America's Education Deficit and the War on Youth

Reform Beyond Electoral Politics

Henry A. Giroux

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781583673461
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

America’s latest war, according to renowned social critic Henry Giroux, is a war on youth. While this may seem counterintuitive in our youth-obsessed culture, Giroux lays bare the grim reality of how our educational, social, and economic institutions continually fail young people. Their systemic failure is the result of what Giroux identifies as “four fundamentalisms” market deregulation, patriotic and religious fervor, the instrumentalization of education, and the militarization of society. We see the consequences most plainly in the decaying education system: schools are increasingly designed to churn out drone-like future employees, imbued with authoritarian values, inured to violence, and destined to serve the market. And those are the lucky ones. Young people who don’t conform to cultural and economic discipline are left to navigate the neoliberal landscape on their own; if they are black or brown, they are likely to become ensnared by a harsh penal system. Giroux sets his sights on the war on youth and takes it apart, examining how a lack of access to quality education, unemployment, the repression of dissent, a culture of violence, and the discipline of the market work together to shape the dismal experiences of so many young people. He urges critical educators to unite with students and workers in rebellion to form a new pedagogy, and to build a new, democratic society from the ground up. Here is a book you won’t soon forget, and a call that grows more urgent by the day.

1.
Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie: The Education Deficit and the New Authoritarianism

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

—MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

THE AMERICAN PUBLIC is suffering from an education deficit. By this I mean it exhibits a growing inability to think critically, question authority, be reflective, weigh evidence, discriminate between reasoned arguments and opinions, listen across differences, and engage the mutually informing relationship between private problems and broader public issues. This growing political and cultural illiteracy is not merely a problem of the individual, which points to simple ignorance. It is a collective and social problem that goes to the heart of the increasing attack on democratic public spheres and supportive public institutions that promote analytical capacities, thoughtful exchange, and a willingness to view knowledge as a resource for informed modes of individual and social agency. One of the major consequences of the current education deficit and the pervasive culture of illiteracy that sustains it is what I call the ideology of the big lie—which propagates the myth that the free market system is the only mechanism to ensure human freedom and safeguard democracy.

The education deficit, along with declining levels of civic literacy, is also part of the American public’s collective refusal to know—a focused resistance to deal with knowledge that challenges common sense or to think reflectively about facts and truths that are unsettling in terms of how they disturb some of our most cherished beliefs. Such beliefs are firmly embedded in the national psyche and include, among others: denouncing the sins of big government, legitimating existing levels of economic insecurity, accepting social inequality as part of the natural order, and embracing “minimal government intervention in the field of welfare legislation.”¹ The decline of civility and civic literacy in American society is a political dilemma, the social production of which is traceable to a broader constellation of forces deeply rooted in the shifting nature of education and the varied cultural apparatuses that produce it, extending from new digital technologies and online journals to the mainstream media of newspapers, magazines, and television. Politics is now held hostage to what the late Raymond Williams called the “force of permanent education,” a kind of public pedagogy spread through a plethora of teaching machines that are shaping how our most powerful ideas are formed.² For Williams, the concept of “permanent education” was a central political insight:

What it valuably stresses is the educational force of our whole social and cultural experience. It is therefore concerned not only with continuing education, of a formal or informal kind, but with what the whole environment, its institutions and relationships, actively and profoundly teaches. . . . [Permanent education also refers to] the field in which our ideas of the world, of ourselves and of our possibilities, are most widely and often most powerfully formed and disseminated. To work for the recovery of control in this field is then, under any pressures, a priority. For who can doubt, looking at television or newspapers, or reading the women’s magazines, that here, centrally, is teaching, and teaching financed and distributed in a much larger way than is formal education.³

Williams’s insight about the relationship between education and politics is more important today than it was in the 1960s, when he developed the idea. The educational force of the wider culture is now one of the primary, if not most powerful, determinants of what counts as knowledge, agency, politics, and democracy itself. Diverse modes of communication are now produced through a range of cultural and pedagogical technologies and distributed in a vast range of new sites extending from computer screens and iPads to mobile phones. The machinery of permanent education and the public pedagogical relationships these create have become the main framing mechanisms in determining what information gets included, who speaks, what stories are told, what representations translate into reality, and what is considered normal or subversive. The cultural apparatuses of popular education and public pedagogy play a powerful role in framing how issues are perceived, what values and social relations matter, and whether any small ruptures will be allowed to unsettle the circles of certainty that now reign as common sense. But education is never far from the reach of power and ideology. As the major cultural apparatuses and technologies of public pedagogy are concentrated in a few hands, the educational force of the culture becomes a powerful ideological tool for legitimating market-driven values and social relations, based on omissions, deceptions, lies, misrepresentations, and falsehoods benefiting the apostles of a range of economic, educational, and religious fundamentalisms.

For the first time in modern history, centralized commercial institutions that extend from traditional broadcast culture to the new interactive screen cultures—rather than parents, churches, or schools—tell most of the stories that shape the lives of the American public. This is no small matter, since the stories a society tells about its history, civic life, social relations, education, children, freedom, and human imagination are a measure of how it values itself, the ideals of democracy, and its future. Most of the stories now told to the American public are about the necessity of neoliberal capitalism, permanent war, and the virtues of a never-ending culture of fear. The domestic front revels in the welcome death of the social state, the necessary all-embracing reach of the market to determine every aspect of our lives, the reduction of freedom to the freedom to consume, placing social relations under the rule of commodities and finance capital, and the notion that everyone is ultimately responsible for their own fate in a world that now resembles a shark tank. The freedom to shop has become the major obligation of citizenship, as George W. Bush reminded the nation after the tragic events of 9/11. Individuals are relentlessly told by advertisers to develop a brand, as if they were just another commodity. We are also constantly reminded by reality TV that life is primarily a theater of cruelty and that only one person can be left on the island. Moreover, illiteracy finds its ultimate legitimation in making role models out of celebrities, encouraging a growing public fondness for ignorance and self-indulgence.

Democracies need informed citizens to make them work, and can only survive amid a formative culture that produces individuals willing to think critically, imagine otherwise, and act responsibly. America seems to have moved away from that possibility, that willingness to think through and beyond the systemic production of the given, the pull of conformity, the comforting assurance of certainty, and the painless retreat into a world of common sense. The time-honored concepts of literacy and critical thinking are under assault by those on the right who view education at best as a profit-making and training organization and at worst as a disciplinary apparatus and object of repression. For instance, in 2006 members of the Florida state legislature outlawed historical interpretation in public schools, arguing that American history must be taught as a series of facts, rather than as a matter of interpretation, reasoned debate, and accumulation of evidence.⁴ Of course, what is really being taught is that critical thinking has no place in the classroom. It gets worse. In 2012, the Texas Republican Party included in their platform a ban on what they termed “higher-order thinking skills” and “critical thinking skills.”⁵ In addition, a number of states have introduced legislation that calls for the teaching of climate change denial in the public schools under the guise of “balanced” teaching.⁶

Hannah Arendt understood the danger of such a state of ignorance, which she famously called the “banality of evil” and described as a “curiously quite authentic inability to think.” ⁷ For Arendt, this was more than mere stupidity, it was a mode of manufactured thoughtlessness that pointed to the disappearance of politics, constituting one of the most serious threats facing democracy. That threat is no longer merely a despairing element of philosophical reflection—it has become the new reality in American life. The political, economic, and social coordinates of authoritarianism are all around us, and, through the educational force of the broader culture, they are becoming more normalized and more dangerous.

There is little distance between what I call an education deficit and the reigning market authoritarianism, with its claim to be both synonymous with democracy and unquestionable in its assumptions and policies. The education deficit, a hallmark achievement of neoliberal capitalism, has produced a version of authoritarianism with a soft edge, a kind of popular authoritarianism that spreads its values through gaming, reality TV, celebrity culture, TV news, talk radio, and a host of other media outlets aggressively engaged in producing subjects, desires, and dreams that reflect a world order dominated by corporations and the alleged “free markets.” This is a world that only values narrow, selfish interests; isolated, competitive individuals; finance capital; the reign of commodities; and the alleged “natural” laws of free-market fundamentalism. Freedom in this neoliberal worldview is about the freedom to choose, mainly understood as an abstract market concept removed from matters of power, politics, and social provisions. This message permeates American society and can be seen in the ongoing attempts to define public education as an individual right rather than a public good. The normalizing, if not normative legitimation of neoliberal values of competition, egoism, narrow self-interest, and materialism are pervasive in mainstream television shows such as American Idol, Real Housewives, Damages, Revenge, and House of Cards, as well as in a plethora of Hollywood films that extend from American Psycho to Up in the Air.

Using Isaiah Berlin’s terminology, freedom in market-driven societies becomes a negative force, largely manifested as freedom from the state. This translates into a highly depoliticized notion of freedom in that it produces “a weakening of democratic pressures, a growing inability to act politically, a massive exit from politics and from responsible citizenship.”⁸ The only element of positive freedom in the neoliberal ideology is the right to consume. There is no talk of freedom as the right to challenge authority, to refuse to conform, and to dissent. This type of market-driven freedom appeals to formal political and personal freedoms largely as a type of freedom from government interference. The neoliberal conception of freedom focuses on individual initiatives and consumer skills, and in doing so diminishes any viable notion of citizen skills. It says nothing about the freedom of individual and collective action that comes with social rights—that is, a vigorous set of state-sponsored social protections and collective insurance policies “that include the right not only to biological survival but also to social respect and human dignity.”⁹

Turbo capitalism rejects the merging of personal, social, and political freedoms. By doing so, it rejects creating the conditions enabled by a robust social state that guarantees free health care, free education, and a decent social wage, as well as housing, food, and other basic necessities for all members of society to live free from material deprivations that make political and personal freedoms dysfunctional. There is more at issue here than a mode of neoliberalism that accelerates the impoverishment of human agency and experience, while it strips freedom and democracy to a thin, if not flattened, conception of consumerism. There is also the emergence of a new mode of authoritarianism in which “the image of progress seems to have moved from the discourse of shared improvement to that of individual survival.”¹⁰

Turbo capitalism with its crushing cultural apparatuses of legitimation does more than destroy the public good and deny too many people the most basic social rights and freedoms; it empties democracy of any substance and renders authoritarian politics and culture an acceptable state of affairs. As the boundaries between markets and democratic values collapse, civil life becomes warlike and the advocates of market fundamentalism rail against state protections as they offer an unbridled confirmation of the market as a template for all social relations.

Notwithstanding the appeal to formalistic election rituals, democracy as a substantive mode of public address and politics is all but dead in the United States. The forces of authoritarianism are on the march, and they seem at this point to be gaining power politically, economically, and educationally. Politicians at every level of government are in collusion with corporate power, many of them bought by industry lobbyists. This despicable state of affairs was particularly evident in the 2010 elections. Commenting on the colonization of politics by big money in that election, Charles Pierce captures the power dynamic and ideological relations that were in effect then and have intensified since:

In 2010, in addition to handing the House of Representatives over to a pack of nihilistic vandals, the Koch Brothers and the rest of the sugar daddies of the Right poured millions into various state campaigns. This produced a crop of governors and state legislators wholly owned and operated by those corporate interests and utterly unmoored from the constituencies they were elected to serve. In turn, these folks enacted various policies, and produced various laws, guaranteed to do nothing except reinforce the power of the people who put them in office.¹¹

More recently, the New York Times reported that soon after President Obama took office, “he cut a closed-door deal with the powerful pharmaceutical lobby [abandoning] his support for the reimportation of prescription medicines at lower prices.”¹² For the Times, this backdoor deal signified “to some disillusioned liberal supporters a loss of innocence, or perhaps even the triumph of cynicism.”¹³ In actuality, it signified a powerful new mode of capitalism that not only controls the commanding heights of the economy but now replaces political sovereignty with an aggressive form of corporate governance. The state and elite market forces, perhaps inseparable before, have become today both inseparable and powerfully aligned. From Reagan’s assault on the values of the welfare state to Obama’s bailout of the mega-banks and the refusal to end the Bush tax cuts, corporate sovereignty as the preeminent mode of U.S. politics is hard to miss. And the surrender of politics to corporate rule and an amalgam of anti-democratic forces is not a one-party affair. As Bill Moyers and Michael Winship have argued, “Since 1979, 377 members of the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans have given almost half a billion dollars to candidates of both parties, most of it in the last decade. The median contribution was $355,100 each.”¹⁴

As is well known, President Clinton implemented deregulation policies that led directly to the economic crisis of 2008, at the same time enacting welfare reforms that turned a war on poverty into a war on the poor. In fact, the most radical economic measures that Clinton undertook “related to further deregulation of the economy [amounting to] some of the most comprehensive deregulatory reforms of the twentieth century.”¹⁵ Similarly, the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy not only increased the power of mega-corporations and financial services to influence policy for the benefit of Wall Street titans and the rich more generally, but also largely punished the middle class and the poor. The Citizens United Supreme Court ruling made especially visible the hidden operations behind contemporary politics: big money translates into political power. The economist Joseph Stiglitz is correct in insisting that “we’ve moved from a democracy, which is supposed to be based on one person, one vote, to something much more akin to one dollar, one vote. When you have that kind of democracy, it’s not going to address the real needs of the 99%.”¹⁶ Stiglitz’s point is right in one sense, though the current political system has nothing substantively to do with democracy and everything to do with a new form of authoritarianism shaped by the converging interests of the financial elite, religious fundamentalists, anti-public intellectuals, and corporate political power brokers.

This new mode of authoritarian governance is distinct from the fascism that emerged in Germany and Italy in the mid-part of the twentieth century. As Sheldon Wolin has pointed out, big business in this new mode of authoritarianism is not subordinated to a political regime and the forces of state sovereignty, but now replaces political sovereignty with corp...