is that it is not enough to teach students to be able to interrogate crit-
ically screen culture and other forms of aural, video and visual rep-
resentation. They must also learn how to be cultural producers. This
suggests developing alternative public spheres, such as online journals,
television shows, newspapers, zines and any other platform in which
different modes of representation can be developed. Such tasks can
be done by mobilizing the technological resources and platforms that
many students are already familiar with.
Teaching cultural production also means working with one foot in
existing cultural apparatuses in order to promote unorthodox ideas

9
N. Chomsky: The Death of American Universities. “Jacobin” 2014. [Online:]
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/03/the-death-of-american-universities/
[1.06.2017].
CHOWANNA.2020.54.03
s. 10 z 12 Henry A. Giroux

and views that would challenge the affective and ideological spaces
produced by the financial elite who control the commanding institu-
tions of public pedagogy in North America. What is often lost by many
educators and progressives is that popular culture is a powerful form
of education for many young people, and yet it is rarely addressed as
a serious source of knowledge. As Stanley Aronowitz has observed
in his book Against Schooling, “theorists and researchers need to link
their knowledge of popular culture, and culture in the anthropological
sense – that is, everyday life, with the politics of education.”
Fourth, academics, students, community activists, young people and
parents must engage in an ongoing struggle for the right of students
to be given a free formidable and critical education not dominated by
corporate values, and for young people to have a say in the shaping of
their education and what it means to expand and deepen the practice
of freedom and democracy. College and university education, if taken
seriously as a public good, should be virtually tuition-free, at least for
the poor, and utterly affordable for everyone else. This is not a radi-
cal demand; countries such as Germany, France, Norway, Finland and
Brazil already provide this service for young people.
Accessibility to higher education is especially crucial at a time when
young people have been left out of the discourse of democracy. They
often lack jobs, a decent education, hope and any semblance of a fu-
ture better than the one their parents inherited. Facing what Richard
Sennett calls the “specter of uselessness,” they are a reminder of how
finance capital has abandoned any viable vision of the future, includ-
ing one that would support future generations. This is a mode of poli-
tics and capital that eats its own children and throws their fate to the
vagaries of the market. The ecology of finance capital only believes
in short-term investments because they provide quick returns. Under
such circumstances, young people who need long-term investments
are considered a liability.
Fifth, educators need to enable students to develop a comprehensive
vision of society that extends beyond single issues. It is only through
an understanding of the wider relations and connections of power
that young people and others can overcome uninformed practice, iso-
lated struggles, and modes of singular politics that become insular and
self-sabotaging. In short, moving beyond a single-issue orientation
means developing modes of analyses that connect the dots historically
and relationally. It also means developing a more comprehensive vision
of politics and change. The key here is the notion of translation – that
is, the need to translate private troubles into broader public issues.
Sixth, another serious challenge facing educators who believe that
colleges and universities should function as democratic public spheres
 CHOWANNA.2020.54.03
Thinking Dangerously… s. 11 z 12

is the task of developing a discourse of both critique and possibility,

or what I have called a discourse of educated hope. In taking up this
project, educators and others should attempt to create the conditions
that give students the opportunity to become critical and engaged citi-
zens who have the knowledge and courage to struggle in order to make
desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical. Critique is
crucial to break the hold of commonsense assumptions that legitimate
a wide range of injustices. But critique is not enough. Without a simul-
taneous discourse of hope, it can lead to an immobilizing despair or,
even worse, a pernicious cynicism. Reason, justice and change cannot
blossom without hope. Hope speaks to imagining a life beyond capi-
talism, and combines a realistic sense of limits with a lofty vision of
demanding the impossible. Educated hope taps into our deepest expe-
riences and longing for a life of dignity with others, a life in which it
becomes possible to imagine a future that does not mimic the present.
I am not referring to a romanticized and empty notion of hope, but to
a notion of informed hope that faces the concrete obstacles and reali-
ties of domination but continues the ongoing task of what Andrew Ben-
jamin describes as “holding the present open and thus unfinished.”10
The discourse of possibility looks for productive solutions and is
crucial in defending those public spheres in which civic values, pub-
lic scholarship and social engagement allow for a more imaginative
grasp of a future that takes seriously the demands of justice, equity
and civic courage. Democracy should encourage, even require, a way
of thinking critically about education – one that connects equity to
excellence, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of social
responsibility and the public good.

History is open. It is time to think otherwise in order to act other-

wise.

Howard Zinn rightly insisted that hope is the willingness “to hold
out, even in times of pessimism, the possibility of surprise.” To add to
this eloquent plea, I would say that history is open. It is time to think
otherwise in order to act otherwise, especially if as educators we want
to imagine and fight for alternative futures and horizons of possibility.

10
A. Benjamin: Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism. London–New
York 1997.
CHOWANNA.2020.54.03
s. 12 z 12 Henry A. Giroux

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