Interview: An Educator’s Reflections on the Crisis in Education and Democracy in the US

Dissident Voice has republished an interview with radical/critical pedagogist Henri A. Giroux.

By Michael Alexander Pozo
www.dissidentvoice.org
September 25, 2004
First Published in Axis of Logic

According to Henry Giroux, critical pedagogy asks, “whose future, story and interests does the school represent? Critical pedagogy argues that school practices need to be informed by a public philosophy that addresses how to construct ideological and institutional conditions in which the lived experience of empowerment for the vast majority of students becomes the defining feature of schooling.”

In May of 2004 Henry Giroux reluctantly left Penn State University after 12 years as a distinguished Professor in the Education Department. Over the years Henry Giroux has been one of the leading advocates for young people, democracy and education in the United States and has arguably been responsible for creating the field of Critical Pedagogy itself. He is considered one of the world’s leading intellectuals and according to Fifty Modern Thinkers in Education and was recently named one of the top thinkers in Education of the 20th century. He is author of over 40 books covering education, cultural studies, political theory and media studies. Much of Giroux’s most stunning and revealing writings have dealt with his tireless work on the dangerous influence of Corporations in schools as well as higher education. In The Abandoned Generation he warned that, “No longer a space for relating the self to the obligations of public life, and social responsibility to the demands of critical and engaged citizenship, schools are viewed as an all encompassing horizon for producing market identities, values, and those privatizing pedagogies that inflate the importance of individual competition”(80). In Take Back Higher Education, co-authored with his wife Susan Searls Giroux, he presents an extensive critique of the corporatization of higher education. ...

The interview