At a time when the public good is under attack and there seems to be a growing apathy toward the social contract or any other civic-minded investment in public values and the larger common good, education has to be seen as more than a credential or a pathway to a job, and pedagogy as more than teaching to the test. Against pedagogies of repression such as high-stakes testing, which largely serve as neoliberal forms of discipline to promote conformity and limit the imagination, critical pedagogy must be viewed as crucial to understanding and overcoming the current crises of agency, politics, and historical memory faced by many young people today. One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators and students is the need to reclaim the role that education has historically played in developing critical literacies and civic capacities. Education must mobilize students to be critically engaged agents, attentive to important social issues and alert to the responsibility of deepening and expanding the meaning and practices of a vibrant democracy.… At the heart of such a challenge is the question of what education should accomplish in a democracy.… In a world that has largely abandoned egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people to challenge authority, resist the notion that education is only training, and redefine public and higher education as democratic public spheres? | more…
Henry Giroux is a phenomenon. He has written more than sixty books, authored hundreds of essays, won numerous awards, and been an outstanding teacher for nearly forty years.… What distinguishes Giroux’s writing is a combination of lucid analysis and incisive and justifiably harsh criticism of the deterioration of the human condition under the onslaught of a savage modern-day capitalism. However, his examination of this savagery does not stop with a description of the vicious attacks on working people by corporations and their allies in government. Nor is it content to enumerate the economic, political, and social consequences of these assaults, such as the rise in poverty, stagnating wages, unconscionably high unemployment, deteriorating health, the astonishing increase in the prison population, and a general increase in material insecurity to name a few. Instead, he goes beyond these to interrogate the more subtle but no less devastating effects of neoliberal capitalism, and by implication capitalism itself, on our psyches and on our capacity to resist our growing immiseration. | more…
Pope Francis’s “ecological encyclical” is an event which—whether taken from a religious, ethical, social, or political point of view—is of planetary importance. Considering the enormous influence of the Catholic Church worldwide, it is a crucial contribution towards the development of a critical ecological consciousness. It was received with enthusiasm by the true defenders of the environment; however it aroused uneasiness and rejection among religious conservatives, representatives of capital, and ideologues of “market ecology.” It is a document with a great richness and complexity, one that proposes a new interpretation of the Judeo-Christian tradition, a rupture with the “promethean dream of dominion over the world,” and a profoundly radical reflection on the causes of the ecological crisis. Many aspects of liberation theology…can be seen as a source of inspiration here, particularly the inseparable.… In the following brief notes, I am interested in emphasizing the aspect of the encyclical that explains the resistance it has found in the economic and media establishment: its anti-systemic character. | more…
John Cassidy, who writes on economics for the New Yorker, is in our view one of the most interesting anhd creative commentators on economic analysis and trends writing in the mainstream today. His perspective might be best characterized as institutionalist-realist, in the tradition of thinkers like Thorstein Veblen, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Hyman Minsky.… Cassidy’s latest critical contribution is an online New Yorker news item published on December 12, 2014, carrying the rather prosaic title, “The Winner of the Spending Bill Vote: Jamie Dimon.”… [In this piece] Cassidy…explain[s] how the spending bill passed by the House of Representatives included a rider that rolled back regulations that had been imposed after the Great Financial Crisis on some of the riskier activities of banks. Such speculative activities were to be transferred to the unregulated bank subsidiaries not covered by the federally guaranteed bank insurance system. This has now been reversed and banks are again allowed to engage directly in such high-risk speculative activities, with the losses being picked up by the general public.… There is no doubt that Cassidy is correct, and that the analyses of “left-left” thinkers like Sweezy, one of Monthly Review’s founding editors, and Chomsky, an MR author, have been generally on the mark in pointing out that such outcomes are to be expected in the state management of the economy. | more…
Many people from divergent ethnic backgrounds, speaking various languages, and possessing different cultures now share a common experience of inequality in the United States. Yet there is an absence of unity among these constituencies, in part because their leaders are imprisoned ideologically and theoretically by the assumptions and realities of the past. | more…
