Critical pedagogy in uncertain times: hope and possibilities

EDUCATION, POLITICS, AND PUBLIC LIFE Series Editors: Henry A. Giroux, McMaster University Susan Searls Giroux, McMaster University Within the last three decades, education as a political, moral, and ideological practice has become central to rethinking not only the role of public and higher education, but also the emergence of pedagogical sites outside of the schools—which include but are not limited to the Internet, television, film, magazines, and the media of print culture. Education as both a form of schooling and public pedagogy reaches into every aspect of political, economic, and social life. What is particularly important in this highly interdisciplinary and politically nuanced view of education are a number of issues that now connect learning to social change, the operations of democratic public life, and the formation of critically engaged individual and social agents. At the center of this series will be questions regarding what young people, adults, academics, artists, and cultural workers need to know to be able to live in an inclusive and just democracy and what it would mean to develop institutional capacities to reintroduce politics and public commitment into everyday life. Books in this series aim to play a vital role in rethinking the entire project of the related themes of politics, democratic struggles, and critical education within the global public sphere. SERIES EDITORS: HENRY A. GIROUX holds the Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. He is on the editorial and advisory boards of numerous national and international scholarly journals. Professor Giroux was selected as a Kappa Delta Pi Laureate in 1998 and was the recipient of a Getty Research Institute Visiting Scholar Award in 1999. He was the recipient of the Hooker Distinguished Professor Award for 2001. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2005. His most recent books include Take Back Higher Education (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006); America on the Edge (2006); Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism (2006), Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (2006), The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (2007), and Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed (2008). SUSAN SEARLS GIROUX is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Her most recent books include The Theory Toolbox (co-authored with Jeff Nealon, 2004) and Take Back Higher Education (co-authored with Henry A. Giroux, 2006). Professor Giroux is also the Managing Editor of The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies.

Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times: Hope and Possibilities Edited by Sheila L. Macrine The Gift of Education: Public Education and Venture Philanthropy (forthcoming) Kenneth J. Saltman Feminist Theory in Pursuit of the Public: Politics, Education, and Public Life (forthcoming) Robin Goodman

Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Ti m es Hope a n d Possi bi l i t i es

Edited b y

S h eil a L . Macrine

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN UNCERTAIN TIMES

Copyright © Sheila L. Macrine, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61320–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Critical pedagogy in uncertain times : hope and possibilities / edited by Sheila L. Macrine. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–61320–9 1. Critical pedagogy. I. Macrine, Sheila L. LC196.C757 2009 370.1195—dc22

2009002672

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: September 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

This book is dedicated to my father, an immigrant to this country, an iron-worker who labored his whole life to support his wife and educate his children. A special thanks goes to my husband Nicholas for his patience and support. Thanks also to my sons Gavin and Garret and my siblings Catherine, Bridget, Thomas, and John, and my new nephew John Andrew.

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C on t e n t s

Foreword Stanley Aronowitz

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Acknowledgments Introduction Sheila L. Macrine

Part 1

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1

Uncertain Times: Exploring the Costs of Neoliberalism

1. The Attack on Higher Education and the Necessity of Critical Pedagogy Henry A. Giroux

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2. Schooling in Disaster Capitalism: How the Political Right Is Using Disaster to Privatize Public Schooling Kenneth J. Saltman

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3. Critical Pedagogy, Latino/a Education, and the Politics of Class Struggle Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo

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4. Unmasking Prepackaged Democracy Donaldo Macedo

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5. A Critical Pedagogy of Hope in Times of Despair Ramin Farahmandpur

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Part 2 Critical Pedagogy: A Source of Hope and Possibility 6. What Is Critical Pedagogy Good For? An Interview with Ira Shor Sheila L. Macrine

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7. Teaching as Possibility: A Light in Dark Times Maxine Greene 8. Imagining Justice in a Culture of Terror: Pedagogy, Politics, and Dissent Antonia Darder 9. Amilcar Cabral: Pedagogue of the Revolution Paulo Freire. Translated by Sheila L. Macrine, Fernando Naiditch, and Joao Paraskeva

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151 167

10. Toward a Critical Pedagogy of the Global Noah De Lissovoy

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Afterword Gustavo E. Fischman

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List of Contributors

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Index

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For e wor d

Stanley Aronowitz

Inspired by the practice and writing of Paulo Freire, several genera-

tions of intellectuals—of which teachers of literacy are a vital part— have learned that the term “pedagogy” may be freed from the tasks associated with the transmission of received knowledge. Teaching, in Freire’s discourse, is eminently political. It is part of the project of freedom, in the first place the liberation of those whom Franz Fanon termed “the wretched of the earth” and others, regardless of their salaries, who are forced to work and live under conditions of subordination. Freire believed that critical literacy was a weapon of emancipation and, conversely, the deprivation of the ability to read and write, and to examine texts as well as the circumstances of one’s life, which perpetuated a system of servitude. Thus, for Freire literacy was not a means to prepare students for the world of subordinated labor or “careers,” but a preparation for a self-managed life. And selfmanagement could only occur when people have fulfilled three goals of education: self-reflection, that is, realizing the famous poetic phrase, “know thyself,” which is an understanding of the world in which they live, in its economic, political and, equally important, its psychological dimensions. Specifically “critical” pedagogy helps the learner become aware of the forces that have hitherto ruled their lives and especially shaped their consciousness. The third goal is to help set the conditions for producing a new life, a new set of arrangements where power has been, at least in tendency, transferred to those who literally make the social world by transforming nature and themselves. In his last work, Freire became imbued with what may be described as “radical democratic humanism,” the concept that learning is not an exercise driven by leaders over the led, but a practice of empowerment of those without power.

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For e w or d

In the context of U.S. social reality, critical pedagogy has always confronted a number of obstacles. Among them, the relentless subordination of schooling to the corporate order in which education is reduced to training for jobs and the concept of citizenship conflated with loyalty to the existing social and economic system and participation in democratic life confined to the act of voting. Recognizing the limits of schooling, especially for the subaltern (underlying) classes, some critical pedagogues have reduced their practice to a teaching method. The heart of this method is to involve students in the process of learning, to listen to what they have to say, to pay attention to their feelings, especially their educational biographies where schooling has hitherto been an experience of oppression rather than a process of selfemancipation. In short, critical pedagogy became, for some, a classroom practice that was integrated, tacitly, with the canonical practices of progressive education, which still remain the only indigenous American philosophy of education. Admittedly, there is much in Freire’s writing that discusses pedagogy in terms of classroom practice. Yet this interpretation of the critical aims of pedagogy is one-sided. We can see the limits of critical pedagogy if it narrows its scope to a teaching method by evaluating the current period of “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) schooling. As Henry Giroux and others have pointed out, this regime is nothing less than a program of control, both of students and of teachers. By forcing teachers to teach to standardized tests, political and education authorities who follow them violate the genuine purpose of education of providing students with a means to achieve self determination. Students “succeed” when they have done well on these tests; if the students achieve high grades in a growing number of school systems, teachers and administrators are rewarded. If they do “badly” the educator is to blame and may suffer dire consequences, including being removed from the classroom. If the social goals of critical pedagogy are to be realized—or even tolerated as an option—teachers and other educators are required to enter the fray to abolish NCLB and offer an alternative both to the standardized test and to the curriculum upon which it is based. As it stands, school authorities have been ordered, in no uncertain terms, to exempt only a tiny fraction of schools from the rote methods by which the curriculum is delivered, and this exemption rarely applies to schools attended by children of the working class, particularly the working poor and the unemployed. In short, parents and teachers who wish to offer children, youth, and adults an opportunity to obtain an education, as opposed to training to be obedient workers, must learn to fight for their program, must enter the tangled world of politics.

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The task is complicated by recent developments. As this is written, a new national administration has taken office. President Barack Obama has nominated an Education Secretary, Chicago school superintendent Arne Duncan, whose main criticism of the Bush administration’s education policy is that NCLB is not fully funded. Unless there is a real outcry from teachers and their organizations secretary Duncan is likely to modify the program a bit, but he will continue the Bush policy of making it a virtual national curriculum and pedagogy. To make matters worse, some educational progressives, notably AFT president Randi Weingarten, a past critic of NCLB, has welcomed Duncan’s nomination. Worse still is that there is almost no debate about its substance. So this book is urgently needed because it revives a discussion of the goals and pedagogies of critical pedagogy at a time when the tide has turned the other way. Yet, those of us who have labored at the intellectual and activist margins of education, no less than in the broader political world, are accustomed to the huge odds that things can actually change. But this time we have a new opportunity. President Obama has rallied millions of young people and social activists to the banner of “change.” If his initial impulse after election is to move rapidly to the middle, there is reason to believe that the economic and social crisis this country is facing may make it difficult to hew a centrist course. Even the old political scene is that you run in the primary to the Left, but in the general election and in administration, moving to the center may no longer suffice, given the depth of the problems facing the United States. The first impulse of nearly all mainstream politicians has been to partially displace the prevailing policy imperative of neoliberalism (that is, the market and the private sector can do everything better) with new forms of state intervention. With each passing day we are inching further in the direction of state capitalism, of which the promise of federal bailouts to banks and industrial corporations were only the first step. In the next period, as state and local governments go broke and demand federal aid, and existing political forces reveal a high degree of incompetence to meet the growing challenges, among the chances for change, a new educational Left that is armed with the wisdom of critical pedagogy may emerge. If this optimistic prognostication has any chance of fulfillment, this book will be a necessary guide.

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Ac k now l e dgm e n t s

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all those who helped

and encouraged me through the completion of this book. It would not have been possible without the contributions of my collaborators to whom I owe a great debt. First, a sincere and genuine thanks to Henry Giroux and Susan Giroux, not only for accepting this book in this new series at Palgrave but also for their continued support and solidarity. I am constantly inspired by Henry Giroux’s unswerving insistence that all public intellectuals take action and develop democratic emancipatory projects that challenge power and dominance and oppression and to defend democracy, democratic public life, and the public sphere in these uncertain times (2006). The idea of this book came as a result of conversations that I had with two colleagues and collaborators, Peter McLaren and Dave Hill, both of whom gave me the courage to do it. I owe a great deal to Peter McLaren, the Poet Laureate of the Educational Left, for his ongoing inspiration, friendship, and constant support of my work. I would also like to say a special thanks to Dave Hill, who jumpstarted my book-writing when he invited me to coedit a series with him for Routledge, London. The inclusion of the piece by Paulo Freire was made possible by the enormous generosity of Paulo Freire’s wife and outstanding scholar, Nita Freire. This piece, which has never been published in English, would not have been possible without the effort and comradeship of Freirean scholar Donaldo Macedo. I could not have negotiated the Paulo Freire piece on Amilcar Cabral without the knowledge, scholarship, and Freirean expertise of my two collaborators, Fernando Naiditch and Joao Paraskeva. I would also like to thank Alex Oliveira for his technical expertise in bringing this piece to light. This book would not have been possible without the encouragement of Maxine Greene, who was the first person to sign on to contribute to my efforts. It also would not have been possible without the contributions of my collaborators, to whom I owe a great deal of gratitude.

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I also want to extend my appreciation to Stanley Aronowitz for writing the Foreword of this book. His contributions to the evolution of Critical Pedagogy are unsurpassed. In addition, I am deeply indebted to Kenneth Saltman, David Gabbard, and Pat Hinchey for their constant support. Their help, stimulating suggestions, and encouragement helped me to refine this book. There is a long list of people who have provided help. A special thanks goes out to Rebecca Goldstein for her intellectual curiosity and to Deborah Eldridge for her endless support. Another nod must go to my dear friend and colleague, Elaine Fine, for her constant belief in my efforts. Thanks also to David Hursh for his encouragement and simple, in the Freirean sense, but elegant suggestions before I even started writing to him to “please give us some practical applications of Critical Pedagogy.” I hope that this book delivers on those suggestions. Recognition goes to my dear friend, Helene R. Boss, for her relentless support to my scholarly efforts throughout my career. Thanks also to my graduate research assistant and technical reviewer, Deborah Hunter. I could not have managed without her outstanding organizational skills. I will never be able to repay her. A special thanks to the folks at Palgrave Macmillan for their help in getting this book off the ground. Julia Cohen, my editor at Palgrave, has been so wonderful to me throughout this effort. A special thanks to Samantha Hasey, Julia Cohen’s assistant, as well as Allison McElgunn, my production editor, for helping to get the book through production, and to Maran at Newgen for managing the copyediting process. Thanks to all of my students over the years. Your questions and insights have challenged and strengthened me.

I n t roduc t ion Sheila L. Macrine

A s we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, we find

the world adrift in economic, cultural, and political uncertainty brought about by the West’s unrelenting adherence to and proselytizing of neoliberal and neoconservative policies—policies that have served to undermine public institutions, such as education, and to disenfranchise the economically powerless.1 In identifying the origins of this crisis and the possibilities for the renewal of democratic ideals, critical pedagogy continues to provide a critical framework that offers insight, understanding, and hope for the future. Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times: Hopes and Possibilities, provides comprehensive analyses of issues related to the struggle against the forces of imperial-induced privatization, not just in education but in all of social life. It situates Critical Pedagogy in the twenty-first century and offers not only critiques but also practical applications, suggestions, and strategies on how attacks can be collectively resisted, challenged, and eradicated especially by those of us teaching in schools and universities. This book celebrates the forty years since the publication of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed with the publication for the first time in English of Paulo Freire’s 1985 talk on Amílcar Cabral, entitled Pedagogue of the Revolution. This piece demonstrates the freshness of Paulo’s work, offering insights that reverberate as much today as they did on its initial presentation, as we see how he traced Cabral’s work through the southern African jungles fighting the Portuguese colonialist seeking not only to take over lands in Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, and other areas, but also to destroy native languages and cultures. Although the works of Amílcar Cabral are not well known in the United States, it is important for critical pedagogues to see how committed Paulo Freire was to this African scholar,

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and his disappointment at not being able to write a book about him. Prominent critical pedagogue and Freirean scholar, Donaldo Macedo, translated much of Paulo’s work and adds that Freire admired Cabral and said that, “Amílcar Cabral was a thinker who put his thought into practice. He was a thinker whom I read over and over again and always got new perspectives from.”2 The chapter by Paulo Freire is an invaluable contribution to his other works, as we are able to see how Freire describes the thinking of Amilcar Cabral. It was shortly after the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed that Paulo Freire contacted Henry Giroux about one of his articles that Paulo had reviewed for Interchange; within a short time a lifelong collaboration began. Henry and Paulo not only coedited a critical theory and education series at Greenwood, but they also wrote a number of introductions together for specific books in the series. Moreover, around the same time in the late seventies, Henry Giroux began to fashion a unique approach to theories of schooling by incorporating the work of the Frankfurt School, Paulo’s work, radical social theory, and selected works of John Dewey, George Counts, and others to construct the foundation for the critical pedagogy we have today. It is worth quoting at length Giroux’s thinking about the origins of Critical Pedagogy. I attempted to theorize Critical Pedagogy through the lens of critical theory. So there was an attempt to link Paulo’s work with European intellectual work. It was also an attempt to move beyond; even then, what I thought was a reductionist, economist model at work in Critical Theory, and in some versions of critical educational theory. I also thought there was a kind of a radical, existential, biographical work emerging that I thought was very important but I thought was limited by virtue of its refusal to link the personal to the public in a way that exemplified the personal not as a kind of emancipatory moment in itself, but one that also needed to be translated. So we had to understand how private issues translate into public issues.3

Another prominent figure in Critical Pedagogy is Peter McLaren, whose first book, Life in Schools, brought him to the attention of Henry and Paulo. Peter’s contribution to critical pedagogy over the years has been crucial as he has worked to link Critical Pedagogy with Revolutionary Pedagogy and Marxist theories of class-based critique. Antonia Darder has called McLaren the “Poet Laureate of the Educational Left” for his “words that flame” his highly imaginative use of language and the eloquence of his rhetorical style. Peter McLaren

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continues to spread the words of Paulo and the essence of critical pedagogy through his international work. McLaren states that: Critical Pedagogy resonates with the sensibility of the Hebrew symbol of tikkun, which means to heal, repair, and transform the world, all the rest is commentary. It provides historical, cultural, political, and ethical direction for those in education who still dare to hope. Irrevocably committed to the side of the oppressed, critical pedagogy is as revolutionary as the earlier view of the authors of the Declaration of Independence: Since history is fundamentally open to change, liberation is an authentic goal, and a radically different world can be brought into being.4

This book, Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times: Hope and Possibility, brings together a unique group of prominent critical scholars including Stanley Aronowitz, Maxine Greene, Antonia Darder, as well as a number of emerging pedagogues who move beyond critique to show how and why critical frameworks of democratically informed education must become the core of our mission. They also show why education must address the importance of relating knowledge to public life, and social responsibility to the demands of critical citizenship. In addition, they contribute to our understanding of why democratic forms of education and various elements of a critical pedagogy are vital not only to individual students but also to our economy and our democratic institutions and future leadership.5 These writers also critically address the current neoliberal policies that have acted to destabilize schools, universities, and institutions for teacher education and in doing so have attacked the very structures that allow democracy and freedom to thrive. The writers come from differing but allied traditions within Critical Pedagogy including Freirean, Feminist, Anti-Imperialist, Anticolonialist, and Marxist. From these different vantage points, this book shows how neoliberal policies have transformed the external dynamics of education from a public good to a private enterprise and how this change has corrupted the integrity of teaching and learning. Giroux (2006) summarizes this crisis: “First and foremost is the concerted attempt by right-wing extremists and corporate interests to strip the professorate of any authority, render critical pedagogy as merely an instrumental task, eliminate tenure as a protection for teacher authority and remove critical reasons from any vestige of civic courage, engaged citizenship and social responsibility.” True knowledge and critical inquiry have been quashed in favor of blind obedience to the false idols of consumerism, imperialism, and greed.

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This assault on professors, teacher educators, students, and academic institutions poses tremendous challenges to educators and forces them to question the fundamental tenets on which they would develop pedagogies and create learning that is critically empowering and sustainable. The authors argue that we all have a role to play as public intellectuals in the process of creating critical pedagogic policies and practices. Today, critical pedagogy remains a source of hope and possibility for educators engaged in struggles against oppression in their classrooms and the world at large. The time has come for teachers and educators to embrace critical pedagogy with a renewed interest and sense of urgency. While critical pedagogy comes under increasing attack by reactionary ideologies and ideologues, its message only becomes more urgent and important in these troubled and dangerous times.6

Part 1: Uncertain Times: Exploring the Costs of Neoliberalism The first section of this book presents a critical assessment of how neoliberalism has shaped education. For example, in chapter 1, “The Attack on Higher Education and the Necessity of Critical Pedagogy,” Henry Giroux discusses the purposes of higher education within a society and how it is being challenged by “the ascendancy of cynicism and anti-democratic tendencies.” He posits that education is necessary in a democracy in order to defend the public sphere, which “provides students with the modes of individual and social agency that enables them to be both engaged citizens and active participants in the struggle for global democracy.” Academics are called upon to act as public intellectuals providing an indispensable service to society by reframing the purpose of education from “job training” to critical thinking and action. In addition, he argues that academics must move away from arcane specialization and, instead, connect their work to public life by embracing controversial issues and examining the role they play in lessening human suffering. Ken Saltman takes up this attack by the Right in his contribution, “Schooling in Disaster Capitalism: How the Political Right is Using Disaster to Privatize Public Schooling,” in which he details how the political right is capitalizing on economic, environmental, and political disasters to effectively privatize education and, by doing so, is undermining the democratic purposes of public education. He specifically describes the havoc wreaked on public education by the No Child Left Behind act, Chicago’s Renaissance 2010, the educational

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rebuilding of the Gulf Coast, and the educational profiteering in Iraq. He contends that these projects threaten the development of forms of education conducive to the expansion of democratic social relations and reroutes badly needed funding from the most challenged schools into the hands of private corporations. Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo argue that critical revolutionary pedagogy needs to return to its Marxist roots, particularly within the Marxist humanist tradition, by discussing critical pedagogy within the context of the broader issue of Latina/o Education in the United States in chapter 3, entitled, “Critical Pedagogy, Latina/o Education, and the Politics of Class Struggle.” By focusing on this timely issue, McLaren and Jaramillo demonstrate that by grounding critical pedagogy in Marx’s critique of political economy, educators are better able to challenge not only the exploitation of human labor that is endemic to capitalist society but also the assault on civil rights and human dignity, not the least of which has been directed at Latina/o populations through institutionalized forms of white supremacy and capitalist patriarchy. Next, Donald Macedo examines what it means to live within a true democracy in chapter 4, “Unmasking Prepackaged Democracy.” Macedo asserts that it is essential for a nation to develop a democracy that reflects its unique historical and cultural contexts rather than follow, the “ready-made, Western-developed democracy kit characterized by a blind embrace of asymmetrical market forces, required to be uncritically implemented without analysis or regard to suitability.” Ultimately, a true democracy, Macedo argues, cannot become a reality without an educated and engaged citizenry. Macedo unmasks the ugliness of the ethics of the market where consumerism empties out humanity. The rise of U.S. economic and political imperialism from the Cold War to the United States’ most recent empire building effort—the War in Iraq—is taken up by Ramin Farahmandpur in chapter 5, “A Critical Pedagogy of Hope in Times of Despair.” As the United States has spent billions of war dollars to cement its ideological hegemony of capitalism throughout, domestic education has paid the price through repeated budget cuts. Strapped for cash, public schools are pressed into financial partnerships with corporations whose interest in true critical pedagogy is dubious. Where as critical pedagogy encourages students to “critically reflect upon their experiences of the world,” corporatization of the public school systems “lures students into an uncritical and blind acceptance of market values and practices designed to reinforce and maintain capitalist social relations of production.”

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Part 2: Critical Pedagogy: A Source of Hope and Possibility Working from the view that education informs the political; the second section of this book explores the power of critical pedagogy to challenge neoliberalism. In doing so, critical pedagogy strives to reinstate education as a public good and educators as public intellectuals charged with developing a “critically informed citizenry” capable of sustaining democracy and transforming society and the human condition. This section opens with chapter 6 with an interview by Sheila Macrine with Ira Shor, where he explicates his notion of critical literacy, a form of critical pedagogy. In this model of Critical Literacy, the teachers invite students to explicitly question the status quo in the name of social justice, democratic rights, and equality. This approach is a “situated pedagogy” shaped by and for specific themes, locations, and constituencies—from multicultural to feminist to socialist to queer to environmental, from K-12 to college to labor and community education, from urban to rural. Next, in chapter 7, Maxine Greene discusses how the illumination of hope can exist even during the darkest of times. This flicker of possibility is ultimately what inspires the imagination to create alternative realities. Teachers are in a unique position to realize these untold possibilities by challenging the status quo, which currently deforms education into simple job training. Greene suggests that, at its best, education enables questioning, self-awareness, and realization In chapter 8, Antonia Darder addresses the necessity of applying critical pedagogy in a way that is truly transformational and warns against formulaic interpretations that leave the notion of critical pedagogy overly simplistic and fetishized. She uses the civil rights movement of the 1960s to show the limitations of “working within the system” rather than seeking true institutional change that challenged the fundamental contradictions within capitalism that function to conserve asymmetrical relations of power and class. For Darder, this struggle is ultimately about honoring the body as the “origin of emancipatory possibility and human solidarity,” for when a body or self is violated through hunger, homelessness, unemployment, or abuse, it gravitates toward “whatever can provide a quick fix to ease the pain and isolation of an alienated existence.” The next chapter (chapter 9) on Amílcar Cabral is a transcription of a lecture that Paulo Freire (1921–1997) gave on November 8, 1985, at the School of Education at the University of Brasilia (UNB) and it was

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originally recorded, transcribed and organized in Portuguese by Professor Venício Arthur Lima. It has never been published in English. It has been made available for publication in this book by the generosity of Professor Nita Freire, the late Paulo Freire’s wife and the executor of the Paulo Freire estate, for which I am eternally grateful. In addition, we would like to extend a special thanks to Alex Oliveira for his technical assistance with this translation. Amílcar Cabral (September 12, 1924–January 20, 1973) was an African agronomic engineer, a writer, a freedom fighter, a Marxist, and a nationalist politician. Cabral led African nationalist movements in Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands and led Guinea-Bissau’s independence movement. Guinean natives, who were agents of Portuguese colonialism, assassinated him in 1973, just months before Guinea-Bissau declared unilateral independence. On April 25, 1974, the military dictatorship that had ruled Portugal was overthrown, resulting in independence movements in Guinea Bissau and the Cape Verde islands. The struggle for independence was carried out under the leadership of Amílcar Cabral and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde islands (PAIGC). Noah DeLissovoy closes this section by discussing the shift toward globality in chapter 10, “Toward a Critical Pedagogy of the Global.” The movement toward a global organization of social life means the frequent interruption of local narratives and expectations as well as the experience of powerlessness in the face of apparently vast historical forces. However, not only do people increasingly share in the experience of subjugation to the same free market fundamentalism, they also potentially share in new forms of oppositional identity or global resistance. DeLissovoy further argues that to maximize this new potential force of global resistance, teaching and learning must be reconceptualized in some fundamental ways. He argues that critical pedagogy alone is insufficient in this conjuncture; what is needed is a critical pedagogy of the global. Finally, the Afterword by Gustavo Fischman describes the book’s contribution to the continued search to overcome the limitations of redemptive narratives in education, by combining strong conceptualizations about the current challenges to more democratic and fair schooling and clearly pledges to the notions of social and educational transformation. In addition, he writes that the contributors of this volume simultaneously provide conceptually sophisticated and pragmatic tools to pursue the construction of pedagogies of freedom, where commitment to justice and fairness is encouraged, where respecting different perspectives on sciences and arts is stimulated,

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where disagreement is not punished, where caring for the “other” and a desire to know is celebrated, and where a passion for democracy and creating fair and inclusive futures is welcomed.

Notes 1. Macrine, S. (forthcoming), “Neoliberalism’s Iconic ‘Wreaking Crew’ of the Welfare State,” in Macrine, S., McLaren, P., and Hill, D. (forthcoming in 2009), Organizing Pedagogy: Educating for Social Justice Within and Beyond Global. 2. Friere P and Macdeo D, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (South Hadley, Bergin and Garvey, 1987), 103. 3. Henry Giroux interviewed by Joe L. Kinchloe, the complete interview can be seen and heard on Joe L. Kinchloe and Shirley Steinberg’s Web site: The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy. http://freire.mcgill.ca/ 4. McLaren, Peter, “Forward,” in Pedagogy and the Politics of the Body: A Critical Praxis by Sherry B. Shapiro (New York: garland Publishing, 1999), ix–xviii. 5. Giroux, Henry A. (ed.), and Myrsiades, Kostas, Beyond the Corporate University: Culture and Pedagogy in the New Millennium: Culture and Pedagogy in the New Millennium (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2001). 6. Farahmandpur, R. “A Critical pedagogy of Hope and in Times of Despair,” Critical Pedagogy Chapter 6, in S. Macrine (ed.). Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times; Hopes and Possibilities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

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Unc e rta i n Ti m es: E x pl or i ng t h e C ost s of Neol i be r a l ism

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Th e At tac k on H igh e r E duc at ion a n d t h e Nec essi t y of C r i t ic a l P e dag og y Henry A. Giroux

What is the task of educators at a time when mainstream American

culture is increasingly characterized by a declining interest in and misgiving about national politics? How one answers this question will have a grave impact not only on higher education but on the future of democratic public life. There are no simple solutions. Hence it becomes crucial for educators at all levels of schooling to provide alternative democratic conceptions of the meaning and purpose of both politics and education. In what follows, I want to argue that one of the primary tasks of educators, students, community activists, and others in the twenty-first century should center around developing political projects that can challenge the ascendancy of cynicism and antidemocratic tendencies in the United States by defending the institutions and mechanisms that provide the pedagogical conditions for critical and engaged citizenship. Crucial to such a challenge is the role that higher education can play in reclaiming the links between education and democracy, knowledge and public service, and learning and democratic social change. While the demand for college education is swelling among the nation’s youth, schooling as an avenue for social and economic advancement is declining. In fact, “no more than 30 percent of jobs in the United States currently and for the foreseeable future, will require a college degree.”1 Moreover, as college costs and tuition skyrocket along with student debt, the poor and working classes are less likely to attend college, while those students who are getting a college education are less likely to choose careers dedicated to public service.2 But if higher

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education increasingly fails as the major mechanism for economic and social mobility, as well as for preparing students to confront “the needs of a troubled world,”3 then it is all the more crucial to consider the role of higher education as a democratic public sphere and as a public good. Given the current assault on critical education by various right-wing groups, the increasing corporatization of the university, and the growing influence of the national security state, it is increasingly important that higher education be defended as a democratic public sphere and that academics be seen and see themselves as public intellectuals who provide an indispensable service to the nation. Such a view must be based not on a recycled conception of professionalism but on the civic obligations and duties performed by such intellectuals. Unfortunately, too many academics retreat into narrow specialisms, allow themselves to become adjuncts of the corporation, or align themselves with dominant interests that serve largely to consolidate authority rather than to critique its abuses. Refusing to take positions on controversial issues or to examine the role they might play in lessening human suffering, such academics become models of moral indifference and examples of what it means to disconnect learning from public life. This is a form of education, as Howard Zinn notes, where scholars “publish while others perish.”4 Even many leftist and liberal academics have retreated into arcane discourses that offer them the safe ground of the professional recluse. Such academics seem unconcerned about writing for a larger public and inhabit a world populated by concepts that both remove them from public access and subject them to the dictates of a narrow theoretical fetishism.5 Making almost no connections to audiences outside of the academy or to the issues that bear down on their lives, such academics have become largely irrelevant. This is not to suggest that they do not publish or speak at symposiums, but that they often do so to very limited audiences and in a language that is overly abstract, highly aestheticized, rarely takes an overt political position, and seems mostly indifferent to broader public issues. Theory increasingly seems to be “measured by the degree with which responsibilities can be escaped.”6 Treated less as a resource to inform public debate, address the demands of civic engagement, and expand the critical capacities of students to become social agents, theory degenerates into a performance for a small coterie of academics happily ensconced in a professionalized, gated community marked by linguistic privatization, indifference to translating private issues into public concerns, and a refusal to connect the acquisition of theoretical skills to the exercise of social power.7 This retreat from public engagement on the part of many academics is increasingly lamentable, as the space of official

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politics seems to grow more and more corrupt, inhabited by ideologues and a deep disdain for debate, dialogue, and democracy itself. The crisis in American democracy has been heralded and exacerbated by the nation’s increasing skepticism—or even overt hostility— toward the educational system, if not critical thought itself, a view that fewer and fewer academics seem willing to oppose by either challenging the right-wing assault or offering positive alternatives. Cynicism about politics and skepticism about education have become mutually reinforcing tendencies that to be understood must be analyzed in tandem. Many educators, if not the public itself, seem to have lost the language for linking schooling to democracy, convinced that education is now about job training and competitive market advantage. With democracy emptied of any substantial content, individuals are unable to translate their privately suffered misery into broadly shared public concerns and collective action. Needless to say, as Frank Furedi points out, “The devaluation of the status of the intellectual and the authority of knowledge has important implications for the conduct of public life.”8 Against this cynicism, we need to pay attention to engaged intellectuals such as Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky, Toni Morrison, Zygmunt Bauman, Stanley Aronowitz, and Cornel West as well as the late Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and Edward Said, all of whom have offered models for academics as committed public intellectuals. Zinn, for instance, deriding those professional intellectuals for whom irony, cleverness, and a disdain for political engagement appear to be the last refuge, defends the link between scholarship and commitment, and has written eloquently about the kind of work that scholars can do “in deliberate unneutral pursuit of a more livable world [and] reconsider the rules by which they have worked, and begin to turn their intellectual energies to the urgent problems of our time.” 9 Similarly, Noam Chomsky argues that “the social and intellectual role of the university should be subversive in a healthy society. . . . [and that] individuals and society at large benefit to the extent that these liberatory ideals extend throughout the educational system—in fact, far beyond.”10 Edward Said took a similar position and argued that academics should engage in ongoing forms of permanent critique of all abuses of power and authority, “to enter into sustained and vigorous exchange with the outside world,” as part of a larger project of helping “to create the social conditions for the collective production of realist utopias.”11 In this article, after outlining some of the major challenges facing educators in this age of diminishing freedoms, I will argue that it is imperative that public intellectuals within and outside of the university

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defend higher education as a democratic public sphere, connect academic work to public life, and advance a notion of pedagogy that provides students with modes of individual and social agency that enable them to be both engaged citizens and active participants in the struggle for global democracy. Following Howard Zinn, Zygmunt Bauman, and others, I believe that intellectuals who inhabit our nation’s universities should represent the conscience of American society because they not only shape the conditions under which future generations learn about themselves and their relations to others and the outside world, but also because they engage pedagogical practices that are by their very nature moral and political rather than simply technical. Pedagogy in this instance works to shift how students think about the issues affecting their lives and the world at large, potentially energizing them to seize such moments as possibilities for acting on the world and for engaging it as a matter of politics, power, and social justice. The appeal here is not merely to an individual’s sense of ethics; it is also an appeal to collectively address material inequities involving resources, accessibility, and power in both education and the broader global society while viewing the struggle for power as generative and crucial to any viable notion of individual and social agency. If the liberal Left seems particularly disheveled and ineffectual at this point in history, then the conservatives, by contrast, appear to be masters of persuasion and organization. Working for decades at grassroots organizing, they have taken both pedagogy and politics deadly seriously. The conservative assault on education at all levels began in the 1970s, following the white working-class and middle-class backlash against civil rights era programs such as affirmative action and busing. Schooling was increasingly reconfigured as a private rather than a public good. And with the shift away from public considerations to private concerns, “privatization” and “choice” became the catch phrases dominating educational reform for the next few decades. The attack on all things public was accompanied by attempts to empty the public treasury, and education became one of the first targets of neoliberals, neoconservatives, religious extremists, and fundamentalists advocating market interests over social needs and democratic values. With the publication of A Nation at Risk, the Reagan administration gave the green light to pass spending cuts in education—cuts that have been obligatory for each administration to follow. Reconceived as a “big government monopoly,” public schooling was derided as bureaucratic, inefficient, and ineffectual, generating a product (dim-witted students) that was singularly incapable of competing in the global marketplace. In short, schools had committed

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“an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament,” the report accused.12 Schools were to blame for increased joblessness and insecurity—not the rapacious greed of corporations eager to circumvent U.S. minimum wage laws, federal taxes, and environmental regulations, while breaking the back of unions at home. Similarly, higher education was accused of harboring a hotbed of leftist academics and promoting culture wars that derided Western civilization. Higher education was portrayed as the center of a class and race war in which the dreams of the white working class were under attack because of the ideological residue of professors tainted by the legacy of radical ’60s politics. The division and distrust between “elitist liberals” and the white working class were now complete and utterly secure. Employing a mobile army of metaphors drawn from Cold War rhetoric, the Right succeeded in a propaganda campaign to turn the popular tide against higher education. After 9/11, the trend continued at an accelerated rate as academics and educators who voiced dissent against government policies increasingly faced retaliatory accusations that equated their views with treason. The most important casualty of this attack on education was democracy itself.13 Unfortunately, the university offers no escape and little resistance. As theorists as diverse as W. E. B. Dubois, John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel, and Cornelius Castoriadis have pointed out, a substantive democracy simply cannot exist without educated citizens. But today the humanistic knowledge and values of the university are being excised as higher education becomes increasingly corporatized and stripped of its democratic functions. As market ideals take precedence over democratic values, and individual rights outweigh collective concerns, the university is increasingly being transformed into a training ground for the corporate workforce. Anyone who spends any time on a college campus in the United States these days cannot miss how higher education is changing. Strapped for money and increasingly defined in the language of corporate culture, many universities seem less interested in higher learning than in becoming licensed storefronts for brand name corporations—selling off space, buildings, and endowed chairs to rich corporate donors. College presidents are now called “CEOs” and are known less for their intellectual leadership than for their role as fundraisers and for their ability to bridge the world of academe and business. In the corporate university, academics are now valued according to the grant money they attract rather than the quality of education they offer to students.14 As the university is annexed by defense, corporate, and

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national security interests, critical scholarship is replaced by research for either weapons technology or commercial profits, just as the private intellectual now replaces the public intellectual, and the public relations intellectual supplants the engaged intellectual in the wider culture. In the age of money and profit, academic subjects gain stature almost exclusively through their exchange value on the market. This is all the more so as the Bush administration attempted to have more control over higher education, cut student aid, plunder public services, and push states to the brink of financial disaster. As higher education increasingly becomes a privilege rather than a right, many working-class students either find it impossible financially to enter college or have to drop out because of increased costs. Those students who have the resources to stay in school are feeling the tight pressures of the job market, and they rush to take courses and receive professional credentials in business and the biosciences as the humanities lose majors and downsize. Not surprisingly, students are now referred to as “customers,” while some university presidents even argue that professors be labeled as “academic entrepreneurs.”15 As higher education is corporatized, young people find themselves on campuses that look more like malls, and they are increasingly taught by professors who are hired on a contractual basis, have obscene work loads, and can barely make enough money to pay the loans for their cars. Tenured faculty are now called upon to generate grants, establish close partnerships with corporations, and teach courses that have practical value in the marketplace. There is little in this vision of the university that imagines young people as anything other than fodder for the corporation or an appendage of the national security state. What was once the hidden curriculum of many universities—the subordination of higher education to capital—has now become an open and much celebrated policy of both public and private higher education.16 The language of market fundamentalism and the emerging corporate university radically alter the vocabulary available for appraising the meaning of citizenship, agency, and civic virtue. Within this discourse, everything is for sale, and what is not for sale has no value as a public good or practice. The traditional academic imperative to publish or perish is now supplemented with the neoliberal mantra “privatize or perish,” as everyone in the university is transformed into an entrepreneur, customer, or client, and every relationship is ultimately judged in bottom line, cost-effective terms. It is in the spirit of such a critique and act of resistance that educators, according to Pierre Bourdieu, need to break with the “new faith in the historical

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inevitability professed by the theorists of [neo] liberalism [in order] to invent new forms of collective political work” capable of confronting the march of corporate power.17 At stake here is the need to question and reject those economic models so fashionable among the academic managers that seek to emancipate economic activity from any consideration except the dictates of profitability. It is important to note that attacks on higher education in the United States come not only from a market-based ideology that reduces education to training and redefines schools as investment opportunities. They also come from conservative Christian organizations such as the American Family Association, conservative politicians, and right-wing think tanks, all of whom have launched an insidious attack on peace studies, women’s studies, Middle Eastern studies, critical pedagogy, and any field that “generates critical inquiry and thought often in opposition to the aims of the United States” and its official regime.18 The frontal nature of such attacks against both dissent and critical education can also be seen in attempts by conservative legislators in Ohio and a number of other states to pass bills such as the “Academic Bill of Rights,” which argues that academics should be hired on the basis of their ideology in order not only to balance out faculties dominated by left-wing professors but also to control what students are taught, with the purpose of protecting conservative students against ideas that might challenge their ideological comfort zones.19 The board of trustees at Utah Valley State College went so far as to insist that the faculty take into consideration conservative political ideologies as part of a new general education requirement for students.20 Professors who address in their classrooms critical issues that unsettle any assumption that favors right-wing ideology are condemned for teaching propaganda. For instance, U.S. congressman Anthony Weiner from New York called for the firing of Joseph Massad, a Columbia University professor who was critical of Israeli policies against Palestinians. Of course, such attacks are not only by Politicians. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called upon the State Department to draw up a blacklist of those critics he calls “excuse makers,” which included those who believe that U.S. actions are at the root cause of violence. According to Friedman, “These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed.”21 This kind of McCarthyite babble has become so commonplace in the United States that it is championed by a famous columnist in one of the world’s leading newspapers. As if to prove the point, some universities in Ohio are bringing back the McCarthy-like loyalty oath,

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requiring that faculty “fill out a form declaring that [they] have no ties to any terrorist groups listed by the U.S. State Department.”22 Higher education has also been attacked by right-wing ideologues such as David Horowitz and Lynne Cheney who view it as the “weak link” in the war against terror and a potential fifth column.23 Horowitz, in particular, acts as the figurehead for various well-funded and orchestrated conservative student groups such as the Young Americans and College Republicans, which perform the groundwork for his “Academic Bill of Rights” policy efforts that seek out juicy but rare instances of “political bias”—whatever that is or however it might be defined—in college classrooms.24 These efforts have resulted in considerable sums of public money being devoted to hearings in multiple state legislatures, in addition to helping impose, as the Chronicle of Higher Education put it, a “chilly climate” of self-policing in the academy and in the classroom.25 At the University of California, Los Angeles, the Bruin Alumni Association has posted on its Web site an article called “The Dirty Thirty,” in which it targets what it calls the university’s “most radical professors” and states as its mission the task of exposing and combating “an exploding crisis of political radicalism on campus.”26 Of course, this has less to do with protesting genuine demagoguery than it does with attacking any professor who might raise critical questions about the status quo or hold the narratives of power accountable. In spite of their present embattled status and the inroads made by corporate power, the defense industries, and the neoconservative Right, universities and colleges remain uniquely placed to prepare students both to understand and to influence the larger educational forces that shape their lives. As Edward Said observed, “It is still very fortunately the case, however, that the American university remains the one public space available to real alternative intellectual practices: no institution like it on such a scale exists anywhere else in the world today.”27 Such institutions, by virtue of their privileged position, division of labor, and alleged dedication to freedom and democracy, have an obligation to draw upon those traditions and resources capable of providing a critical, liberal, and humanistic education to all students in order to prepare them not only for a society in which information and power have taken on new and potent dimensions but also for confronting the rise of a disturbing number of antidemocratic tendencies in the most powerful country in the world and elsewhere across the globe. Part of such a challenge means that educators, artists, students, and others need to rethink and affirm the important presuppositions that higher education is integral to fostering the imperatives of an

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inclusive democracy and that the crisis of higher education must be understood as part of the wider crisis of politics, power, and culture. Jacques Derrida argued that democracy contains a promise of what is to come and that it is precisely in the tension between the dream and the reality of democracy that a space of agency, critique, and education opens up and signals both the normative and political character of democracy.28 But democracy also demands a pedagogical intervention organized around the need to create the conditions for educating citizens who have the knowledge and skills to participate in public life, question institutional authority, and engage the contradiction between the reality and promise of a global democracy. Democracy must do more than contain the structure of a promise; it must also be nurtured in those public spaces in which “the unconditional freedom to question” becomes central to any viable definition of individual and social agency.29 At stake here is the recognition that if democracy is to become vital, then it needs to create citizens who are critical, interrogate authority, hold existing institutions accountable for their actions, and assume public responsibility through the very process of governing.30 What I am suggesting is that higher education is one of the few public spaces left in which unconditional resistance can be both produced and subjected to critical analysis. That is, the university should be “a place in which nothing is beyond question, not even the current and determined figure of democracy, and not even the traditional idea of critique.”31 The role of the university in this instance, and particularly of the humanities, should be to create a culture of questioning and resistance aimed at those ideologies, institutions, social practices, and “powers that limit democracy to come.”32 The idea of the university as democratic public sphere raises important questions about not only the purpose of higher education but also the kinds of strategies needed for academics to address what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls “taking responsibility for our responsibility.”33 Part of the struggle for the university as a democratic public sphere and as a site of resistance against the growing forces of militarism, corporatism, neoconservatism, and the religious fundamentalism of the Christian Right demands a new understanding of what it means to be a public intellectual, which in turn suggests a new language for politics itself. Central to such a challenge is the necessity to define intellectual practice “as part of an intricate web of morality, rigor and responsibility” that enables academics to speak with conviction, enter the public sphere in order to address important social problems, and demonstrate alternative models for what it means to bridge the gap

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between higher education and the broader society.34 This is a notion of intellectual practice that refuses the instrumentality and privileged isolation of the academy while affirming a broader vision of learning that links knowledge to the power of self-definition and to the capacities of administrators, academics, students, and artists to expand the scope of democratic freedoms, particularly as they address the crisis of the social as part and parcel of the crisis of democracy itself. This is the kind of intellectual practice that is attentive to the suffering of others and “will not allow conscience to look away or fall asleep.”35 Given the seriousness of the current attack on higher education by an alliance of diverse right-wing forces, it is difficult to understand why liberals, progressives, and left-oriented educators have been relatively silent in the face of this assault. There is much more at stake than the issue of academic freedom. First and foremost is the concerted attempt by right-wing extremists and corporate interests to strip the professoriate of any authority, render critical pedagogy as merely an instrumental task, eliminate tenure as a protection for teacher authority, and remove critical reason from any vestige of civic courage, engaged citizenship, and social responsibility. The three academic unions have a combined membership of almost 200,000, including graduate students and adjuncts, and yet they have barely stirred. In part, faculty are quiet because they are under the illusion that tenure will protect them, or they believe the assault on higher education has little to do with how they perform their academic labor. They are wrong on both counts, and unless the unions and progressives mobilize to protect the institutionalized relationships between democracy and pedagogy, teacher authority, and classroom autonomy, they will be at the mercy of a right wing that views democracy as an excess and the university as a threat. Democracy demands urgency. Of course, urgency entails not only responding to the crisis of the present—increasingly shaped by the anonymous presence of neoliberal capitalism and a number of other antidemocratic tendencies—but also connecting to the future that we make available to the next generation of young people. How much longer can we allow the promise of democracy to be tainted by its reality? Making pedagogy and education central to the political tasks of reclaiming public space, rekindling the importance of public connectedness, and infusing civic life with the importance of a democratic worldly vision is at the heart of opposing the new authoritarianism. Democracy cannot work if citizens are not autonomous, selfjudging, and independent—qualities that are indispensable for students if they are going to make vital judgments and choices about

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participating in and shaping decisions that affect everyday life, institutional reform, and governmental policy. Pedagogy, in this instance, is put in the service of providing the conditions for students to invest in a robust and critical form of agency, one that takes seriously their responsibility to others, public life, and global democracy. Hence, pedagogy becomes the cornerstone of democracy in that it provides the very foundation for students to learn not merely how to be governed but also how to be capable of governing. Cornel West has argued that we need to analyze the ominous forces shutting down democracy, yet “we also need to be very clear about the vision that lures us toward hope and the sources of that vision.”36 In taking up this challenge, engaged public intellectuals need to merge as central players in a wide range of social and educational institutions. If higher education is to be a crucial sphere for creating citizens equipped to understand others, exercise their freedoms, and ask questions regarding the basic assumptions that govern democratic political life, academics will have to assume their responsibility as citizen-scholars, take critical positions, relate their work to larger social issues, offer students knowledge, debate and dialogue about pressing social problems, and provide the conditions for students to have hope and believe that civic life not only matters but that they can make a difference in shaping it. The engaged public intellectual, according to Edward Said, must function within institutions, in part, as an exile, “whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to refuse to be easily co-opted by governments or corporations.”37 This politically charged notion of the oppositional intellectual as homeless—in exile and living on the border, occupying an unsutured, shifting, and fractured social space in which critique, difference, and a utopian potentiality can endure—provides the conceptual framework for educators to fight against the deadly instrumentalism and reactionary ideologies that shape dominant educational models.38 Public intellectuals need to resist the seductions of a narrow understanding of academic labor with its specialized languages, its neutralization of ideology and politics through a bogus claim to objectivism, and its sham elitism and expertise rooted in all the obvious gender, racial, and class-specific hierarchies. Falsely secure in their professed status as specialists and experts, many full-time academics retreat into narrow modes of scholarship that display little interest in how power is used in institutions and social life to include and exclude, provide the narratives of the past and present, and secure the authority to define the future.39

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Higher education is one of the few places where scholars can be educated for life in a global democracy by becoming multi-literate in ways that not only allow them access to new information and technologies but also enable them to be border crossers capable of engaging, learning from, understanding, and being tolerant of and responsible to matters of inclusiveness, meaningful difference, and otherness. Two of the most challenging issues facing the academy today are grasping what we mean by the political and theorizing a politics of and for the twenty-first century. Academics should enter into a dialogue with colleagues and students about politics and the knowledge we seek to produce together, and connect such knowledge to broader public spheres and issues while heeding Hannah Arendt’s warning that “Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance.”40 The role of engaged intellectuals is not to consolidate authority but to understand, interpret, and question it.41 Social criticism has to be coupled with a vibrant selfcriticism and the willingness to take up critical positions without becoming dogmatic or intractable. Critical education links knowledge and learning to the performative and worldly space of action and engagement, energizing people not only to think critically about the world around them but also to use their capacities as social agents to intervene in the larger social order and confront the myriad forms of symbolic, institutional, and material relations of power that shape their lives. These connections between pedagogy and agency, knowledge and power, and thought and action must be mobilized in order to confront the current crisis of authoritarianism looming so large in the United States and elsewhere around the globe today. Individuals and collectivities have to be regarded as potential agents and not simply as victims or ineffectual dreamers. It is this legacy of critique and possibility, and of resistance, that infuses intellectual work with concrete hope and offers a wealth of resources to people within the academy and other public spheres who struggle on multiple fronts against the rising forces of authoritarianism. Hannah Arendt recognized that any viable democratic politics must address the totality of public life and refuse to withdraw from such a challenge in the face of totalitarian violence that legitimates itself through appeals to safety, fear, and the threat of terrorism.42 Against this stripped down legitimation of authority is the promise of public spheres that, in their diverse forms, sites, and content, offer pedagogical and political possibilities for strengthening the social bonds of democracy and for cultivating both critical modes of individual and social agency and crucial opportunities to form alliances in the collective struggle for a biopolitics that affirms

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life, hopeful vision, the operations of democracy, and a range of democratic institutions—that is, a biopolitics that fights against the terror of totalitarianism. In a complex and rapidly changing global world, public intellectuals have the important task of taking back control over the conditions of intellectual production in a variety of venues in which the educational force of the culture takes root and holds a powerful grip over the stories, images, and sounds that shape people’s lives around the globe. Such sites constitute what I call “new spheres of public pedagogy” and represent crucial locations for a cultural politics designed to wrest the arena of public debate within the field of global power away from those dangerous forces that endlessly commodify intellectual autonomy and critical thought while appropriating or undercutting any viable work done through the collective action of critical intellectuals. Such spheres are about more than legal rights guaranteeing freedom of speech; they are also sites that demand a certain kind of citizen whose education provides the essential conditions for democratic public spheres to flourish. Cornelius Castoriadis, the great philosopher of democracy, argues that if public space is not to be experienced as a private affair but instead as a vibrant sphere in which people experience and learn how to participate in and shape public life, then it must be shaped through an education that provides the decisive traits of courage, responsibility, and shame, all of which connect the fate of each individual to the fate of others, the planet, and global democracy.43 Artists, cultural workers, youth, and educators need to create new discourses of understanding and criticism and offer up a vision of hope that fosters the conditions for multiple global struggles that refuse to use politics as an act of war or markets as the measure of democracy. The challenge posed by the current regime of religious extremism, market fundamentalism, state-sponsored terrorism, and the incursion of corporate power into higher education presents difficult problems for educators and demands a profoundly committed sense of individual and collective resistance if all of those who believe in a vibrant democracy are going to fight for a future that does not endlessly repeat the present. At the current moment, higher education faces a legitimation crisis—one that opens a political and theoretical space for educators to redefine the relationship between higher education, the public good, and democracy. Higher education represents one of the most important sites over which the battle for democracy is being waged. It is the site where the promise of a better future emerges out of those visions and pedagogical practices that combine hope and moral responsibility as part of a broader emancipatory discourse. Far from hopelessly

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utopian, such a task echoes an insight by the French philosopher Alain Badiou that famously captures a starting point for reclaiming higher education as a democratic public sphere: “In fact, it’s an immense task to try to propose a few possibilities, in the plural—a few possibilities other than what we are told is possible. It is a matter of showing how the space of the possible is larger than the one assigned—that something else is possible, but not that everything is possible.”44

Notes 1. Stuart Tannock, “Higher Education, Inequality, and the Public Good,” Dissent 53, 2 (Spring 2006): 45. 2. See Jeffrey J. Williams, “Debt Education: Bad for the Young, Bad for America,” Dissent 53, 3 (Summer 2006): 53–59. 3. Howard Zinn, On History (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), 178. 4. Ibid. 5. I have taken up this issue in Henry A. Giroux, Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2000); and in Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Palgrave, 2006). 6. Zygmunt Bauman cited in Nicholas Fearn, “Profile: Zygmunt Bauman,” New Statesman, January 16, 2006: 32. 7. Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (New York: Verso, 2003), 68; I have taken up this issue in a number of books: Henry A. Giroux, Impure Acts (New York: Routledge, 2000); Henry A. Giroux, Public Spaces/Private Lives: Democracy Beyond 9/11 (Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education (New York: Palgrave, 2006). 8. Frank Furedi, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? (New York: Continuum, 2004), 72. 9. Howard Zinn, On History, 186. 10. Noam Chomsky, “Paths Taken, Tasks Ahead,” Profession (2000): 35. 11. Edward Said, “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals,” The Nation, October 1, 2001: 4. 12. See the National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk (April 1983), Online: www.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/index.html. 13. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004). 14. See Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education (New York: Palgrave, 2006). 15. See Henry A. Giroux, “Academic Entrepreneurs: The Corporate Takeover of Higher Education,” Tikkun (March/April 2005): 18–22, 28. 16. Stanley Aronowitz, “The New Corporate University,” Dollars and Sense (March/April 1998): 32.

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17. Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance (New York: New Press, 1999), 26. 18. A. Naomi Paik, “Education and Empire, Old and New,” unpublished paper (January 8, 2005): 38. 19. See Henry A. Giroux, Against the New Authoritarianism (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2005). 20. Rob Capriccioso, “Walking on Eggshells,” Inside Higher Education (August 15, 2006). Available online: http://insidehighered.com/news/ 2006/08/15/utah. 21. Thomas Friedman, “Giving the Hatemongers No Place to Hide,” New York Times, July 22, 2005. Online: www.nytimes.com/2005/07/22/ opinion/22friedman.html?ex=1279684800&en=17fb5beb19b09d86& ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss. 22. Scott Jaschik, “Are You Now or Have You Ever . . .,” Inside Higher Education (August 15, 2006). Available online: http://insidehighered. com/news/2006/08/15/oath. 23. This charge comes from a report issued by the conservative group, American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), founded by Lynne Cheney (spouse of Vice President Dick Cheney) and Joseph Lieberman (Democratic senator). See Jerry L. Martin and Anne D. Neal, Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done about It (November 2001), 1. Available online: www.la.utexas. edu/~chenry/2001LynnCheneyjsg01ax1.pdf. This statement was deleted from the revised February 2002 version of the report available on the ACTA Web site:www.goacta.org/publications/Reports/defciv.pdf. ACTA also posted on its Web site a list of 115 statements made by allegedly “un-American Professors.” 24. David Horowitz’s book trades in racially charged accusations, the ongoing claim that almost anyone who criticizes the Bush administration hates America, and accuses critics of the Iraq war of getting Americans killed in Iraq. His latest book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (New York: Regnery, 2006), purports to name and expose those left-wing professors who hate America and the military, and give comfort to terrorists. 25. See “Forum: A Chilly Climate on the Campuses,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 9, 2005: B7–B13. 26. See “The Dirty Thirty.” Online: www.uclaprofs.com/articles/dirtythirty. html. 27. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004): 72–73. 28. Jacques Derrida, “The Future of the Profession or the Unconditional University,” in Derrida Down Under, ed. Laurence Simmons and Heather Worth (Auckland, New Zealand: Dunmarra Press, 2001), 253. 29. Ibid., 233. 30. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime,” Constellations 4, 1 (1997): 10. 31. Jacques Derrida, “The Future of the Profession,” 253.

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32. Ibid., 233. 33. Cited in Madeline Bunting, “Passion and Pessimism,” The Guardian, April 5, 2003. Available online: http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/ 0,3858,4640858,00.html. 34. Arundhati Roy, Power Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2001), 6. 35. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 143. 36. Cornel West, “Finding Hope in Dark Times,” Tikkun 19, 4 (2004): 18. 37. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 8–9. 38. See Henry A. Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005). 39. Stanley Aronowitz, How Class Works: Power and Social Movement (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 53. 40. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1977), 149. 41. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 8–9. 42. Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism: Part Three of the Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1976), 162. 43. See, especially, Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy,” Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 81–123. 44. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso, 1998), 115–116.

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S c hool i ng i n Dis a st e r C a pi ta l ism: How t h e Pol i t ic a l R igh t Is Usi ng Dis a st e r to P r i vat i z e P u bl ic S c hool i ng 1 Kenneth J. Saltman

Introduction Around the world, disaster is providing the means for business to accumulate profit. From the Asian tsunami of 2005 that allowed corporations to seize coveted shoreline properties for resort development to the multibillion dollar no-bid reconstruction contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and from the privatization of public schooling following Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast to the ways that No Child Left Behind sets public school up to be dismantled and made into investment opportunities—a grotesque pattern is emerging in which business is capitalizing on disaster. Naomi Klein has written of, . . . the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering. And on this front, the reconstruction industry works so quickly and efficiently that the privatizations and land grabs are usually locked in before the local population knows what hit them. 2

Despite the fact that attempts to privatize and commercialize public schools proceed at a startling pace,3 privatization increasingly appears in a new form that Klein calls “disaster capitalism” and that David Harvey terms “accumulation by dispossession.” This article details how in education the political right is capitalizing on disaster from Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 to the federal No Child Left Behind

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act, and from educational rebuilding in the Gulf Coast of the United States to education profiteering in Iraq. The new predatory form of educational privatization aims to dismantle and then commodify particular public schools. This conservative movement threatens the development of public schools as necessary places that foster engaged critical citizenship. At the same time it undermines the public and democratic purposes of public education, and it amasses vast profits for the few, and even furthers U.S. foreign policy agendas. Educators who are committed to defending and strengthening public education as a crucial public sphere in a democratic society may be relieved by several recent failures of the educational privatization movement. By 2000, business publications were eyeing public education as the next big score, ripe for privatization and commodification, likening it to the medical and military industries and suggesting that it might yield $600 billion a year in possible takings.4 However, it has become apparent that only a few years later Educational Management Organizations (EMO), which seek to manage public schools for profit, have not overtaken public education (though EMOs are growing at an alarming rate of a fivefold increase in schools managed in six years). The biggest experiment in for-profit management of public schooling, The Edison Schools, continues as a symbol, according to the rightwing business press, of why running schools for profit on a vast scale is not profitable.5 The massive EMO Knowledge Universe, created by junk bond felon Michael Milken upon his release from prison for nearly a hundred counts of fraud and insider trading, is in the midst of going out of business.6 By the autumn of 2005, the school voucher movement, which the right has been fighting to implement for decades, had only succeeded in capturing the Washington, D.C. public schools (through the assistance of Congress), and that experiment is by all accounts looking bad. The charter school movement, which is fostering privatization by allowing for publicly funded schools managed by for-profit companies and is being pushed by massive federal funding under No Child Left Behind, has also taken a hit from NAEP scores that in traditional terms of achievement suggest charters do not score as high as the much maligned public schools. Even school commercialism has faced a sizable backlash from a public that is fed up and sickened by the shameless attempts of marketers to sell sugar-laden soft drinks and candy bars to U.S. school children who are suffering epidemic levels of type II diabetes and obesity. Although commercialism continues putting ads in textbooks and playing fields, on buildings and buses, a growing number of cities, states, and provinces have put in place anticommercialism laws. Such laws limit the transformation of

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public space into yet more commercial space for corporations, which have succeeded in infiltrating nearly every bit of daily life with advertisements and narratives that prosthletize the elements of corporate culture: celebrating consumerism, possessive individualism, social Darwinism, authoritarianism, and a corporate vision for the future of work, leisure, politics, and the environment. It would be difficult to assert that most public schools currently foster the best alternative to corporate culture, that is, democratic culture, what Dewey called “creative democracy.” Nurturing a democratic culture and a democratic ethos demands of educators continual work, practice, and attention.7 The present historical moment is seeing the radical erosion of democratic culture by not only the aforementioned onslaught of commercial culture but also the state-led dismantling of civil liberties under the new dictates of the security state, the resurgence of jingoistic patriotism under the so-called “war on terror,” and demands for adhesion to a militarized corporate globalization.8 If many public schools do not presently foster a democratic ethos necessary for developing in citizens habits of engaged public criticism and participation, the public nature of public schools makes them a crucial “site and stake” of struggle for the expansion of democratic social relations. Privatizing public schools does not simply threaten to skim public tax money to provide rich investors with profit. Public schools differ from privately controlled schools in that they harbor a distinct potential for public deliberation and oversight that privately owned and controlled educational institutions limit. Privately controlled institutions are captured by private interests. For example, freedom of speech is protected on the public space of a town common but is privately regulated in a shopping mall. In a public school learning and knowledge can be engaged in relation to pressing public problems in ways that can be limited within privatized schools. Consider for example the following threats to the public: the threats posed by the expanded corporate control over a biotechnology giant like Monsanto that can patent life, own and control the genetic makeup of all crops, and infect biodiverse crops with potentially devastating genetically modified Frankenfood; the threats posed to the global environment by a multinational like McDonald’s that participate in destroying the rainforests for cattle grazing land; the threats to public life as a national security state expands to enable the U.S. government to continue to strategically surround the world’s oil supplies with permanent military bases to benefit oil corporations, military corporations, and to continue to project a capitalist model of development that is most often, despite the rhetoric, thoroughly at odds with democracy, particularly in the states

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alleged to be U.S. allies: Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, Uzbekistan, and so on. When a for-profit corporation runs schools, it will share ideological commitments to corporate globalization that frame public problems in ways compatible with ever expanding corporate profit despite the risks to people. Public problems, like the weakening of the public sphere resulting from the corporate takeover of knowledge and schooling, are not likely to be taught by corporations such as The Edison Schools. At stake in the struggle for public education is the value of critical and public education as a foundation for an engaged citizenry and a substantive democracy.

Capitalizing on Disaster in Education Despite the range of obvious failures of multiple public school privatization initiatives, the privatization advocates have hardly given up. In fact, the privatizers have become far more strategic. The new educational privatization might be termed “back door privatization,”9 or maybe “smash and grab” privatization. A number of privatization schemes are being initiated through a process involving the dismantling of public schools followed by the opening of for-profit, charter, and deregulated public schools. These enterprises typically despise teachers’ unions, are hostile to local democratic governance and oversight, and have an unquenchable thirst for “experiments,” especially with the private sector.10 These initiatives are informed by right-wing think tanks and business organizations. Four examples that typify backdoor privatization are (1) No Child Left Behind, (2) Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 project, (3) educational rebuilding in Iraq, and (4) educational rebuilding in New Orleans.

No Child Left Behind No Child Left Behind (NCLB) sets schools up for failure by making impossible demands for continual improvement. When schools have not met Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), they are subject to punitive action by the federal government, including the potential loss of formerly guaranteed federal funding and requirements for tutoring from a vast array of for-profit Special Educational Service providers. A number of authors have described how NCLB is a boon for the testing and tutoring companies while it doesn’t provide financial resources for the test score increases it demands.11 (This is aside from the cultural politics of whose knowledge these tests affirm and

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discredit.)12 Sending billions of dollars of support the way of the charter school movement, NCLB pushes schools that do not meet AYP to restructure in ways that encourage privatization, discourage unions, and avoid local regulations on crucial matters. One study has found that by 2013 nearly all of the public schools in the Great Lakes region of the United States will be declared failed public schools and subject to such reforms.13 Clearly, NCLB is designed to accomplish the implementation of privatization and deregulation in ways that open action could not. A study of the Great Lakes region of the United States by educational policy researchers found that 85–95 percent of schools in that region would be declared “failed” by NCLB AYP measures by 2014.14 These implications are national. Under NCLB, “The entire country faces tremendous failure rates, even under a conservative estimate with several forgiving assumptions.”15 Under NCLB, in order for Illinois, for example, to get much needed federal Title I funds, the school must demonstrate “adequate yearly progress,” AYP. Each year Illinois has to get higher and higher standardized test scores in reading and math to make AYP. Illinois schools, and specifically Illinois schools already receiving the least funding and already serving the poorest students, are being threatened with: (1) losing federal funds; (2) having to use scarce resources for under-regulated and often unproven (SESs) supplemental educational services (private tutoring) such as Newton, a spin-off company of the much criticized for-profit Edison Schools; or (3) being punished, reorganized, or closed and reopened as a “choice” school (these include for-profit or nonprofit charter schools that do not have the same level of public oversight and accountability, that often do not have teachers unions, and that often have to struggle for philanthropic grants to operate). Many defenders of public education view remediation options 2 and 3 under NCLB as having been designed to undermine those public schools, which have been underserved in the first place, in order to justify privatization schemes.16 Public schools need help, investment, and public commitment. NCLB is setting up for failure not just Illinois public schools but public schools nationally by raising test-oriented thresholds without raising investment and commitment. NCLB itself appears to be a system designed to result in the declaration of wide scale failure of public schooling to justify privatization.17 Dedicated administrators, teachers, students, and schools are not receiving much needed resources along with public investment in public services and employment in the communities where those schools are situated. What they are getting instead are threats.

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The theoretically and empirically dubious underlying assumption of NCLB is that threats and pressure will force teachers to teach what they ought to teach, and will force students to learn what they ought to learn. In terms of conventional measures of student achievement, Sharon Nichols, Gene Glass, and David Berliner found in their empirical study, High-Stakes Testing and Student Achievement: Problems for the No Child Left Behind Act, that “there is no convincing evidence that the pressure associated with high-stakes testing leads to any important benefits for students’ achievement . . . [the authors] call for a moratorium on policies that force the public education system to rely on high-stakes testing.”18 These authors find that high-stakes testing regimes do not achieve what they are designed to achieve. However, to think beyond efficacy to the underlying assumptions about “achievement,” it is necessary to raise theoretical concerns. Theoretically, at the very least, the enforcement-oriented assumptions of NCLB fail to consider the limitations of defining “achievement” through highstakes tests, fail to question what knowledge and whose knowledge constitute legitimate or official curricula that students are expected to master, fail to interrogate the problematic assumptions of learning modeled on digestion or commodity acquisition (as opposed to dialogic, constructivist, or other approaches to learning), and such compartmentalized versions of knowledge and learning fail to comprehend how they relate to the broader social and political realities informing knowledge-making both in schools and in society generally. Renaissance 2010 In Chicago, Renaissance 2010, essentially written by the Commercial Club of Chicago, is being implemented by Chicago Public Schools, a district with more than 85 percent of students who are poor and nonwhite. It will close 100 public schools and then reopen them as forprofit and nonprofit charter schools, contract schools, magnet schools, and bypass important district regulations. The right-wing Heartland Institution hailed the plan, stating, “Competition and (public private) Partnerships are Key to Chicago Renaissance Plan,” while the President of the Chicago Teacher’s Union described it as a plan to dismantle public education.19 These closings are targeting neighborhoods that are being gentrified and taken over by richer and whiter people who are buying up newly developed condos and townhomes. Critics of the plan view it as “urban cleansing” that principally kicks out local residents.20 Like NCLB, Renaissance 2010 targets schools that have “failed” to meet Chicago accountability standards defined through high-stakes

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tests. By closing and reopening schools, Renaissance 2010 allows the newly privatized schools to circumvent the AYP requirements of NCLB, which makes the list of Chicago’s “need improvement” schools shorter. This allows the city to claim improvement by simply redefining terms. NCLB and Renaissance 2010 share a number of features including not only a high pressure model, but also reliance on standardized testing as the ultimate measure of learning, threats to teacher job security and teachers’ unions, and a push for experimentation with unproven models including privatization and charter schools, as well as a series of business assumptions and guiding language. For example, speaking of Renaissance 2010, Mayor Daley stated, “this model will generate competition and allow for innovation. It will bring in outside partners who want to get into the business of education.”21 Beyond its similarities to NCLB, Renaissance 2010 is being hailed as a national model in its own right across the political spectrum. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the most heavily endowed philanthropy in history, worth about $80 billion, with projects in health and education. Its focus on school reform is guided by the neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council’s Progressive Policy Institute. Though it offers no substance, argument, or evidence for why Renaissance 2010 should be replicated, the economically unmatched Gates Foundation praises Renaissance 2010 as a “roadmap” for other cities to follow.22 As Pauline Lipman, a progressive urban education scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, writes: If Chicago’s accountability has laid the groundwork for privatization, Renaissance 2010 may signal what we can expect nationally as school districts fail to meet NCLB benchmarks. In fact, failure to make “adequate yearly progress” on these benchmarks, and the threat of a state takeover, is a major theme running through the Commercial Club’s argument for school choice and charter schools. Business and political leaders seem to believe turning schools over to the market is a common sense solution to the problems in the schools. 23

Both NCLB and Renaissance 2010 involve two stages of capitalizing on disaster. The first stage involves the historical underfunding and disinvestment in public schooling that has resulted in disastrous public school conditions. For those communities where these schools are located, it is the public and private sectors that have failed them. Although the corporate sector is usually represented not only in mass media but also in much conservative and liberal educational policy

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literature as coming to rescue the incompetent public sector from itself, as Dorothy Shipps points out in her book School Reform, Corporate Style: Chicago 1880–2000, the corporate sector in Chicago and around the nation has long been deeply involved in school reform, agenda setting, and planning in conjunction with other civic planning. As she asks, “if corporate power was instrumental in creating the urban public schools and has had a strong hand in their reform for more than a century, then why have those schools failed urban children so badly?”24 Creative Associates International, Incorporated In Iraq, Creative Associates International, Incorporated, a for-profit corporation, has made over a hundred million dollars from no-bid contracts with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to rebuild schools, develop curriculum, develop teacher training, and procure educational supplies. The company has avoided using local contractors and has spent the majority of funds on security while the majority of schools continue to languish in squalor. Educational privatization typifies the way the U.S. invasion has been used to sell off Iraq. Privatization and the development of U.S. style charter schools are central to the plan (conservative consultants from the right-wing Heritage Foundation have been employed), despite the fact that these are foreign to Iraq’s public education system, members of right-wing think tanks have been engaged to enact what invasion and military destruction has made a lucrative opportunity financially and ideologically. Privatization of the Iraqi schools is part of a broader attempt to privatize and sell off the Iraqi nation while for-profit educational contractor CAII appears as the spearhead of U.S. foreign policy to “promote democracy.”25 As I discuss at length elsewhere,26 the claims for “democracy promotion” in Iraq appear to have more to do with using this human-made disaster for promoting the interests of corporations and transnational capital and nothing to do with expanding meaningful and participatory democracy. Hurricane Katrina Similar to the situation in Iraq, following the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina in the U.S. Gulf Coast, a for-profit educational contractor from Alaska, named Akima, won a no-bid contract to build temporary portable classrooms in the Gulf Coast. But for-profit education’s big haul in the Big Easy was in the U.S. Department of Education imposing the largest ever school voucher experiment for

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the region and nation. Right-wing think tanks had prepared papers advocating such an approach describing public school privatization as a “silver lining” and a “golden opportunity.”27 Six months after Hurricane Katrina, the destroyed New Orleans public schools sit slime-coated in mold, debris, and human feces, partially flooded and littered with such detritus as a two-ton air conditioner that had been on the roof and the carcasses of dead dogs. All 124 New Orleans Public Schools were damaged in some way and only 20 have reopened with more than 10,000 students registered. There were 62,227 students enrolled in NOPS before the storm. 28

The devastation nearly defies description. . . . Katrina roared in, severely damaging about a quarter of the schools: Roofs caved in. Fierce winds blew out walls and hurled desks through windows. Floodwaters drowned about 300 buses. Computers, furniture and books were buried in mud. Dead dogs and rotting food littered hallways.29

Yet days after the disaster The Washington Times quoted longstanding advocate of school vouchers, Clint Bolick of the Alliance for School Choice. Bolick used the tragedy to propose wide scale privatization of the New Orleans public schools in the form of a massive voucher scheme. He said, “If there could be a silver lining to this tragedy, it would be that children who previously had few prospects for a high-quality education, now would have expanded options. Even with the children scattered to the winds, that prospect can now be a reality—if the parents are given power over their children’s education funds.”30 Calling for the privatization of public schools, Bolick’s metaphor of the silver lining would be repeated over and over in the popular press immediately after the storm. Karla Dial in the Heartland News wrote, “emergency vouchers could be the silver lining in the storm clouds that brought Hurricane Katrina to the Gulf Coast on August 29.”31 Reuters quoted Louisiana State Superintendent of Education Cecil Picard as saying, “We think this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I call it the silver lining in the storm cloud.”32 Jack Kemp, who served in the Reagan administration, a long time proponent of business approaches to urban poverty, took poetic license but stayed with the theme of precious metal, “ . . . with the effort to rebuild after Katrina just getting underway, the Right sees, in the words of Jack Kemp, a ‘golden opportunity’ to use a portion of the billions of

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federal reconstruction funds to implement a voucher experiment that, until now, it has been unable to get through Congress.”33 The governor of Louisiana saw gold too. Although before the storm the state legislature had rejected the governor’s attempt to seize control of the public schools from the city, “legislation proposed by Governor Blanco in November allows the state to take over any New Orleans school that falls below the statewide average on test scores and place it into the state’s Recovery School District. Under this low standard, management of 102 of the 115 Orleans Parish schools operating before Katrina would be transferred to the state.” The governor sees it as an effort to grasp what she called a “golden opportunity for rebirth.”34 Brian Riedlinger, the director of the Algiers Charter Schools Association that would control all but one of the reopened New Orleans schools six months after the tragedy, employed a creative variation on the theme, invoking the poetry of Coleridge and the discourse of hygiene, “I think the schools have been a real albatross. And so I think what we’re giving parents is the possibility of hope, a possibility of wiping the slate clean and starting over.”35 Longstanding advocates of public school privatization, Paul T. Hill and Jane Hannaway, carried the hygienic metaphor a step further writing, in their Urban Institute report, “The Future of Public Education in New Orleans,” that “[e]ducation could be one of the bright spots in New Orleans’ recovery effort, which may even establish a new model for school districts nationally.”36 This “bright spot,” according to Hill and Hannaway, that should be a national model, calls for refusing to rebuild the New Orleans public schools, firing the teachers and by extension dissolving the teachers union, eradicating the central administration, and inviting for-profit corporations with sordid histories, such as The Edison Schools37 and other organizations, to take over the running of schools.38 Sajan George is a director of Alvarez and Marsal, a Bush administration-connected business-consulting firm that is making millions in its role subcontracting the rebuilding of schools. George, a “turnaround expert” contracted by the state, brought these metaphors together stating, “This is the silver lining in the dark cloud of Katrina. We would not have been able to start with an almost clean slate if Katrina had not happened. So it really does represent an incredible opportunity.”39 An incredible opportunity indeed. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans typifies the new form of educational privatization. The disaster has been used to enrich a predominantly white tiny business and political elite while achieving

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educational privatization goals that the right has been unable to achieve before: (1) implement the largest ever experiment in school vouchers; (2) allow for enormous profits in education rebuilding by contracting firms with political connections; (3) allow the replacement of a system of universal public education with a charter school network designed to participate in the dispossession of poor and African American residents from their communities. Such documents as those by the Urban Institute and Heritage Foundation discuss strategies to make the temporary voucher scheme permanent and even how to take advantage of future disasters. Vouchers use public money to pay for private schools and thus stand as a potentially lucrative business opportunity. Right-wing think tanks and advocates of educational privatization have been calling for wide scale voucher schemes for decades, alleging that the competition for consumers’ money will drive up quality and drive down costs. For example, the Heritage Foundation has been lobbying for vouchers for decades and published a report immediately after the hurricane calling for vouchers, as did the Urban Institute.40 Support for vouchers comes largely from the neoliberal ideological belief that applying business ideals to the necessary bureaucratic public sector guarantees efficiencies. Critics of vouchers have contended that (1) encouraging parents to “shop” for schools will take scarce federal resources away from those public schools most in need of them— schools that have historically been underfunded by having resource allocations pegged to local property taxes;41 (2) vouchers have traditionally been used to maintain or worsen racial segregation in the face of desegregation policies42 —a particularly relevant legacy to the racial dispossession going on in New Orleans; (3) vouchers undermine universal public schooling by redefining a public good as a private commodity and stand to exacerbate already existing inequalities in funding; (4) vouchers undermine the public democratic purposes of public schooling by treating citizens as consumers; (5) vouchers undermine the constitutional separation of church and state. Not only was the voucher agenda being pushed unsuccessfully for years before the storm, but also until Katrina the only federally funded voucher scheme was implemented by the U.S. Congress in the District of Columbia. One that has been “marked by a failure to achieve legislatively determined priorities, an inability to evaluate the program in the manner required by Congress, and efforts by administrators to obscure information that might reflect poorly on the program.”43

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This voucher scheme was surreptitiously inserted into federal legislation by being rolled into a budget bill and it was aggressively supported by one of the richest people on the planet, Wal-mart inheritor John Walton of the Walton Family Foundation, one of the largest spenders pushing privatization of public education.44 Not only did New Orleans not have a voucher scheme prior to Katrina, but a K-12 voucher bill had just been defeated in the Louisiana state legislature just before the hurricane.45 The bill would have allowed for public tax money to fund private or religious schooling. Despite public democratic deliberation on the issue concluding against vouchers, conservative privatization advocates moved quickly to take advantage of the disaster. Within two weeks after the hurricane struck, the Heritage Foundation released a “special report” refashioning their long-standing agenda as “principled solutions” for rebuilding. “Heritage has been pushing school vouchers since 1975 and so it is no surprise that the organization now strongly believes that a voucher proposal that would fund private schools constitutes a successful response to the crisis.”46 The Bush administration, so slow to provide federal emergency aid to residents, was nonetheless quick to respond to extensive media criticism by following the privatization proposals of such right-wing think tanks. The administration proposed $1.9 billion in aid to K-12 students, with $488 million designated for school vouchers. The editors of Rethinking Schools accurately wrote, “This smells like a backdoor approach to get public funding for private schools and would essentially create the first national school voucher plan.”47 Privatization advocates were quite explicit in their desire to undermine local control over educational decision-making and to create a situation in which it would be very difficult to reverse the implementation of vouchers. For example, Carla Dial reporting in the rightwing Heartland Institute School Reform News quotes Chris Kinnan of Freedom Works, a D.C. organization fighting for “smaller government” and more “personal freedom.” “Having those vouchers for a couple of years would change the way parents and students and even educators think about them,” Kinnan said. “The impact would be so powerful that if you did it right, [school] systems would be competing to attract these [kids with vouchers]. It’s all about changing the incentive. Once you have that freedom it would be very difficult to go back to the community control system.”48

For Kinnan and his ilk, “freedom” means privatizing public control over public resources so that fewer people with more wealth and power

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have more political control over the said resources. The genius of framing the amassing of political and economic control over public resources as individual consumer choice is that it takes on the deceptive appearance of increasing individual control while it actually removes individuals from collective control. Privatizers aim to treat the use of public resources as “shopping” by “consumers,” thereby naturalizing the public sector as a market—as a natural, politically neutral entity ruled by the laws of supply and demand rather than as a matter of public priority, political deliberation, and competing values and visions. Such metaphors of consumer culture not only conceal the ways that public goods and services are different from markets (public services aim to serve public interest and collective goals, not the amassing of private profit), but such appeals also fail to admit that markets themselves are hardly neutral and natural but are, on the contrary, hierarchical, human-made political configurations unequally distributing power and control over material resources and cultural value. Clint Bolick of the Alliance for School Choice was also scheming to get a foot in the door. Hopeful that the initial one-year period for vouchers in the Bush proposal could be extended indefinitely, he said, “I think that if emergency school vouchers are passed this time they will be a routine part of future emergency relief. I’m also hopeful that when the No Child Left Behind Act is modified that it will be easier for Congress to add vouchers to the remedies available under that law.”49 The Heritage Foundation, The Alliance for School Choice, and The Heartland Institute were hardly alone as a large number of right-wing groups committed to vouchers praised the President’s plan. Gary Bauer of the group American Values hailed the “rebuilding challenge as an opportunity to implement conservative ideas such as school vouchers and tax free zones.”50 The Bush plan was praised by the Family Research Council, Rich Lowry of the National Review, Gary McCaleb of the Alliance Defense Fund, Marvin Olasky of World Magazine, and William Donohue of the Catholic League, among others.51 The Yankee Institute took a full page color advertisement in Heartland’s School Reform News with a letter from Executive Director Lewis Andrews, who admonishes readers that when the real estate bubble bursts and public education “cost soars relative to home values” in rich communities, “savvy reformers will be prepared to make the case for school vouchers in all communities.”52 The ad begins with the expression, “Every cloud has a silver lining.” Implicit in Andrews’ statements is the fact that privatizers have already been taking advantage of the historical failure to fund

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education properly in poor and working-class communities. Before Katrina, per pupil spending in New Orleans stood at about $5000 ($4,986 in 1998). To put this in perspective, per pupil spending in suburban public school districts in wealthy suburbs around the nation is as high as roughly quadruple this amount despite the fact that they face far fewer obstacles. As the right clearly grasps, the question of privatization is inextricably linked to matters of public funding. Vouchers, charters, and EMOs cannot make headway with well-financed public schools in richer communities. Crisis and emergency benefit privatization advocates who can seize upon a situation with preformulated plans to commodify this public service. To put it differently, privatizers target those who have been denied adequate public investment in the first place. As the United Federation of Teachers’ Joe Derose insists, the policy emphasis in rebuilding should is on the chronic underfunding plaguing the New Orleans public schools rather than on the schemes to privatize them.53 As the above quotes from Bolick, Kinnan, and Andrews illustrate, the right is eager to take advantage of crisis to subvert democratic oversight over policy matters of great public importance. The Bush administration has long aimed to expand vouchers. In 2002, vouchers were removed from the No Child Left Behind bill at the last moment as part of an effort to secure bipartisan support.54 Not only do the Katrina federal vouchers cover far beyond the Gulf Coast region, but they take advantage of the crisis to promote the idea of vouchers and privatization generally. For example, while select counties and parishes in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida are included in the Emergency Impact Aid, the entire state of Texas is included in the voucher scheme. While emergency funds do not permit public school rebuilding, they nonetheless give funding to schools in forty-nine states. What is more, the vouchers can be given to charter schools without charter schools meeting section 5210 (1) of ESEA No Child Left Behind, which requires charter schools to be developed with public charter agencies. In other words, the vouchers allow public funding for charter schools that do not need to be held accountable to public oversight institutions that regulate charter schools. As a result, the Aid favors not merely the public funding of private schools but even encourages the development of charter schools unregulated by the public sector by funding them even when they would otherwise be ineligible to receive federal funding for having failed to meet basic requirements.55 This shifting of educational resources around the nation under the guise of emergency needs is to be understood in relation to the failure

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of the Bush administration to pay states’ federal funds as part of NCLB. As Monty Neil points out, Not only has the federal government failed to meet the social, economic, and health-related needs of many children, but NCLB itself does not authorize nearly enough funding to meet its new requirements. The Bush administration has sought almost no increase in ESEA expenditures for FY2005 and the coming year. The funds Congress has appropriated are about $8 billion per year less than Congress authorized. Meanwhile, states are still suffering from their worst budget crises since World War II, cutting education as well as social programs needed by low-income people. 56

It appears that emergency is being used to cover failed promises that have nothing to do with emergency other than the emergencies created by an administration hostile to supporting public education in the first place. But such coverage is taking the form of privatization. Failures of a conservative executive and legislature to support public education need to be understood in relation to a conservative judicial branch that in 2002 ruled vouchers constitutional. The political right is waging war on public education while doing all it can to force through privatization initiatives that are unpopular and difficult to win politically.

Neoliberalism and the Uses of Disaster in Public Schooling Contemporary initiatives to privatize public schools through the use of disaster can only be understood in relation to neoliberal ideology that presently dominates politics.57 As David Harvey elucidates, neoliberalism, also described as “neoclassical economics” or “market fundamentalism,” brings together economic, political, and cultural policy doctrine. Neoliberalism, which originates with Frederic Von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and the “Chicago boys” at the University of Chicago in the 1950’s, expresses individual and social ideals through market ideals. Within this view, individual and social values and aspirations can best be reached through the unfettered market. In its ideal forms (as opposed to how it is practically implemented) neoliberalism demands privatization of public goods and services, removal of regulation on trade, loosening of capital and labor controls by the state, and the allowance of foreign direct investment. For neoliberalism, public control over public resources should be taken from the “necessarily bureaucratic” state and placed with the

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“necessarily efficient” private sector. The implosion of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall were used by neoliberals to declare that there could be no alternative to global capitalism— Thatcher famously called this the TINA thesis, There Is No Alternative to the market. Within the logic of capitalist triumphalism, the only thing to do would be to put into effect the dictates of the market and spread the market to places previously inaccessible. The financial past performance of neoliberalism, as Harvey explains, is not one of accomplishment but rather one of failure having caused crises, instability, and unreconciled contradictions regarding state power.58 However, as he shows, neoliberalism has been extremely accomplished at upwardly redistributing economic wealth and political power. Consequently, Harvey suggests understanding neoliberalism as a long-standing project of class warfare waged by the rich on everyone else. Neoliberalism has damaged welfare state protections and undermined government authority to act in the public interest. As well, these policies have brought on wide-scale disaster around the globe, including a number of countries in Latin America and the pacific rim. Such disasters have compelled governments to reevaluate neoliberalism as it has been enjoined by the so-called “Washington consensus.” In fact, recent elections throughout Latin America with left victories have largely been a reaction to the neoliberal “Washington consensus” that imposes neoliberal globalization through institutional mechanisms such as the IMF and World Bank. Initially seen as a wacky doctrine, neoliberalism was not brought into the mainstream of policy and government circles until the late seventies and early eighties in Thatcher’s U.K. and Reagan’s United States. As Harvey details, Chile, under brutal dictator Pinochet, was a crucial test field for the ideology, resulting in increased commercial investments in Chile alongside 30,000 citizen disappearances. The widening reception to neoliberalism had to do with the steady lobbying of right-wing think tanks and electoral victories, but also with the right conditions, including economic crises that challenged the Keynesian model and Fordist modes of economic production and social formation in the late seventies.59 Neoliberalism has a distinct hostility to democracy. As Harvey writes, Neoliberal theorists are, however, profoundly suspicious of democracy. Governance by majority rule is seen as a potential threat to individual rights and constitutional liberties. Democracy is viewed as a luxury, only possible under conditions of relative affluence coupled with a strong middle-class presence to guarantee political stability. Neoliberals therefore tend to favour governance by experts and elites. A strong

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preference exists for government by executive order and by judicial decision rather than democratic and parliamentary decision-making.60

Such opposition to democracy and preference for elite governance is ceaselessly expressed by such writers of neoliberal education as those of the Koret Task Force of the Hoover Institution, such as John Chubb, Terry Moe, Eric Hanuschek, and company.61 For progressive and critical educators principally concerned with the possibilities for public schooling to expand a democratic ethos and engaged critical citizenry, neoliberalism’s antidemocratic tendencies appear as particularly bad. Neoliberalism has pervasively infiltrated education, with radical implications, remaking educational practical judgment and promoting the privatization and deregulation program. The steady rise of privatization and the shift to business language and logic can be understood through the extent to which neoliberal ideals have succeeded in taking over educational debates. Neoliberalism appears in the now commonsense framing of education through presumed ideals of upward individual economic mobility (the promise of cashing in knowledge for jobs) and the social ideals of global economic competition. In this view national survival hinges upon educational preparation for international economic supremacy. The preposterousness of this assumption comes as school kids, rather than corporate executives, are being blamed for the global economic race to the bottom. The “TINA” thesis (There Is No Alternative to the Market) that has come to dominate politics throughout much of the world has infected educational thought as omnipresent market terms such as “accountability,” “choice,” “efficiency,” “competition,” “monopoly,” and “performance” frame educational debates. Nebulous terms borrowed from the business world, such as “achievement,” “excellence,” and “best practices” conceal ongoing struggles over competing values, visions, and ideological perspectives. (Achieve what? Excel at what? Best practices for whom? And says who?) The only questions left on reform agendas appear to be how to best enforce knowledge and curriculum conducive to individual upward mobility within the economy and national economic interest as it contributes to a corporately managed model of globalization as perceived from the perspective of business. This is a dominant and now commonplace view of education propagated by such influential writers as Thomas Friedman in his books and New York Times columns, and such influential grant-givers as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This neoliberal view of education dangerously eradicates the role of democratic participation and the role of public schools in preparing public democratic citizens with the intellectual and critical tools for meaningful and participatory self-governance. By reducing the politics

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of education to its economic functions, neoliberal educational thinking has deeply authoritarian tendencies that are incompatible with democracy. Democracy is under siege by the tendency of market fundamentalism to collapse politics with economics, thereby translating all social problems into business concerns with the possibilities for continued profit making. Yet, democracy is also under siege by a rising authoritarianism in the United States that eviscerates civil liberties and attacks human rights domestically and internationally through the USA Patriot Act, “extraordinary rendition” (state sanctioned kidnapping, torture, and murder), spying on the public, and other measures that treacherously expand executive power. Internationally, this appears as what Harvey has termed “The New Imperialism” and others have called “militarized globalization,” which includes the socalled “war on terror,” the U.S. military presence in more than 140 countries, the encirclement of the world’s oil resources with the world’s most powerful military, and so on. This is on top of a continued culture of militarism that educates citizens to identify with militarized solutions to social problems. In education, I have called this militarism “education as enforcement,” which aims to enforce global neoliberal imperatives through a number of educational means.62 David Harvey offers a compelling economic argument for the rise of repression and militarization, explaining the shift from neoliberalism to neoconservatism. Neoliberal policy was in dire crisis already in the late 1990s as deregulation of capital was resulting in a threat to the United States as it lost the manufacturing base and increasingly lost service sector and financial industry to Asia.63 For Harvey, the new militarism in foreign policy is partly about a desperate attempt to seize control of the world’s oil spigot as the lone superpower status of the United States is endangered by the rise of a fast-growing Asia and a unified Europe with a strong currency. Threats to the U.S. economy are posed by not only the potential loss of control over the fuel for the U.S. economy and military, but also the power conferred by the dollar remaining the world currency and the increasing indebtedness of the United States to China and Japan as they prop up the value of the dollar for the continued export of consumer goods. For Harvey, the structural problems behind global capitalism remain the financialization of the global economy and what Marx called “the crisis of overproduction” driving down prices and wages while glutting the market and threatening profits. Capitalists and states representing capitalist interests respond to these crises through Harvey’s version of what Marx called primitive accumulation, “accumulation by dispossession.”

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Privatization is one of the most powerful tools of accumulation by dispossession, transforming publicly owned and controlled goods and services into private and restricted ones—the continuation of “enclosing the commons” begun in Tudor England. If neoliberalism came into crisis due to the excesses of capitalism (deregulation and liberalization yielding capital flight, deindustrialization, etc.), then the neoconservative response—emphasizing control and order and reinvigorated overt state power—makes a lot of sense. As Harvey explains in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, central to the crisis of neoliberalism are the contradictions of neoliberalism’s antipathy to the nation and reliance on the state. Neoconservatives have responded to the neoliberal crisis by using national power to push economic competition, to pillage productive forces for continued economic growth, and also to control populations through repression as inequalities of wealth and income are radically exacerbated, resulting in the expansion of a dual society of mobile professionals on one side and everyone else on the other.64 The surging culture of religious right-wing populism, irrational new age mysticism, and endless conspiracy theorizing appear to symptomatize a cultural climate in which neoliberal market fundamentalism has come into crisis as both economic doctrine and ideology. Within this climate, private for-profit knowledge-making institutions including schools and media are institutionally incapable of providing a language and criticism that would enable rational interpretation necessary for political intervention. Irrationalism is the consequence. Not too distant history suggests that this can lead in systematically deadly directions.65 At the present moment there is a crucial tension between two fundamental functions of public education for the capitalist state. The first involves reproducing the conditions of production—teaching skills and know-how in ways that are ideologically compatible with the social relations of capital accumulation. Public education remains an important and necessary tool for capital to make political and economic leaders or docile workers and marginalized citizens, or even participating in sorting and sifting out those to be excluded from economy and politics completely. The second function that appears to be relatively new and growing involves the capitalist possibilities of pillaging public education for profit, in the United States, Iraq, or elsewhere. Drawing on Harvey’s explanation of accumulation by dispossession, we see that in the United States the numerous strategies for privatizing public education—from voucher schemes, to for-profit charter schools, to forced for-profit remediation schemes, to dissolving public schools in poor communities and replacing them with

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a mix of private, charter, and experimental schools—all follow a pattern of destroying and commodifying schools where the students are redundant to reproduction processes, while maintaining public investment in the schools that have the largest reproductive role of turning out managers and leaders. Strategies of capitalist accumulation, dispossession and reproduction, appear to be at odds. After all, if public schooling is being pillaged and sold off, then how can it reproduce the social order for capital? Yet privatization is targeting those most marginal to capitalist reproduction, thereby making the most economically excluded into commodities for corporations. Hence, EMOs target the poor, making economically marginalized people into opportunities for capital, the way for-profit prisons do. Reproduction and dispossession feed each other in several ways: in an ideological apparatus such as education or media, privatization and decentralization exacerbate class inequality by weakening universal provision, weakening the public role of a service, putting in place reliance upon expensive equipment supplied from outside, and justifying further privatization and decentralization to remedy the deepened economic differentiation and hierarchization that has been introduced or worsened through privatization and decentralization. The obvious U.S. example is the failure of the state to properly fund public schools in poor communities and then privatizing those schools to be run by corporations.66 Rather than addressing the funding inequalities and the intertwined dynamics at work in making poor schools or working to expand the democratic potential of public schools, the remedy is commodification. It is crucial to emphasize that what Klein terms “disaster capitalism” and Harvey terms “accumulation by dispossession” are not just an economic project but also a cultural project and that these need to be comprehended together. What Henry Giroux has termed the “cultural pedagogy of neoliberalism”67 is typified not merely by the language of “silver linings” and “golden opportunities” but by the turn to business language and models in thinking about the social world, including public school reform and policy. Not only have public school debates been overrun by the aforementioned neoliberal language, but, as we see in New Orleans, business “turnaround specialists” such as Alvarez and Marsal are brought in to dictate school rebuilding while residents are dispossessed of their communities through economic rationales. The state and Alvarez and Marsal invoked “supply and demand” to justify not rebuilding the New Orleans public schools (residents do not return because the schools have not been rebuilt and then the planners declare that there is no

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demand for school rebuilding); the idealization of choice, markets, business, deregulation, and antiunionism is propagated in a number of ways through the cultural pedagogy of neoliberalism. It is essential to remember what Pierre Bourdieu emphasized about neoliberalism. Neoliberal economics . . . owes a certain number of its allegedly universal characteristics to the fact that it is immersed or embedded in a particular society, that is to say, rooted in a system of beliefs and values, an ethos and a moral view of the world, in short, an economic common sense, linked as such to the social and cognitive structures of a particular social order. It is from this particular economy [that of the United States] that neoclassical economic theory borrows its fundamental assumptions, which it formalizes and rationalizes, thereby establishing them as the foundations of a universal model. That model rests on two postulates (which their advocates regard as proven propositions): the economy is a separate domain governed by natural and universal laws with which governments must not interfere by inappropriate intervention; the market is the optimum means for organizing production and trade efficiently and equitably in democratic societies.68

A number of educational forces in addition to schools are required to keep such premises appearing natural and hence unquestionable. Mass media is one of the most powerful pedagogical forces that carry out ongoing education of the public to understand “the economy” as natural and inevitable, whether through news programs that report stock prices just like they report the weather or through sports that align capitalist values of numerically quantifiable progress and growth with the possibilities of the human body, or through police shows (nearly half of U.S. TV content) that replace the primary role of the police, protecting private property, with the drama of seldomcommitted spectacular murders, or the social Darwinist game shows that make contestants compete for scarce resources including money, cutthroat corporate jobs, trophy spouses, and cut-face plastic surgery to compete all the better, or through the advertising behind it all that sells the fantasies that comprise a particular kind of radically individualized cynical consumer view of the self and the social world. Such media products function pedagogically to define what is possible to think and what is impossible to imagine for the future. Yet, as powerful as mass media is as a pedagogical force in teaching, the traditions of critical pedagogy, critical theory, cultural studies, feminism, progressive education, and critical cultural production offer powerful tools to produce different kinds of visions—hopeful, democratic visions that articulate with growing democracy movements

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around the world. The neoliberal postulates that Bourdieu denaturalizes appear increasingly dubious at best as wealth and income are radically redistributed upward in the United States while nation after nation in Latin America rejects the neoliberal “Washington consensus” in favor of another path that coheres generally much more with the democratic ideals of the global justice movement.69 Thoroughly at odds with critical pedagogical approaches, these neoliberal views of education have an accomodationist bent that views the social order as fundamentally just and do not make central the role that teachers can play in preparing democratic citizens. Perhaps most ominously a number of these individuals and institutions advocate measuring the value of teacher education instruction by the numerical test scores of the students of teaching candidates. Such a positivist approach to knowledge both separates claims to truth from animating underlying assumption and it insists on understanding learning as a product and knowledge as a commodity to be deposited into students so that they can “make achievement gains.” Such thinking removes from consideration crucial questions about whose knowledge is worth learning and why, how knowledge relates to authority, and who designed the tests that supposedly neutrally and objectively measure knowledge that is alleged to be of universal value. These concerns are in addition to questions of who is profiting financially from test publishing, textbook sales, and the vast resources that go into such dubious “performance based” reforms that are increasingly being extended from their destructive presence in K-12 to teacher education. The neoliberal assault on education participates in how the right is capitalizing on disaster by producing forms of education that restrict from the curriculum matters that are central to the making of a democratic culture. For teacher and other cultural workers, the most crucial matter at stake in debates over privatization and school reform generally is the possibility for schooling to expand a democratic ethos and foster democratic practices and social relations with regard to politics, culture, and economy. What is being done for profit and ideology in New Orleans, Iraq, Chicago, and throughout the United States with NCLB and the assault on teacher education does just the opposite by political dispossession, economic pillage, and cultural symbolic violence. It is incumbent upon educators to develop pedagogical and material strategies to expand democratic struggles for the public to take back schools, resources, and cultural power as part of a broader democratic alternative to the antidemocratic neoliberal approaches that capitalize on disaster and imperil the public.

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Notes 1. This article draws on my forthcoming book Capitalizing on Disaster: Breaking and Taking Public Schools (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2007). 2. Naomi Klein, “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” The Nation, May 2005. 3. For the most recent update on the state of educational privatization, see the research provided by the Educational Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University, available at www.schoolcommercialism.org. 4. “Reading, Writing, and Enrichment: Private Money is Pouring Into American Education—And Transforming It,” The Economist, January 16, 1999: 55. I detail a number of business publications that were salivating over privatizing public schooling in “Junk King Education” chapter one of Robin Truth Goodman and Kenneth J. Saltman, Strange Love, Or How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). In academic circles, Paul Hill was striving to make education an investment opportunity. Paul Thomas Hill, Lawrence C. Pierce, James W. Guthrie, Reinventing Public Education: How Contracting Can Transform America’s Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Hill appears at the forefront of calls for Katrina profiteering in 2005, as the first chapter details. 5. See for example, William C. Symonds, “Edison: an ‘F’ in Finance,” Business Week 3806, November 4, 2002: 2; and Julia Boorstin, “Why Edison Doesn’t Work,” Fortune 146, December 9, 2002: 12. For a detailed discussion of Edison’s financial problems and the media coverage of them, see Kenneth J. Saltman, The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education (New York: Routledge, 2005). 6. See “Junk King Education,” in Robin Truth Goodman and Kenneth J. Saltman, Strange Love, Or How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). 7. See Richard J. Bernstein’s important discussion of the need for a democratic ethos based in Dewey’s notion of Creative Democracy in The Abuse of Evil (New York: Verso 2005). 8. See William I. Robinson, The Critical Globalization Studies (New York: Routledge, 2003). 9. The editors of Rethinking Schools describe the federal voucher scheme after hurricane Katrina as “back door privatization” “Katrina’s Lesson’s,” Rethinking Schools Fall (2005): 4–5. 10. David Hursh offers an important discussion of how neoliberal educational policies destroy democratic public educational ideals, in “Undermining Democratic Education in the USA: The Consequences of Global Capitalism and Neo-liberal Policies for Education Policies at the Local, State, and Federal Levels,” Policy Futures in Education 2, 3 and 4: 607–620.

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11. For an excellent collection of criticisms of No Child Left Behind, see Deborah Meier and George Wood (eds.), Many Children Left Behind (Boston: Beacon, 2004). In relation to what Henry Giroux has called the “war on youth” being waged in the United States, see his important chapter on NCLB in Henry A. Giroux, Abandoned Generation (New York: Palgrave, 2003). See also the collection of writings on NCLB on the rethinkingschools.org Web site. 12. School rewards professional and ruling class knowledge and dispositions and disaffirms and punishes the knowledge and dispositions of working class, poor, and culturally nondominant groups. See, for example, the work of Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Passeron, Louis Althusser, Raymond Williams, Michael Apple, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Stephen Ball, Sonia Nieto, Jean Anyon, Gloria LadsonBillings, Michelle Fine, and Lois Weis, to name just a few. 13. See Edward W. Wiley, William J. Mathis, and David R. Garcia, “The Impact of Adequate Yearly Progress Requirement of the Federal ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act on Schools in the Great Lakes Region,” Education Policy Studies Laboratory (September 2005), available at edpolicylab.org. 14. Edward Wiley, William Mathis, and David Garcia, “The Impact of the Adequate Yearly Progress Requirement of the Federal ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act on Schools in the Great Lakes Region,” Educational Policy Studies Laboratory (September 2005), available at http://edpolicylab. org page 3 of “Executive Summary.” 15. Edward Wiley, William Mathis, David Garcia, “The Impact of the Adequate Yearly Progress Requirement of the Federal ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act on Schools in the Great Lakes Region,” Educational Policy Studies Laboratory (September 2005), available at http://edpolicylab. org page 3 of “Executive Summary.” 16. See, for example, the contributors in Deborah Meier and George Wood (eds.), Many Children Left Behind (Boston: Beacon, 2004). Also see, for example, the writing of Stan Karp and Gerald Bracey on NCLB. A number of excellent resources on privatization and commercialism implications of NCLB can be found at the site of the Educational Policy Studies Laboratory at www.schoolcommercialism.org. 17. Alfie Kohn, “NCLB and the Effort to Privatize Public Education,” in Many Children Left Behind, ed. Deborah Meier and George Wood (Boston: Beacon, 2004), 79–100. 18. Sharon L. Nichols, Gene V. Glass, and Davic C. Berliner, “High-Stakes Testing and Student Achievement: Problems for the No Child Left Behind Act,” Educational Policy Studies Laboratory, available at http:// edpolicylab.org page 3 of “Executive Summary.” 19. For an important scholarly analysis, see Pauline Lipman, High Stakes Education (London: Routledge, 2004). 20. Activist groups include: Parents United for Responsible Education, Teachers for Social Justice, Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, among others.

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21. Deb Moore, “A New Approach in Chicago,” School Planning and Management (Jul 2004): 8. 22. “Snapshot: Chicago Renaissance 2010,” Possibilities: An Education Update, page 2, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, available at http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Education/RelatedInfo/Possibilities/ Possibilities2004. 23. Pauline Lipman, “We’re Not Blind. Just Follow the Dollar Sign,” Rethinking Schools Online 19, 4 (Summer 2005), available at www. rethinkingschools.org. 24. Dorothy Shipps, School Reform, Corporate Style: Chicago 1880–2000 (Lawrence: The University of Kansas Press, 2006), x. 25. Pratap Chaterjee, Iraq, Inc.: A Profitable Occupation (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004). 26. Kenneth J. Saltman, “Creative Associates International, Inc.: Corporate Education and Democracy Promotion in Iraq,” Review of Education Pedagogy Cultural Studies 28 (2006): 25–65. 27. For example, Clint Bolick of the Alliance for School Choice described privatization as the “silver lining” of the cloud that was hurricane Katrina. His op-ed or quote was then carried by countless publications, including the neocon The National Review and The Heartland Institute and The Washington Times, USA Today, and so on. The quote was picked up and repeated by others advocating the same. 28. April Capchino, “More than 100 N.O. Schools Still Closed,” New Orleans City Business, February 27, 2006. 29. Sharon Cohen, “New Orleans’ Troubled Schools Get Overhaul,” Associated Press, March 4, 2006, YahooNews, news.yahoo.com. 30. Clint Bolick, “Katrina’s Displaced Students,” The Washington Times, September 15, 2005. 31. Karla Dial, “Emergency School Vouchers Likely for Katrina Victims,” Heartland Institute School Reform News, November 2005, available at www.heartland.org. 32. Sharon Cohen, “New Orleans’ Troubled Schools Get Overhaul,” Associated Press, March 4, 2006 YahooNews, news.yahoo.com. 33. People for the American Way, “Hurricane Katrina: A ‘Golden Opportunity’ for the Right-Wing to Undermine Public Education,” November 14, 2005, available at www.pfaw.org. 34. Paul Hill and Jane Hannaway, “The Future of Public Education in New Orleans.” After Katrina: Rebuilding Opportunity and Equity into the New New Orleans. The Urban Institute, January 2006. 35. Online NewsHour, “Rebuilding New Orleans Schools,” December 19, 2005, available at www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education. 36. Paul Hill and Jane Hannaway, “The Future of Public Education in New Orleans.” After Katrina: Rebuilding Opportunity and Equity into the New New Orleans. The Urban Institute, January 2006. 37. See Kenneth J. Saltman, The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education (New York: Routledge, 2005).

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38. Paul Hill and Jane Hannaway, “The Future of Public Education in New Orleans.” After Katrina: Rebuilding Opportunity and Equity into the New New Orleans. The Urban Institute, January 2006. 39. Sharon Cohen, “New Orleans’ Troubled Schools Get Overhaul,” Associated Press, March 4, 2006 YahooNews, news.yahoo.com. 40. People for the American Way, “Hurricane Katrina: A “Golden Opportunity” for the Right-Wing to Undermine Public Education,” November 14, 2005, available at www.pfaw.org. 41. Linda Baker makes this important point about the embedded funding implications of “choice” in the context of how No Child Left Behind allows students to choose any school, “All for One, None for All,” In These Times, October 24, 2005. 42. For an excellent discussion of the history of voucher debates, see Jeffrey Henig, Rethinking School Choice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 43. People for the American Way, “Hurricane Katrina: A “Golden Opportunity” for the Right-Wing to Undermine Public Education,” November 14, 2005, available at www.pfaw.org. 44. See the eulogy for Walton, who died in a private airplane crash in the right-wing Hoover Institution, in the Fall 2005 issue of Education Next magazine, 5. It is important to mention that Walton’s multibillion dollar inheritance was the result of Wal-marts’s spectacular growth that came not only from the entrepreneurial savvy of Sam Walton but also his commitment to union-busting, displacing the cost of healthcare onto public coffers by refusing to offer adequate health insurance to employees, the destruction of small business throughout the United States through monopolistic practices, and, of course, being a significant contributor to the vast loss of manufacturing sector work to China. See the excellent documentary film “Wal-mart: the high cost of low prices.” 45. Clint Bolick, “Katrina’s Displaced Students,” The Washington Times, September 15, 2005. 46. People for the American Way, “Hurricane Katrina: A “Golden Opportunity” for the Right-Wing to Undermine Public Education,” November 14, 2005, available at www.pfaw.org. 47. The Editors, “Katrina’s Lessons,” Rethinking Schools (Fall 2005):, 5. 48. Karla Dial, “Emergency School Vouchers Likely for Katrina Victims,” Heartland Institute School Reform News, November 2005, available at www.heartland.org. 49. Karla Dial, “Emergency School Vouchers Likely for Katrina Victims,” Heartland Institute School Reform News, November 2005, available at www.heartland.org. 50. People for the American Way, “Hurricane Katrina: A “Golden Opportunity” for the Right-Wing to Undermine Public Education,” November 14, 2005, available at www.pfaw.org.

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51. People for the American Way, “Hurricane Katrina: A “Golden Opportunity” for the Right-Wing to Undermine Public Education,” November 14, 2005, available at www.pfaw.org. 52. Heartland Institute School Reform News, November 2005, 9 available at www.heartland.org. 53. Sharon Cohen, “New Orleans’ Troubled Schools Get Overhaul,” Associated Press, March 4, 2006 YahooNews, news.yahoo.com. 54. George Wood, “Introduction,” Many Children Left Behind, ed. Deborah Meier and George Wood (Boston: Beacon, 2004), ix. 55. See U.S. Department of Education, Volume I, Frequently Asked Questions, Emergency Impact Aid for Displaced Students, January 12, 2006. 56. Monty Neil, “Leaving No Child Behind: Overhauling NCLB,” in Many Children Left Behind, ed. Deborah Meier and George Wood (Boston: Beacon, 2004), 102–103. 57. Henry Giroux’s The Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder: Paradigm Press, 2004) makes a crucial analysis of the cultural pedagogy of neoliberalism. For discussion of neoliberal pedagogy in relation to school curriculum, film, and literary corporate cultural production, see also Robin Truth Goodman and Kenneth J. Saltman, Strange Love, Or How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). An excellent mapping and analysis of these conservatisms and others can be found in Michael Apple’s Educating the Right Way (New York: Routledge, 2001). 58. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 59. For an excellent succinct discussion of the shift from Fordism to postFordism with the rise of neoliberal globalization and the concomitant shifts in social organization as well as implications for cultural theory, see Nancy Fraser, “From Discipline to Flexibilization? Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization,” Constellations 10, 2: 160–171. 60. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 66–67. 61. See for example, Chubb and Moe’s neoliberal education bible, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools. See also the several Koret edited collections, including A Primer on America’s Schools. 62. See Kenneth J. Saltman and David Gabbard (eds.), Education as Enforcement: the Militarization and Corporatization of Schools (New York: Routledge, 2003). 63. Harvey offers important tools for comprehending neoliberalism and neoconservatism in both A Brief History of Neoliberalism and The New Imperialism. For a discussion of Harvey’s recent work and the implications for public school privatization and theoretical limitations of this work, see Kenneth J. Saltman, “Review of a Brief History of Neoliberalism,” Policy Futures in Education (2007).

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64. The expansion of the dual society as a result of neoliberal globalization has been importantly theorized by Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: the Human Consequences (New York: Polity, 1998); and Nancy Fraser, “From Discipline to Flexibilization? Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization,” Constellations 10, 2: 160–171. 65. See Theodore Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001). 66. See Kenneth J. Saltman, Collateral Damage: Corporatizing Public Schools—A Threat to Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000). 67. Henry A. Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder: Paradigm, 2004). 68. Pierre Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy (Malden, MA: Polity, 2005), 10–11. 69. A valuable source for entry into literature on the global justice movement is Z Net, available at zmag.org.

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C r i t ic a l P e dag og y, L at i no/a E duc at ion, a n d t h e Pol i t ic s of C l a ss St rug gl e 1 Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo

Due to the fact that critical pedagogy constitutes a narrative of uni-

versal emancipation (at least those versions that have escaped attempts by postmodernists and neoliberals to domesticate them), critics on both the political left and the right not only have dismissed its politics as yet another example of the colonizing incarnations of the Western educational canon but also have rejected it as a valid means for social transformation. They have accused it of possessing, among other toxic attributes, an outdated and historically discredited working-class triumphalism premised on vulgar economic reductionism that should have been abandoned long before Fukuyama 2 famously announced that the teething pains of capitalism were over and that liberal capitalist democracy had finally ascended to the zenith of humankind’s ideological achievements through its ultimate victory over its conquered rival ideologies of hereditary monarchy, fascism, and more recently communism.3 Of course, the primary object of attack is Marxist theory itself, which has been making some significant inroads of late within the critical pedagogy literature, more specifically as the central theoretical armature of the critique of the globalization of capitalism and the pauperization of the working masses in the wake of recent “free trade” agreements and the economic and military imperialism of the Bush Jr. administration. In this article, we attempt to discuss critical pedagogy in light of what we perceive to be the importance and efficacy of Marxist theory, particularly within the Marxist humanist tendency. We have chosen to accomplish this as part of a larger discussion of Latina/o education in the United States.

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Our central position is that by grounding critical pedagogy in Marx’s critique of political economy, educators are better able to challenge not only the exploitation of human labor that is endemic to capitalist society with its law of value, private property, and production for monetary return but also the assault on civil rights and human dignity that can be traced to the policymaking practices of the Anglosphere, not least of which has been directed at Latina/o populations through institutionalized forms of white supremacy and capitalist patriarchy. Capitalist society requires that we routinely perform our labor in schools, in factories, in churches, at the voting booth, and on the picket line, and that we educate ourselves to enhance our labor power.4 Consequently, we have borrowed the term used by Paula Allman— revolutionary critical pedagogy 5 —to emphasize critical pedagogy as a means for reclaiming public life that is under the relentless assault of the corporatization and privatization of the life world, including the corporate-academic complex. This is not a reclamation of the public sphere through an earnest reinvigoration of the social commons but its socialist transformation.6 The term revolutionary critical pedagogy seeks to identify the realm of unfreedom as that in which labor is determined by external utility and to make the division of labor coincide with the free vocation of each individual and the association of free producers, where the force of authority does not flow from the imposition of an external structure but from the character of the social activities in which individuals are freely and consciously engaged. Here, the emphasis is not only on denouncing the manifest injustices of neoliberal capitalism and creating a counterforce to neoliberal ideological hegemony but also on establishing the conditions for new social arrangements that transcend the false opposition between the market and the state. Accompanied by what some have described as the “particular universalism” of Marxist analysis as opposed to the “universal particularism” of the postmodernists, critical educators collectively assert—all with their own unique focus and distinct disciplinary trajectory— that the term social justice all too frequently operates as a cover for legitimizing capitalism or for tacitly admitting to or resigning oneself to its brute intractability. Consequently, it is essential to develop a counterpoint to the way social justice is conceptualized and practiced in progressive education. This stipulates not only a critical examination of the epistemological and axiological dimensions of social democracy but also a critique of the political economy of capitalist schooling so that teachers and students may begin to reclaim public

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life from its location within the corporate-academic complex in particular and the military-industrial complex in general, while acknowledging in both cases their violent insinuation into the social division of labor and capitalism’s law of value. Amid the erstwhile Bush regime’s star-spangled war on hope and freedom, post-Marxists and anti-Marxist educators had intensified their assault on anticapitalist perspectives within the field of critical pedagogy. It is not surprising that this is the case, especially since Bush declared that the “war on terror” is a war against regimes under the gnarled thumb of Old Scratch, regimes that the boy emperor likened to totalitarian (i.e., Marxist) regimes of the Cold War. Consider his commentary during a West Point address in 2002: Because the war on terror will require resolve and patience, it will also require firm moral purpose. In this way our struggle is similar to the Cold War. Now, as then, our enemies are totalitarians, holding a creed of power with no place for human dignity. Now, as then, they seek to impose a joyless conformity to control every life and all of life.7

One wonders how the illegal and murderous deployment of cluster bombs, depleted uranium ordinances, white phosphorous shells, MK 77, SMAW-NE thermobaric urban destruction bombs, and invasions of sovereign countries such as Iraq that kill, by some estimates, in excess of a hundred thousand civilians, contribute to what Bush Jr. refers to above as “human dignity.” It has not escaped our notice that once the evil empires of the Cold War fell, new ones were created quickly to fill the gap. J. Martin Rochester’s “Critical Demogogues: The Writings of Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren,” published in the Hoover Institute’s flagship education journal, Education Next, constitutes a representative neoconservative assault on critical pedagogy.8 Demagoguery apparently is only acceptable when it is practiced by the leader of the world’s sole superpower. One of Rochester’s charges against critical pedagogy is that it contributes to the development of a left-wing antiintellectualism by means of emphasizing ideology over inquiry. For Rochester, critical pedagogy is nothing less than a “chiliastic movement.” Instead of participating in what are alleged to be critical pedagogy’s pernicious forms of ideological indoctrination, Rochester sets the goal for teaching in terms redolent of a mawkish eulogy, maintaining that teachers must “reaffirm education as that which promotes,” in the words of an 1830 Yale University report, “The Discipline and Furniture of the Mind.” Rochester contends that it is impossible to

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teach a social justice agenda and at the same time foster a solid foundation of knowledge and understanding, a love of learning, and the tools for pursuing that learning. The latter, not the former, should be the first principle of education. The debates over values and truths should, Rochester argues, “be guided by a disposition toward objectivity, the spirit of free inquiry, and academic integrity rather than by chiliastic movements.” According to this assessment—what some critical theorists might refer to as a suprahistorical ethics of pure intentionality—not even history-shaking movements such as a national literacy movement can ever be guided by anything but craven selfinterest, and therefore revolution always makes for bad pedagogy. What fails to get explored by Rochester is exactly what is meant by the term ideology. As criticalists know, to employ ideologically free research practices is a Tantalusian illusion. Seemingly objective facts are always already socially and historically produced or mediated (often as the reified thought of the bourgeoisie). Ideology achieves its purpose when it is able to erase evidence of its presence and often we are aware of its presence only retroactively, when it has exhausted its welcome and is replaced with another ideological effect. Here, we are not claiming that ideology is a purely passive social relation (i.e., determined by the economic base in a linear fashion), because ideological effects may react back on economic forces, reshaping the ideological field in general. What we are claiming is that Rochester lives in a perfumed world of unimpaired optimism where pedagogy is both taught and practiced from the fertile verdure of Mount Olympus, from the lazy sinecure of common sense, from an unsullied world of science where his categories of analysis are grounded in what seems to be the ontologically necessary dimensions of human existence—a perspective that itself is shrouded in a debilitating epistemological positivism. Rochester fails to understand how theory is a type of practice raised to consciousness. This insight would be useful for Rochester when attempting to understand critical pedagogy’s methodological requirements for a unity of theory and practice. Rochester’s own position of research as ideologically disinterested is fraudulent and irresponsible as it assumes that research transcends its institutional technology and distinct historical configurations of power and knowledge. It represents the methodological practices of specific and historical subjects often in conflict among themselves. His normative epistemological pretensions are inescapably illusory and enshrine in the language of objective science the interests of a particular social and political class disguised as general social interests. Inquiry that fails to address the social relations of production and

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totalizing epistemes that historically mediate the research question itself is not worthy of the name. Consequently, it is not surprising that the Hoover institution would support a critique of critical pedagogy under the banner of an ideologically purged pedagogy, given its own ideological allegiance to the imperialist imperatives of the White House administration.

Empire, the Crush of Civilization, and Politics of Latino/a Education Since September 11, 2001, Bush arrogated to himself the role of the Grand Panjandrum of the “civilized world” (i.e., the world with the most sophisticated military technology, the most powerful army, and a political administration that possesses the will and the determination to put those assets to use wherever and whenever it feels its national interests [i.e., profits] threatened). The Bush cabal’s cunning political prestidigitations enabled it to govern the country with lies under the shibboleth of “exporting democracy,” and those who were not hoodwinked and spoke out against such mass deception were labeled enemies of civilization. Imperialism’s grand legacy of racism and white supremacy that has accompanied the virulent backlash against Marxist-driven instantiations of critical pedagogy is also affecting the agonistic terrain of Latina/o education in the United States. The defining principle underlying national policy initiatives (i.e., English-only propositions, anti-immigrant initiatives, and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001) that both implicitly and explicitly target the education of Latina/o students is what we have termed the politics of erasure. Unilaterally designed to erase students’ native language, national origin, and cultural formations, these initiatives arise out of an era marked by heightened nationalism and its attendant “fear factor” that views anyone outside of the xenophobic U.S. monoculture as a threat to U.S. citizenship. As a direct result of their demographic numbers, Latina/os have become both objects of inclusion (through assimilationist efforts) and exclusion (by restricting their access and opportunity to a quality education) in educational politics. On the surface, the politics of erasure seeks to incorporate a burgeoning Latina/o population into the economic, social, and cultural spheres of U.S. society. But the repressed underside of such initiatives is reminiscent of efforts designed to safeguard the cultural and linguistic homogeneity of what Gilbert Gonzalez has termed the “Ideology and Practice of Empire.” 9 Within this framework, education is perceived as the major apparatus of assimilating and acculturating

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a growing Latina/o population into the economic and social dimensions of an increasingly imperial and militaristic Pax Americana. Unearthing and naming the ostensibly hidden narratives and ideological underpinnings of education policy is a necessary counterpoint to the reigning initiatives that evoke, at times, the popular support of Latina/os in pursuit of achieving the gross material benefits associated with American nationality. It is essential, therefore, that policy initiatives be understood in terms of their historical specificity, especially as this affects their functional imperatives for nation-states, which includes administering a commodity-centered economy and its division of social labor.10 In education policy, the rhetoric of positive nationalism (i.e., equal opportunity for all) occludes both the racialized ideologies and class interests of the political elite who act—either willingly or unknowingly—in the service of maintaining internal cultural homogeneity and an internal colonialism. Especially in light of today’s war on terrorism, Latina/o entrepreneurs are needed to legitimize the economic objectives of the capitalist elite and provide ballast to the existing social division of labor, just as the rural and urban poor are needed as frontline troops in the country’s imperialist wars. As an instructive example, consider the recent arguments set forth by Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington. Huntington’s commentary is predictably aligned to the ideological imperatives of U.S. citizenship.11 Concerned with Hispanic immigrants who have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves, he writes the following: “There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.”12 In linguistics, we would refer to the aforementioned coupling as cognates, but in Huntington’s context, that speaks directly to the reactionary segments of the Anglo-Protestant population that he depicts; they represent two separate and incommensurable worlds divided by language, culture, and values. In his enfeebled defense of the Anglosphere as the sacerdotal aerie of U.S. citizenship, Huntington cites a number of scholars who characterize Latina/os, primarily those of Mexican decent, as a monolithic cultural group that possess a “lack of initiative, self-reliance, and ambition” and have “little use for education; and acceptance of poverty as a virtue necessary for entrance into heaven.”13 Huntington’s nativism is an unholy alliance of xenophobia and racism masquerading as a defense of the cultural identity of the United States (not to mention, as a scholarship). Huntington’s alarmist screed, premised on an unstated fear that Mexican immigrants might one day engage in a reconquest of the U.S. Southwest, betrays

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at once a fear of the decline of an Anglo-Protestant majority and a defense of free-market capitalism. Such views are neither new nor limited to depicting the Latina/o population. The rise of industrialization, the emergence of world wars, the collapse of statist Communism and reformist Social Democracy, and the creation of the United States as the world’s sole superpower have exacerbated an “us versus them” discourse that legitimizes cultural, political, military, and economic domination. Huntington’s work is but an academic gimcrack, the kind of crass racism you might find in a seaport bar, only dressed up in the iron breastplate of the Angel of History—acrimonious ignorance disguised as moral profundity blown into our minds by a storm from paradise. It is the scholarly umbrage in which the most vile human sentiments take refuge from the light of reason.

“Latina/o”: Historical and Material Dimensions To understand the ways in which the education of Latina/o youth is being affected by what we term a politics of erasure, it is necessary to fully define Latina/o. We consider it important to highlight the arguments posited by Martha Gimenez, who suggests that ethnic labels such as Latino or Hispanic work not only to solidify the negative stereotyping associated with that group but also to hide and de-emphasize both the differences and similarities across ethnic enclaves.14 By differences, we are suggesting that Latina/os constitute a population of wide variation—across class and other social dimensions—and that they do not, by any measure, share or ascribe to an organic or pure cultural identity. By similarities, we are also suggesting that Latina/os, when viewed as individuals situated along an historical and material continuum differentiated by class status, share traits, experiences, and values with other “non-Latino” groups. The process of Americanization, acculturation, or assimilation is not a uniform process for Latina/os. Gimenez is particularly insightful on this point: “Dialectically, however, culture is not a thing one learns or unlearns (thus becoming acculturated): It is the lived experience of people shaped by their location in the class and socioeconomic stratification systems.”15 In light of Gimenez’s observation, it is necessary to view Latina/os as a social group in all of their iterations and to consider the material backdrop of their cultural formations.16 Here the alienation of Latina/o youth can best be understood by investing the ontological concept of alienation with social, historical, and economic content. Here, we take the position that although race, class, and gender invariably intersect and interact, they are not coprimary. We

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conceptualize class antagonism or struggle as one in a series of social antagonisms (race, class, gender, etc.) but argue that class most often sustains the conditions that produce and reproduce the other antagonisms. This is not, however, to argue that we can simply reduce racism or sexism to class. In other words, class struggle is the specific antagonism, the generative matrix, that helps to structure and shape the particularities of the other antagonisms. It creates their conditions of possibility. The material basis of race and gender antagonisms can be traced to the means and relations of production within capitalist society—to the social division of labor that occurs when workers sell their labor power for a wage to the capitalist (i.e., to the ownership of the means of production). Regrettably, class exploitation is a topic that is very often ignored within schools of education. When it is discussed, it frequently deliquesces into a discussion of unequal resource distribution, and this ignores the fact that exploitation is a fundamental character of capitalism, that it is constituent of the labor-capital relation. Class struggle is a determining force that structures in advance the very agonistic terrain in which other political, racial, and gender antagonisms take place. However, we want to underscore that in no way does this position ignore forms of nonclass domination. John Bellamy Foster makes an important observation when he writes the following: The various forms of non-class domination are so endemic to capitalist society, so much a part of its strategy of divide and conquer, that no progress can be made in overcoming class oppression without also fighting—sometimes even in advance of the class struggle—these other social divisions.17

Among U.S. institutions, public schools bear the greatest burden to bring youth and their families into the neoliberal regime. For educators such as Stanley Aronowitz, schools serve as the primary mechanism to connect children and their families to the full spectrum of social life.18 Social life, in these terms, includes broad notions of citizenship, but it also, and perhaps most importantly, suggests the cultivation of a laboring citizen body. Aronowitz argues that the common school is charged with the task of preparing children and youth for their dual responsibilities to the social order: citizenship and, perhaps its primary task, learning to labor. On the one hand, in the older curriculum on the road to citizenship in a democratic secular society, schools are supposed to transmit the jewels of the enlightenment, especially literature and science. On the other hand, students

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are to be prepared for the work world by means of a loose but definite stress on the redemptive value of work, the importance of family, and of course the imperative of love and loyalty of one’s country.19 We concur for the most part with Aronowitz’s description of the public school, and we find it particularly relevant for Latina/os and other immigrant groups struggling assiduously on the margins for full incorporation into the dominant landscape of U.S. society. The notion that schools ultimately shape and form future generations under the mantra of democracy building or “loving one’s country” is a necessary tool for policy-makers and other members of the capitalist elite to justify pedagogical programs and initiatives designed to homogenize and unify a seemingly varied population. What is often overlooked is the role that schools play in serving as pallbearers of profit maximization and in sustaining a commodity-centered economy predicated on the social division of labor. It is here that the linkages between the expansion of capital and schooling become more opaque—in terms of schools becoming transformed into commodities (through increased privatization) and in their role as commodity-producing (human labor power) institutions. Government sponsored commissions clearly capture the interplay between schools, labor, capital, and citizenship. A report commissioned in 2003 on behalf of the G. W. Bush administration, From Risk to Opportunity, Hispanics in the U.S., outlines these very relations.20 The report states that if the employment picture does not change, the economic consequences of an uneducated workforce will strain the economy of the United States. Hispanics are not maximizing their income potential or developing financial security. This leads to lost tax revenues, lower rates of consumer spending, reduced per capita savings, and increased social costs.21 This narrative antiseptically reduces the failed economic participation of Latina/os to an itemized list of discrete educational factors.22 Against a backdrop of characteristics such as limited parent involvement, poor academic instruction, and a lack of English or teacher accountability, an investment in school “improvement” is considered the only viable alternative toward eliminating the fiscal and social “crisis” associated with the Latinization of the United States. The Commission asserts that “school improvement may be an expensive short-term investment, but the ultimate profit resulting from an educated Hispanic workforce is much greater.”23 When Latina/os’ participation in the labor market is contrasted against indicators that measure their integration in education and other aspects of social life, the stage is set to “reform” or “rectify” those conditions associated with what is perceived as “failed assimilation.” Across ethnic groups,

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Latina/os have the highest high school dropout rate, nearly 28 percent, and for newly arrived immigrants, the dropout rate stands at 40 percent.24 Only one in ten Latina/os aged twenty-five and older have received a bachelor’s degree or higher, yet in the year 2002, nearly one in five of all those incarcerated in the United States were Latino.25 Close to five million English-language learners reside in the United States, with the overwhelming majority being Spanish speakers. In the 2000–2001 period, Latina/os represented 10 percent of the school-aged population in the nation, a number that is expected to increase exponentially in the coming decades. When the “Latina/o experience” is viewed against these statistics, it provides the fuel and impetus for policy-makers to create and implement educational initiatives to reverse the trend of the so-called Latina/o failure. Such is the rationale behind increased standardization (as a way to equalize educational inputs and outcomes) of curriculum, testing mechanisms, and instructional techniques. For Latina/os and other segments of the population clinging to the rhetoric of positive nationalism, education policies conceived in this vein are configured and ideologically refitted with irresistible appeal. But ultimately, such efforts come at the expense of an often cruel and violent pedagogy of dehumanization that places the burden on the young and “unacculturated” to adopt “ways of being” that are, indeed, foreign and alien. The very system that incorporates Latina/os and other immigrant groups into the dominant “Whitestream” society is the same system that seeks to alienate them from their local histories, their culture, and the location where their knowledge is inscribed, namely, their language.26 Language, which serves to classify, categorize, and label human essence, relies on the process of internalization. We are conceiving the process of internalization largely in relation to the function of language in identity formation. In other words, language represents a core construct of our subjectivity and the bulwark of our modes of self- and social identification. In the words of Gloria Anzaldua, “ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself.”27 With language valorized as the essentialized component of nationality and identity, English-only movements profoundly affect the Latina/o experience in public schools. Starting in California, with Proposition 227, an initiative that legally dismantled bilingual education instruction, and followed by similar propositions in Arizona and unsuccessful attempts in Colorado and Massachusetts, bilingual education is consistently thrust into politically pernicious and ideologically heated debates that negatively affect language-minority students.

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Although language policy has historically been sanctioned at the level of the state, the federal government’s reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, marked a reversal of language policy by stressing the acquisition of English skills only.28 By eliminating any reference to the term bilingual, by mandating achievement tests that measure the acquisition of English over subject matter content,29 and by attaching a strict system of punishment and rewards to test results, the U.S. government has solidified a neocolonial model of education that legitimizes the sustained subordination of groups that fall short of gaining membership to the dominant discourses of U.S. citizenship. Gutierrez, Asato, Santos, and Gotanda have referred to this phenomenon as “backlash pedagogy” rooted in “backlash politics, products of ideological and institutional structures that legitimize and thus maintain privilege, access and control of the sociopolitical terrain.”30 Along a similar vein, Donaldo Macedo writes that English-only initiatives are present-day forms of colonialism, designed to subordinate groups through the loss of their human citizenship.31 In conjunction with initiatives that support anti-immigrant hysteria (Proposition 209 in California, the elimination of the Immigrant Education Program in No Child Left Behind 2001) and measures to eradicate affirmative action programs, we are constantly reminded that becoming “American,” from the standpoint of education policy, is an atrophic process that denies the full development of human subjectivity.

Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy as Marxist Humanism As critical educators, we reject the notion that Latina/os and other marginalized student groups must selectively choose between the inflexible yet complementary tension of Americanism or un-Americanism, a binary construction that sets up a perfidious false opposition. We also reject the notion that schools must ultimately service the needs of capital rather than the humanizing needs of children and their families.32 We denounce as well the reorganization of cultural hegemony and symbolic capital through the use of English as the only medium of classroom instruction—a nativist ploy to use monolingual “immersion” English classrooms to delegitimate or erase the daily lived experiences of linguistic minorities who are oppressed by a class-divided, racialized, and gendered social order, and to immure them inside a civic culture predicated upon property rights and the capitalist law of value production. At the same time, we are aware of the complex set of

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social relations that have compelled millions of working-class and poor people from Latin America to leave their countries of origin in search of a viable alternative. The creation of composite national identities and the lived tensions and contradictions confronted in every aspect of social life in the United States by “immigrants” or “exiles” compel us to articulate a humanizing critical pedagogy that is rooted in the cultural, spiritual, and linguistic dimensions of everyday life. But a humanizing pedagogy is also grounded in a critique of the material social relations and practices associated with contemporary capitalist formations. We have made an effort to note that the exploitation of human capacity to labor (labor power) is not limited to regional or national geographical spaces alone. Rather, Latina/os in the United States and abroad are implicated in a web of transnational relations linked to the accumulation of capital and extraction of surplus value. Moving from the center to the periphery, it is instructive for us to engage critically social movements and popular education initiatives in Latin America as illustrative sites toward a humanizing critical pedagogy. A fundamental axiom of a critical humanizing pedagogy is a respect accorded to students’ language and cultural identity. It begins, in the words of Antonia Darder, “with the view that all human beings participate actively in producing meaning and thus reinforces a dialectical and contextual view of knowledge.”33 Cultural workers in this tradition ask students to recollect the past; to situate the present socially, politically, and economically; and to strive toward a future built on a utopian universality. Such a utopia has the potential to create the conditions for groups to liberate themselves in their own contextually specific ways from all forms of oppression, domination, alienation, and degradation. A pedagogy built on these perspectives and practices seeks to understand the underlying motives, interests, desires, and fears of draconian shifts in education policy, and it contests ascribed methods of producing knowledge. To challenge the erasure of students’ cultural and subjective formations, a humanizing critical pedagogy refashions dialectically self and social formation by challenging normative notions of citizenship and by underscoring what it means to be the subject rather than the object of history. However, we clearly need more than a new normative foundation for a critical cultural cosmopolitanism; we also need a major shift in the mode of production. In addition to cultural solutions, we need to seize political power on behalf of workers. Yet—in itself—this does little to eradicate the capitalist law of value. Moving beyond the capitalist law of value is a challenge that can be met by adopting a historical materialist critique and engaging in the struggle for socialism.

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Criticizing the model of “cultural schizophrenia” that informs the ideological ambivalence of “Chicana/o literature,” Marcial Gonzalez advances a historical materialist critique that we believe is efficacious for the dedomestication of critical pedagogy.34 Historical materialism is important for Gonzalez, as it is for us, precisely because it “attempts to understand the dialectical relation between the particularities of existence and the larger social frameworks that give them meaning.”35 It also helps us to grasp more fully and more deeply “the relation between universal processes and their local manifestations”36 in ways the puerile prospects of postmodernism cannot. Furthermore, historical materialism provides the means for “understanding the complex categories of identity based on race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender, not as autonomous formations but as interconnected processes within the larger dynamics of social relations,”37 so that we are able to recognize “the particularity and relative autonomy of race without jettisoning the causal character of class relations.”38 From such a perspective, reality is perceived not as an absolute truth but as “a set of processes.”39 The purpose of historical materialist critique is not to “correct faulty ideas” analytically but “to negate them” and demystify them as ideological correlates of real contradictions, and in so doing, “to transform them qualitatively.”40

Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy as a Dialectics of Praxis In this section, we attempt to further situate revolutionary critical pedagogy in a Marxist-Hegelian optic, centered on a philosophy of praxis. To perform our revolutionary agency critically is to revisit the dialectical relation of theory and practice. What is important are the ideas of social change that are given birth in spontaneous movements and struggles and those developed in theory and made available to the “nonordinary” ordinary people. Raya Dunayevskaya has rethought Marx’s relations to Hegelian dialectics in a profound way;41 in particular, Hegel’s concept of the self-movement of the idea from which Marx argued the need to transcend objective reality rather than thought. Dunayevskaya notes how Marx was able to put a living, breathing, and thinking subject of history at the center of the Hegelian dialectic. She also pointed out that what for Hegel is absolute knowledge, Marx referred to as the new society. Although Hegel’s self-referential, allembracing, totalizing absolute is greatly admired by Marx, it was, nevertheless, greatly modified by him. For Marx, absolute knowledge did not absorb objective reality or objects of thought but provided

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a ground from which objective reality could be transcended. By reinserting the human subject into the dialectic and by defining the subject as corporal being, Marx appropriates Hegel’s self-movement of subjectivity as an act of transcendence and transforms it into a critical humanism. In her rethinking of Marx’s relationship to the Hegelian dialectic, Dunayevskaya parts company with Derrida, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, Negri, Deleuze, Meszaros, and others.42 She has given absolute negativity a new urgency, linking it not only to the negation of today’s economic and political realities but also to developing new human relations. She places a special emphasis on the “second negation.” The second negation constitutes drawing out the positive within the negative and expressing the desire of the oppressed for freedom. Second negativity is intrinsic to the human subject as an agent; it is what gives direction and coherence to revolutionary action as praxis. A second negation permits abstract, alienated labor to be challenged by freely associated labor and concrete, human sensuousness. The answer is in envisioning a noncapitalist future that can be achieved, as Hudis notes, after Dunayevskaya, by means of subjective self-movement through absolute negativity so that a new relation between theory and practice can connect us to the realization of freedom.43 Of course, Marx rejects Hegel’s idealization and dehumanization of self-movement through double negation because this leaves untouched alienation in the world of labor-capital relations. Marx sees this absolute negativity as objective movement and the creative force of history. Absolute negativity in this instance becomes a constitutive feature of a self-critical social revolution that, in turn, forms the basis of permanent revolution. Peter Hudis raises a number of difficult questions with respect to developing a project that moves beyond controlling the labor process.44 It is a project that is directed at abolishing capital itself through the creation of freely associated labor: The creation of a social universe not parallel to the social universe of capital is the challenge here. The form that this society will take is that which has been suppressed within the social universe of capital: socialism, a society based not on value but on the fulfillment of human need. For Dunayevskaya, absolute negativity entails something more than economic struggle, the liberation of humanity from class society.45 This is necessarily a political and a revolutionary struggle and not only an economic one. This particular insight is what, for us, signals the fertile power of Dunayevskaya’s Marxist-humanism, the recognition that Marx isn’t talking about class relations only but human relations. Domesticated currents of critical pedagogy are too preoccupied with

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making changes within civil society or the bourgeois “public sphere,” where students are reduced to test scores and their behavior is codified in relation to civic norms. Marx urged us to push beyond this type of materialism that fails to comprehend humanity’s sensuous nature and regards humans only as statistics or averaged-out modes of behavior. We need to move toward a new social humanity. This takes us well beyond civil society. We need to work toward the goal of becoming associated producers, working under conditions that will advance human nature, where the measure of wealth is not labor time but solidarity, creativity, and the full development of human capacities. This can only occur outside the social universe of capital. Revolutionary critical pedagogy, built on the concept of absolute negativity, is needed to combat the ideological crisis that has occurred as a result of the defeat of communism, socialism, and national liberation movements and the radical wings of social democracy. Of course, one of the immediate goals of a revolutionary critical pedagogy is to disable the U.S. administration from conflating leftist revolutionaries with fundamentalist Islamic terrorists. Guided by a cabal-like combination of Christian fundamentalists, global robber barons, far-right neoconservatives, ultranationalists, arms dealers, oil tycoons, and militarists, the U.S. government’s pursuit for the role of master and commander of the global capitalists system proceeds apace. Admittedly, it cannot be stopped by a revolutionary critical pedagogy, no matter how powerful its self-reflexive counterperformances. But neither can it be effectively challenged without it. Today, it is urgent that we develop a coherent philosophy of praxis, but equally important must be our determination to live our dialectical self reflexivity, as we navigate the perils of everyday existence and enact a politics of refusal and transformation. A true renewal of thinking about educational and social reform must pass through a regeneration of Marxist theory if the great and fertile meaning of human rights and equality is to reverberate in the hopes of aggrieved populations throughout the world. A philosophically driven revolutionary critical pedagogy, one that aspires toward a coherent philosophy of praxis, can help teachers and students grasp the specificity of the concrete within the totality of the universal—for instance, the laws of motion of capital as they operate out of sight of our everyday lives and thus escape our commonsense understanding. Revolutionary critical pedagogy can assist us in understanding history as a process in which human beings make their own society, although in conditions most often not of their own choosing, and therefore influenced by the intentions of others. Furthermore, the

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practice of double negation can help us understand the movement of both thought and action by means of praxis, or what Dunayevskaya called the “philosophy of history.” The philosophy of history proceeds from the messy web of everyday social reality—from the arena of facticity and the tissues of empirical life—and not from lofty abstractions or idealistic concepts gasping for air in the lofty heights of some metaphysical crow’s nest. Revolutionary critical educators engage students in a dialectical reading of social life in which “the labor of the negative” helps them to understand human development from the perspective of the wider social totality. By examining Marx’s specific appropriation of the Hegelian dialectic, students are able to grasp how the positive is always contained in the negative. In this way, every new society can be grasped as the negation of the preceding one, conditioned by the forces of production, which gives us an opportunity for a new beginning. I think it is certainly a truism that ideas often correspond to the economic structure of society, but at the same time, we need to remember that history is in no way unconditional. In other words, not everything can be reduced to the sum total of economic conditions. The actions of human beings are what shape history. History is not given form and substance by abstract categories. Both Freire and Dunayevskaya stress here that the educator must be educated. The idea that a future society comes into being as a negation of the existing one finds its strongest expression in class struggle. Here, we note that dialectical movement is a characteristic not only of thought but also of life and history itself. And here the outcomes are never guaranteed.

Class Struggle in a Global Context If dialectical praxis within the larger project of class struggle is to serve as the centerpiece of critical revolutionary pedagogy, both in its fight against economic exploitation as well as racism and patriarchy, it is imperative that we chart out the lineaments of our anticapitalist, prosocialist struggle. Although it is important to acknowledge that the globalization of capital can be resisted, it is equally important to be aware of the strengths and limitations of our counter-hegemonic strategies and tactics. In short, we need a theory of counter-hegemony. William Robinson expands on this position: Globalization is the resistible renewal of capitalism. Globalization is always partial and incomplete, although the aspiration is one of universality and generalization. Any theory of historic change must

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address the question of how alternative projects arise, how resistance is articulated and how dominant structures are subverted. Theories of capitalist hegemony are incomplete without corresponding theories of counter-hegemony.46

Here, Robinson rehearses Gramsci’s distinction between a war of maneuver (frontal attack) and a war of position (struggle of trench warfare, or of attrition) as follows: A war of maneuver, associated with the traditional notions of revolution, can potentially succeed when the power that sustains the existing system is situated in a limited number of identifiable sites, like the police, military, etc. But the expansion of the state into new “private” and community realms under capitalism that Gramsci theorized, and the rise of a civil society in which the power of the dominant groups is anchored in ideological and cultural processes, implies that power is no longer limited to a number of sites and is more dispersed and multidimensional. The formal distinction between a war of position and a war of maneuver is clearly methodological, not real (organic), in the sense that social struggles involve both dimensions simultaneously. Which may be the most salient in strategies and practices of struggle is a matter of historical conjuncture and collective agency.47

Robinson convincingly argues that we must begin our anticapitalist struggle with a strategic war of position, the exercise of resistance in the sphere of civil society by popular classes who are able to avoid co-optation and mediation by the nation-state—and this means resistance at the points of accumulation, capitalist production, and the process of social reproduction. Robinson revealingly elaborates this position: Social conflicts linked to the reorganization of the world economy will lie at the heart of world politics in the twenty-first century. The challenge is how to reconstruct the social power of the popular classes worldwide in a new era in which such power is not mediated and organized through the nation-state. The universal penetration of capitalism through globalization draws all peoples not only into webs of market relations but also into webs of resistance.48

Drawing on the work of Kees van der Pijl, Robinson maintains that all three moments in the process of the subordination of society and nature to the reproduction of capital—original accumulation, the capitalist production process, and the process of social reproduction— generate its own form of “countermovement” of resistance and struggle. Consequently, it is to the social forces from below engaged

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in resistance at all three of these moments to which we should turn in anticipation when developing our own counter-hegemonic impulse. Robinson has established four fundamental requirements for an effective counter-hegemony that are worth repeating here. First, he argues that we urgently need to build a political force on a broader vision of social transformation that can link social movements and diverse oppositional forces. The resistance of popular classes needs to be unified through a broad and comprehensive “strategy of opposition to the broader structures that generate the particular conditions which each social movement and oppositional force is resisting.”49 The challenge for popular social movements is how to fuse political with social struggles through the development of political instruments that can extend to political society (the state) the counter-hegemonic space currently being opened up in civil society through mass mobilization. Popular classes have nothing to gain by limiting their struggles to local and isolated “sites” of oppression and forsaking the development of a larger project of transformation, a project that includes a struggle against the state. Here, it is important to “address how oppression and exploitation, and the immediate conditions around which popular sectors are struggling, are linked to and derive from a larger totality, that totality being global capitalism.”50 The organizational forms of a renovated left must include a commitment to the autonomy of social movements, to social change from the bottom up rather than the top down, to democratic principles and practices within organizations themselves, and to an abandonment of the old verticalism in favor of nonhierarchical practices. The second requirement for an effective counter-hegemony is building a viable socioeconomic alternative to global capitalism. To this end, Robinson asserts the following: Beyond calling for a mere change in the particular form of accumulation, a counter-hegemonic alternative needs to challenge the logic of the market in its program and ideology. If not, some new ideology and program designed from above by global elites, such as the so-called “Third Way” promulgated in the United states and the United Kingdom in the late 1990’s, may well allow the global capitalist bloc to retain the initiative as crises extend and to forestall the possibilities of more fundamental change. An anti-neo-liberal agenda, however important, must develop into an anti-capitalist—that is, socialist—alternative.51

The third requirement is that popular classes need to transnationalize their struggles. This means nothing less than expanding

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transnational civil society, which serves as an effective countermovement to global capitalism. Robinson further warns that the crisis and eventual collapse of neoliberalism may create the conditions favorable to the winning state power promoting an alternative. It is not clear, however, how effective national alternatives can be in transforming social structures, given the ability of transnational capital to utilize its structural power to impose its project even over states that are controlled by forces adverse to that project. The answer, for Robinson, is the challenging of the global elite “by accumulating counter-hegemonic forces beyond national and regional borders; to challenge that power from within an expanding transnational civil society.”52 In the wake of this aim, his fourth requirement calls on organic intellectuals to henceforth subordinate their work to and in the service of popular majorities and their struggles. In his latest book, A Theory of Global Capitalism, Robinson (2004) further elaborates on what a counter-hegemonic movement should look like.53 He importantly notes that fundamental change in a social order becomes possible when an organic crisis occurs, but that such an organic crisis of capitalism is no guarantee against social breakdown, authoritarianism, or fascism. What is necessary is a viable alternative that is in hegemonic ascendance—an appealing alternative to the existing capitalist social order that is perceived as preferable by a majority of society. Although the socialist alternative is unlikely to be considered a viable alternative by the majority of society any time soon, this should not dampen our efforts to bring us closer to that goal. It is precisely an unyielding commitment to the Other that gives revolutionary critical pedagogy—nourished by Marxist roots—its ethical exigency and its affirmative starting point. Furthermore, it prevents critical educators from being caught in an endless vortex of negativity that previously trapped many critical theorists. In the language of dialectics, revolutionary critical educators negate the negation inflicted on the oppressed. They do so from the perspective of the affirmation of the oppressed. Not only does this negation of the negation have a roborant effect on critical praxis, it is the very bulwark of revolutionary activity. As long as critical educators ignore the strategic centrality of class struggle, the more difficult it will be for critical pedagogy to become a powerful catalyst in the ongoing struggle for social democracy.54 Thus, we argue that critical revolutionary pedagogy needs to return to its Marxist roots; we do not use the concept of “returning” in the sense of going back to some prior or originary moment of a linear sequence in time. To return is not to regress but rather to move

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forward in awakening ourselves to our relationship with living history, which is both the source and destiny of the human subject: the self-transcendence of our species’ being. Our pedagogical project is directed toward a journey of self-discovery mediated by an infinite hope. Here, hope’s infinite movement does not transcend human history but is embodied in finite, sensuous human beings struggling for freedom. As in the case of Hegel’s true infinity, critical pedagogy’s subject of history moves in and through otherness in the direction of a circle, a movement that returns into itself in its journey of self-discovery. Bad infinity, on the other hand, is a movement lost in the externality of the infinite, one of endless repetition and alienation. It is represented by a straight line in which experiences are never reconciled, in which the historical subject is endlessly lost and never reaches self-recognition, and the basis for a return to the self is forever out of reach.55 Critical pedagogy, as we envision it, avoids the bad infinity of mainstream pedagogy in which truth and justice is sought outside of living history in the precincts of a mystical otherness. In contrast, we underscore our conviction that the subjunctive world of the “ought to be” must be wrought within the imperfect, partial, defective, and finite world of the “what is” by the dialectical act of absolute negation. It is a utopia in which the future is inherent in the material forces of the present. It is given birth out of the existing contradictions of the present moment. The critical pedagogy we are struggling to build works toward a transformation of the social through a form of concrete, as opposed to metaphysical, transcendence, through entering into the subjunctive mode of “what could be.” But in moving the struggle forward, we must not extend the concept of “what could be” to some ethereal hinterland beyond the reach of “what is.”56 It is because we do not look to the externality of the infinite but rather to the infinite within ourselves, within our own pedagogical project, that we can describe our pedagogy as concrete utopian rather than abstract utopian. To avoid falling into the pit of abstract utopianism, the realm of the “what is” must be inclusive of the “what could be”—which is, we maintain, the struggle for genuine universality (when history itself becomes a conscious and self-mediating process, that is, when history can unfold outside of the value form of labor under capitalism) rather than for an abstract universality (that exists outside of the historical time of real, sensuous human struggle in which concrete acts of labor are left behind). Here, our self-activity and subjective self-awareness recognizes humankind’s global interdependence and that only in our being for others can our own self-understanding be achieved. And even if the times are not propitious, we must nevertheless undertake an

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arduous and perhaps even harrowing journey in and through difference and return to a very different place from which we started out.

Notes 1. Several sections in this article appear in expanded form in Peter McLaren’s Capitalists and Conquerors, especially the chapter, “God’s Cowboy Warrior: Christianity, Globalization, and the False Prophets of Imperialism,” by Peter McLaren and Nathalia Jaramillo. 2. F. Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (1989): 3–18. 3. A defense of a Marxist-driven critical pedagogy against such attacks can be found in Peter McLaren’s (in press), “Let Them Blister Paint: Response to Rebecca Martusewiczs”; Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and Peter McLaren’s (2004), “Class Dismissed? Historical Materialism and the Politics of ‘Difference’ ”; Peter McLaren and Donna Houston’s (2005), “The Nature of Political Amnesia: Response to C.A. Bowers”; Donna Houston and Peter McLaren’s (2004) “Education and Environmental Crisis: Ecosocialist Critical Pedagogies in Theory and Praxis”; and in the opening chapter of Peter McLaren’s Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy Against Empire. 4. P. McLaren and R. Farahmandpur, “Critical Multiculturalism and Globalization. Some Implications for a Politics of Resistance,” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 15, 3 (1999): 27–46; P. McLaren and R. Farahmandpur, “Critical Pedagogy, Postmodernism, and the Retreat from Class: Towards a Contraband Pedagogy,” Theoria 93 (1999): 83–115; P. McLaren and R. Farahmandpur, “Reconsidering Marx in Post-Marxist Times: A Requiem for Postmodernism?” Educational Researcher 29, 3 (2000): 25–33; P. McLaren and R. Farahmandpur, “Educational Policy and the Socialist Imagination: Revolutionary Citizenship as a Pedagogy of Resistance,” Educational Policy 13, 3 (2001): 343–378; P. McLaren and R. Farahmandpur, “Teaching against Globalization and the New Imperialism: Toward a Revolutionary Pedagogy,” Journal of Teacher Education 52, 2 (2001): 136–150; P. McLaren and N. Jaramillo, “Critical Pedagogy as Organizational Praxis: Challenging the Demise of Civil Society in a Time of Permanent War,” Educational Foundations 16, 4 (2002): 5–32; P. McLaren and N. Jaramillo, “A Moveable Fascism: Fear and Loathing in the Empire of Sand,” Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies 4, 2 (2004): 223–236; P. McLaren and G. Martin, “The Legend of the Bush Gang: Imperialism, War and Propaganda,” Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies 4, 3 (2003): 281–303; G. Rikowski, After the Manuscript Broke off: Thoughts on Marx, Social Class and Education. Paper presented at the British Sociological Association Education Study Group, King’s College London (June 2001); G. Rikowski, The Battle in Seattle: Its Significance for Education (London: Tufnell, 2001).

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5. P. Allman, Revolutionary Social Transformation: Democratic Hopes, Radical Possibilities and Critical Education (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1999); P. Allman, Critical Education against Global Capitalism: Karl Marx and Revolutionary Critical Education (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2001). 6. P. McLaren, “Let Them Blister Paint: Response to Rebecca Martusewicz,” Educational Studies 39, 1 (2006): 91–94. 7. Cited in D. Domke, God Willing? Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the ‘War on Terror,’ and the Echoing Press (London, and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto, 2004), 112. 8. J. M. Rochester, “Critical Demagogues: The Writings of Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren,” Education Next (2003), http://www.educationnext.org/20034/pdf/77.pdf (accessed October 30, 2005). 9. G. Gonzalez, “The Ideology and Practice of Empire: The U.S., Mexico, and the Education of Mexican Immigrants,” Cultural Logic 4, 1 (2001), http://eserver.org/clogic/4-1/gonzalez.html (accessed October 30, 2005). 10. E. San Juan, Racism and Cultural Studies, Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Difference (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 11. S. Huntington, “This Hispanic Challenge,” Foreign Policy 141 (March/ April 2004): 30–46 (electronic version). 12. Ibid., 45. 13. Ibid., 44. 14. M. Gimenez, “Latino/ ‘Hispanic’—Who Needs a Name? The Case against Standardized Labeling,” in Latinos and Education, a Critical Reader, ed. A. Darder, R. Torres, and H. Gutierrez (New York: Routledge, 1997), 225–238. 15. Ibid., 231. 16. See Kincheloe and Steinberg, Changing multiculturalisms (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1997). 17. J. B. Foster, “The Renewing of Socialism,” Monthly Review 57, 3 (2005): 17. 18. S. Aronowitz, “Against Schooling: Education and Social Class,” Workplace: Online Journal for Academic Labor (2004), http://www.louisville.edu/ journal/workplace/issue6p1/aronowitz04.html (accessed October 30, 2005). 19. Ibid., Introduction, 1.1. 20. President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans, From Risk to Opportunity, March 31, 2003. 21. Ibid., 3. 22. L. F. Mirón and J. X. Inda, “Race as a Kind of Speech Act,” Cultural Studies: A Research Volume 5 (2000): 85–107. 23. President’s Advisory Commission, 3. 24. National Council of La Raza, State of Hispanic America 2004, February 29, 2004, 3, available at http://www.nclr.org.

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25. Ibid., 11. 26. N. Maldonado-Torres, “The Topology of Being and the Geopolitics of Knowledge: Modernity, Empire, Coloniality,” CITY Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 8, 1 (2004): 29–56. 27. G. Anzaldua, Borderlands/la frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 81. 28. J. Crawford, The Bilingual Education Act 1968–2002 (Spring 2002), http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jwcrawford/T7obit. html (accessed October 30, 2005). 29. J. Abedi and R. Dietel, Policy Brief: Challenges in the No Child Left Behind Act for English Language Learners (Los Angeles: National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing/UCLA, Winter 2004). 30. K. Gutierrez, J. Asato, M. Santos, and N. Gotanda, “Backlash Pedagogy: Language and Culture and the Politics of Reform,” The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 24, 4 (2002): 337. 31. D. Macedo, “The Colonialism of the English Only Movement,” Educational Researcher 29, 3 (2000): 15–24. 32. N. De Lissovoy and P. McLaren, “Educational ‘Accountability’ and the Violence of Capital: A Marxian Reading,” Journal of Education Policy 18, 2 (2003): 131–143. 33. A. Darder, Reinventing Paulo Freire (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2002), 135. 34. M. Gonzalez, “Postmodernism, Historical Materialism and Chicana/o Cultural Studies,” Science & Society 68, 2 (2004): 161–186. 35. Ibid., 180. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 181. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 182. 41. R. Dunayevskaya, Philosophy and Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973); Marx’s ‘Capital’ and Today’s Global Crisis (Detroit, MI: News and Letters, 1978); Marxism & Freedom: From 1776 until Today (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000); The Power of Negativity (Landham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002). 42. P. Hudis, “The Dialectical Structure of Marx’s Concept of ‘Revolution in Permanence,’ ” Capital & Class 70 (2000): 127–142; “The Death of the Death of the Subject,” Historical Materialism 12, 3 (2004): 147–168; “Working out a Philosophically Grounded Vision of the Future.” Paper presented to the 2004 Convention of News and Letters Committees, Chicago (March 2004); “Directly and Indirectly Social Labor: What Kind of Human Relations can Transcend Capitalism?” Paper presented at a series on “Beyond Capitalism,” Chicago (March 2005); “Organizational Responsibility for Developing a Philosophically Grounded Alternative to Capitalism.” Paper presented to the National Plenum of News and Letters Committees, Chicago (September 2005).

78 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55.

56.

P e t e r Mc L a r e n a n d N at h a l i a E . J a r a m i l l o Hudis, 2000. Ibid. Dunayevskaya, 2002. W. I. Robinson, Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change, and Globalization (London: Verso, 2003), 319. Ibid., 319–320. Ibid. Ibid., 321. Ibid., 322. Ibid. Ibid., 324. W. I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). V. Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and P. McLaren, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of Race and ‘Difference,’ ” Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies 3, 2 (2003): 148–175. D. McNally, “The Dual Form of Labor in Capitalist Society and the Struggle over Meaning: Comments on Postone,” Historical Materialism 12, 3 (2004): 189–208. B. Gulli, “The Folly of Utopia,” Situations 1, 1 (2005): 161–191.

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The much anticipated peace dividends with the end of the cold war

evaporated as the twenty-first century was ushered with unimaginable human sufferings that ranged from crimes against humanity to preemptive wars under the guise of the spread of democracy. The United States, as the sole super power, and with much complicity of Western allies, has given the Orwellian view of the world a new meaning where the “unreason of reason” has been naturalized into common sense—a common sense that rationalizes the killings of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians as the necessary price to export and impose democracy while torture and the violation of Geneva conventions are legitimized by the dominant ideological propaganda machine that has largely reduced the citizenry to the role of mere spectators in the theater of democracy. The ideological propaganda apparatus has so anesthetized the citizenry to the point that a very large segment of the population is unable to differentiate myth from reality. This inability pushes us, more and more, to a perpetual flirtation with historical hypocrisy—a process that also enables us to falsely reconcile the enormous contradictions inherent in most contemporary democracies. In other words, while the “bewildered herd” is subject to ideological mechanisms that undermine independent thought, a prerequisite for the Orwellian “manufacture of consent,” policy-makers and the educated class unabashedly labor to undermine democracy so as to guarantee the maintenance of the Western cultural hegemony. These policy-makers aggressively promote schools as “institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young.”1 Noam Chomsky cites the creation of the Trilateral Commission whose members— among them former president Jimmy Carter—argued that schools

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should be institutions for indoctrination, “for imposing obedience, for blocking the possibility of independent thought, and they play an institutional role in a system of control and coercion.”2 While Western capitalist hegemonic forces insidiously work to empty out the substantivity of democracy by reducing it to ritualistic voting exercises designed to rectify elite decisions, they expect societies that suffered from centuries of colonialism and exploitation to implement the Western prepackaged democracy when these societies are forced to spend precious resources in fighting civil wars and political instability fueled by external powers and market interests that cynically demand democracy. Thus, the term “democracy” is not to be understood within the historical and cultural contexts of each country but rather as a ready-made, Western-developed democracy kit characterized by a blind embrace of asymmetrical market forces, required to be uncritically implemented without analysis or regard to suitability. In this sense, democracy precludes the development of a well-thought-out economic plan designed for the general welfare of all people rather than the interests of the ruling elites, which makes this prepackaged democracy a figment of the Western imagination. What good does a ritualistic voting practice do when the vast majority of citizens remain voiceless, at risk of dying of hunger, and lacking access to housing, health care, and education? By stripping democratic practices that ensure the welfare of all people and reducing it only to a theater event of periodic election, the Western-developed democracy kit reproduces values that are enormously undemocratic. Even the ritualistic theatrical election is not free from glaring contradictions to the degree that if the voters were to elect a candidate that does not fit the profile determined by the prepackaged democracy kit, the elite policy-makers move quickly to undermine the will of the voters. That was the case in Chile where Henry Kissinger declared the following: “I don’t see why we should have to stand by and let a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.”3 The tragedy for Chile and the democratically elected President Salvador Allende is that the United States not only did not stand by them but also engaged in countering them by undemocratic measures that would address Kissinger’s worries “that a successful economic development [in Chile], where the economy producing benefits for the general population—not just profits for private corporations—would have a contagious effect.”4 Kissinger’s worries were put to rest when former President Richard Nixon declared that the United States would “make the [Chilean] economy scream”5 and, according to the U.S. ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry, “to do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty.”6 As it has been

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amply recorded by history, the punishment to Chileans for exercising their democratic rights to vote for the candidate of their choice involved a CIA supported “military coup . . . and the [Allende] government was overthrown—and thousands of people were being imprisoned, tortured and slaughtered—the economy aid which had been cancelled immediately began to flow again. As a reward for the military junta’s achievement in reversing Chilean democracy, the US gave massive support to the government.”7 Instead of the crippling notion of democracy where schools function as “institutions for the indoctrination of the young,” where the citizens are anesthetized and alienated so as to accept that their government engage in horrendous crimes against humanity, as the Chilean case attests, we should embrace a radical democracy where the democratization of education is a sine qua non of civic and structural democratization. Democracy and economic development cannot become a reality without an educated and engaged citizenry whose skills and agency are of paramount value in nation reconstruction and nation building. By the same token, democracy is unachievable without economic development for all people that can guarantee sustained development of infrastructures in the areas of health, education, and housing. The failure to embrace radical democratic practices will only lead to a system of coercion where teachers cannot stray from the official curriculum in an attempt to liberate themselves and their students from Walter Lippmann’s dictum that “the public must be put in its place [in a democracy and this can be fundamentally achieved] through the manufacture of consent, [a] self-conscious art and regular organ of popular government.”8 In order to achieve the goal of maintaining the facade of democracy while instituting mechanisms that undemocratically undermine the ideals of participatory democracy, conservative as well as many liberal intellectuals argue for “measures to discipline the institutions responsible for ‘the indoctrination of the young’—schools, universities, churches, and the like—and perhaps even through government control of the media itself—censorship does not suffice.” 9 Within a framework that views true participatory democracy as a form of “crisis of democracy,” schools play a crucial role in “the manufacture of consent” through the imposition of a pedagogy of lies that makes most teachers and administrators alike unable to see the obvious as they tailor their work to “engineer consent” for students’ consumption. According to Noam Chomsky, the inability to see the obvious represents “a real sign of deep indoctrination [in] that you can’t understand elementary thoughts that any l0-year-old can understand. That’s real indoctrination. So for him [the indoctrinated

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individual] it’s kind of like a theological truth, a truth of received religion.”10 In many respects, the claim that schools are consciously engaged in a pedagogy of lies to serve the interests of the dominant elite is immensely more obvious in an era of preemptive wars, chronic violation of international laws, and a system of coercion and lies. In fact, government lies have been so naturalized into the mainstream discourse that it is now common sense to expect the ruling elite and policy-makers to lie with impunity. For example, Alejandro, a nine-year-old boy, could readily see through the lies that constituted the foundation of President Bush’s rationale to invade Iraq: “Why is President Bush going to war to bring freedom to Iraq and he is passing laws to take away freedom at home?”11 If It had not been for the “logical illogicality” in the curtailment of freedom at home so as to bring freedom to Iraq, most people would find it shocking that a nine-yearold boy could see clearly through the obvious contradictions contained in the current dominant discourse attempting to legitimize an illegal war against Iraq while the media and most Americans—who, by and large, have received higher levels of education—cannot see, for instance, how the Patriot Act that was overwhelmingly enacted by Congress aggressively undermines the Constitution, limiting guaranteed freedom of association and speech. In the name of “security,” most Americans willingly accepted President Bush’s directive for neighbors to spy on neighbors, for citizens to lose protection from racial and ethnic profiling, and for citizens and noncitizens alike to be jailed indefinitely without being charged with a crime and without the right to legal counsel—characteristics that are reminiscent of totalitarian states that we have no difficulty recognizing and are eager to denounce whenever and wherever they occur so long these totalitarian measures are practiced by official enemy states. For instance, the U.S. media had a field day covering and denouncing through editorials Fidel Castro’s cracking down on dissent a few years ago. The crackdown led to long-term jail sentences for several dozen people under the pretext that they were organizing to undermine the government and that they had also received U.S. aid to maximize their goals. Castro’s regime at least understood that a trial would be necessary to provide the dissenters with the appearance of legal venues to defend themselves in a court of law. In truth, this legal window dressing could have been nothing more than an attempt to ameliorate Cuba’s undemocratic image abroad and at home. This is a pretense that the Bush administration finds unnecessary given the effectiveness of its propaganda apparatus to control the “bewildered herd,” meaning the U.S. citizenry, in a state of quasi-perpetual stupidification: “From

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a propaganda point of view, the most powerful state in history needs no justification or serious arguments for its actions: declaration of noble intent should suffice,”12 such as ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction. When the WMD rationale collapsed under the weight of its falsehoods proven even by official documents, all the propaganda apparatus had to do is just announce another noble intent— that of bringing democracy to Iraq. It is immaterial that democracy was being imposed undemocratically through violent means or that the supposed freedom given to Iraqis meant curtailing freedom at home, counting on the fact that the vast majority of the intellectual class and the mass media would fall in line. According to the journalist, editor, and former assistant secretary of state in the Carter administration, Holding Carter, “[it’s] a ‘lead-pipe cinch,’ . . . the mass media in America have an overwhelming tendency to jump up and down and bark in concert whenever the White House—any White House—snaps its fingers.”13 The draconian measures legalized under the Patriot Act and supported by both Republicans and Democrats smack of the totalitarianism that is summarily denounced by the American administration and the public when they are practiced by countries that are considered “rogue states.” When totalitarianism is practiced by friendly countries, such as Chile under Pinochet, Nicaragua under Samoza, Philippines under Marcos, and Cuba under Batista, the U.S. government and the compliant corporate media usually engage in a social construction of not seeing the state terrorism these dictators practice against their own people, often with the support of the United States. The shrinking of civil rights through the Patriot Act has aroused little dissent from most intellectuals, and the mass media have very much toed the administration’s line as exemplified by a piece published in the Washington Post that cites “FBI and Justice Department investigators as saying that ‘traditional civil liberties may have to be aside if they are to extract information about Sept. 11 attacks and terrorist plans.’ ”14 While most Americans may rationalize that, given the aftermath of September 11, these undemocratic measures are necessary to protect Americans and their hard-earned freedom, which, they blindly believe, is unparalleled in the world, they fail to understand that, according to policy-makers and the ruling intellectuals that advise them, freedom can be freely enjoyed so long as self-censorship would guarantee that the policy-makers continue, as Walter Lippmann said, “to live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd . . . ignorant and meddlesome outsiders [whose role in democracy should be] spectators not participants [in the democratic process].”15

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Hence, the current curtailment of democratic rights through imposed censorship and denial of civil rights is not a temporary aberration that will eventually correct itself and prove that, after all, the democratic system works, but is part and parcel of the very design of American democracy when, for example, James Madison, one of the founding father opined that “power must be delegated to the ‘wealth of the nation,’ ‘the more capable of men,’ who understand that the role of the government is ‘to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.’ ”16 What appears to be an occasional aberration in otherwise functional democracy is, in reality, the fulfillment of the need for corrective measures to ensure the continuation of undemocratic principles that shape and continue to reshape the appearance of democracy. The periodic democratic measures that abound in the history of the United States range from the “civilizing” crusade to impose a quasigenocide of American Indians, to the denial of rights to women, to preemptive wars (both overt and covert) against countries that flirted with nationalistic fervor (Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, among others) that could affect U.S. national interests (meaning the interests of the business class), to McCarthyism, and to the Patriotic Act and the now the perpetual war on terror. If it were not for the historical amnesia partially imposed by the selective teaching of history, written always from the victors’ point of view and aided by a compliant media, one could easily make the linkage between historical events in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of reality. The ability to make the necessary linkages would also help to unveil the reasons lies and contradictions are more readily embraced by the educated class to the degree that the more educated and specialized individuals become within a domesticating model of education, the more interest they have invested in the dominant system that provides them with special privileges and rewards. For this reason, we often see people, whose consciousness has not been totally atrophied, fail, sometimes willfully, to see the obvious contradiction that the nine-year-old Alejandro readily saw in Bush’s hypocritical justification to launch an illegal war against Iraq. In most cases, these individuals begin to believe the lies, and in their roles as functionaries of the state, they propagate these same lies. That is why over 60 percent of college students initially supported the war against Iraq and believed the administration’s contention of a linkage between Iraq and Al Qaeda. According to Howard Zinn, these college students “didn’t get anything in their education that would prepare them to look critically at what the government says, so they listen to the government say again

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and again that something is true or hint and suggest and make connections, and then when the president denies it in one statement, it’s not enough to penetrate what has already become a mountain of lies.”17 The erstwhile Bush administration’s lies had reached such phantasmagorical proportions that there was little urgency on the part of policy-makers to even attempt to mask them. Empirical evidence is now considered immaterial, inconvenient distractions, and these officials count on the fact that the mere repetition of lies, no matter how outlandish, will be eventually believed by the citizenry. Take, for example, the lie that attempted to link Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda. Even President Bush has had to disavow his earlier pronouncements concerning Saddam Hussein’s link with Al Qaeda, although he continues to use language manipulation that, on the one hand, moves away from his initial categorical proposition that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda and, on the other, reconstructs an association by proposing, instead of a link, a relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, a rhetorical mechanism designed to achieve the same ends: “[T]he reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda [is] because there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.”18 President Bush demonstrated little patience for contrary evidence and he summarily dismissed any impertinent fact by just declaring that it is so because I said so. He could also count on his vice president, Dick Cheney, to continue to disregard all official evidence that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda by contending that the “evidence is overwhelming” of a “relationship,”19 just by saying so without an ounce of proof to support his claim. Notice that linkagemaking is ideologically manipulated, and the willful decision to make or not make linkages is also determined by ideology. That is, the very policy-makers in the Bush administration who were the architects of the illegal war against Iraq were eager to establish linkages between Iraq and Al Qaeda by providing only unsubstantiated hearsay evidence of a supposed meeting between Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 terrorist attack, and Iraqi officials in the Czech Republic. However, if opponents of the Iraq war were to suggest that there are official documents that prove a formal linkage and support for Saddam Hussein’s terrorism against his people as well as against Iran by the same architects of the current Iraq war who conveniently have turned Saddam Hussein from a former friend into evil incarnate, the proposed linkage would certainly be viewed as unpatriotic and antiAmerican, even though there are photographs of Donald Rumsfeld, the then secretary of defense, shaking hands with Saddam Hussein

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when he was sent to Iraq as “Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East during the period of the worst terror there and was delegated to establish firmer relations with Saddam Hussein.”20 The mere suggestion that Donald Rumsfeld was enormously more linked with Saddam Hussein’s terror than Mohammed Atta would invite a barrage of assault from policy-makers and the mass media, as James Rubin, a former State Department spokesman, advocated that we “need to spotlight the ‘excuse makers.’ ”21 Since it’s a “lead-pipe cinch” for “the mass media in America . . . to jump up and down and bark in concert whenever the White House . . . snaps its fingers,” it should be unsurprising that Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times would take a cue from James Rubin and castigate those he calls apologists: “[A]fter every major terrorist incident, the excuse makers come out to tell us why imperialism, Zionism, colonialism, or Iraq explains why the terrorists attacked. These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed.”22 Thus, for Friedman, historical analysis is confused with justification as he preaches the virtues of open societies without acknowledging that his own framework of freedom of speech in an open society is undermined by his aggressive exclusion of historical analysis that could illuminate the root cause of terrorism. According to Friedman, “[w]hen you live in an open society like London, where anyone with a grievance can publish an article, run for office or start a political movement, the notion of blowing up a busload of innocent civilians in response to Iraq is somehow ‘understandable’ is outrageous.”23 Just as outrageous as the current suppression in the New York Times of historical facts that point to U.S. support of Saddam Hussein’s regime of terror (mostly against his own people): The warmth of the relations [between Saddam Hussein and the Reagan/Bush administration] was indicated when a delegation of senators, led by majority leader and future Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, visited Saddam in April 1990. They conveyed President Bush’s greetings and assured Saddam that his problems did not lie with the U.S. government [emphasis added] but with “the haughty and pampered press.” Senator Alan Simpson advised Saddam “to invite them to come here and see for themselves” to overcome their misconceptions. Dole assured Saddam that a commentator on Voice of America who had been critical of him had been removed [emphasis added].24

Just as outrageous is the removal of the Voice of America commentator just because, according to Bob Dole, he “had been critical” of

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Saddam Hussein when he was considered a valuable friend of the Bush I administration—a friendship that lasted “long after Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds” and translated into the issuance of “a national security directive declaring that ‘normal relations between the United States and Iraq would serve our long-term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and Middle East.’ [Former President Bush] took the occasion of the invasion of Panama shortly after to lift a ban on loans to Iraq.”25 If President Bush junior were to apply universally and not selectively his laws governing supporting and abetting terrorist organizations, he should have arrested his father, President Bush senior, given the considerable aid his administration provided Saddam Hussein, who oversaw despicable state terrorism that ranged from the gassing of the Kurds to the use of chemical weapons against Iran, as the U.S. military kept providing significant intelligence aid during the Iran/Iraq war. Instead of being rewarded for their complicity with state terrorism and crimes against humanity, the following officials of the Reagan/Bush administration would have to be tried and convicted in a court of law, given the current promulgation of antiterrorist legislation and the Patriot Act. Noam Chomsky provides a few compelling examples26 that would suffice: 1. John Negroponte, who ran the embassy in Honduras that was the main base for the terrorist attacks on Nicaragua. He was duly chosen to oversee the diplomatic component of the current phase of the war on terror at the United Nations. 2. Elliot Abrams, who supervised the Central America “war on terror.” After pleading guilty to misdemeanor counts in the Irancontra affair, Abrams received a Christmas Eve pardon from President Bush I in 1992 and was appointed by Bush II “to lead the National Security Council’s office for Near East and Northern African Affairs, . . . efforts to promote peace in the troubled region,” a phrase drawn from Orwell, in light of the record. 3. Otto Reich, who was charged with running an illegal covert domestic propaganda campaign against Nicaragua, was appointed temporary assistant secretary for Latin American affairs. 4. Roger Noriega, who replaced Reich as assistant secretary and “served in the State Department during the Reagan administration, helping forge fiercely anti-Communist policies toward Latin America”; in translation, terrorist atrocities. 5. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is now cast as administration moderate, served as national security advisor during the final stage

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of the terror, atrocities, and undermining of diplomacy in the 1980s in Central America, and provided support for the apartheid regime in South Africa. 6. John Poindexter, who was in charge of the Iran-contra crimes and was convicted in 1990 of five felony counts (overturned mostly on technicalities). Bush II placed him in charge of directing the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program, under which, the ACLU observes, “every American—from the Nebraskan farmer to the Wall Street banker—will find themselves under the accusatory cyber-stare of an all powerful national security apparatus.” To this list we could easily add a cast of characters in the U.S. government who have been involved in supporting, aiding, and abetting state terrorism, from Henry Kissinger, given his direct involvement with state terrorism in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, and Angola, among other nations, to Oliver North, for his involvement with the Contras, a proxy terrorist organization that committed incalculable terrorist atrocities against mostly Nicaraguan civilians that, according to Thomas Walk, “a leading academic historian [who] points out . . . a death toll that would be comparable to 2.25 million dead in the United States, relative to population. Reagan State Department official and historian Thomas Carothers observes that for Nicaragua, the toll ‘on per capita terms was significantly higher than the number of U.S. persons killed in the U.S. Civil War and all the wars of the twentieth century.’ ”27 Material evidence from the official records against these individuals prove that complicity with state terrorism is abundant, and yet they have all been rewarded by a doctrinal system that is simultaneously trying to link individuals and organizations with retail terrorists in the Muslim world no matter how flimsy the circumstantial evidence maybe. Take the seventy-five years in prison given by a New York judge to Sheik Mohammed Ali Hassan al Moayad who, according to the Boston Globe, “bragged of terror ties . . . [and] was convicted on charges of conspiring to support Al Qaeda and Hamas . . . and attempting to support Al Qaeda.”28 If we were to juxtapose “charges of conspiring to support” and “bragg[ing] of terrorism” with the criminal involvement of Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state under President Richard Nixon, whose complicity with Pinochet in overthrowing the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in which over 3,000 Chileans were killed is well documented, we would see the hypocrisy that informs the current Patriot Act. According to Kissinger himself, in a conversation with Pinochet, he told him that “[t]here is merit in what you say. It is

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a curious time in the U.S. . . . It is unfortunate. We have been through Vietnam and Watergate. We have to wait until the [1976] elections. We welcome the overthrow of the Communist-inclined government here. We are not out to weaken your position.”29 While the United States summarily dismisses the complicity of its officials with crimes against humanity; it is merciless in pursuing enemy terror suspects whose crimes, in many instances, pale when compared to the documented atrocities inflicted on other nations by the U.S. foreign policy and imperialistic ambitions. When the evidence against enemy terror suspects cannot withstand the burden of proof in court, the situation is remedied by labeling the suspects “enemy combatants” without ever being charged of any crime while denying them access to legal counsel in a democratic and open society. In other instances, the United States has little trouble sending terror suspects to countries where they are tortured so as to extract information. The open discussion and analysis of the historical facts listed above are summarily suppressed by the defenders of freedom in open societies, such as The New Times’s Thomas L. Friedman, who, while pontificating that “anyone with a grievance can publish an article,” viscerally denounces anyone whose grievances entail the exposure of historical hypocrisy via analysis that makes the necessary linkages between mainstream rhetoric about the “war on terror” and our shameful history of supporting state terrorism throughout the world. The question that remains is why highly educated individuals continued to support Bush and his administration officials, who rapaciously dismissed the opinions of ten million people worldwide who marched to protest Bush’s fabricated lies as he and his administration, aided by a compliant media, were whipping the citizens’ fervor for an illegal war that violated all international conventions to which the United States is a signatory. One could argue that most of the individuals who continued to support Bush’s lies were kept ignorant and are victims of a deceptive ideology. However, I believe that ignorance is never innocent and these individuals willfully refuse to recognize the falsehoods inherent in the rationale to invade Iraq. They do so because, in many respects, these individuals have already invested in an ideological system from which they expect to receive some rewards. These same individuals will have little difficulty recognizing lies and falsehoods from official enemy countries. In fact, they eagerly justify the U.S. atrocities in many countries by pointing to the totalitarian nature of their regimes and the lack of freedom their citizens have. In order to reconcile their conscience with the blatant lies that were being told by the Bush administration, conservatives and many

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liberals devised mechanisms that legitimized their often inglorious postures by either making some discussions taboo (if you want to get along, avoid discussing politics) or engaging in some form of censorship. This is certainly true of the intellectuals who have historically played a shameful role in support of the doctrinal system. Given their less-than-honorable posture, one can question whether they should be considered intellectuals at all, which points to the fact that intellectualism is no guarantor of democratic ideals or civilizing values, given that Western civilization, according to Noam Chomsky, with its unabashed claim to superiority in the arts, science, and enlightenment, has committed the most horrendous crimes against humanity unparalleled by any other civilization in the history of the worldcrimes against humanity, which include genocide, slavery, and wholesale exploitation of other human beings to satiate greed and avarice. Self-censorship is usually practiced by liberals who easily proclaim the virtues of social justice, freedom, and democracy while maintaining privileges extracted from the very structures engaged in discriminatory practices and the violation of democratic principles. I will return to the paradoxical posture of liberals in the last section of this chapter. Self censorship becomes essential in an open society that has to maintain the aura of democracy while creating conditions to “control the mind”—a process that is blatantly achieved through coercion and violence in totalitarian states that make no pretense to democratic ideals. Self-censorship manifests itself in what types of discussions are considered appropriate and what topics would be labeled taboo. In other words, any analysis of the root cause of terrorism that would move beyond Bush’s astute naiveté embedded in his question “why do they hate us?” would be considered by conservatives and many liberals as unpatriotic, apologetic, and anti-American, as the quotation from Thomas L. Friedman exemplifies. Self-censorship manifests itself also in the whitewashing of language via euphemisms as a process of not naming reality for what it is. That is why terms such as oppression, ruling class, and praxis are seldom found in the popular press and the educational literature and become, for instance, disenfranchised, affluent people, and practice, respectively. While the mass media and educational institutions make abundant references to middle-class and working-class issues, they simultaneously deny the existence of class in the United States. What would not be allowed is the reference to proletariat as a class category to the degree that it has been associated with Marxism, a taboo term in the open American society. The proletariat’s euphemistic replacement, the working class, fails to capture the substance and complicity encapsulated in what it

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means to be workers “possessing neither capital nor means of production . . . [who] . . . must earn their living by selling their labor”30 under exploitative conditions and antagonistic working relations with owners who control the means of production. The term working class also conjures up a false reality in which the inhabitants of the middle-class category would have to be classified as nonworkers. Most liberals have an aversion to critical language and viscerally dismiss the use of critical language by falsely labeling critical as too theoretical (meaning not practical enough). This was evident during a discussion with a colleague concerning the role of language in class demarcation when, after exhausting her arguments to deny the existence of class in the United States, she proclaimed: “That’s why I don’t do theory”—a remark that forced me to point out to her that she, in fact, does theory. Her problem does not lie with theory but with the fact that she does bad theory. Bad theory involves its denial by those who falsely claim to be engaged in practice only, particularly when the denial of theory truncates questions that could unveil the raison d’etre of the very denial of theory. It does not matter that the more polite euphemism preferred by most liberals invariably distorts reality by disabling the appropriate association between a linguistic term and its contextual referent. It does not matter that practice is never able to capture the concept inherent in praxis, which requires both critical reflection and action in a process that leads to transformation. What matters is that praxis is Marxist-sounding and thus usually dismissed even by many liberals who consider themselves progressives. It does not matter that a euphemistic language fails to capture the reality to which it pretends to refer, thus enabling the creation of mechanisms for mass deception. What matters is that language remains always polite within the bounds of “civility,” as it abundantly was when Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic Council, used frontal language to characterize the behaviors of Republicans as ideology. He was castigated by conservative Republicans, but his latest critics came from among his Democratic colleagues such as Joseph Lieberman, the senator from the state of Connecticut, who considered his pronouncements as going over the top. While Democrats who are considered liberals aggressively engage in a form of self-censorship that avoids naming reality for what it is, Republicans applaud their in-your-face approach to language use, as evident when Vice President Cheney told Senator Patrick Lahey from Vermont to “fuckoff” in the halls of Congress and no one, including the media, ever demanded that Cheney apologize for using what some commentators termed “colorful language.” Thus, language

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sanitation has the consequence of also bleaching important concepts that could have provided the citizenry with tools to read reality more comprehensively rather than blindly consuming the lies that characterized the modus operandi of the Bush administration. Hence, it is no coincidence that the use of language that deceives is characterized by the main stream media as “plain talk” while the use of critical language is perceived as caustic. What is clear is that this form of manipulation of language serves the very dominant ideology many liberals claim to contest and, in the process, they either betray their avowed social justice political project or unveil the hypocrisy that shapes and informs the rhetoric of their liberal discourse. It is difficult to work against social injustice within a discourse that censors a language that fractures the very reality of oppression by making terms such as oppression, subordination, and the ruling class, among others, taboos, while replacing these terms with euphemisms that are, on one hand, more palatable and, on the other, complicit with the reproduction of the oppressive conditions inherent in the asymmetry of power relations between oppressors and oppressed. In an editorial urging that “hate mongers” need to be exposed, Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times argued that “words matter.” True enough. Words matter not only when they are used to denounce political enemies. They should also matter when exposing our own hate mongers, from the Christian-right evangelist Pat Robertson’s demonization of Muslims and their culture to President Bush’s announcement of a crusade against Muslims under the rubric “war on terror.” Words must matter to point out the racism of General Westmoreland, the commander in the Vietnam War, who voiced that “[t]he Orient doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Western. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.”31 Because “life is cheap in the Orient,” there is, perhaps, no contradiction in the White House’s assertion that “the invasion was to save the Iraq people from Saddam [ignoring the irony] . . . since we have bombed and killed thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Iraq civilians to ‘save’ them.”32 Words matter to the degree that they create images where, according to Henry Giroux, “effects on both a small and large scale are increasingly defined and mediated through various regimes of representation (defining good and evil, civilization and barbarism, etc.) and fields of vision deployed by the media.”33 The creation of false binarisms designed to demonize the other, a tool effectively used by President Bush in his official war on terror (i.e., the axis of evil), is also astutely deployed by Osama Bin Laden in his attempt to legitimize his war against the “infidels.” Thus, the creation of images

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through words and their subsequent relationships has had the consequence of impugning all Muslims for the crimes committed by extremist Muslims—a form of extremism found also in other religions, races, and cultures (i.e., the terrorism committed by the white American McVeigh in the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing more than one hundred innocent civilians, including dozens of children): The leap from deviant Muslins perpetrating atrocities to a religion being impugned for the sins of its supposed adherents is breath-taking in its audacity. This distinction has become critical ever since the “showdown with Saddam” transmuted into the “war on terror.” With the daily mind-numbing imagery of maniacal Muslin “insurgents” savaging troops and civilians alike, a transformation rapidly took place: The problem was just not Muslin terrorists but an “evil” Islam itself. This is a theme broadcast with malevolent glee by talk shows on a daily basis thereby intensifying suspicion, fear, contempt, and hatred of Islam. Demonizing Islam makes it the enemy in the “war on terror.”34

The manufacturing of a permanent evil enemy to justify a perpetual war on terror not only has had the effect of infusing a paralyzing fear in the citizenry who are constantly reminded of a pending danger in airports, train stations, and the ever-frequent color-coded alerts manipulated by Homeland Security. It has had also the consequence of distancing the citizenry from the disturbing fact that our war on terror has killed more than 100,000 civilians in Iraq alone, including women and children, an index of carnage that far surpasses the atrocities suffered in the destruction of the World Trade Center. The manipulation of the media, particularly visual media, has led to the “emergence of the spectacle of terrorism [which] is all the more significant since, as novelist and cultural critic Marina Warner puts it, ‘in the realm of culture, the character of our representations matter most urgently. . . . The images we circulate have the power to lead events, not only report them [and] the new technical media have altered experience and become interwoven with consciousness itself.’ ”35 Self-censorship is found also in the refuge that a very large percentage of Americans find in infotainment, a new media mechanism to divert the attention of millions of Americans from the fact that tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed, “nearly 1,800 American men and women have died in Iraq . . . 30,000 children die every day from preventable causes, entertainment (and I am not talking about ‘The Daily Show’) is a concern for idiots.”36 Entertainment

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as autocensorship is well understood by totalitarian leaders who aggressively attempt to keep the populace distracted through sports and other means of immediate gratification. According to Noam Chomsky, this form of autocensorship begins at an early age through socialization that is also a form of indoctrination that works against independent thought in favor of obedience. Schools function as a mechanism of socialization. The goal is to keep people from asking questions that matter about important issues that directly affect them and others. . . . But schools are by no means the only instrument of indoctrination. Other institutions work in tandem to reinforce the indoctrination process. Let’s take what we are fed by television. We are offered to watch a string of empty-minded shows that are designed as entertainment but function to distract people from understanding their real problems of identifying the sources of their problems. Instead, those mindless shows socialize the viewer to become a passive consumer. One way to deal with an unfulfilled life is to buy more and more stuff. The shows exploit people’s emotional needs and keep them disconnected from the needs of others. As public spaces are more and more dismantled, schools and the relatively few public spaces left work to make good consumers.37

While the country was mourning the tragedy of 9/11, important questions about this horror were not permitted to be raised, and linkages between the destruction of the World Trade Center and U.S. foreign policy were strictly forbidden through media-imposed censorship as President Bush eagerly urged Americans to show their patriotism and go out and shop. Words should matter in exposing the anesthetization of Americans through entertainment and shopping, which represent mechanisms designed to assuage their ever-increasing alienation and induced fear. President Bush’s insistence that Americans go shopping as a diversion from their alienated lives not only unmasks the ugliness of the ethics of the market where consumerism empties out humanity but his eagerness to have Americans shop as an appropriate response to a national tragedy is part and parcel of all oppressive ideologies, as Freire succinctly writes: In their unrestrained eagerness to possess, the oppressors develop conviction that it is possible for them to transform everything into objects of their purchasing power; hence their strictly materialist concept of existence. Money is the measure of all things, and profits the primary goal. For the oppressors, what is worthwhile is to have more—always

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more—even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing. For them, to be is to have and to be the class of the “haves.”38

Notes 1. Noam Chomsky, Language and Politics, ed. C. P. Otero (New York: Black Rose Books, 1988), 671. 2. Ibid. 3. Noam Chomsky, Secrets, Lies and Democracy (Tucson, Arizona: Odonian Press, 1994), 94. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 92. 6. Ibid., 92–93. 7. Ibid., 93. 8. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004), 6. 9. Ibid., 7. 10. Noam Chomsky, Language and Politics, ed. C. P. Otero (New York: Black Rose Books, 1988), 681. 11. Howard Zinn with Donaldo Macedo, Howard Zinn on Democratic Education (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), 1. 12. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, 124. 13. Ibid., 117. 14. Alexander Cockburn, “Green Lights for Torture,” The Nation, May 31, 2004, 9. 15. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, 6. 16. Ibid., 7. 17. Howard Zinn with Donaldo Macedo, Howard Zinn on Democratic Education, 54. 18. Jonathan Schell, “The Lexicographers,” The Nation, July 12, 2004, 10. 19. Ibid., 10. 20. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, 106. 21. Thomas L. Friedman, “Expose the Haters,” International Herald Tribune, July 23–24, 2005, 5. 22. Ibid., 5. 23. Ibid., 5. 24. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, 112. 25. Ibid., 111–112. 26. Ibid., 106. 27. Ibid., 98. 28. The Boston Globe, July 29, 2005, A2. 29. Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (New York: Verso, 2002), 70. 30. The American Heritage Dictionary, 990.

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31. Derrick Z. Jackson, “The Westmoreland Mind-Set,” The Boston Globe, July 20, 2005, A13. 32. Ibid., A13. 33. Henry A. Giroux, “Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism: Rethinking Politics in the Society of the Image.” Typewritten manuscript. 34. Abdul Cader Asmal, “Foe Isn’t Islam, It’s Binladenism,” The Boston Globe, August 3, 2005, A11. 35. Henry A. Giroux, “Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism.” 36. Wendy Button, “Speechwriters, Cool the Rhetoric,” The Boston Globe, July 30, 2005, A13. 37. Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on MisEducation (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000), 24–25. 38. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum International, 2005), 58.

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A C r i t ic a l P e dag og y of Hope i n Ti m es of Despa i r 1 Ramin Farahmandpur

Introduction We live in times of empire building and imperial aggression; times when the rhetoric of war is used to silence the opponents of the military invasion and occupation of Iraq; times when hate-filled radio hosts, Fox News television pundits, and fundamentalist preachers join forces to slander public intellectuals and antiwar activists such as Ward Churchill, Cindy Sheehan, and Pennsylvania House of Representative John Murtha, who muster the courage to raise moral and ethical objections against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan; times when the Administration continues to violate international human rights treaties by operating secret CIA prisons (known as “black sites” often hidden in Soviet-era compounds in Eastern Europe) where “enemy combatants” were tortured; and times when the National Security Agency is pointing its sophisticated arsenal of high-tech espionage devices on American citizens inside the nation’s borders. As neoliberalism triumphantly parades down Wall Street, and as Milton Friedman, Francis Fukuyama, and Jeffrey Sachs, among others—the architects and ideologues of global capitalism—march behind in self-congratulatory gestures, the discourses of democracy that permeate our contemporary public sphere have shifted so far to the right that moral and ethical debates not directly linked to the Manichean struggle between good and evil have been effectively sidelined, if not permanently excluded. Here corporations relentlessly seek the highest margins of profits on their investments without any consideration for the welfare of the millions of the working poor; education, synchronized to the pulse of Wall Street, is forcing millions

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of students in public schools to compete against one another by taking high-stakes standardized tests; and the erstwhile Bush gang and its corporate junta kept pouring billions of dollars into Iraq, hoping to cement U.S. military presence in the region and to extend the reach of the U.S. Empire to the Middle East in the name of “democracy” and the “war on terrorism.” Back in the Homeland, where the banner of free market democracy flies the highest, millions of Americans experience chronic homelessness and unemployment. Much like the recent devastation caused by hurricane Katrina in the South, especially in New Orleans, where many of its victims have suffered from discriminatory racist policies and practices, capitalism is ratcheting up the brutality of its deployment, creating a disposable contingent workforce of the proletariat, but on a grander scale.

The New Imperialism There is no question that the topics of imperialism and empire have attracted considerable notice, occasioning the requisite premonitory warnings about the demise of civilization but also promoting vigorous debates in the academy over recent years. Perhaps the most significant of these involves the best-selling book, Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Hardt and Negri’s Empire has been hailed by many leftist scholars (as well as grassroots activists) as a conceptual tour-de-force that unlocks the boneyard secrets of capital and uncoils the mysteries of empire.2 Many have applauded the book for its meticulous mapping of the past, present, and future trajectories of capitalism. The book’s thesis on empire fervently claims to have surpassed Lenin’s theory of imperialism, in which imperialism was understood as the highest stage of capitalism.3 While there is little space here to rehearse, instance-by-instance, Hardt and Negri’s thesis on empire, I will, however, offer a brief overview of the major arguments they make in their book as a means of distinguishing my own contrasting position. In Empire, Hardt and Negri announce the arrival of postimperialism. They proclaim that empire is what follows imperialism. While Hardt and Negri do not go as far as dismissing Lenin’s theory of imperialism in its entirety, their mainly Kautskyian analysis of capitalism (while rejecting Kautsky’s fatalistic Marxism that views the laws of the development of society as acting independently of human volition, inevitably assigning to the mass of working-class individuals a specific form of consciousness, I do not mean to dismiss all of the

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insights of “the renegade Kautsky,” sometimes known as the “pope of Marxism”) does signal the demise of inter-imperialist rivalries and global competitions. Hardt and Negri make the dubious claim that we have entered an era of “peaceful capitalist coexistence.” They identify the rise of empire with Bush padre’s announcement of a New World Order, the defeat of U.S. imperialism in the Vietnam War, the expansion of Nongovernment Organizations (NGOs), the diminishing role of the welfare state, the increasing influence of multinational corporations, and the overwhelming power of supranational organizations such as the WTO and the IMF. However, as Bashhir AbuManneh correctly points out, a cardinal weakness in Hardt and Negri’s analysis is that they fail to account for one of the three major contradictions of capitalism, namely, its “combined and uneven development.”4 Abu-Manneh writes that inter-imperialist rivalries, which arise from the “combined and uneven development,” constitute one of capitalism’s inescapable contradictions. Lenin recognized that in the era of inter-imperialist competition “uneven development” could only intensify, and that “there can be no permanent joint exploitation of the world.”5 A brief outline of Lenin’s theory of imperialism below will elucidate my point. Lenin referred to imperialism as “moribund capitalism” because it was impregnated by the contradictions of capitalist social relations of production. He identified three major contradictions in capitalism. The first contradiction is the contradiction between labor and capital; that is, between the working classes and the ruling classes. This antagonistic relationship holds true both in national and international contexts in which workers are exploited by multinational corporations. The second contradiction is the one that exists among multinational corporations and those imperialist countries (i.e., United States, Europe, and Japan) that compete with each other over the control of the world’s natural resources, and frequently engage in military warfare over territorial conquests. The third is the contradiction between Western industrial countries and so-called Third World and developing nations. This contradiction arises from the fact that in order to exploit these (often colonial or neocolonial) nations, imperialist countries must industrialize them by building railroads, factories, and commercial centers. In the course of their economic development, new revolutionary classes of proletariats and intelligentsia emerge that challenge the colonizers and occupiers. Abu-Manneh’s point that Lenin’s theory of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism unassailably provides a much needed

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analysis and framework that sheds important light on the latest developments of capitalism and continues to have relevancy for organizing revolutionary proletarian struggles as we press forward into the twenty-first century. However, one major point of contention with Hardt and Negri is with their stubborn insistence that state power has become obsolete or that its role has significantly diminished. In contrast, in my view, the state continues to play a key role in advancing the U.S. imperial project of global dominance by means of two interlocking processes: globalization and neoliberalism. At the time of the Cold War, the United States relied on a “double containment” strategy to maintain its global supremacy and dominance. On the one hand, such a strategy prevented the spread of communism from spilling over from the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries into Third World countries, and also suppressed the rise of nationalist inspired movements in the former colonies that posed a serious challenge to its geopolitical interests. Bill Blum writes: From the late 1940s to around the mid-1960s, it was an American policy objective to instigate the downfall of the Soviet government as well as several Eastern European regimes. Many hundreds of Russian exiles were organized, trained and equipped by the CIA, then sneaked back into their homeland to set up espionage rings, to stir up armed political struggle, and to carry out acts of assassination and sabotage, such as derailing trains, wrecking bridges, damaging arms factories and power plants, and so on.6

Of course, the Reagan administration would like to take most of the credit for the breakup of the Soviet Union. In fact, Reagan’s tough anticommunism no doubt delayed the breakup since in all likelihood the extreme militarization of American policy strengthened hardliners in the Soviet Union and worked against those Soviet reformers who, independently of the United States, had been working for change within the Soviet Union ever since Stalin. Blum puts it thus: [W]hat were the fruits of this ultra-tough anti-communist policy? Repeated serious confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union in Berlin, Cuba and elsewhere, the Soviet interventions into Hungary and Czechoslovakia, creation of the Warsaw Pact (in direct reaction to NATO), no glasnost, no perestroika, only pervasive suspicion, cynicism and hostility on both sides. . . . It turned out that the Russians were human after all—they responded to toughness with toughness. And the corollary: there was for many years a close correlation between the amicability of US-Soviet relations and the

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number of Jews allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union. Softness produced softness.7

On the other hand, the United States also used the fear of communism as part of its overall foreign policy strategy to keep in check its main imperial rivals, Europe and Japan. However, by the early 1990s, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet republics and East European satellite states, the United States faced a “crisis of legitimacy.” It could no longer rely on the “communist threat” to stave off its potential imperial rivals. In an effort to reestablish its legitimacy in the international arena, United States imperialism targeted and attacked a number of countries, most notably Iraq and the former Yugoslavia. Under the “humanitarian” pretext of putting an end to the ethnic wars that had swept the former Yugoslavian republics, and with the help and the intervention of NATO forces, the United States was able to secure a more visible role and active military presence in Europe. The same is true in the more recent case of the Middle East. After having lost its legitimacy as the protector of the ruling monarchy in Saudi Arabia against Saddam Hussein’s territorial ambitions for a greater Iraq (which included the failed annexation of Kuwait in 1991), the United States decided to invade and occupy Iraq under cover of a series of carefully stage-managed lies that led the United States public to believe that there existed a connection between the September 11 attacks and Saddam Hussein’s regime. With the help of the CIA and the corporate-run media machine, the Bush Administration orchestrated a propaganda campaign that accused Saddam Hussein of hiding an extensive supply of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Of course, neither the missing link between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Al-Queda was found nor the Weapons of Mass Destruction. It was not until the tragic events of September 11, 2001, and the full-blown “war on terrorism” that the United States was able to find the political and ideological justification to maintain and expand its imperial dominance, which included the military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. And, as we all know by now, the main objective of U.S. occupation was to secure the oil fields in Iraq, which are the second largest oil reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia. Thus, in his address to a joint session of Congress and the American people, Bush’s statement—“Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”—was a molten warning to all nations that the United States had decided to pursue a foreign policy of “unilateralism,” which positioned it as the one and only uncontested imperial power in the world.

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The Crisis of Global Capitalism In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, with the breakup of the former Soviet Union and the East European socialist nations, the United States declared a “unilateralist” foreign policy. And with the defeat of its main ideological and political rival, the United States aggressively pursued its ambitious imperial foreign policy objectives, including the expansion of its geopolitical interests in the Middle East and in Central Asia by establishing unprecedented military presence in the region. However, at the same time, the United States faced economic, ideological, and military-political crises.8 In the late 1970s, with the decline of the postwar economic boom, the United States and its main Western industrial capitalist allies experienced a crisis of overproduction of goods that flooded the global markets. Currently, the crisis of overproduction has intensified competition among transnational corporations, causing what some economists have identified as a “crisis of profitability.” In the early 1980s, Western industrial nations’ response to overcapacity and overproduction was to introduce neoliberal social and economic reforms. These reforms encouraged investment in finance and speculative capital that involved “squeezing value out of already created value.” 9 A second response to the crisis of overcapacity and overproduction involved moving the manufacturing industry abroad to Third World and developing nations, including China, where labor costs are much lower than in any other place in the world. In addition to the economic crisis, the invasion and occupation of Iraq in the spring of 2003 deepened the military-political crisis of U.S. imperialism. The ambitious goal of the United States to fill in the vacuum left behind by its geopolitical and ideological rival, the former Soviet Union, has caused what Bello and Rees identify as the “crisis of overextension,” which can be described as the “gap between goals and resources.”10 To achieve its foreign policy objectives, the United States resorts to its brute military might to forcefully overthrow any nation of people or government foolish enough to challenge or threaten its interests. The first series of post-Soviet era military operations in Iraq (1991), Somalia (1993), and Yugoslavia (1999) served as testing grounds for what was to follow later as large-scale military operations and interventions, including the ongoing occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, in the early stages of the occupation of Iraq, key disagreements emerged among political and military strategists over the number of troops needed in Iraq. Many political analysts now admit that the current 130,000 troops deployed in Iraq are insufficient to effectively occupy and stabilize the country.

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However, the political and military debacles in Iraq have not deterred the United States from escalating the likelihood of a military confrontation with Iran or Korea over their nuclear programs in the near future. Many political analysts, including Chomsky, note that Iran may be the next target of U.S. imperial aggression.11 There are reports of growing military buildup of Israeli and American forces on the border between Turkey and Iran, including an increasing number of reconnaissance missions flown over the Iranian airspace to collect military and nonmilitary intelligence. Both the United States and Israel have publicly declared Iran as a major military and economic threat to their geopolitical and economic interests in the region. However, they are also aware that a military attack on Iran will further destabilize the Middle East. Finally, Bello and Rees identify the third crisis as the “crisis of legitimacy.”12 In the United States as well as in many other nations around the world, millions of workers, students, farmers, and even some segments of disfranchised middle class have joined the protests and marches against U.S. foreign policy. In November 2005, massive protests erupted as a reaction to Bush’s participation in the Summit of the Americas in Argentina. Similar protests followed in Venezuela in which demonstrators demanded the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. Back in the Homeland, a growing number of organizations and grassroots movements opposed to the occupation of Iraq, including Military Families Speak Out, Gold Star Families for Peace, and the Iraq Veterans Against the War, have been demanding the safe return of U.S. troops back home and an immediate end to the war.

The Return of Marx: The Sequel The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism has not prevented the prophetic words of Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party from haunting even the staunchest market fundamentalists and ideologues, some of whom are bygones of the McCarthy era. Consider Shelby County commissioners Tommy Hart and Marilyn Loeffel, and Memphis city councilman Brent Taylor, who were infuriated when they discovered the words “Workers of the World, Unite” engraved in the dark granite columns standing outside of the newly built $70 million Memphis Central Library. The MarxEngels quote was among many other inscriptions by famous artists, scientists, and political leaders such as Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Leonardo da Vinci, and others etched out on the granite columns. However, for Loeffel’s Christian fundamentalist taste, the Marx and Engels quote is as obscene as heavy metal and rock lyrics

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that have to be forcefully extracted and erased from the collective consciousness of the masses. In countries such as Indonesia, where 500,000 communists and leftists were tortured and executed by the repressive regime of General Suharto in the 1960s, who was financed and backed by the United States, displaying or selling Marxist paraphernalia is illegal and considered a serious crime punishable with a stiff prison sentence. Recently, in a raid on a T-shirt shop in Jakarta, one man was arrested for selling T-shirts with the picture of Marx printed on it. The man now faces criminal charges and may be prosecuted under a law that prohibits the public display of political statements or artwork that contains “hostility,” “insults,” or “hatred” toward the existing regime. If there is any indication that capitalism has finally succeeded in defeating socialism by burying it alongside Lenin’s tomb in Red Square, then we need to ask why millions of former Soviet citizens continue to dream about socialism? A recent nationwide survey of 1600 Russians found a growing discontent among Russians with the mafiacracy that now rules over much of Russia and its former republics. The nationwide poll, published in November 2002, concluded that between 1990 and 2002 the number of Russians who believed that the Bolshevik revolution had a “positive” impact on Russia had jumped from 49 percent to 60 percent. In addition, 33 percent of the Russians surveyed believed that communism had improved living standards. Finally, 43 percent of Russians surveyed expressed that they would have “actively” supported the Bolsheviks.13 This is surprising given that after the social and economic reforms carried out under the banner of “Glasnost” and “Perestroika,” many of which have had the backing of the International Monetary Fund, post-Soviet Russia continues to experience financial turbulences: record high poverty, unemployment, prostitution, gambling, and crime, to name a few. Post-Soviet Russia is currently in a state of moral indifference coupled with corrosive ethics in which the needs of majority of the people have been sacrificed for the greedy minority class of Russian Nouveaux-riches, and where the meaning of democracy and capitalism have become synonymous. The recent devaluation of the Russian currency, the Ruble (today thirty Rubles equals one U.S. Dollar), has forced ordinarily working-class Russians to question who has profited more from the transition from socialism to capitalist free market economy. The beneficiaries of this new social and economic order have only been a small class consisting of pyramid-scheme swindlers, coup plotters, Kremlin security goons, arms smugglers and dealers, and Mafia hit squads.

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The explanatory power of Marx’s insights and analysis of capitalism and the workings of the free market is far from exhausted. In fact, Marx is more relevant today than at any other time in history, especially when there is no end in sight to the growing social and economic polarization caused by the recent neoliberal social and economic reforms. Consider a recent survey conducted by Britain’s Radio 4 that hosts the morning program “In Our Time.” Radio listeners who participated in the survey voted Karl Marx as the greatest philosopher of all time. The second and third place went to David Hume and to Ludwig Wittgenstein, respectively. Even a growing number of colleges and universities across the United States are showing a renewed interest in the work of Marx. The University of Rhode Island now offers a new honors course to undergraduate students, which focuses on the ideas and theories of Karl Marx. The topics covered in the class include the history of capitalism and the study of Marx’s Capital. Not surprisingly, Marx has become unfashionable among, if not anathema to, most academics in higher education in the United States and abroad. While universities and colleges are too eager to offer courses on postcolonialism, postmodernism, post-structuralism, and cultural studies, they are far less willing to provide any serious forums or seminars in which Marx can be critically discussed, debated, and studied. And while most armchair academics of various stripes on the left in North America, especially proponents of postmodernism and post-structuralism, continue to outright dismiss Marxism for its failure to fulfill its promise of bringing forth the necessary social and political conditions for the development of a socialist utopia, and willfully ignore the powerful effects social class has on the outcome of the life chances of the working poor, the debates over class, especially in the media, have only intensified. Recently the New York Times devoted a series of articles on social class in America, which was published later by a group of its correspondents as a book entitled Class Matters.14 The book focuses on how social class shapes and determines many aspects of our lives, including access to health care, education, and housing. While the authors of the book should be praised for raising public awareness on the taboo subject of social class, regrettably most of their analysis draws upon neo-Weberian interpretations of social class. For example, the authors fail, in the main, to include key Marxist concepts such as “exploitation,” “alienation,” “commodity-production,” “wage-labor,” “ownership of the means of production,” and “the forces of production,” all of which illuminate and enrich our understanding of social class. They dilute the concrete experiences associated with class by focusing instead on consumption patterns and

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practices of individuals and groups in society. They admit that the concept of class is an elusive construct because it encompasses culture, rank, identity, attitudes, taste, and wealth.

The Neoliberalization of Education and Schooling As the “war on terror” expands its tentacles to all corners of the globe, and as the U.S. administration spreads the so-called “democracy” and “freedom” amongst the people in Iraq and Afghanistan (with bullets and smart bombs targeting innocent men, women, and children, we might add), the military defense budget continues to swell at the expense of more cuts in funding public education. In the 2002–2003 annual budget, state tax revenues sharply fell by $22 billion compared to the year before. The Bush Administration’s decision to abolish the estate tax must have caused an additional $10 billion loss in revenues. The impact of the Bush Administration’s social and economic policies have had devastating financial implications for public education, forcing many school districts to reduce school programs and services. As David Goodman notes: Schools around the country are reeling from the cuts. In California, where 3,800 teachers and 9,000 other school employees received pink slips last year, districts have cut textbook purchases, summer school, bus routes, maintenance, athletics, student newspapers, and electives. Half of the school districts in Kansas have cut staff; several districts have gone to a four-day week; and 50 schools in Kansas now charge students to participate in some extracurricular activities. In Michigan, funding for gifted and talented students is down 95 percent; Buffalo, New York, has been forced to close eight schools and eliminate 600 teaching jobs over the past years.15 (43)

Oregon’s school districts, which at one point prided in having one of the finest public schools in the nation, have fallen victim to the financial crisis that is now afflicting the rest of the nation. Over the past decade, public school funding in Oregon has experienced a sharp decline. This explains why 90 of the 198 school districts in Oregon have been forced to reduce the number of instructional days to balance their school district’s annual budget. Since 1990, Portland Public School district has cut 15 percent of its classroom teachers and counselors, reduced music- and arts-related programs, and increased class sizes. In response to the state’s diminishing revenues and budget shortfalls, students, teachers, parents, and community activists have taken

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desperate measures to prevent the number of instructional days from being reduced even further at their schools. Recently, under the threat of being forced to lay off six hundred of Portland Public Schools’ three thousand teaching work force, voters passed measure 26-48, an income tax initiative that would generate $128 to $135 million annually for the next three years. Portland Public Schools teachers also agreed to work ten days without pay in order to balance the district’s budget-deficit and to avoid having their health benefits reduced. The Hillsboro School District, in Hillsboro, Oregon, decided to close its schools seventeen days earlier than the regular school calendar for similar reasons. Finally, in Eugene, Oregon, parents of students who attend Family School, a five-grade, five-classroom school, organized a fund-raising drive to raise $73,000 in an effort to save the job of one of their teachers. The fund-raising involved donating their blood plasma to raise money. Faced with the shortage of revenues to support their existing educational programs, many school districts have been forced to develop partnerships with corporations eager to step into the lucrative education market. Consider McDonald’s recent adoption of a new strategy to promote its products in the highly profitable market dominated by children. This comes after the much highly publicized libel suit now famously referred to as the McLibel Case, and the recent film, Super Size Me, which raised ethical and moral questions regarding McDonald’s food processing and preparing practices that many believe has significantly contributed to the increasing obesity and other health risks among children. Nancy Hellmich reports that in an effort to restore its much-tarnished public image as the family-friendly fast-food chain, and to further protect its market shares, McDonald’s has decided to capitalize on physical education programs in public schools.16 Over seven million students in 31,000 public schools have agreed to participate in McDonald’s “Passport to Play” program. The program consists of a number of multicultural physical education activities, including “boomerang golf” from Australia, “Mr. Daruma Fell Down” from Japan, and Holland’s “Korfball.” Students who complete each of these activities receive a stamp in their passport issued by McDonald’s. According to Bill Lama, McDonald’s chief marketing officer, the objective of the Passport to Play program is to educate students on the “importance of eating right” and “staying active.” Such a strategically calculated move allows McDonald’s not only to counter much of the negative publicity it has received in the past few years, but it also helps McDonald’s to have a greater presence and visibility in public schools. Or take for example the company called Field Trip Factory that, as part of its “Be a Smart Shopper” program, organizes field trips to

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local chain stores, such as Sports Authority, for students who live in the Boston metropolitan area. For their homework assignment, students are encouraged to check their local newspaper for Roche Bros. and Sudbury Farms coupons and make a “shopping list.” Recently, companies have targeted the lucrative and profitable youth market. In England, the marketing agency “Cunning Stunts” has developed an innovative approach to advertising commercial brand products. The company has found that the foreheads of college students can be made into a profitable business venture. The advertising agency is hiring students who are willing to wear a corporate logo on their heads for a minimum of three hours a day for £ 88.20 a week. As John Cassy of The Guardian reports: “The brand or product message will be attached by a vegetable dye transfer and the students will be paid to leave the logos untouched.”17 These examples and others illustrate that corporations are not so much interested in preparing students for critical citizenship and civic engagement as they are in developing future consumer-citizens. Whereas the former encourages students to question, conceptualize, analyze, theorize, and critically reflect upon their experiences in the world, the latter lures students into an uncritical and blind acceptance of market values and practices designed to reinforce and maintain capitalist social relations of production. As Charles Sullivan notes: Of course it is not in the self-interest of capitalism to educate people who can see capitalism for what it is, to think critically about it, and perhaps even do something to change it. Corporate education exists to promote programming consumers and providing an obedient work force to an unfair slave wage system, not to provide society with a well informed and politically active citizenry. In fact these are the things that pose the greatest threat to America’s corporate oligarchy.18

In spite of the daunting challenge that awaits educators, we should not be discouraged from encouraging students to question and deconstruct the role of consumer capitalism in the commercialization of education and schooling.

Standardizing Imperialism: The NCLB Reform Movement The origins of the current standards-based movement can be traced back to the early twentieth century when curriculum theorists such as Ellwood Cubberley and others attempted to align school curriculum

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to the needs and demands of the U.S. economy by developing a scientific approach to designing and planning school curriculum.19 From the 1950s to the 1970s, with the Cold War in full swing, the “back to basics” movement gained momentum in teacher education programs and graduate schools of education. Supporters of the movement were determined to ensure that school curriculum reflected not only the ideologies and political views of the dominant social classes in the United States but that it also prepared students for employment in the growing military industrial complex to defend the country against the so-called “communist threat.” The publication of A Nation at Risk report in 1983 was another significant milestone in the history of the education reform movement.20 The report blamed and vilified schools for the relatively weak economic performance of the United States compared to its Asian and European rivals. The driving force behind the recent educational policies of the No Child Left Behind act passed in 2001 are neoliberal social and economic policies that favor flexibility, efficiency, outsourcing, and downsizing methods of production. Under the neoliberal economic model, schools must perform similar to corporate entities. Just as the Dow Jones Industries measures the performance of companies and represents the pulse of Wall Street, so too the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) report measures and ranks the performance of public schools. One understated consequence of the No Child Left Behind laws is that the state can indefinitely close or restructure “under-performing schools” that fail to meet the requirements established by the AYP. With the neoliberal reform movement on the offensive, the provisions within the No Child Left Behind have shifted the discourse of educational policy from “equality” to “adequacy.”21 The language of “higher standards” and “higher expectations” has replaced ethical and moral standards. As part of the daily rituals and practices designed to raise student moral, schools now employ what Kozol refers to as “auto-hypnotic slogans.” In schools identified as “under-performing,” students of color are encouraged to memorize confidence-building phrases like “I can,” “I am smart,” and “I am confident” to boost their self-esteem and improve their academic performance. Today urban schools are organized around the same principles used in factory production lines. “Raising test scores,” “social promotion,” “outcome-based objectives,” “time management,” “success for all,” “authentic writing,” “accountable talk,” “active listening,” and “zero noise” all constitute part of the new discourse in public schools. Most urban public schools have adopted business and market “work related themes” and managerial concepts that have become part of the

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vocabulary used in classroom lessons and instruction. In the “market drive classrooms,” students “negotiate,” “sign contracts,” and take “ownership” of their own learning. In many classrooms, students can volunteer as the “pencil manager,” “soap manager,” “door manager,” “line manager,” “time managers,” and “coat room manager.” In some fourth grade classrooms, teachers record student assignments and homework using “earning charts.” In these schools, teachers are referred to as “classroom managers,” principals are identified as “building managers,” and students are viewed as “learning managers.” It is commonplace to view schoolchildren as “assets,” “investment,” “productive units,” or “team players.” Schools identify skills and knowledge students learn and acquire as “commodities” and “products” to be consumed in the “educational marketplace.” Under the current climate of the No Child Left Behind school reform movement, teachers are regarded as “efficiency technicians” and encouraged to use “strict Skinnerian control” methods and techniques to manage and teach students in their classroom. In the market-driven model of public education, teachers are viewed as “floor managers” in public schools, “whose job it is to pump some ‘added-value’ into undervalued children.”22 To the disdain of progressive educators, the “test-craze” is now a growing trend in most large metropolitan public school districts. In some schools districts, standardized testing begins in kindergarten. Some public schools have been forced to cut back or entirely remove art and music classes from their school curriculum. Other schools have reduced or altogether eliminated recess or naptime. Most public schools now have a testing coordinator. During homeroom, for example, school administrators encourage teachers to teach students testtaking skills and strategies. The Los Angeles Unified School Districts, for instance, has developed its own quarterly assessment tests in Math, Science, Social Studies, and English. The district tests students every two months. We are told that the purpose of these district assessment tests is to prepare students for the statewide standardized tests in late spring. Most of teacher and staff development meetings time is spent on sharing and discussing effective strategies and methods to prepare students for quarterly assessment tests and to review state and districts standards. Teachers are also encouraged to attend workshops and conferences to learn more about how to align their teaching practices to the state standards. As the standardized curriculum and standardized testing widens the achievement gap between poor and wealthy school districts, working-class students and students of color continue to be tracked into vocational programs and classes that teach life-skills or offer basic

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training that prepares them for jobs in the retail and service industry.23 Even more disturbing perhaps is the placement of high school female students in sewing and cosmetology classes. As we know by now, these classes do little for students who must compete with advanced placement and college tracked students.

Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Hope Why should teachers be concerned with the political economy of schooling under global capitalism and the new imperialism? How can they recognize the decisive role they play in the ensuing battle between labor and capital? Why should teachers be troubled with the growing class polarization and the maquiladorization of the global economy? What lasting impact, if any, will the persistent wave of attacks of neoliberal social and economic policies have on the working conditions of teachers? Can teachers join workers and resist the corporatization and privatization of schools? Clearly, the answer to these questions and others will largely depend on how teachers and educators perceive their role in the ensuing battles between labor and capital. In the wake of the dictatorship of the financial markets where, in the words of Robert Went, the “invisible hand” of the market is mercilessly and ruthlessly strangling millions of working-class men, women, and children, how can we liberate creative human powers and capacities from their inhumane form, namely capital?24 What does it mean to be human and how can we live humanely? What ethical and moral actions or steps must we take to live humanely? How can teachers recognize the important role they play in the battle between labor and capital? These questions, along with others, can be answered only in the course of revolutionizing educational practices, and their answers will largely depend on the willingness of teachers to join anti-imperialistic struggles. Teachers need to recognize that, as workers, their interests are tied to struggles against imperialism. For educators, the main challenge is to link their classroom pedagogy to anti-oppressive struggles both in the local and global arena. The anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, and the widespread demonstrations against the G8 summit in Genoa, Italy in 2001, has generated a growing resurgence of coalitions comprised of social movements, progressive organizations, labor unions, community activists, and ordinary citizens who are collectively engaged in various forms of struggles and resistance against global capitalism and U.S. Imperialism. The recent anti-immigration Sensenbrenner bill, named after its author and leading sponsor, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, which

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criminalizes undocumented immigrants and makes illegally living and working in the United States a felony, has outraged and angered many immigrant communities across the United States. In Los Angeles, for example, more than 500,000 demonstrators poured into the streets and protested against the anti-immigration legislature on March 25, 2005. The following day, more than 36,000 students in the Los Angeles Unified School District walked out of their classrooms and marched into the streets protesting against the bill. Similar student demonstrations and walkouts were reported in Dallas, Detroit, and Phoenix. Along with the recent mass protests in the United States against the domestic policies of the erstwhile Administration of Bush and his cronies, there has been a growing and visible international movement against neoliberal social and economic policies. In France, for example, over a million workers clashed with police over the new labor laws that allow private corporations more flexibility to release or fire workers under the age of 26. In Argentina, the workers autonomous movement has emerged as a response to the country’s recent financial downfall. More than 20,000 unemployed workers organized themselves and took over and reopened factories that were closed down and abandoned by companies that moved their operations abroad to China where labor costs are much lower and profits are much higher. In Bolivia, the victory of Evo Morales, the first indigenous president in the country’s history, is a sure sign of hope for the millions of indigenous people who make up 75 percent of the Bolivian population. In recent years, the enforcement of neoliberal social and economic policies in Bolivia, spearheaded by such international bodies and organizations as the IMF, has only contributed to the acceleration of social and economic polarization. In the case of Bolivia, for instance, the free trade has downsized the standard of living of more than 66 percent of Bolivians, who have been forced to survive on two dollars a day. Recently, in a symbolic gesture of solidarity with the Bolivian people, President Morales announced he would cut his salary by half in order to hire more teachers. As the drums of war drown out dissent and as accountability and testing regimes are imposed upon public schools, it is imperative that teachers and educators offer students a curriculum that enables them to conceptualize, analyze, theorize, and critically reflect upon their experiences in the world. This calls for a renewed and retooled approach to critical pedagogy, one that is guided by Freirean pedagogy. There is no question that Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed has profoundly influenced and shaped the way in which teachers and

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educators frame political and ideological questions concerning teaching and learning in their classrooms. There is no question that the ethical and moral dimensions of Freirean pedagogy has inspired and motivated a new generation of educators and activists to courageously defend democratic principles, values, and practices in their classrooms and schools against the neoliberal onslaught in an age of terror, fear, and permanent war. Freire sees human beings as a “presence in the world.” He notes that taking risks is an essential characteristic of our “existing being.”25 Freire reminds us that education, both as a political and ideological activity, involves taking risks. Our presence in the world is not a neutral presence. As political and ideological agents, we are compelled to take a stance toward the world because: “Nobody can be in the world, with the world, and with others in a neutral manner.”26 Thus, “being” is a being in the world. As critical educators, we need to recognize that history is impregnated with possibility and hope. However, to make that possibility tangible, we must actively engage and intervene in the world. What does “being in the world” entail? Our presence in the world is not to adapt to it, but to work toward transforming it. According to Freire, adapting to the world is only a process—a temporary phase— toward intervening and transforming the world. Thus, adaptation is a “moment in the process of intervention.”27 Because we live in an ethical world, our ideological and political orientation compels us to make moral and ethical decisions. Our actions have a universal dimension, and “being in the world” entails recognizing our responsibilities and commitments toward other human beings. We are both subjects and objects of history. In other words, while the forces of history shape our past and present, we can change the course of history, and in the process create history. As Freire puts it, “the future does not make us, we make ourselves in the struggle to make it.”28 As Marx asserts, we have the ability to break away from the chains of history passed down to us from previous generations and make our own history. In short, human beings are conditioned by history, but they are not determined by the forces of history because history is impregnated with the possibility of a better world. A critical reading of the world involves denouncing the existing oppression and injustices in the world.29 At the same time, it involves announcing the possibility of a more humane and just world. Thus, the pedagogical act of reading the world as a dialectical process involves denouncing the existing world and announcing the possibility of a new world. Reading the world is both a pedagogical-political

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and a political-pedagogical undertaking. Denouncing the world is an act that involves criticizing, protesting, and struggling against domination and domestication. On the other hand, the act of announcing a new world entails hope, possibility, and envisioning a new democratic society. Moreover, we need to make a crucial distinction between the role of education for helping students develop critical thinking skills and education for training and preparation of students to enter the workforce. We need to be cautious not to reduce education to a set of techniques and skills. Education can be used as a tool to “make and remake” ourselves.30 Education involves knowing that you know and knowing that you don’t know. Finally, education entails developing a “critical curiosity” and a radical reorientation toward the world. Education involves learning to question the world by cultivating an “epistemological curiosity.” As such, critical pedagogy encourages educators to imagine, dream, and struggle toward building the foundations of a new democratic society. Educators need to develop the capacity to be a “presence” in the world. By doing so, they can engage in a critical reading of the word and the world. Undoubtedly, critical pedagogy remains a source of hope and possibility for educators engaged in struggles against oppression in their classrooms. The time has come for teachers and educators to embrace critical pedagogy with a renewed interest and sense of urgency. While critical pedagogy comes under increasing attack by reactionary ideologies and ideologues, its message only becomes more urgent and important in these troubled and dangerous times.

Notes 1. This is a slightly revised version of R. Farahmandpur, “A Critical Pedagogy of Hope in Times of Despair: Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism,” Social Change 36, 3 (2006): 77–91. 2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 3. V. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1977). 4. Bashhir Abu-Manneh, “The Illusions of Empire,” Monthly Review 56, 2 (2004), www.monthlyreview.org/0604abumanneh.htm (accessed June 1, 2006). 5. Ibid. 6. Bill Blum, “The Myth of the Gipper: Reagan Didn’t End the Cold War,” Counterpunch (2004), www.counterpunch.org/blum06072004.html (accessed June 10, 2006).

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7. Ibid. 8. W. Bello and J. Rees, “U.S. Imperialism: The Cracks in the U.S. Machine,” Socialist Review (2005), http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/ article.php?articlenumber=9501. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. N. Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions: Conservations on the Post-9/11 World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005). 12. Bello and Rees. 13. O. Nedbayeva, “Putin’s Russia Seeks Role Model in Tsarist Past,” AFP (Moscow, 2002). 14. Correspondents of The New York Times, Class Matters (New York: Times Books, 2005). 15. David Goodman, “Class Dismissed,” Mother Jones, 29, 3 (2004): 43. 16. N. Hellmich, “McDonald’s Kicks off School PE Program,” USA Today, September 12, 2005. 17. J. Cassy, “Students Cash in on ‘Human Billboards’ Plan,” The Guardian, 2003, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4600434,00.htm 18. C. Sullivan, “Programming the Work Force: The Failure of Mass Education,” Counterpunch (2003), http://counterpunch.org/ sullivan02252003.html 19. C. Sleeter, Un-standardizing Curriculum: Multicultural Teaching in the Standards-based Classroom (New York: Teachers College Press, 2005). 20. Ibid. 21. J. Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (New York: Crown Publishers, 2005). 22. Ibid., 285. 23. Ibid. 24. R. Went, Globalization: Neoliberal Challenge, Radical Responses (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000). 25. P. Freire, Pedagogy of Indignation (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004). 26. Ibid., 60. 27. Ibid., 34. 28. Ibid., 34. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid.

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Pa r t 2

C r i t ic a l P e dag og y : A S ou rc e of Hope a n d Possi bi l i t y

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Wh at Is C r i t ic a l P e dag og y G ood For? A n I n t e rv i e w w i t h I r a Shor Sheila L. Macrine

In this chapter Ira Shor discusses Critical Literacy as it takes shape

inside critical pedagogy, where teachers invite students to explicitly question the status quo in the name of social justice, democratic rights, and equality. According to Shor, this approach is a “situated pedagogy” shaped by and for specific themes, locations, and constituencies —from multicultural to feminist to socialist to queer to environmental, from K-12 to college to labor and community education, from urban to rural. He adds that Freirean critical pedagogy, of course, involves practices and frameworks derived from the foundational work of Paulo Freire, whose “pedagogy of the oppressed” was a class-based practice, offering dialogic literacy programs to Brazilian peasants and workers through a problem-posing process. The challenge has always been to diversify the singular focus on social class and to reinvent the approach for other times and places outside Brazil. Ira Shor writes that his notion of Critical literacy is also consistent with Aronowitz’s and Giroux’s notion that “critical literacy would make clear the connection between knowledge and power. It would present knowledge as a social construction linked to norms and values, and it would demonstrate modes of critique that illuminate how, in some cases, knowledge serves very specific economic, political and social interests. Moreover, critical literacy would function as a theoretical tool to help students and others develop a critical relationship to their own knowledge.”1 With this kind of literacy, students “learn how to read the world and their lives critically and relatedly . . . and, most importantly, it points to forms of social action and collective struggle.”2 He continues that this activist agenda was also central to Joe Kretovics’

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definition: “Critical literacy . . . points to providing students not merely with functional skills, but with the conceptual tools necessary to critique and engage society along with its inequalities and injustices. Furthermore, critical literacy can stress the need for students to develop a collective vision of what it might be like to live in the best of all societies and how such a vision might be made practical.”3

Tell Us about Your Recollections of Paulo Freire Five decades ago, Freire launched his literacy circles in a time of growing popular optimism in Brazil, when mass movements for democracy were afoot. The insurgent political climate propelled the social impact of this activist pedagogy. However, as is well known, his programs were suddenly and violently crushed on April 1, 1964, during a military coup d’état. In our own time, here in the United States, no military takeover, but rather a long conservative restoration, has restricted the space for democratic opposition and for dissident methods such as critical pedagogy. In years of right-wing ascendancy, invitations from critical teachers to rethink the status quo face uphill battles in schools and classrooms. Critical teachers in such times can benefit from reflecting on some advice Freire offered in prior decades, I think. For example, when critical teachers do invite students to radically question the status quo, the process is more likely to work if the language used is accessible and if the subject matter is meaningful to student life and thought. This preferential option for concreteness in speech, texts, and themes had always been a special preoccupation of Freire’s vis a vis classroom practice and teacherly discourse. At the core of Freire’s process was the educator’s discovery and use of “generative themes and words,” that is, situations and language encountered in the everyday lives of students, which teachers re-presented in class as problems for study. The dialogic task of the teacher is to build an unfamiliar critical inquiry around familiar situations while also connecting daily life to larger issues of power in society. We could say that the generative theme approach embedded concreteness in the learning process while positioning the local in relation to the global. The local starting point of a generative theme also helps to discipline the teacher’s tendency to talk at and over students in academic idioms learned at universities. The patient restraint of voice and the patient testing of themes comprise an elegant discipline learned by critical teachers in process, on the job, by doing it. The payoff for this discipline lies in opening the process to student participation.

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Participation in critical learning helps such classrooms to function as vigorous public spheres, that is, as active public forums of broad deliberation, which Henry Giroux has often urged upon us as essential in a democratic society. Because discourse is a material force in the social construction of self and society, such public spheres are instruments for the democratic construction of self-in-society and society-in-self. These forums for democratic deliberation are broadly needed in society—at work, in neighborhoods, in town hall settings, and so on—for a culture of democracy to predominate. This critical connection of participatory deliberation to democracy in school and society can be traced backward from Giroux to Freire and then to John Dewey. When deliberative problem-posing works in class, teachers and students think through the nuances and consequences of knowledgemaking, re-perceiving the way things are and reimagining the way things could be. For sure, such a critical pedagogy is “political” and “ideological.” But, to critical theorists of education, all pedagogies are political, whether or not they acknowledge their ideology. Critical pedagogy foregrounds the politics (power relations) in any subject matter, but to foreground something is not to impose it. Freire insisted that “education is politics,” but he opposed polemical impositions on students. To him, imposing answers on students was a form of oppressive education, even though no method can be neutral or value-free. All are political because all involve the formation of human beings. Education is an organized social experience intended to shape the people in it, another Freirean notion that was foundational in the work of Dewey, on whose shoulders Freire acknowledged standing. Given that education is a social experience, that all social experience is formative, and that all formative experiences embed one value system or another, it is impossible then to form or shape humans in any manner without implicating norms and orientations for thought and action, which is a synonym for ideology. Education is politics, then, simply because it develops students and teachers this way or that way depending on the values underlying the learning process. The values embedded in every learning process can shape us into people who question the status quo or into people who accommodate to the way things are or into people who celebrate the system we live in. Through texts, exams, grades, assignments, lectures, recitations, and so on, students develop ways of thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting. To learn accommodation to or celebration of the status quo are choices as political as to learn questioning the way things are. Humans are the agents who make the world what it is by their everyday

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labor; while society makes us, we also make it; our everyday lives can enable the system to continue as it is or can compel it to change if we oppose it. Schooling thus understood, as a site for the social construction of the self, is by definition directive, persuasive, and formative, attempting to discipline and normalize students and teachers (as Foucault would put it), who, of course, decide for themselves the limits of their accommodation and resistance. This, then, is why critical pedagogy, as an educational process for human development, is no more and no less “political” than every other pedagogy. Yet, are the politics of critical pedagogy still relevant, still needed? Here we are, fifty years after Freire originated his “pedagogy of the oppressed” and thousands of miles from the site of his original literacy work. Now, more than a decade after Freire’s passing, forty years since experiments in critical pedagogy began in North American schools and colleges (seventy-five years later, counting Myles Horton’s work at Highlander), in a time of runaway globalization and digital everything, is there anything new to be done with critical pedagogy? To find some answers, consider some aspects of current U.S. society: Vast wealth and power are accumulating at the top and in the private sector, drained from working families and taken from public programs whose social services are starved for resources. Oil corporations have record profits in a time when no shortages of supply and no production bottlenecks justify such high charges. Pharmaceutical companies are not merely super-pricing their drugs but are also laying off thousands of employees while repatriating billions in foreign profits at reduced tax levels, thanks to a tax holiday from Congress (the so-called “American Jobs Creation Act of 2004,” which enabled them to pocket about $90 billion that should have gone to the public sector). A prison-industrial complex now exists in the United States, which has quadrupled the number of inmates held in jail since Reagan took office, mostly African-American and Hispanic young men. (The railroading of dark-skinned men to jail has thankfully hit one snag through DNA exonerations of falsely convicted death-row inmates, now exceeding 200 in number.) Only 5 percent of the families in New York City can afford to buy a median-priced home there; family income for the bottom 90 percent of the nation has been mostly stagnant for the past 30 years, despite huge gains among the top 1 percent. A disastrous and illegal war in Iraq has so far cost 4200 American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, the trashing of the Constitution vis a vis torture and illegal detention, and the wasting of $500 billion in our wealth. A right-wing majority on the Supreme Court is busily undoing egalitarian gains and democratic rights

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achieved in past decades. A monstrous financial meltdown created by Wall Street’s reckless profiteering is being shuffled onto the backs of Main Street taxpayers. This list of depredations indicates the disturbing national drift toward oligarchy and helps explain why we need critical pedagogy to question the status quo wherever possible, along with more powerful tools to defend democratic rights and to promote equality. Critical pedagogy is one tool through which teachers can invite students to rethink power relations and the economy, but a consolidation of popular forces into mass movements for change will be needed to install social justice in society.

What Do You Think Have been Your Main Contributions to Critical Pedagogy? One book I wrote, Culture Wars (1986, 1992), studied the transition in school and society from the insurgent 1960s to the reactionary period afterward, naming this contested shift as “the conservative restoration,” which Michael Apple and others have found useful to denote the recent era. Another book, A Pedagogy for Liberation (1986), was the first “talking book” Paulo Freire did with a coauthor, in which we tried to address frequent questions asked about critical pedagogy while using a new form of discourse. Other books have anthologized some of the best work in critical practice from the 1970s to the 1990s. Much of my written work concerns efforts to reinvent Freirean critical pedagogy for the postliterate, and the North American schools and colleges. For example, one of those efforts, When Students Have Power (1996), reported a democratic instrument called “the After-Class Group,” which I summarize below: “The After-Class Group”: This ongoing experiment involves teacher-student power sharing, negotiating the syllabus, and codeveloping the curriculum. It builds from Freire’s assertion in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that overcoming the teacher-student contradiction was the first problem in the classroom. How can democratic practices be built into the learning process as practices and not merely as verbal declarations of good intentions? The critical syllabus can integrate “democracy,” “inequality,” “sexism,” “racism,” “homophobia,” or “global warming” as subject matters for problem-posing. But, I wanted to transform the learning process itself so that governance became a terrain of innovative democratic discourse. To democratize the social relations of the classroom, I began negotiating grading contracts, “protest rights” of students, and a working committee called “the After-Class Group” (ACG).

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The ACG is comprised of 4–8 student volunteers who meet with me immediately after each class session to review that day’s work for its strengths and weaknesses. I convene the ACG after other students have left and start the session by asking the remaining group what went well and what went badly in the class that just ended? Was it a good use of their time? Did some parts of the class work well and others not? Did they learn something new and worthwhile? Did we write and read too much or too little? Did the teacher talk too much or too little, too quickly or too slowly, too loudly or too quietly, in understandable words or not? Was student participation broad? Given what happened in class today, what should be first on the lesson plan for the next class meeting? Such questions have provoked some remarkable, frank exchanges between me and the students and among the students themselves. Whenever an ACG forms effectively in any course, it has improved my teaching. Overall, the ACG is one concrete tool for power sharing, for practicing democratic social relations, for distributing responsibility, and for drawing students out as agents of their own educations. Another effort to reinvent Freire for the North American classroom involves curriculum design using subject matters beyond the foundational Freirean resource of “the generative theme.” In the following text, I explain how this works: Thematic Options for ProblemPosing: Freire’s literacy teams researched student communities to discover “generative themes and words” that the teachers used as primary subjects for writing and discussion when the literacy circles were convened. In Freirean critical pedagogy, generative theme research underlies curriculum design. It answers the question, “Where does subject matter come from?” Generative themes have the advantage of familiarity and concreteness because they are drawn from local experience. But not everything that goes on in student life qualifies as a generative theme. The material selected as “generative” is done so because it is judged by the teachers to be especially good for connecting the local to the global. The task of the critical teacher is first to discover key generative themes in student life and then to move outward from them into their relation with contexts of power in society. To this generative theme method, I’ve added two other kinds of thematic resources: the topical theme and the academic theme. I discuss these two approaches in Empowering Education and will say here briefly that topical themes are consequential and controversial issues currently circulating in society but not yet extant in student speech, or are there only in low profile. The critical teacher presents a topical theme to invite student participation in an ongoing public issue

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(for example, the use of torture and illegal detention on prisoners; or the Mayor of New York’s proposal for “congestion pricing” to tax vehicles entering Lower Manhattan; or the Mayor’s interest in reversing term limits voted for twice by the people of the City; or the use of public tax funds to build lavish new sports stadiums for private teams like the Nets, Yankees, and Mets). The second curricular method— the academic theme—is a formal body of knowledge or a disciplinebased subject matter that a teacher has to or wants to introduce to students given the departmental location of the course in the curriculum or given the developing needs of a critical inquiry (for example, how data is named and represented in statistical formats; how two different disciplines—fossil-based paleontology and DNA-based evolutionary biology—explain the nature and extent of Neanderthalhomo sapiens interaction; how allopathic and homeopathic practices differ in the treatment of illness, etc.). Because topical and academic themes are not subject matters already circulating locally in student life, they require different handling than does the generative theme, but they are useful options for critical teaching among postliterate students in a formal school or college. Next, I could mention my notion of “The Critical Paradigm” vis a vis extending and adapting Freire’s critical pedagogy. Extending Freire’s famous metaphor of “banking pedagogy,” I’ve contrasted “the critical paradigm” with “the zero paradigm” of traditional schooling. The goal here is for critical practice to avoid “banking pedagogy” that fills students with deposits of official knowledge, constructing them as empty accounts. The “banking”-style teacher (a traditional lecturer using direct instruction or frontal pedagogy) draws knowledge from a central bank and vocally drops them into the allegedly empty heads of the students sitting in class, who then withdraw this knowledge when called upon to do so (oral or written examinations). This “banking pedagogy” is a deficit model that Dewey originally criticized as “pouring in” knowledge. It construes students as passive, empty, silent recipients. It construes teachers as responsible professionals when they cover required material, filling students with information through a narrating voice or through handouts. The critical alternative to banking pedagogy is dialogic problemposing, whose epistemology can be called “The Critical Paradigm.” This paradigm asserts a dialectical starting point for critical pedagogy: both students and teachers come to class at more than zero and less than zero at the same time. Teachers and students both bring knowledge-making assets to class for critical study while both bring

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anti-critical liabilities as well. The Critical Paradigm, then, acknowledges all parties as agents with potentials to enable or to disable the process. Moreover, the Critical Paradigm denotes a complex and contradictory starting point, noting equivalence and difference among teacher and students, with both capable of constructive and destructive impacts on potentials for learning. A last item I could mention in terms of reinventing Freire for the U.S. context involves the central notion of “critical consciousness.” One of Freire’s early works is titled Education for Critical Consciousness. The nature of “critical consciousness” is an unfinished and important discussion in Freire and others. In this debate, I renamed and redefined the tripartite structure of consciousness originally proposed by Freire, offering four dimensions for critical habits of mind, which I proposed as goals for this pedagogy. Below I excerpt quoted sections on these dimensions from Empowering Education.4 Some critical teachers have found the scheme below useful as a guide for their practice, so perhaps these are good items to highlight here: • “Power Awareness: Knowing that society and history are made by contending forces and interests, that human action makes society and that society is unfinished and can be transformed; discovering how power and policy-making in society interact in society, with some groups holding dominant control; how history and social policy can be changed by organized action from the bottom up . . . ” • “Critical Literacy: Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking that go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning and root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse . . . ” • “Permanent Desocialization: Understanding and challenging artificial, political limits on human development; questioning power and inequality in the status quo; examining socialized values in consciousness and in society that hold back democratic change in individuals and in the larger culture; seeing self and social transformation as a joint process . . . ” • “Self-Education/Organization: Self-organized transformative education to develop critical thought and cooperative action; knowing how to study critically in groups or individually, how to find out about an issue or subject . . . ; acknowledging the value of humor, passion, curiosity, intuition, and outrage as emotional dimensions

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of knowledge; developing educational projects coordinated with political groups . . . ”

What Are the Current Challenges to Critical Educators? What Do You Think Will Be the Next Phase of Critical Pedagogy? The future is impossible to predict. We can only look at current conditions to get a feel for limits, options, and trends. First, of course, is the ongoing conservative climate. This right-wing advance continues in the United States despite three historic disasters that have discredited the status quo: the failures and lies of the Iraq War, the refusal to rescue victims of Hurricane Katrina, and the financial meltdown of Wall Street in September 2008. On the plus side for the oligarchy, however, there is the huge success of globalization and billions accumulating in many corporate balance sheets. But, this soaring wealth competes with the economic troubles of working families, thanks to outsourcing, layoffs, stagnant wages, rising prices, high taxes, and impossible health care. Perhaps we will get to see just how long a system can lavish its top 1 percent while abusing the bottom 99 percent before the privileged are overtaken by rage from below. Perhaps the multitudes abroad who live in developing economies will take the lead against globalization. Perhaps the 87,000 violent protests reported in China in 2006 by the government there will spread. Perhaps the $700 billion taxpayer bailout of Wall Street will provoke widespread demands for a new economic order. Or, perhaps Mother Nature will enforce a pause or pullback on runaway globalization if Global Warming accelerates the run of catastrophic hurricanes, or if a pandemic races across borders, or if a mass poisoning from tainted goods strikes a nation. With China, India, Russia, and Eastern Europe now integrated into the Western market system, providing enormous opportunities for investment and return and enormous risk and instability, globalization most likely has fast and wobbling legs, especially with Labor, Feminist, and Environmental groups now small and divided, though such forces can grow surprisingly fast when their time has come or if a general crisis erupts. In terms of education, K-12 teachers, students, and parents will have to cope with the continuing imposition of high-stakes testing if the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is ultimately renewed. Public school budgets will continue struggling with property tax rebellions and with the fiscal crisis of the state in the wake of a trillion-dollar

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Iraq War and a trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street exhausting public sector funds. For sure, it seems very important for teachers to work within their unions to make these organizations militant advocates for children and the public sector. The brilliant Rethinking Schools group in Milwaukee over twenty years of activism is an example of what can be accomplished by rank-and-file teachers who start from their own kitchen tables. At the college level, inequality is advancing, with poor and working-class students having less access to four-year degrees because of rising tuition and stagnant family incomes. Colleges in this new Gilded Age follow the lead of Harvard whose $37 Billion portfolio fuels options available to very few campuses, yet many, like the impoverished City University of New York try to upscale. The former “Harvard of the Working Class,” my own City University of New York, now lavishly finances an elitist Macaulay Honors College and plans to spread its use of SAT scores for admission (just as many other colleges are finally abandoning this toxic instrument of inequality). For college teachers, the big problem is large class size, high course loads, greater pressure from “publish or perish,” the vocational anxieties of students in debt to pay for college in an age of depressed wages, and the runaway exploitation of contingent staff. Overworked and underpaid adjuncts make up huge proportions of the faculty. Only solidarity and union action can address this decline in conditions for teaching and learning.

Given the Prime Need to Consolidate Democratic Opposition in School and Society, What Can Critical Literacy Do in Classrooms? The difficulties of the current moment, it seems to me, are also teaching opportunities. Perhaps the best places to begin are the conditions and needs of the students in the context of oligarchic concentrations of wealth and power in this country. Pose the problems of globalization and privatization, inequality, war, the Main Street bailout of Wall Street, and the toxic spoliation of the planet at the ground level where students live them out. Syllabi that grapple with the growing inequalities of wealth, gender, and race, with the global context of our local conundrums, are acts of opposition against the Brave New World shaping up around us. Even if critical pedagogy in particular and education in general cannot by themselves reverse these conditions, they can break the silence moving us into the worst world possible. Interfere by teaching your heart out. Interfere with where we

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are headed by making classrooms public spaces whose discussions grapple with what is happening to us. Shine bright lights on the obscured mechanisms of power. When Wall Street bankrupts Main Street, pose the problem. Critical classrooms are opportunities to circulate unauthorized democratic discourse against the status quo. This consequential task questions “the power now in power,” as Freire called it, against which “the power not yet in power” will have to imagine and invent another world.

Tell Us about Identity, Difference, and Power in Critical Literacy Classrooms Critical literacy classes focused on identity differences have also been construed as “contact zones” by Mary Louise Pratt: “ . . . social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power. . . . ”5 Pratt proposed some rhetorical arts for a critical pedagogy that profiles differences while resisting dominant culture, including two useful alternatives to mimicking elite discourse in writing classes. These two alternatives for producing texts offer students and teachers options to assimilating uncritically into academic discourse: • Autoethnography: a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them . . . • Transculturation: the processes whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant or metropolitan culture . . . While subordinate peoples do not usually control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what gets absorbed into their own and what it gets used for. These literate practices ask students to take critical postures toward their own language uses as well as toward the discourses dominating school and society, such as mainstream news media. Further, from Pratt’s contact zone theory, we can extract and summarize more pedagogical advice for questioning power relations and encouraging critical literacy: 1. Structure the class around “safe houses” (group caucuses within the larger class where marginalized “others” can develop their positions).

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2. Offer exercises in oral and written storytelling and in identifying with the ideas, interests, histories, and attitudes of “others.” 3. Give special attention to the rhetorical techniques of parody, comparison, and critique so as to strengthen students’ abilities to speak back to their immersion in the literate products of the dominant culture. 4. Explore suppressed aspects of history (what Foucault referred to as “disqualified” or “unqualified” narratives relating popular resistance). 5. Define ground rules for communication across differences and in the midst of existing hierarchies of authority. 6. Perform systematic studies of cultural mediation, or how cultural material is produced, distributed, received, and used. Finally, Pratt enumerated other “critical arts” of the contact zone that could encourage a rhetoric of resistance: doing imaginary dialogues (to develop student ability to create subjectivities in history), writing in multiple dialects and idioms (to avoid privileging one dominant form), and addressing diverse audiences with discourses of resistance (to invite students to imagine themselves speaking to both empowered and disempowered groups). Pratt’s pedagogy for producing critical discourse has been deployed for writing classes by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg.6 In general, contact zone theory has a friendly fit with the critical literacy I defined elsewhere as: Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse.7

My definition is also consistent with Aronowitz’s and Giroux’s (1985) notion that “critical literacy would make clear the connection between knowledge and power. It would present knowledge as a social construction linked to norms and values, and it would demonstrate modes of critique that illuminate how, in some cases, knowledge serves very specific economic, political and social interests. Moreover, critical literacy would function as a theoretical tool to help students and others develop a critical relationship to their own knowledge.”8 With this kind of literacy, students “learn how to read the

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world and their lives critically and relatedly . . . and, most importantly, it points to forms of social action and collective struggle.” 9 This activist agenda was also central to Joe Kretovics’ definition: “Critical literacy . . . points to providing students not merely with functional skills, but with the conceptual tools necessary to critique and engage society along with its inequalities and injustices. Furthermore, critical literacy can stress the need for students to develop a collective vision of what it might be like to live in the best of all societies and how such a vision might be made practical.”10

How Do You Think We Can Utilize Critical Literacy for Envisioning Change? Envisioning and realizing change was a key goal of Freire’s literacy teams in Brazil before they were destroyed by the military coup of April, 1964: From the beginning, we rejected . . . a purely mechanistic literacy program and considered the problem of teaching adults how to read in relation to the awakening of their consciousness . . . We wanted a literacy program which would be an introduction to the democratization of culture, a program with human beings as its subjects rather than as patient recipients, a program which itself would be an act of creation, capable of releasing other creative acts, one in which students would develop the impatience and vivacity which characterize search and invention.11

Freire’s original method included trisyllabic exercises for decoding and encoding words. Even though this project had explicit political intentions, Freire’s practical pedagogy focused on writing, reading, and dialogue from generative themes based in student life, not on didactic lectures based in teacherly discourse. Freire thus developed pragmatic “agencies for doing,” to use Dewey’s phrase. The students’ literacy skills emerged through concrete exercises on generative themes displayed in drawings (“codifications”) from their lives (Dewey’s vital subject matter as the context for developing reflective habits and language abilities). Freire’s much-read reports of dialogic pedagogy for illiterate Brazilian peasants and workers offer an instructive comparison to the literacy narrative of Mike Rose who chronicled his life and work among basic writers at UCLA and elsewhere. Rose, based at a highprofile campus dominated by academic discourse, developed and

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taught a rhetorical form of critical literacy: “framing an argument or taking someone else’s argument apart, systematically inspecting a document, an issue, or an event, synthesizing different points of view, applying theory to disparate phenomena . . . comparing, synthesizing, analyzing . . . summarizing, classifying . . . ”12 Rose’s definition of critical literacy reiterates Mina Shaughnessy’s earlier advice for teaching rhetorical habits to basic writers.13 By naming these literate habits and by asking students to learn them through complex cases drawn from across the curriculum, Rose responded to the academic needs of basic writers at a flagship campus, UCLA. In Freire’s original culture circles the situation was not academic, but rather nonformal adult basic education offered where the students lived or worked, certainly not on a campus. Later in his career, when Freire became Secretary of Education for the City of Sao Paulo in 1989, responsible for an impoverished school system of about 700,000 students, he proposed that standard forms should be taught to nonelite Brazilian students in the context of democratizing schools and integrating the themes of their lives: Finally, teachers have to say to students, Look, in spite of being beautiful, this way you speak also includes the question of power. Because of the political problem of power, you need to learn how to command the dominant language, in order for you to survive in the struggle to transform society.14

Freire reiterated this point a few years later in Pedagogy of the City (1993): “The need to master the dominant language is not only to survive but also better to fight for the transformation of an unjust and cruel society where the subordinate groups are rejected, insulted, and humiliated.”15 In these remarks, Freire foregrounds ideology and education for changing society, activist positions typical of critical literacy. Freire’s remarks discussed above involve an inflammatory issue of language education in the United States and elsewhere: Should all students be taught standard usage and initiated into academic discourses of traditional disciplines, or should students be encouraged to use the language they bring to class (called students’ rights to their own language in a controversial policy statement by the Conference on College Composition and Communication in 1973)? In the United States, the argument for teaching standard usage to black youth has been taken up strenuously by Lisa Delpit (1995). Yet, despite her stance in favor of standard usage for all, Delpit produced

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a special anthology defending “ebonics” in the classroom (with coeditor Theresa Perry, The Real Ebonics Debate, 1998). This anthology includes a strong essay by Geneva Smitherman, the longtime proponent of black students using African-American English. A bidialectal or contrastive rhetoric approach is being suggested here for honoring and using the students’ community language while also studying Standard English. Freire would likely agree with the bidialectal approach, but he would insist on ethical and historical foundations for such a program: standard usage, rhetorical forms, and academic discourse make democratic sense only when taught in a critical curriculum explicitly posing problems about the status quo based in themes from the students’ lives. In a program clearly against inequality, many tools and resources can be useful, including standard usage, bidialectalism, bilingualism, contrastive translations of texts from community language into academic discourse, and so on. In a critical program, the teaching of standard form is thus embedded in a curriculum oriented toward democratic development. By themselves, correct usage, paragraph skills, and rhetorical forms such as narrative, description, or cause and effect are certainly not foundations for democratic or critical consciousness, as Bizzell recognized after her long attempt to connect the teaching of formal technique with the development of social critique.16 Another oppositional approach merging technique and critique is Gerald Graff’s “teach the conflicts” method, which has been developed thoughtfully for writing classes by Don Lazere.17 Lazere provides rhetorical frameworks to students for analyzing ideologies in competing texts and media sources. The specific rhetorical techniques serve social critique here, insofar as the curriculum invites students to develop ideological sophistication in a society that mystifies politics, a society, in fact, where “politics” has become a repulsive “devil-word.” Lazere uses problem-posing at the level of topical and academic themes (social issues chosen by the teacher and subject matters taken from expert bodies of knowledge and then posed to students as questions) rather than generative themes (materials taken from student thought and language).18 My own Deweyan and Freirean preference is to situate critical literacy in student discourse and perceptions as the starting points, but the “teach the conflicts” method of Graff and Lazere is indeed a critical approach worthy of study, especially because it teaches us a way to pose academic subject matters as problems, questions, and exercises rather than merely lecturing them to students. Merging the study of formal technique with social critique is not simple, but this project is no more and no less “political” than any

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other kind of literacy program. The position taken by critical literacy advocates is that no pedagogy is neutral, no learning process is valuefree, no curriculum avoids ideology and power relations. To teach is to encourage human beings to develop in one direction or another. In fostering student development, every teacher chooses some subject matters, some ways of knowing, some ways of speaking and relating, instead of others. These choices orient students to map the world and their relation to it. Every educator, then, orients students toward certain values, actions, and language with implications for the kind of society and people these behaviors will produce. This inevitable involvement of education with developmental values was called “stance” by Jerome Bruner: . . . the medium of exchange in which education is conducted— language —can never be neutral . . . [I]t imposes a point of view not only about the world to which it refers but toward the use of mind in respect of this world. Language necessarily imposes a perspective in which things are viewed and a stance toward what we view . . . I do not for a minute believe that one can teach even mathematics or physics without transmitting a sense of stance toward nature and toward the use of the mind . . . The idea that any humanistic subject can be taught without revealing one’s stance toward matters of human pith and substance is, of course, nonsense . . . [T]he language of education, if it is to be an invitation to reflection and culture creating, cannot be the socalled uncontaminated language of fact and “objectivity.”19

Also denying the neutrality of language and learning, poet Adrienne Rich said of her work in the Open Admissions experiment at the City University of New York that “My daily life as a teacher confronts me with young men and women who had language and literature used against them, to keep them in their place, to mystify, to bully, to make them feel powerless.”20 Rich ended her tribute to the cultural democracy of Open Admissions in the early 1970s by connecting the writing of words to the changing of worlds: [L]anguage is power and . . . those who suffer from injustice most are the least able to articulate their suffering . . . [T]he silent majority, if released into language, would not be content with a perpetuation of the conditions which have betrayed them. But this notion hangs on a special conception of what it means to be released into language: not simply learning the jargon of an elite, fitting unexceptionably into the status quo, but learning that language can be used as a means for changing reality.21

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Thus, to be for critical literacy is to take a moral stand on the kind of just society and democratic education we want. This is an ethical center proposed many years ago by the patron saint of American education, John Dewey, who insisted that school and society must be based in cooperation, democratic relations, and egalitarian distribution of resources and authority. Progressive educators since Dewey, such as George Counts, Maxine Greene, and George Wood, have continued this ethical emphasis. Freire openly acknowledged his debt to Dewey and declared his search “for an education that stands for liberty and against the exploitation of the popular classes, the perversity of the social structures, the silence imposed on the poor—always aided by an authoritarian education.”22 Many teachers reject authoritarian education. Many strive against fitting students quietly into the status quo. Many share the democratic goals of critical literacy. This educational work means, finally, inventing what Richard Ohmann referred to as a “literacy-from-below” that questions the way things are and imagines alternatives, so that the word and the world may meet in history for the making of social justice.23

Notes 1. S. Aronowitz and H. Giroux, Education Under Siege: The Conservative, Liberal and Radical Debate Over Schooling (New York: Routledge, 1985), 132. 2. Ibid. 3. J. Kretovics, “Critical Literacy: Challenging the Assumptions of Mainstream Educational Theory,” Journal of Education 167, 2 (1985): 51. 4. I. Shor, Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 126–130. 5. Pratt, Mary Louise, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 33–40. 6. P. Bizzell and B. Herzburg, Negotiating Difference: Cultural Case Studies for Composition (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1995). 7. Shor, Empowering Education, 129. 8. S. Aronowitz and H. Giroux, Education Under Siege, 132. 9. Ibid. 10. Kretovics, 51. 11. P. Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), 43. 12. M. Rose, Lives on the Boundary (New York: Penguin, 1990), 188, 194, 138. 13. M. Shaughnessy, “Some Needed Research on Writing,” College Composition and Communication (December 1977).

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14. P. Freire and I. Short, A Pedagogy for Liberation (Granby, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1986), 73. 15. P. Freire and D. Macedo, Pedagogy of the City (New York: Continuum International Publishing, 1992), 135. 16. P. Bizzell, Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992). 17. G. Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992). See Don Lazere’s chapter in Critical Literacy in Action, ed. I. Shor and C. Pari (Portsmouth, NH: Boyton/Cook Publishers, 1999). 18. See Shor, Empowering Education, 2–5, 46–48, 73–84. 19. J. Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 121, 128, 129. 20. A. Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silences (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 61. 21. Ibid., 67–68. 22. M. Cox, “Paulo Freire: Interview,” OMNI 12 (April 1990): 74–94. 23. R. Ohmann, Politics of Letters (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press: 1987).

Additional References L. Delpit, Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom (New York: The New Press, 1985). T. Perry and L. Delpit, eds. The Real Ebonics Debate (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1998). I. Shor, Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration 1969–1984 (New York: Routledge, 1986) and (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). I. Shor and P. Freire, A Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues on Transforming Education (Granby, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1986). I. Shor, When Students Have Power: Negotiating Authority in Critical Pedagogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Ira Shor, “What is Critical Literacy?” Journal for Pedagogy, Pluralism & Practice 1, 4 (1999), available http://www.lesley.edu/journals/jppp/4/ index.html. Ira Shor, “Can Critical Teaching Foster Activism in this Time of Repression?” Radical Teacher 79 (2007): 39–39, 2/3.

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Te ac h i ng a s Possi bi l i t y : A L igh t i n Da r k Ti m e s Maxine Greene

Borrowing from a bitter poem by Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt

entitled a book of essays, Men in Dark Times.1 The poem, “To Posterity,” she explained, spoke of the horrors taking place in the early days of Nazi rule in Germany and of the absence of outrage. Things were covered up, she wrote, by “highly efficient talk and double talk;” and she stressed how important it always is to have a space in which light can be shed on what is happening and what is being said. Granted, our times may not be marked by the kinds of monstrosities associated with the Nazis; but dark times are no rarity, even in American history. In the darkest moments, she wrote, we still “have the right to expect some illumination . . . and such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under all circumstances . . . ”2 I view our times as shadowed by violations and erosions taking place around us: the harm being done to children; the eating away of social support systems; the “savage inequalities” in our schools; the spread of violence; the intergroup hatreds; the power of media; the undermining of arts in the lives of the young. And then I think of the “light that some men and women will kindle under almost all circumstances,” and that makes me ponder (and sometimes wonder at) the work that is and might be done by teachers at this problematic moment in our history. There is doubt, unquestionably, within and outside the schools, and there is dread. The poet Adrienne Rich has written some remarkable poetry about the different kinds of dread experienced by different people. When asked how, in the face of this, she could maintain such

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an affirmative attitude, she said, “If poetry is forced by the conditions in which it is created to speak of dread and of bitter, bitter conditions,by its very nature, poetry speaks to something different. That’s why poetry can bring together those parts of us which exist in dread and those which have the surviving sense of a possible happiness, collectivity, community, a loss of isolation.”3 Arendt and Rich, each in her distinctive voice, are speaking of the capacity of human beings to reach beyond themselves to what they believe should be, which might be in some space they bring into being among and between themselves. The two remind us (by speaking of an uncertain light and of something different) of what it signifies to imagine not what is necessarily probable or predictable, but what may be conceived as possible. All of those who have parented children or taught the young may resonate to this on some level, particularly when they recall the diverse, often unexpected shapes of children’s growing and becoming. Many may find a truth in Emily Dickinson’s saying that “The Possible’s slow fuse is lit/ By the Imagination.”4 Imagination, after all, allows people to think of things as if they could be otherwise; it is the capacity that allows a looking through the windows of the actual toward alternative realities. It is obvious enough that arguments for the values and possibilities of teaching acts (no matter how enlightened) within the presently existing system cannot be expressed through poetry, even as it is clear that the notion of “teaching as possibility” cannot simply be asserted and left to do persuasive work. The contexts have to be held in mind, as does what strikes many of us as a backward leaning, inhumane tendency in our society today. For all the apparent resurgence of Deweyan progressive thinking in the school renewal movement, parent bodies and community representatives in many places are explicitly at odds with what they believe is being proposed. They respond more readily to the media-sustained talk of standards and technology than they do to the idea of multiple patterns of being and knowing, to a regard for cultural differences, to an attentiveness when it comes to voices never listened to before. Teachers who are consciously and reflectively choosing themselves as participants in school renewal are being challenged to clarify their beliefs and (more and more often) to defend their practices. If the discourse they are developing can be infused with the kinds of metaphor that reorient ordinary commonsense thinking, if they can break through more often what John Dewey called “the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness” when attention is turned to the school, neighborhood or district discussions may be moved beyond

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the customary and the self-regarding.5 If the fears and suffering of local people, some of them feeling themselves to be ignorant and powerless, can be taken into account, what Paulo Freire called a “pedagogy of hope” might even take form, and dialogue of a different sort might take the place of the language of prescription or complaint or demand.6 If teachers can begin to think of themselves as among those able to kindle the light Arendt described, or are among those willing to confront the dread and keep alive the sense of “a possible happiness,” they might find themselves revisioning their life projects, existing proactively in the world. Paying heed to the repetitive drumbeat of current concerns—for professional development, standard-setting, authentic assessment, an enriched knowledge base, technological expertise,—teachers cannot but occasionally ask themselves “to what end?” There are, of course, the official announcements and prescriptions. There are presumably obvious “goods” linked to each statement of an educational goal. Most often, we realize, the benefits of reform are linked to the nation’s welfare, or to market expansion, or to technological dominance in a competitive world. Suppose, however, we were to summon up an articulation of purpose suggested by Rich’s “possible happiness, collectivity, community, a loss of isolation.” The words imply a reaching out for individual fulfillment among others in (perhaps) the kind of community in the making that John Dewey called democracy. They are, to a degree, abstract and metaphorical; but, speaking indirectly as they do, they respond to some of the evident lacks in our society, to the spaces where people feel solitary and abandoned, to domains of felt powerlessness. If our purposes were to be framed in such a fashion, they would not exclude the multiple-literacies and the diverse modes of understanding young persons need if they are to act knowledgeably and reflectively within the frameworks of their lived lives. Situatedness; vantage point; the construction of meanings: all can and must be held in mind if teachers are to treat their students with regard, if they are to release them to learn how to learn. Their questions will differ, as their perspectives will differ, along with their memories and their dreams. But if teachers cannot enable them to resist the humdrum, the routine, or what Dewey called the “anesthetic,” they will be in danger of miseducative behavior, ending in cul-de-sacs rather than in openings.7 If situations cannot be created that enable the young to deal with feelings of being manipulated by outside forces, there will be far too little sense of agency among them. Without a sense of agency, young people are unlikely to pose significant questions, the existentially rooted

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questions in which learning begins. Indeed, it is difficult to picture learner-centered classrooms if students’ lived situations are not brought alive, if dread and desire are not both given play. There is too much of a temptation otherwise to concentrate on training rather than teaching, to focus on skills for the work place rather than any “possible happiness” or any real consciousness of self. Drawn to comply, to march in more or less contented lockstep (sneakered, baseball capped, T-shirted), familiar with the same media-derived referents, many youngsters will tacitly agree to enter a community of the competent, to live lives according to “what is.” There are, of course, young persons in the inner cities, the ones lashed by “savage inequalities,”8 the ones whose very schools are made sick by the social problems the young bring in from without.9 Here, more frequently than not, are the real tests of “teaching as possibility” in the face of what looks like an impossible social reality at a time when few adults seem to care. There are examples, in Mike Rose’s work on “possible lives,” for instance, where he expresses his belief that “a defining characteristic of good teaching is a tendency to push on the existing order of things.”10 In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the child Claudia is explaining her hatred of Shirley Temple dolls, to her the very exemplars of hatred are a world of objects, a world in which people yearn for possessions above all, including white china dolls for Black children. “I did not know why I destroyed those dolls,” writes Claudia. “But I did know that nobody ever asked me what I wanted for Christmas. Had any adult with the power to fulfill my desires taken me seriously and asked me what I wanted, they would have known that I did not want anything to own, or to possess any object. I wanted rather to feel something on Christmas day. The real question would have been, ‘Dear Claudia, what experience would you like on Christmas?’ I could have spoken up, ‘I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama’s kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play his violin for me alone.’ The lowness of the stool made for my body, the security and warmth of Big Mama’s kitchen, the smell of the lilacs, the sound of the music, and, since it would be good to have all of my senses engaged, the taste of a peach, perhaps, afterward.”11 This cannot be attributed to teaching; but it is a “push on the existing order of things”; and it may hold clues to what good teaching can be. Claudia is cared for harshly by her mother; but she is confident of her concern and of her love. She is, at least at that young age, able to resist the existing order of consumable and ownable things and to tap into some deeper need for what she calls “experience.” Perhaps this cannot be taught, but Claudia’s seems to be an insight that underlies the

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insistences of the culture, that has to do with being sensually alive and within a loving world. This is not a purely fictional phenomenon. Too many teachers, by now, have read their students’ journals and stories and poems; they have exposed themselves to many kinds of dread and many kinds of desire. Much of the suffering, much of the deprivation, is due, quite obviously, to economic and social injustices; but there is a sense in which imagination and desire can feed the recognition of the need to transform and, perhaps, the passion to change. To have that sense is to be able to listen to what Wallace Stevens calls “the man with the blue guitar” who “does not play things as they are.”12 Imagination alters the vision of the way things are; it opens spaces in experience where projects can be devised, the kinds of projects that may bring things closer to what ought to be. Without such a capacity, even young people may resemble the inhabitants of the town of Oran Albert Camus described at the start of The Plague, “where everyone is bored and devotes himself to cultivating habits.” The point is made that you can get through the day without trouble once you have formed habits. In some other places, the narrator says, “People have now and then an inkling of something different.”13 They have had an intimation, and that is so much to the good. He did not necessarily mean an intimation of the end of the plague and a return to normal life. He meant, perhaps, an intimation of mortality, of injustice that has to be struggled against, of silences that have to be acknowledged and at once overcome. For us, that may imply a recognition, not solely of the human condition but of the contradictions in what we think of as a democratic society. Even to think about bringing about significant changes within the school is to contest on many levels the behaviorist, stratifying tendencies that still mark the culture as it impinges on the school. To encourage the young to develop visions of what might be and then recognize, against those visions, how much and what is lacking maybe is to strike against all sorts of easy platitudes that obscure the turmoil of change. Most of us realize that only when we envisage a better social order do we find the present one in many ways unendurable, and hence stir ourselves to repair it. The sight and description of the new schools at the present time—the Coalition schools, the Charter schools, the New Vision Schools—make it uniquely possible to identify what is wrong with the traditional schools. All we need to do is to take heed of what can happen when a junior high school girl, caught in an overcrowded city school, visits one of the new theme schools. Abruptly, she may notice what is lacking in her own school: a brightly decorated classroom, small groups

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and family circles, a breaking through of the forty-five-minute class period. Without witnessing a better state of things, she could not have realized what was lacking, what was wrong. Sometimes, introduced to a reflective or a learning community, someone will become aware of the dearth of understanding in her/ his own domain and of the blocks to knowing and to questioning. Sometimes, a teacher or a relative or a friend may pay heed, as does the singer Shug Avery in the Color Purple.14 She suggests to Miss Celie a way of being without “that old white man” in her head, actually a way of becoming free. Celie writes: “Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come from?) Not the little wild flowers. Nothing.”15 She, too, made aware of alternatives, can discover that “she feels like a fool” because of what she was never enabled to notice and about which she had never asked. Inklings and intimations, of course, are not sufficient, as the townspeople in Oran discovered when they organized sanitary squads to fight the plague, “since they knew it was the only thing to do.”16 Imagination is what imparts a conscious quality to experience and the realization that things do not repeat themselves, that experience should not be expected to be uniform or frictionless. Imagination, moreover, is enriched and stimulated through live encounters with others, through exposure to diverse vantage points and unfamiliar ways of looking at the world. Imagination should not, however, as Dewey warned, be permitted to run loose so that it merely builds “castles in the air” and lets “them be a substitute for an actual achievement which involves the pains of thought.”17 Yes, there are distinctive moments made possible by the poetic imagination, but the social and ethical imagination is concerned for using ideas and aspirations to reorganize the environment or the lived situation. Paulo Freire had this in mind when he wrote about the shaping of a critical discourse that showed adult learners “the lovelier world to which they aspired was being announced, somehow anticipated, in their imagination. It was not a matter of idealism. Imagination and conjecture about a different world than the one of oppression are as necessary to the praxis of historical ‘subjects’ (agents in the process of transforming reality) as it necessarily belongs to human toil that the worker or artisan first have in his or her head a design a ‘conjecture,’ of what he or she is about to make.”18 Freire believes that democratic education requires enabling ordinary people to develop their own language, derived from their readings of their own social realities,

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their own namings, their own anticipations of a better state of things. We might return to the present use of storytelling, especially contextualized storytelling, by means of which young people explore the influences of social life on their becoming, of race and gender and ethnic membership, of traditions, of the stories told to them. Dialogue can arise from storytelling in a shared classroom space; and out of dialogue and conjecture can come the making of projects also shared. They may be as simple and concrete as polling the neighborhood mothers on immunization of their babies, as rehabilitating rooms somewhere for homeless classmates, as volunteering for a tutoring program, as organizing street dances or a marching band. There is considerable talk these days of how fair societies may be nurtured in families, schools, work places, and congregations. Modern democracies, says Michael Sandel, can be nourished close to home, in settings where people experience and act upon accepted responsibility.19 One of his examples is of the civil rights movement, which actually began in small black Baptist churches in the South and progressed from there to a national movement. We might be reminded also of Vaclav Havel writing from prison a decade ago. He found hope in small students movements, ecological movements, peace movements, because he believed that “human communality” begins in a “renaissance of elementary human relationships which new projects can at the very most only mediate.”20 This may well ascribe new importance to the school and to teachers willing to foster the values Havel talked about: “love, charity, sympathy, tolerance, understanding, self-control, solidarity, friendship, feelings of belonging, the acceptance of concrete responsibility for those close to one”—all with an eye on the social formations that decide the fate of the world. Freire, also thinking of how to move beyond the small community, the local, spoke about “the invention of citizenship,” clearly with imagination in mind once again.21 The processes of speaking, writing, and reading must be attended to; there must be reflectiveness with regard to the languages in use— the language of images, of technology, of ordinary communication grounded in everyday life. The current interest in narrative and in the landscapes on which people’s stories take shape is enabling many learners to explore their own idioms, to create projects by means of which they can identify themselves. To do that is inevitably to take the social setting into account, the social situation without which no self can come to be. We might recall Edward Said saying that no one is purely one thing, that “labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind.”22

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We need to listen to other echoes in the garden, he reminds us, to attend to the continuity of old traditions as well as to the connections only now being disclosed. Both require a consciousness of location, an awareness of both contemporaries and predecessors. We are realizing how much the negotiation of identity today has to do with connectedness and membership; and the notion of participant membership has to feed into our conceptions of democratic citizenship. Visions of public spaces may open, if we allow them to, spaces where all kinds of persons can come together in collaborative concern for what is lacking or what is wrong, what needs to be improved or repaired. The greatest obstacle in the way, as Hannah Arendt saw it, is “thoughtlessness—the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of truths which have become trivial and empty . . . ”23 Clearly, this has pedagogical implications, as did Dewey’s warning about a “social pathology” standing in the way of inquiry into social conditions. “It manifests itself in a thousand ways,” he wrote, “in querulousness, in impotent drifting, in uneasy snatching at distractions, in idealization of the long established, in a facile optimism assumed as a cloak, in glorification of things ‘as they are’ . . . ”24 Again, there is the implied demand for attention to a “blue guitar,” even as persons are asked to think about their own thinking, their own denials, their own ends in view. Both Dewey and Arendt paid attention to the problem of impersonality and to the empty sociability taking over from community. Both spoke of business, consumerism, and (in time) of bureaucracy. Action and the sense of agency were crucial for both; their writings urged readers to appear before one another to allow something to take shape between them, a space where diverse beings could reach toward possibility. Both knew that dialogue and communication were focal and, when conceivable, face-to-face communication, with persons addressing one another as who they were and not what they were. It was the lack of authentic communication, Dewey wrote, that led to the “eclipse of the public.” He pointed out that Americans had at hand “the physical tools of communication as never before, but the thoughts and aspirations congruent with them are not communicated and therefore are not common. Without such communication, the public will remain shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for itself, but seizing and holding its shadow rather than its substance.”25 Writing seventy years ago, Dewey may have anticipated the predicaments of a computerized society with a public transmuted into audience or listeners interested in consumption of ideas as well as goods. He might not have been surprised by the crotchety, of insulting telephone calls to

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the talk shows by the prayerful heaves at evangelists’ meetings, the shouts at rock concerts, the hoots and screams at football games. Certainly, people are entitled to make all sorts of sounds, to express themselves in multiple ways; but when the “thoughts and aspirations” Dewey sought are subsumed under noise and sound bytes, teachers are challenged to pay heed. Classroom preoccupations with efficacy or technical efficiency or even “world-class standards” will not solve the problem of communication or the “eclipse of the public.” Nor will they suffice when it comes to consideration of the arts of practice, much less the arts and mystery of being human. The things covered up by “highly efficient talk and double talk” still call for many kinds of illumination.26 Teachers may well be among the few in a position to kindle the light that might illuminate the spaces of discourse and events in which young newcomers have some day to find their ways. Dewey wrote that “democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communion. It had its seer in Walt Whitman.”27 Whitman’s “Song of Myself” comes insistently to mind, with its call for liberation and for equity! “Unscrew the locks from the doors,” he wrote. “Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs/ Whoever degrades another degrades me,/ And whatever is done or said returns at last to me./ Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index./ I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,/ By God I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.”28 Dewey knew this was not a definition of democracy, nor a series of slogans nor a sermon nor a lesson in political science. The function of art “has always been,” he said, “to break through the conventionalized and routine consciousness.” Art is what touches “the deeper levels of life,” and when they are touched “they spring up as desire and thought. This process is art.” And then: “Artists have always been the real purveyors of the news, for it is not the outward happening in itself which is new, but the kindling by it of emotion, perception and appreciation.”29 It must be noted that Dewey affirmed the uses of the arts in the midst of a study of the public, and he spoke about the “deeper levels of life” at the end of the chapter called “Search for the Great Community.” Not only was he emphasizing the place of art experiences in moving persons beyond what was fixed and stale and taken for granted. He was suggesting once again the importance of informing the state of social affairs with knowledge, intelligence, and the kinds of connections—past and present—that compose the fabric of what we have come to call the common world. Teachers, often troubled by charges

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of imposition of white, Western culture upon young people arriving from different worlds, are often at a loss when it comes to providing the kinds of shared cultural referents that help weave networks of relationship. There was a time when the Scriptures offered something in common, or the orations of statements such as those of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, or certain plays of Shakespeare, or folktales or (beginning in the nineteenth century) fictions capturing aspects of the American experience at sea, in the woods on the rivers, on the open roads. It is said today that television shows have replaced such common cultural holdings: “David Letterman,” “The Today Show,” and “Saturday Night Live” shape the culture’s conversation, and the “deeper levels of life” are rolled over or ignored. Teachers concerned about illumination and possibility know well that there is some profound sense in which a curriculum in the making is very much a part of a community in the making. Many are aware of the call on the part of hitherto marginal groups—ethnic minorities, women, gays, and lesbians—for an inclusion of their own traditions in what is sometimes thought of as the “core” of intellectual and artistic life. For all the dissonances and uneasinesses, there is a demand for a kind of historical consciousness on the part of diverse persons within and outside of their associations. This signifies a recognition that the past is like a stream in which all of us in our distinctiveness and diversity participate every time we try to understand. There are, of course, thousands of silenced voices still, thousands of beings striving for visibility, thousands of interpretations still to be made, and thousands of questions to be posed. The common world we are trying to create may be thought of as a fabric of interpretations of many texts, many images, and many sounds. We might think of interpreted experiences with such texts taking the place of a tradition in the old sense of canonical objectivity. When Hannah Arendt wrote about a common world, she put her stress on the innumerable perspectives through which that common world preweans itself and for which a common denominator can never be devised.30 In a classroom, this would mean acknowledgment of and recognition of the different biographical histories that affect the shaping of perspectives. More than in previous times, teachers are asked to confront and honor the differences even as they work for a free and responsible acceptance of the norms marking whatever community is in the making: concrete responsibility for one another, respect for the rights of others, solidarity, regard for reflective habits of thought. At once, there are the ways of thinking and seeing that enable various young persons to decode and interpret what is made available: the ability to distinguish

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among the discourses in use, to have regard for evidence and experience, to be critically conscious of what is read and heard, to construct meanings in the diverse domains of their lives. “Be it grand or slender,” said Toni Morrison in her Nobel Address, “burrowing, blasting or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word or the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue? Word-work is sublime because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”31 This should apply to all the young, whoever they are, if—like Whitman and Morrison as well—we refuse at last to withhold recognition, to degrade or to exclude. Michael Fischer, an ethnologist also concerned for connectedness, writes about the importance of the present tendency to encourage participation of readers themselves in the production of meaning. The conscious effort to move readers to respond to incompleteness and make connections becomes, he suggests, an ethical device attempting to activate in readers a “desire for communitas with others, while preserving rather than effacing differences.”32 We might visualize interpretive encounters with Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne daring to engage in speculative thought while living on the verge of the wilderness, Melville’s Bartleby who “preferred not to,” compared with “a piece of wreckage in the mid Atlantic”: Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart, caught like a cog in the wheel of a material society. Or we might think of the narrator of Ellison’s Invisible Man saying he has “whipped it all except the mind, the mind. And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived.” Or the chaos due to nameless pollution and the falsifications of the media in De Lillo’s White Noise, or Doctorow’s cities with their denials and their cover-ups and their violations of children. Or Tillie Olsen’s narrator standing behind her ironing board, hoping only that her daughter will be more than a dress beneath the iron. And so many other voices, Hispanic and Asian and Native American, all activating questions whose answers create no “common denominator,” but which make each text deeper, richer, more expansive, yes, and more replete with mystery. That, in part, suggests what is meant by teaching as possibility in these dark and constraining times. It is a matter of awakening and

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empowering today’s young people to name, to reflect, to imagine, and to act with more and more concrete responsibility in an increasingly multifarious world. At once, it is a matter of enabling them to remain in touch with dread and desire, with the smell of lilacs and the taste of a peach. The light may be uncertain and flickering, but teachers in their lives and works have the remarkable capacity to make it shine in all sorts of corners and, perhaps, to move newcomers to join with others and transform. Muriel Rukeyser has written: Darkness arrives splitting the mind open. Something again Is beginning to be born. A dance is dancing me. I wake in the dark.33

She offers a metaphor and a watchword. It may help us light the fuse.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

H. Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968). Ibid., ix. B. Moyers, The Language of Life (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 342. Emily Dickinson, “The Gleam of an Heroic act,” in The Complete Poems, ed. T. H. Johnson (Boston: Little Brown, 1960), 688–689. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, OH: The Swallow Press, 1954), 183. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope (New York: Continuum, 1994). John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch, and Co., 1931), 40. Jonathon Kozol, Savage Inequalities (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991). Stephen O’Connor, Will My Name be Shouted Out? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). Mike Rose, Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education (Wilmington, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 428. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Washington Square Press/ Pocket Books, 1970), 21. Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1937), 165. Albert Camus, The Plague (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 4. Alice Walker, The Color Purple, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982). Ibid., 25.

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16. Camus, The Plague, 120. 17. John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 404. 18. Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, 39. 19. Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996). 20. Vaclav Havel, Letters to Olga (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), 371. 21. Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, 39. 22. Edward Said, Musical Elaborations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 336. 23. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), 5. 24. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 170. 25. Ibid., 142. 26. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, viii. 27. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 184. 28. Dewey, Art as Experience, 53. 29. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 184. 30. Arendt, The Human Condition. 31. Toni Morrison, 1996. “The 1993 Nobel Prize Lecture: Honors in Stockholm,” Humanities 17, 1 (1996): 11. 32. Michael Fischer, “Ethnicity and the Arts of Memory,” in Writing Culture, ed. J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 233. 33. Muriel Rukeyser, Muriel Rukeyser Reader (New York: W. W. Norton and Co Inc., 1994), 284.

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I m agi n i ng Just ic e i n a Cu lt u r e of Te r ror : P e dag og y, Pol i t ic s, a n d Disse n t Antonia Darder

[U]nder the sign of a timeless war on global terror . . . dissent as a form of political activism was placed strategically by the rulers of the security state on a continuum of lawlessness leading to terrorism, a continuum in which protest was perceived as disloyal, as the unpatriotic act of the enemy within, as a threat to the safety of the polity—in short, as undemocratic. Robert L. Ivie (2004)1

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on

September 11, 2001 stand as a clear demarcating moment in the history of the United States. These attacks on U.S. soil destroyed the comforting illusion of security and invincibility long held as the mainstay of our democracy. No longer would U.S. elites, political officials, and businessmen exist unscathed by the vengeance of the “enemies” that their own greed and imperialist visions helped to produce during the latter years of the twentieth century. The current international landscape leaves little doubt that we are living in a new era. Steeped in the fears manufactured by a culture of terror, dissenting voices are discouraged or repressed and global protest is rendered impenetrable to neoliberal policies and practices of injustice. Xenophobic pundits denounce the Muslim world, the poor, and the foreign, exploiting the fear of invasion as a clear and present danger. The threat of terrorists, immigrants, and the impoverished now vividly commingle in our psyches. U.S. war acts of aggression persist in Iraq and other parts of the world, while the overwhelming economic,

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political, and military violence at home has been rendered invisible by the evangelizing patriotism and corporate greed of the past decade. The political ramifications of this patriotic zeal not only resulted in the passage of the Patriot Act but also condoned the invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq, orchestrated to protect economic interests and political influences in the Middle East—all in the name of freedom and democracy. This is the same misguided patriotism that has turned a blind eye to the genocide in Darfur, where the United States claims no political or economic interests to defend. On the domestic scene, the rampant incarceration of the poor is justified through the media’s barrage of stereotypes that parade as news, reality cop shows, and criminal pseudo-documentaries such as American Justice and Cold Case Files. Whether at home or in the international arena, U.S. citizens are systematically warned to be afraid of those who are poor or foreign, both major sectors of the population that are rapidly expanding, given the impact of deepening and hardening structures of economic inequality in the United States and abroad. The fear of uncertainty generated by the tragedy of 9/11 led to the formation of The Department of Homeland Security, which initiated a culture of terror and shifted our perceptions of safety on the street and in the air. In its wake, our civil liberties have been vastly compromised in the name of protecting our borders. Through a variety of politically induced media distortions, U.S. citizens are warned repeatedly of “orange alerts” and aroused to question the safety of our own homes. In turn, this has inspired xenophobic sentiments that have given rise to a variety of local, state and federal legislative actions geared toward ridding the country of “illegal” immigrants. At the same time, widespread campaigns for the militarization of the border by both official border patrol agents and border vigilantes prevail.2 Today, Muslim and other immigrants have become the scapegoats of the culture of terror, shrouding America’s political and economic immorality. For example, a recent Newsweek poll, although fairly positive, reported that 25 percent of Americans would consider putting Muslims in U.S. detention camps if another 9/11-style attack were to occur.3 Meanwhile, obvious and long-standing determinants of inequality—poor job security, insufficient income, lack of health care, growing poverty, and the wholesale incarceration of the deeply impoverished—are ignored or dismissed as secondary to issues of national protection. As a consequence, trillions of dollars are being poured into Homeland Security and for military actions at the border and around the world, while social justice is conveniently redefined to abdicate the

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State of any responsibility to its distressed citizens. Instead, the free market is touted as the great equalizer of the twenty-first century, leaving those outside the field of its neoliberal global order to fend for themselves or suffer the bitter consequences of exile. As a leading proponent of the current internationalization of the “war on terrorism,” the United States remains the world’s wealthiest nation, yet it is one of the most economically unequal. “We live in a society in which 1 percent of the population owns 60 percent of stock and 40 percent of total wealth. The top 10 percent of Americans own over 80 percent of the total wealth.”4 At the same time, the poor are “nickel and dimed” into subsistence by the increasing cost of substandard housing, the lack of health care benefits, expensive transportation and commuting costs, too few and often costly child care options, low-wage employment, and increasing job insecurities tied to outsourcing of well-paying jobs and plant shutdowns.5 It is disturbing to note that neoliberals often claim that such actions are good for the world because it redistributes the wealth, while remaining closemouthed about the staggering profits gained from employing lowwage workers without benefits and operating their enterprises in environmentally deregulated zones. Hence, to forge a critical pedagogy within a culture of terror requires us to remain thoughtful about the manner in which neoconservative values and neoliberal policies conflate to protect profits and their stronghold on the economy through supporting a parallel “terror of dissent.” As such, dissenting voices that clamor against current national policies or persistently demand greater democratization of institutional structures are perceived as a danger to the unity of our identity as a nation, justifying the silencing of such dissenters. This is even more disturbing when the politics of neoliberalism, couched in alarmist antiterrorist rhetoric, is enacted on the international arena in the name of democracy.

The Hidden Inseparability of Racism and Class Inequality What tends to disappear from view is the relations of exploitation and domination which irreducibly constitute civil society, not just as some alien and correctable disorder but as its very essence, the particular structure of domination and coercion that is specific to capitalism as a systemic totality—and which also determines the coercive function of the state.6 Ellen Meiksins Wood (1995)

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Contemporary struggles for democratic schooling do not arise in vacuum. They are, instead, historically on a continuum with the dissent and struggles of workers in the early decades of the twentieth century and the antiwar, feminist, and civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. However, unlike earlier political protests, the civil rights movement incorporated a liberal politics of rights, which prevailed as the common orthodoxy for dissent. Notwithstanding, a small cadre of political dissenters adamantly argued that any movement for social justice in the states should be linked to an international, anti-imperialist agenda, one that clearly challenged the inequalities and social exclusions intrinsic to a capitalist political economy. In concert with the times, however, the decision was made to retain a civil rights approach, firmly anchored to a strategy of litigation, to wage dissent and organize communities. This direction in the movement was to represent a significant political juncture that, unwittingly, left unforeseen and untouched the unfettered advancement of globalization in the final decades of the twentieth century. As a result of court gains, movement efforts in schools were chiefly driven by repeated demands for a multicultural curriculum, bilingual education, ethnic studies programs, and affirmative action efforts to diversify students and faculty, and create a greater link between schools and communities. Dropping earlier progressive strategies of dissent tied to class struggle, most movement efforts of the period, principally founded on identity politics, pushed aggressively against traditional institutional boundaries linked to “race” inequality. Although such forms of dissent most certainly served to initiate and marshal a new population of “minority” professionals and elites into a variety of fields and professions, it did little to change the larger structural conditions of inequality most prevalent in poor, working class, and racialized communities. The “race relations” paradigm, unfortunately, failed to challenge the fundamental contradictions of capitalism that continued to misinform the policies and practices of schools and society—contradictions that both conserve and disguise asymmetrical relations of power. Key to this discussion is an understanding of racism that acknowledges class and capitalism as inextricably linked in ways that do not apply to other categories of exclusion. Class inequalities encompass the State’s cultural and political-economic apparatus, which functions systematically to retain widespread control and governance over material wealth and resources. As such, racism operates in conjunction with other ideologies of exclusion (whether cultural, political, class, gendered, sexual, or racialized) to preserve the hegemony of the

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modern capitalist state, engendering its capacity to appropriate even revolutionary projects born of dissent and strip them of their transformative potential. A major study, conducted by Gary Orfield7 at the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, for example, concluded that although progress toward school desegregation had peaked in the late 1980s— with the courts concluding that the goals of Brown v. Board of Education had largely been met—the current trend is moving rapidly in the opposite direction. Concerns regarding segregation, therefore, still have tremendous political saliency today, particularly with respect to questions of academic achievement and the failure of U.S. schools to educate Latino, African American, Native American, and other racialized and working-class student populations. In fact, as Latinos became the largest minority population in the United States, hegemonic forces at work in the reproduction of racialized class inequalities have rendered Latino students (dubbed the “new face of segregation”) more segregated today than their African American counterparts. This study points to the inseparability of racism and economic inequality. Accordingly, contemporary theories of segregation as an outcome of racialized and class reproduction must be grounded in a politics of class struggle. This is to say that racism, as a significant political strategy of exclusion, domination, marginalization, violence, and exploitation, cannot be separated from its economic imperative. Thus, it should be no surprise that over 90 percent of segregated African American and Latino neighborhood schools are located in areas of concentrated poverty.8 In fact, students who attend segregated minority schools are 11 times more likely to live in areas of concentrated poverty than students (of all ethnicities) who attend desegregated schools. Hence, when problems of schooling are racialized, deep-seated questions of economic injustice are often deceptively camouflaged. For example, poor students labeled “white” exhibit comparatively similar social and academic difficulties as their counterparts of color. This is most visible in rural schools of the Midwest or the South, where poor “white” students are generally the majority. However, this phenomenon in the United States has been effectively masked and obscured through the racialized portrayals of youth of color in the media and the social sciences. It is interesting to note that this process of racialization became most pronounced following the protests of African American, Latino, Asian American, and Native American students of color in the 1960s and 1970s. It was at this

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historical juncture that the media shifted from commonplace portrayals of “white” youth as juvenile delinquents or hoodlums to the racialized depictions of gangbangers as urban terrorists. The point here is that the impoverished conditions that prevail in segregated communities are inextricably tied to the reproduction of racialized class formations—not some biological or cultural predisposition. Hence, racism can only be ameliorated through a vision of social justice and a politics of dissent firmly rooted in a redistribution of wealth, power, and privilege. So, although much good has been attributed to the politics of Brown v. Board of Education, we find ourselves in a new historical moment that warrants a critical rethinking of emancipatory solutions and strategies of dissent rooted in another time and place. Given the lessons of the last fifty years, many solutions anchored in the “race relations” paradigm of the civil rights era have been called into question by today’s context. For instance, there are researchers who contend that the “race relations” paradigm actually functions, unwittingly, to obscure the phenomenon of racism and, hence, the hegemonic forces at work within the sociopolitical construction of segregation.9 Instead, they contend that the process of racialization, with its reified commonsense notions of “race,” fails to challenge fundamental structural inequalities of an internationalized capitalist mode of production. Contemporary society has become entrenched in the language of “race” as destiny, with an implicit dictum that membership in particular “races” enacts social processes, rather than ideology and material conditions of survival. Today, political discourses of every kind are structured by attaching deterministic meaning to social constructs of physical and cultural characteristics, although the racialized landscape has become far more complex. Interestingly, this same myopic lens is often reflected both in liberal advocates of identity politics and in those conservatives who espouse xenophobic views of “foreigners” or the “other.” In stark contrast, critical pedagogy must seek to reinforce an understanding of democratic vision and dissent beyond dichotomies of black and white. In the absence of a more complex vision of ethnic, religious, and political differences, the outcome is the absolutizing of all social and political relations, with little room for the formation of a heterogeneous U.S. national identity in the United States. Instead of waging dissent across our differences on issues and concerns that impact all communities (i.e., health, income, education, environment, etc.), all political interests are categorically racialized. As such, the notion of “race” becomes both absolute and instrumentalized by even well-meaning theorists and policy-makers who seek to analyze

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the difficulties and concerns of racialized populations. Accordingly, the malignant ideologies of oppression that sustain necessary capitalist inequalities and result in segregation and other forms of social exclusion10 are left unattended or reputed as irrelevant. A key point to be made here is that the ideology that informs how we define a social or institutional problem will also determine our choice of political strategies, potential solutions, and ultimately the outcome. The busing solution of the 1970s is a useful example. Busing was one of the predominant integration solutions chosen to wage protest against segregation—a solution anchored in a “race relations” paradigm. But to the chagrin of many African American and Latino communities, this solution actually functioned to destroy the strength, cohesion, and coherence of community life. Some would further argue that it was, in fact, the already more economically privileged minorities (who, incidentally, defined the problem and chose the predominant means for dissent) who made the greatest gains. And, despite the interventions of the civil rights movement, forty years later the class composition of U.S. society based on control of wealth has failed to improve, becoming, in fact, more polarized between the rich and the poor across all population groups. That is to say, members of the ruling class, of all ethnicities, are wealthier today than they were in the 1960s. Hence, the expansion of an elite, professional class of African American and Latinos ultimately failed to dismantle the oppressive economic and racialized policies and practices of the Capitalist State. Instead, hegemonic practices of economic exploitation and the hardened structures of racialized inequality became further camouflaged behind neoliberal aspirations. Such was also the fate of multiculturalism, which, falling prey to both the politics of identity and state appropriation, became an effective vehicle for further depoliticizing the remnants of political dissent rooted in the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s. Notwithstanding its original emancipatory intent, the politics of multiculturalism was, from its inception, flawed by its adherence to the language of “race relations” and its rejection of class struggle. Moreover, the well-meaning celebrations of difference and the hard-fought battles of a variety of identity movements for representation failed to generate any real or lasting structural change, beyond liberal proposals such as affirmative action, for instance, that more often than not served the interests of the more privileged. In the final analysis, multiculturalism became an effective mechanism of the state, used to manage, preserve, and obscure racialized class divisions, while in the marketplace the new multiplicity of identities generated new products for global consumption.

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Beyond the Domestication of the Culture of Terror Also familiar are the effects of the large-scale violence undertaken to ensure the welfare of the world capitalist system . . . [while] the culture of terror domesticates the expectations of the majority. People may no longer even think about alternatives different than those of the powerful, who describe the outcomes as a grand victory for freedom and democracy. Noam Chomsky11

In the midst of empire-building abroad and the tightening of individual civil liberties at home, radical educators attempt to make sense of the world through our practice and our theoretical reflections. It is in response to the current culture of terror, along with the everyday fears and uncertainties of old, that many embrace critical pedagogy to provide direction and inspiration to move their teaching beyond the growing inequalities that function to domesticate the vitality of students’ lives and their dreams. Unfortunately, however, critical pedagogy’s promise to contend with growing oppressive conditions within schools and to develop a consistent project of dissent has often fallen short. This has been as much due to the repressive conditions within schools as due to its depthless and misguided use. In the latter instance, critical pedagogy has been reified into simplistic fetishized methods that are converted into mere instrumentalized formulas for intervention, discouraging dissent and leaving untouched the inequities and asymmetrical power relations in schools today. But, in truth, a critical pedagogy cannot be realized as merely a classroom-centered pedagogy. Instead, it must reach beyond the boundaries of the classroom, into communities, workplaces, and public arenas where people congregate, reflect, and negotiate daily survival. In the absence of such a public project, critical pedagogy can neither support dissent nor advance an emancipatory vision for the eradication of political and economic enslavement. Moreover, its revolutionary potential for contending with uncertainty and despair must be grounded in the material conditions that give rise to oppression. It is the power of this perspective that enhance the capacity of educators to read power effectively and, thus, enact political and pedagogical interventions in the interest of cultural and economic democracy. Many educators in poor communities express a deep sense of powerlessness in their efforts to teach marginalized students. In the midst of a culture of terror, with its vitriolic rhetoric of terrorism and deceptive justifications, this sense of powerlessness is intensified,

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particularly in regions where the population is increasingly poor, diverse, and immigrant. School issues related to academic failure, student delinquency, or classroom inattentiveness are generally addressed in superficial or alienating ways. The objective becomes solely to eliminate the immediate symptom, masking the underlying social malaise. Meanwhile, the deeply serious problems students face within schools and in their private lives are ignored carte blanche, swept under the carpet of institutional efficiency and classroom control. Still, the Jeffersonian ideal of educating citizens for participation in a democratic society continues to be widely expressed, even by the most conservative educators and policy-makers. Meanwhile, poor, working class, and racialized student are socially and politically exiled within schools, resulting in their academic demise. As teachers intentionally embrace or unintentionally internalize a belief in the neutrality and benevolence of schooling, students are simultaneously tested, labeled, sorted, and tracked, while simplistic bootstrap platitudes of self-reliance warp ideals of social justice and institutional equality. These misguided notions undergird the policies and practices of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). With NCLB’s intensely conservative agenda, pedagogical authoritarianism with its instrumentalization of knowledge is translated most violently within public schools that serve the most disenfranchised students. As such, public schooling in an age of terror works to effectively trump the development of critical consciousness, civic sensibilities, and political empowerment. In the interest of capitalist accumulation, schooling in the United States socializes the majority of students to accept the betrayal of their civil rights in exchange for a fantasy of accumulation and security that can never be guaranteed. The construction and control of knowledge are at the heart of this phenomenon. Despite democratic claims, conditions within public schools reproduce inequalities and social exclusions through pedagogical relationships that reinforce repression and deny most students and faculty, for that matter, their freedom and autonomy to think and express themselves without undue fear of retaliation. Consequently, marginalized populations are terrorized daily by policies and practices systematically designed to limit their imaginations and participation in social transformation, while the dissonance existing in the culture of the school and that of students’ lives is often dismissed as irrelevant to their schooling and academic success. Unfortunately, even well-crafted programs that claim to be committed to social justice tend to sabotage student autonomy and cultural integrity, compelling them to adopt prescribed ways of knowing and

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manufactured identities that prove false when brushed across their daily experiences.12 Here, well-meaning teachers use their authority and privilege to invalidate, intentionally or unintentionally, students who become involved in the construction of oppositional knowledge, thus reinforcing students’ silence and self-doubt. Unfortunately, many teachers who are able to recognize the violence of injustices within other instructional settings are less willing to accept that they themselves might need to make fundamental changes in their classroom teaching in order to support democratic practices—including political dissent. Critical ideas and practices in the interest of democratic schooling must remain central to our efforts to confront the concealed alienation and powerlessness so prevalent in schools and society today. To challenge the repressive tendencies of the culture of terror, educators must stretch the boundaries of critical educational principles in order to infuse public contexts with critiques that counter the violence of both neoconservative values and neoliberal solutions. It is a moment when emancipatory theories of schooling must be put into action in an effort to counter a repressive national educational agenda that renders teachers, students, parents, and communities voiceless and devoid of social agency. There is an urgent need for civic courage that challenges the contemporary rhetoric of rugged individualism and neo-Darwinian self-reliance, which shamelessly undermines difference and dissuades dissent. Through authoritarian educational practices and the imposition of a hidden curriculum of the market place, the ideological practices of public schooling uncritically nourish patriotic zeal, defend the violence of war as a necessity, and justify the violation of our civil rights in the name of national security. Simultaneously, strident individualism and backlash politics destroy historical memory and impose an official public transcript (an apolitical, ahistorical, and, at moments, blatantly dishonest spin) on events, in concert with the imperatives of neoliberalism, namely, the expansion of the “free” market, the deregulation of environmental policies, the corporatization of all bureaucratic institutional functions, the monopoly of the media, and the wholesale privatization of every human need. In response to the current political climate, an important role of critical educators, then, is not only to unveil the hidden curriculum of terror in schools and society but also to work toward the reinstitution of a multiplicity of historical memories tied to disenfranchised communities and their survival. In these repressed histories is often found the collective possibility to wage protest through the opportunity to imagine a different world. As such, this constitutes an

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essential dimension in forging a critical pedagogy that challenges civic domestication, opens the ground for political engagement, and welcomes the heated passion of dissent.

Imagination and Dissent Imagine all the people Sharing all the world . . . You may say I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one I hope someday you’ll join us And the world will live as one John Lennon To use imagination is to . . . enable us to break with the one-dimensional vision, to look towards what might or what ought to be. Clearly, this is troubling to those who seek the comfort of the familiar. For others, however, it signifies an end to submission, to the taken-for-granted, to what has seemed inescapably “given” . . . Maxine Greene13

The culture of terror disrupts our critical powers to imagine a different world—a world in which our shared humanity is central to our politics. This neoliberal culture of terror, steeped in the shadows of paranoid delusions, thrives on “cynicism, fear, insecurity, and despair.”14 And, since it is precisely the ability to imagine beyond the status quo that opens the door to a new vision of politics and the world, neoliberalism renders unfettered imagination suspicious, at best, and, at worst, terrorism. Hence, the voices and participation of those who refuse to extend their consent to its treachery are rendered invisible or marked for subjugation. The crack down on civil liberties, including the right to information, movement, and dissent, has rapidly intensified over the past decade. However, it is important to note that the current efforts of the Department for Homeland Security did not just materialize overnight. Since the late 1980s, an increasing number of men and women from working class and racialized communities have lost their civil rights as a consequence of felony convictions and massive rates of incarceration. The level of surveillance within many public schools, including the use of armed personnel, has made them paragons of the Security State. In addition, a plethora of federal, state, and local

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policies have been proposed and many enacted to repress the movement of people (but not capital) across U.S. borders. More recently, actions have been instigated against antiwar protestors, critics of globalization, and other political dissenters. In 2005, for example, a Flag Amendment was passed that made burning the American flag a felony. In 2002, Joseph Frederick unveiled a fourteen-foot paper sign declaring “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” Although he was on a public sidewalk outside his Juneau, Alaska, high school, he was suspended. His civil rights case reached the Supreme Court, where the court’s decision drew a fuzzy line between advocacy of illegal conduct and political dissent, ultimately limiting student rights.15 The Democracy Now! Archive is replete with news stories of peace and antiwar dissidents who have been spied on, jailed, or fired from their workplaces, including longtime progressive columnist Robert Scheer who was fired by the L.A. Times in 2005.16 And, most recently, Ward Churchill, a professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Bolder, was fired for his political views, despite the ostensible protections of academic freedom. Meanwhile, private groups such as the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps 17 at the U.S./Mexico border and Internet terrorist hunters such as Shannon Rossmiller18 are the new millennium’s self-appointed vigilantes, drenched in the moralistic rhetoric of the culture of terror. Much of this commotion has been fueled by the hysteria of the war on terrorism and The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, better known as the Patriot Act. In response, Michael Steinberg, Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, encouraged political dissent saying, “in times of crises, it is even more important for citizens to dissent when the government is doing wrong . . . Dissent is not antipatriotic.”19 Given the repressive context illustrated by these examples, it is imperative that critical educators take on issues of social justice publicly in a serious, forthright, and sustained manner. To accomplish this requires that we remain ever cognizant of the political nature of education and its inextricable relationship to the larger societal and economic forces that govern our lives. Historically, disenfranchised populations who have borne the brunt of political and economic policies of exclusion, for example, must find within public schools and communities an opportunity to develop their critical faculties and political awareness. This demands pedagogical conditions that tend to the free development of intellectual formation, respect the sovereignty of cultural identities, support solidarity of collective action, and foster faith and confidence in political dissent. The

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educational neglect of such overarching pedagogical and political needs in a democratic state, coupled with an unmerciful emphasis on assimilation and the dispossession of rights, constitutes an act of covert political terrorism waged against disenfranchised communities through the hegemonic mechanism of schooling. The relationship between pedagogy, politics, and dissent must intermingle with emancipatory principles of an engaged public life, making it impossible to deny that dissent, though not synonymous with democracy, is an essential political ingredient for the evolution of a just and democratic society. Dissent is, in fact, absolutely necessary to the enactment of democratic principles, particularly within a nation so tremendously diverse (e.g., ethnic, gender, class, culture, language, sexuality, etc.) as the United States. Politics stripped of dissent leaves the powerful unaccountable, to run roughshod over the interests, needs, and aspirations of the majority of the world’s population, irrespective to any expressed principles of freedom and democracy. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the manner in which the voices and concerns of millions of antiwar protesters around the globe have been flagrantly ignored in order to assure that the war interests of neoliberal enterprise would not be daunted by large-scale popular dissent. In the face of the recent devastating events in Iraq, it is evident that the erstwhile Bush administration should have heeded the concerns and warnings of informed protesters who imagined a different world and assumed their civic responsibility as citizens of the international community to raise their voices of discontent. Imagining justice requires an ability to rethink the world anew. What this points to is the pedagogical importance of imagination to both critical formation and political development. Unfortunately, this is an aspect of education that seldom receives the attention that it merits, particularly within an ostensibly democratic society. Yet, the capacity to imagine the world beyond our current social conditions, with a confidence in our ability to enact change through individual and collective efforts, is central to any transformative process. However, it is the power of imagination that opens the field for students to simultaneously reflect on what is, as well as what might be. As students are supported in efforts to grapple with what they find beyond the present conditions, they are “midwifed,” so to speak, into critical social insights that unveil the hidden ideologies and material conditions that repress their freedom. By so doing, imagination compels students to break through the silences of injustice and speak the unspeakable. Once spoken, new ideas of the world can be shared in dialogue and critically engaged. It is through the organic regeneration

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of such a pedagogy of imagination that we become empowered to forge a collective vision of social justice founded on a politically moral and ethically grounded understanding of public life. In line with a radical philosophical tradition of education, both Paulo Freire and Maxine Greene spoke often in their work about the importance of imagination to the forging of an emancipatory political vision. They similarly linked the notion of imagination to our capacity to step back from a set of familiar circumstances or conditions in order to enter into a different understanding of the world. By opening up to a variety of tested and untested possibilities of knowing and experiencing the world, we are better able to understand how students from different cultural traditions come to think or act differently in the world. Unlike the narrow rationality and ethnocentrism of conservative identity politics, critical imagination can exist only within a realm where plurality of thought and practice resides. This is so because critical thought requires an open-mindedness and expansiveness of vision that can only be found through our willingness to confront fear as a normal aspect of everyday life, consistently countering, individually and collectively, values and practices that seek to terrorize or pathologize dissenting views. To nourish imagination, then, is to fuel one of the most indispensable qualities inherent to the practice of transformative dissent. For without imagination, the injustice of an exploitive status quo is rendered intractable, as is often the case in schools where bureaucratic power, in direct contradiction to democratic rights and principles, represses creativity, fosters dependency, and coerces consent. In contrast, a critical pedagogy cultivates imagination and seeks to create opportunities to insert students into new and unfamiliar contexts so they can grapple with the cognitive dissonance and ambiguity, which is intrinsic to a highly diverse society. Moreover, such imagination is important to the process of critical dissent, because it not only centers its focus on undoing but also is attentive to critically rethinking conditions of inequality and offering “solutions that arise from collaboration and consensus.”20 Rather than simply entering into dissent and conflict with wholesale antagonism, critical educators must recognize the complexity of both human relations and human existence, and to thus enter into conflict with not only clear values and vision but also with humility. Humility, anchored in a politics of love, provides the openmindedness to listen to an adversary without stripping the person of dignity and respect.21 In the absence of such political imagination, any possibility of dialogue is stifled. Generally, this is so because the

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communication becomes stonewalled and oppositional. Once this happens, the two sides of a conflict become mired in the ego-pursuit of winning the battle and being right, rather than remaining focused on a collective democratic intent. Righteousness and moralism seem to be by-products of such a contentious process, limiting the possibility of critical compassion and revolutionary solidarity in the course for political struggles. A critical pedagogy, through invigorating critical discourse with imagination and faith in our humanity, supports students in building sound epistemological and ontological pursuits in resonance with universal principles of emancipatory life. It is here where often there is a departure between postmodernists and those who remain committed to the belief in the salience of class struggle and the anticapitalist project. Just as it was for Marx, the struggle against capitalism today and its culture of terror is indeed a fiercely moral one. Undoubtedly, the ferocity of Marx was as much a part of his political convictions as it was his ability to imagine the limitless capacity of human beings to continuously make, unmake, and remake the world. At a time when the culture of terror seems hell-bent on the disintegration of our civil rights and the relentless immorality of global capital threatens environmental collapse, we need a critical pedagogy that is unapologetically political and moral. A critical pedagogy for the classroom and our daily lives that can help us to unearth the virulent structures of power that limit our dreams, incarcerate our bodies, and defile the meaning of democracy and freedom. We need a revolutionary pedagogy of love that embraces our civic responsibility as critical citizens of the world and fully authorizes our kinship as human beings. All these are necessary so that we might thoughtfully and passionately voice, labor, dissent, struggle, hope, and imagine a future where “all the world can live as one.”

Notes 1. R. L. Ivie, “Prologue to Democratic Dissent in America,” Javnost-The Public 11, 2 (2004): 19–36. 2. See A. Darder, “Radicalizing the Immigration Debate: A Call for Open Borders and Global Human Rights,” New Political Science 29, 2 (2007). 3. B. Braiker, “Americans and Islam,” Newsweek, July 20, 2007. http:// www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19874703/site/newsweek/ 4. A. J. Noury and N. C. Smith, “Bye, Bye American Dream,” Political Affairs (December 2004): 26. 5. Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed (New York: Owl Books, 2002).

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6. E. Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 256. 7. G. Orfield, Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation (Boston, MA: The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, 2001). 8. Ibid. 9. R. Miles, Racism after Race Relations (London: Routledge, 1993); A. Darder and R. D. Torres, After Race: Racism after Multiculturalism (New York: New York University Press, 2004). 10. P. Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Colorline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 11. N. Chomsky, Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998), 24. 12. R. Butson, “Teaching as a Practice of Social Injustice: Perspective from a Teacher,” Radical Pedagogy (2003), http://radicalpedagogy.icaap.org/ content/Issue 5_1/10_butson.html. 13. M. Greene, “Metaphors and Responsibility,” On Common Ground: Partnerships and the Arts 5 (1995), http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/pubs/ A18/greene.html. 14. H. A. Giroux, “Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Neoliberalism: Making the Political More Pedagogical,” Policy Futures in Education 2, 3/4 (2004). 15. B. Mears, “Bong Hits for Jesus” Case Limits Student Rights, CNN Washington Bureau (2007), http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/06/25/ free.speech/index.html. 16. Democracy Now!, November 14, 2005, http://www.democracynow. org/article.pl?sid+05/11/14/1447244. 17. To see the Minuteman Web site, go to: http://www.minutemanhq. com/hq/ 18. B. Harden, “In Montana, Casting a Web for Terrorist,” Washington Post, June 4, 2006, A03, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2006/06/03/AR2006060300530.html. 19. S. Chang, “ACLU Encourages Political Dissent as a Patriotic Action,” Michigan Daily, April 12, 2002. 20. J. Hart, “Meet the New Boss: You: How and Why the People are Taking Charge,” Utne Reader, May–June 2007, 42. 21. See A. Darder, Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002) for an extensive discussion of Paulo Freire’s pedagogy and the indispensable characteristics that he identifies within a revolutionary understanding of love.

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A m i l c a r C a br a l : P e dag ogu e of t h e R e volu t ion Paulo Freire1 Translated by Sheila L. Macrine, Fernando Naiditch, and Joao Paraskeva

Introduction I would like, from the outset of our conversation, to make a point or two more or less clear. In the first place, I feel great satisfaction at being here today. Since my return from exile in 1980, this is the first time, or rather the second, I have come to the University of Brasilia for a meeting of the Board, but it is the first time I have come, for a conversation such as this one, legally, without any camouflage. Venicio de Lima brought me here in 1981, I believe, along with others, but I came without anyone’s knowledge, went into some mysterious room because I was simply forbidden. So, I would like to say how pleased I am to be here with you this morning. Now, the second point I want to stress is that by accepting the invitation to come here to have a conversation about Amilcar Cabral, 2 I do not want to give the impression that I consider myself an expert in his work, thought, or practice. Obviously, I have been reflecting on Amilcar Cabral’s thinking; if I did not know anything about Cabral, it would be difficult to explain why I am here having a conversation about him, as that would be a profoundly immoral act, from an intellectual point of view. However, I want to insist from the beginning that I do not consider myself an expert, though I wish I had become an expert, on Cabral, at least not with the superficiality with which some people, at times, think themselves experts of particular kinds of issues.

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I had a great dream of developing a project, a biography of the praxis of Amilcar; in a way I have felt frustrated to this day for not having been able to do it. However, before people start to raise questions, I would first like to make a few comments. I did not know Amilcar Cabral in person, but I got to know him through the references that people made about him and his involvement in the African struggle against colonialism. It seems to me that it was impossible to even comment on, or speak about, the liberation movements in Africa, above all in the so-called “Africas of Portuguese Expression”3 (which to me is more an expression of a Portuguese colonialist stance than that phrase is true), without paying attention to Amilcar Cabral. I always used to say that I did not recognize different Africas, a Portuguese one, a French one, an English one. To me, colonialism imposed itself upon Africa, but without ever having the capacity to turn it into Africas of this or that expression. Amilcar Cabral was involved at the gestation of all of the liberation movements in the former Portuguese colonies since the time when he was still young and studying in Lisbon. Regrettably, I was never able to meet with him in person. That is one of my greatest frustrations; I wish I had gotten to know him personally. However, I do know his work, and I have dedicated myself to studying them after the liberation of Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and the other countries. I was invited by the Guinea-Bissau government, along with a team I worked with at the time in Geneva, to make a contribution to the people of Guinea-Bissau, and of Cape Verde, as well. Thus, we committed ourselves to develop a serious study of what we encountered in the works of Amilcar Cabral. I remember that I read two volumes of Amilcar’s work that were translated into French and only much later was I able to obtain the original text published in Lisbon. I used to read Amilcar page-by-page, word-by-word, making my personal notes, and when our team from the Institute of Cultural Action (Idac) and I went to Guinea-Bissau, we started to engage in conversations with people, from all over Cape Verde and Guinea Bissau, who fought side-by-side with Amilcar. Based on those conversations, we began to realize, and then to verify, through those testimonials, the enormous coherence that existed between what we read in Amilcar Cabral’s writing and what the people were telling us about him. They were youthful people, young people, guerrilla fighters who had fought in the fields and in the jungles alongside Amilcar. Reading Amilcar’s work, knowing his personality, and understanding him as a great revolutionary were things that fascinated me, and they completely fascinate me even today. And the idea of the book was born there,

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from those encounters with the works of Amilcar Cabral and the effects of his work in practice, even with the distance, a great one that existed at times, between what he wrote and what he did in the process of liberation. The putting into practice of his work after the change, after the liberation, does not in any way diminish, to me, the validity of Cabral’s political project. Hence the dream of doing a study was born there, a sort of biography of Cabral’s praxis. I actually went as far as naming the book that I wished to write, but was not able to; the title would have been, Amilcar Cabral, Pedagogue of the Revolution. In this very title, I established a difference between being a ‘pedagogue of the revolution’ and being a ‘revolutionary pedagogue.’ I think that there is a slight difference, but that does not or should not diminish in any way what it is to be a ‘revolutionary pedagogue.’ Still, there is a slight difference, but that does not or should not diminish in any way what it is to be a ‘revolutionary pedagogue.’ There was a difference that I found to be fundamental: Amilcar to me was a ‘pedagogue of the revolution.’ I mean, he perfectly embodied the dream of the liberation of his people and the political and pedagogical procedures to realize that dream. I remember, as well, that one of the paths I thought of for carrying out my project on Amilcar was precisely that of listening, to a maximum extent, to the people that had fought alongside him, within Guinea-Bissau, in Cape Verde, and later in other African countries, and later still, to people outside Africa. I went as far as having a conversation with the PAIGC (African Party for Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde Independence) leadership, to whom I put my proposal, my project. I remember I said that, as an intellectual, I felt like a militant, and that the difference between me and some other intellectual was that a different intellectual might conduct very serious research, as a matter of fact, and then write the book without seeking the PAIGC party’s permission, or even without engaging in the PAIGC party’s debate. But that was not my position. In case the party said yes, I would then get to work and, should I someday get to the completion of what I dreamed to accomplish, I would offer up to the party the original manuscripts before publishing them, so that they could read them and then summon me to debate with me the points the party did not agree with. With a deep sense of loyalty, I would say, “If the PAIGC can convince me of any error on my part, I will remove it, if they do not, I won’t.” But what I want to make very clear is my political position, and not merely the position of a detached intellectual just interested in the work of a great leader, as was Amilcar Cabral. The party agreed to the project and did not pose any obstacles. I would go

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further to say that once the text was approved I would gift it to the party, and that I would just work with the publishers toward getting it published, but that the party would retain full ownership rights. I started work, and then I remembered something regrettable, I had recorded approximately ten interviews in Guinea-Bissau, and they were all lost, all of those cassettes, in our move from Geneva to Brazil. I remember vividly that I had excellent interviews, one of which was with a Cape Verdean, Julinho Carvalho, who is today in Cape Verde and was Armed Forces commissioner in Guinea-Bissau prior to the rupture. I spoke a great deal with that man, who was an extraordinary human being and a great military strategist. I had a fantastic interview with him, we recorded close to two hours, speaking of the political vision, the military vision, which we can term here without any fear, Amilcar Cabral’s humanist vision, without provisioning the humanist objective with any sappy connotation: a humanist vision in the sense of the “radicality of the humane” in him or the sense of the radicalness with which we refer to what is human in him. He then told me of events such as the one I am going to relate here: One day, he said, a team of commanders, of which he was a member, organized and carried out an armed action aimed at destroying the main Portuguese military base, an irreparable loss for the colonialist forces. In that Portuguese defeat, envisioned in the commanders’ planning, the colonialist army would hardly manage to survive. The commander said that they took the plan to Amilcar, that he examined it, discussed it for two hours, and that when he was done, at a given point, he asked the commanders, “What about the social cost of putting this plan into practice? Militarily, I have no doubt that it will work. What I want to know is: if we put this in plan into practice what will this cost?” “Well, we will liquidate the Portuguese troops one hundred percent, and we will lose fifty percent of ours,” replied one of the commanders. “It is too costly to be put into practice.” And, then, Amilcar said something to them that was impressive to me: “Listen you have created this plan, a project of war, a project of struggle without paying attention to the fact that we are on the side of history, and that history is on our side. It is the Portuguese that are the ones against history. Therefore, there is nothing wrong if we just delay that ultimate moment of throwing the last shovel of dirt over the colonialist grave and bury colonialism, without losing so many people.” And he concluded,

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“Our aim is to expose and expel the colonialists and not necessarily to kill them. In order to drive them out, we must kill some, and die.” Notice that what Amilcar states is, contrary to what we might think, very normal, since I could never accept the idea that a revolutionary being is someone who just wants violence, and just wants to kill. That is absurd because that is not what a revolutionary is, that is pathology. Therefore, it is not an attribute of a revolutionary to want to kill people. But that concern on Amilcar’s part, told to me by that commander, was an enduring concern present in the struggles and in the analyses he provided in his writings—in fact, his writings, for the most part, need to be seen as an outcome of those extraordinary seminars, like his evaluations of the armed conflict, and so on, many of which were conducted in the middle of the jungle. While talking to another young man who worked in Guinea-Bissau as a sort of district supervisor in the area of education, I asked, “What impressed you the most in your experience with Amilcar?” “Comrade Paulo Freire, what impressed me the most about Comrade Cabral was his capacity to know beyond his immediate surroundings and to imagine the not yet.” “What might that be?” I asked. “I think, do I not, Comrade?” “But of course you think.” “Tell me now, I am not able to think six-hundred meters beyond myself. Comrade Cabral would think six years ahead of himself.” “Explain that,” I said. “Once we were in the frontline of battle, in a certain war zone, after a week of taking strong punishment from ‘TuGa’ 4 Portuguese aviation, and Comrade Cabral arrived for an inspection and studies visit . . . ” That is what I am referring to here as the seminars that he used to hold in the jungles as an assessment of the armed conflicts or an evaluation of the praxis. Deep down, Amilcar was an extraordinary theorist, and for that reason he was an excellent practitioner. He, then, brought the crowd to one of those seminars. I keep imagining one of those marvelous clearings we can find in the African bushes, in the jungles. And sitting there, in an African way, under the shelter of the huge trees, and Amilcar discussed and talked about how he valued the process of struggle, and in a moment, he suddenly said, “I need to withdraw two hundred of you from the battlefront, to send to a different battlefront. I need two hundred of you to send to Guinea-Conakry, to the Capacitation Institute, in order to train and to educate all two hundred and then bring them back to the

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interior of the country, to the liberated zones, in order to work as teachers.” Then, the young man looks at me and speaks again. Notice how very immediate his reasoning is, and how very similar it is to some of our reasoning in Brazil and Latin America. “How is it that I, who had a rifle in my hands, seeing my comrade falling dead by my side, the ‘TuGas’ killing us, how was I to think, at that moment, that there might be the possibility for two hundred of us to leave the battlefront to go to school?” So my reply was the following, “But, Comrade Amilcar, this business of education can wait for when we have kicked the ‘TuGas’ out; then, we can think about education; we can be educated and trained. I thought that you, Comrade Cabral, were bringing another two hundred fighters here, not taking two hundred away from here.” And Cabral replied, “And why do you think that is not right?” “Because we cannot lose the war,” said the young man. “But it is precisely so that we will not lose the war that I need two hundred of you,” said Cabral. That is a beautiful dialogue. This is something extraordinary to me! And the young man continued not to believe and, above all, not to understand. Incidentally, making a comment, there is something built into this dialogue that says a great deal about the pedagogue of the revolution. This is, in fact, what I call democratic substantiveness, which does not mean being a social democrat. We must put an end to this kind of revisionism that claims that just because someone talks about democracy that it immediately makes them an individual for social democracy, or a spontaneistic revisionist, or a wimp, or a lot of other such things. We must put an end to the habitual notion that there can only be rigor under authoritarianism. It is necessary for those who say so to own up to their authoritarianism rather than transfer it to others. It seems to me, then, that the fact of that young man’s dialogue with Cabral shows that he indeed held Cabral as a great leader, may no one think otherwise, because he is still the great present leader, not a magically present one or mythically so. Well, obviously, at that moment, he knew that Cabral was the leader, but the leader did not just speak to the ones he led, because he actually spoke with them, in addition to speaking to them. I would like to make another parenthesis to say that it is fundamental to me that for a radical democratic revolutionary leadership the leadership speaks to the ones led. However,

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what is not possible is for that leadership to stop speaking with, and to me there is only one way to speak to the ones who are being led without speaking against them, and that is to speak with them as well. It is only through speaking with that one can be legitimized at certain necessary moments when one might run the risk of falling into spontaneity; it is only by speaking with that one can, at certain times, legitimize one’s right to speak to. That was something Amilcar did in an extraordinary manner; the authoritarian always speaks to someone; the spontaneistic thinks that they can never speak to and must always speak with. To me, those are two false positions, and I would like to make them clear here. My position is that of someone who speaks to because he speaks with. And Amilcar did so. At one point in his narrative, the young man then says that Amilcar looked at everyone and said the following, “My friends, my fellow comrades, this war will not be won by some of my generation, who will escape; it will not be won by some of your generation, who will escape; rather, it will be won by the generation that is coming up.” Notice what vision Cabral has; this is what I call historic sensibility, what exuded from his pore, that is, the capacity for reading the world and not just for reading texts. Those who lose themselves in reading only dichotomized texts of the world and the context of these texts constantly fall flat on their faces. The only way to avoid falling on their faces is to take over their own scholarship and then to take care of their own academy. And then Amilcar said, “What happens is that, in five or six years, when this now younger generation of little ones out there comes upon the moment of definitive struggle, they will need to use war instruments that are not the ones you are using, war instruments requiring mathematical knowledge that you did not and do not have, scientific knowledge, that the next generation will need. And what we need now is precisely to take two hundred of you to go to be educated, so that you can return and educate and train the others here.” The young man looks at me and says, “Comrade Paulo, I then went to Guinea-Conakry. I confess to you, Sir that I went without much understanding, but I went. I went to school, educated myself, and returned. Here, I educated ranks of them, ranks indeed of the generation that had to win, and I saw students who studied with me shooting down “TuGa” planes with rockets, those soviet rockets.” And he went on,

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“Comrade, Paulo Freire, that is why at the beginning I told you, Sir, that I am able to think six-hundred meters around myself, and that Comrade Cabral could think six years ahead of himself.” I still remember that when he told me about this, I took advantage of that situation to segue into talking about my understanding of prophetism. To me, Comrade Cabral was a prophet, not on account of being a bearded madman, or as ugly as a “Beato Salu.”5 There is a misconception, whereby, when they hear mention of a prophet, many people conjure up thoughts of a crazy person, a mad, dirty person who is always making speeches. Not so! A prophet or a prophetisa is a man or woman who lives so intensely today, and because of that they can figure out tomorrow. I deliberately used the words “to figure out” to somewhat recognize the task to “figure out” as in epistemology. I think knowing is not just guessing. However, it does go figuring out, or intuition, if you want to be more polite. A prophet is exactly the person that is not crazy in the least but rather has a deep rooting in today, as he/she fights to transform it. And it is precisely this praxis that is completely immersed in today that allows him/her to predict, figure out, and foresee the future because he/she knows quite well that you actually make the future based on the things that you transform today. There is no such thing as a predestined future out there waiting for the people who will come along to claim it in a future time. No, we build the future in the process of a radical transformation of today. And that is what Cabral, this man capable of thinking six years ahead of himself, accomplished. The testimonials I collected in Guinea-Bissau were, more or less, fifteen to sixteen hours of recordings, all taken from different figures, comrades who fought with rifles, who had commanding duties, comrades who were commissioners or ministers at the time of the interviews. Prime Minister Chico Terra also granted me an extensive interview, and he died in an accident shortly thereafter. All of the testimonials emphasized Cabral’s capacity: first, of his ability at anticipating the future; second, they stressed his belief of speaking with the people; third, his extraordinary competence paired with historical sensibility, and they mentioned his qualities that are absolutely indispensable for scientific knowledge, in addition to his sensibility for the objective, the concrete, and for objectivity. The interviews also highlighted his deep respect of common sense and to “I think it is” statements, which characterizes the uncertainty of popular wisdom. Cabral really had a profound respect for popular wisdom/knowledge. I remember, for example, that in one of his texts, where he talked about his assessments of the struggles, he discussed with a group of

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guerrillas and freedom fighters about their superstition of “cri-cri”6 power and the belief in the power of the amulets, the “bentinhos,” and such things, talismans and other such charms were called “ ‘mezinhos.” And one fellow argued, convinced that the amulet would cause the enemy’s bullet to ricochet, veer off to a side, not hit a man. Cabral listens to that with the wisdom of a political anthropologist and then says, “I would like to say to all comrades that what defends us from the enemy’s bullet is whether we know or do not know how to fight.” It is whether one has, I would now add, or does not have a certain competence for the struggle that one can only gain in the struggle, and the mezinhos, the lucky charms do not do that. Then, Cabral says, “But the party respects; it respects the belief, the conviction that that is embodied in our culture.” Those were the dimensions of culture that Cabral termed feebleness of culture, and such feebleness lay, from the standpoint of his analysis, precisely within the relations between human beings and the natural world. And Cabral defended and responded to this so beautifully, and said that it was not a matter here of reaching for a shovel of dirt under which to bury that magical understanding of the real. It was not about people remaining at that level of feebleness, but rather about starting out from it so as to reach toward overcoming it. On a political and pedagogical level, that is also what I have been saying since the fifties; nevertheless, there are those critics of mine in this country who say what Freire defends is that educators should remain at the learner’s level. That is something incredible. I have never used the verb remain, because that would be absurd; I have always used the verb to start out. I mean starting out from the understanding of the world held by the learner, or held by masses of people, and to start out from, unless a dictionary might provide me a contrary view, means to depart from a certain point toward another. Therefore, there exists within the verb to start out a connotation of movement, and another of intentionality, and another of directivity. That is why education is indeed directive; it is a starting out from. Well, then, in Cabral, one can see this in an extraordinary way. So he concluded his speech in what must have been a beautiful afternoon in a Guinea-Bissau jungle, “However, I have no doubt that our children’s children will praise the PAIGC for having known how to fight, but they will say with a smile: our parents believed in bizarre things, strange things.” Now, let us notice again how marvelous this is! It is in these statements that Cabral affirms himself as a pedagogue of revolution. You see, it would be absurd, for example, if some day children said to

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parents, “You are idiots, and I cannot understand how you can still be alive.” However, at the same time, it would also be absurd to make concessions to the feebleness of culture itself; such concessions were not an option. Therefore, the way to deal with it is to talk openly about this feebleness of culture while not stigmatizing it. That Cabral did in everything. Another testimonial, by a woman who held a very high-up, very important post in the Ministry of Education, also impressed me a lot. She told me that one day Cabral brought together the whole directors’ team in Guinea-Conakry, where liberation from French colonialism came before Guinea-Bissau’s liberation. There, the PAIGC had a training center (Capacitation Center), and one day, she went on to tell me, in a large meeting for evaluating the process for the struggle for freedom, when he seemed to be adjourning the meeting, Cabral fixed his gaze upon the ceiling of the room. Then he said, “Now, let me think.” He then started to speak to himself. He described what Guinea-Bissau would be like, what Cape Verde would be like, after the independence. He went so far as touching on administrative details, speaking about ministries, about departments, which were called commissions. He described and profiled the country as it stepped out of the colonialist muck and constituted itself within the continuation of the struggle for freedom and at the same time consolidating the struggle for liberation. At one point he stops and looks at the whole group, and one of the team members says, “Comrade Cabral, but is that a dream?” The problem was that Cabral was pointing out that the dream was quite near. She then told me that Cabral gave one of those answers that stuck with me, “Yes, yes, it is a ‘dream.’ But there is no revolution if you do not dream. You cannot be a revolutionary without dreaming, the real issue is that you have to know how to fight to make your dreams come true.” Notice how this has to do with Cabral’s prophetic dimension, and with a very lucid, very clear awareness he possessed as to the unbreakable relationship between theory and practice, which he never dichotomized. However, he also never made a speech that was purely theoretical, because it would have made the comprehension of the content difficult for his fellow comrades in war and in the struggle. In Cabral, I learned a great many things, and when I say in Cabral, I also mean with Cabral. I learned many things, and I confirmed other things I already suspected, but I learned one thing that is a necessity

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for the progressive educator and for the revolutionary educator. I make a distinction between the two: For me a progressive educator is one who works within the bourgeois classed society such as ours, and whose dream goes beyond just making schools better, which needs to be done. And goes beyond because what he/she indeed dreams of is the radical transformation of a bourgeois classed society into a socialist society. For me that is a progressive educator. Whereas a revolutionary educator, in my view, is one who already finds himself/herself already situated at a much more advanced level both socially and historically within a society in process. But, returning to what I was saying, one thing I learned with him in a big way was how a progressive educator needs to make himself simple, without ever becoming simplistic. That to me is fantastic; pick up Cabral’s writings and notice how really simple they are, but not simplistic. Simplistic, to me, is a fantastic expression, a powerful one, of elitism; it is even worse than populism but has a lot in common with certain populist orientations. In other words, deep down the simplistic are authoritarian. The simplistic is one who says, “How can I talk to these people who are not capable of understanding me?” He, then, speaks in half-truths, quarter-truths, in fact through mere fragments of truth. In Cabral, we can see the opposite of that, and what he does is talk about the concrete in very serious but simple ways. I have a picture of Cabral at my house, the only one I ever saw where he stands with a rifle. They told me in Guinea-Bissau that he was horrified by that photo because of one of Cabral’s few negative attributes. Apparently, he was not crazy about his short height; I don’t know to what extent that was true, but they say he was short and that he very much disliked his height, especially when carrying a rifle. In this photo, you can actually notice how short he really was when comparing his height with the size of the rifle. On account of this business about Cabral’s height, I will actually allow myself the right to be prosaic and quote one of those clichés: “Cabral was enormous inside.” I am reminded, though, of one of those testimonials, and if I were an artist I would be able to reproduce the image I have in my memory of what I did not see. The encounter is of the meeting of Amilcar Cabral and Che Guevara in the jungle. As I was told by the person who gave that testimonial, the two of them stood there, one before the other, profoundly attracted to one another. They then embraced. That moment when these two enormous men, one short and the other big, met may possibly have been the only time when Cabral was not bothered by his physical size. It was as if he was completed

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physically by what was abundant in the physicality of Guevara. The truth is they both complemented one another with regard to their political understanding of the struggle. It is no coincidence that Guevara did not hesitate in the least to speak about love, with respect to the Revolution, “While running the risk of seeming ridiculous, I must say that there is no revolution without love.” And then there is that other beautiful quote from Guevara about tenderness, “One must harden without ever losing one’s tenderness.”7 It is not by accident that he would say that, and Cabral would say similar things. Deep down, those men represented to me two of the greatest expressions of the twentieth century. Guevara was also a pedagogue of revolution rather than just a revolutionary educator, and he had the same popular sensibility, without being a populist. He got the chills as well before speaking before the people, the masses, and he knew what “the people” meant. Yet, Amilcar did not have any fear to speak in front of the people. He knew what it meant to meet “ordinary people.”

The Historic process in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, with Their Differences, in Search of Unity One day, early on in my visits to Cape Verde and to Guinea-Bissau, I asked one of the ministers whether it would be possible for some form of political, cultural, and economic solidarity to exist, in fact, among the “five sister-nations,” while preserving each country’s administrative and political autonomy. After all, it seemed to me that there were certain historical and cultural rifts between the two societies, and thus it seemed to me difficult to set those aside so as to form one single block. The very forms of colonizing Portugal adopted were the cause of one such rift, the colonizing procedures employed in Cape Verde and in Guinea-Bissau were distinct procedures. The impression I have is that the colonizer chose the Cape Verde archipelago as a location for the production of assimilated individuals, for the most part. That was the political dream of the Portuguese, which did not work. Such was the policy with regard to the meztico populations (an intricate combination of inter-racial relationships), the mixed-race, lighter-skinned, rather than darker-skinned, population of Cape Verde. There an intellectuality was formed that had a chance not afforded other meztico communities. Portugal had planned to garner their own ranks from Cape Verde, which they did, as necessary intermediaries to the colonial

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administration in the other colonies, or in the so-called provinces. That took place over a long period, and this single fact alone marked one distinction with respect to the other colonies. Thus, I could see, for example, a greater ease, and I am not sure that is the word, a greater degree of applicability at the time of Cabral’s proposals in Cape Verde than in Guinea-Bissau. For instance, there seemed to be greater coherence between what was said and what was done. I found that somewhat difficult; there was a certain jealousy, without wanting to discuss here whether it was right or not, on the part of those in Guinea-Bissau, and that aspect was exploited, from the standpoint of the right, with respect to the Cape Verdeans. I find it to be absurd, linguistically speaking, and indeed unfeasible, to teach Portuguese to the popular masses in Guinea-Bissau. It is a political unfeasibility, but at times that unfeasibility is not political. Imagine, if you would, that Brazil had gone into a revolution, were living a revolution, and that we approached the Brazilian rural workers, the laborers, the factory workers to say the following, “You see, in order for our revolution to fly, we are just going to have to educate in the Spanish language now; it is the same thing.” But I remember that in my first consultation with Mário Cabral; in my first letter in Cartas a Guiné-Bissau I make reference to this problem. When we arrived in Guinea-Bissau, I did put that issue to the ministry’s teams, and they told me that it was not so, that there was bilingualism, to a great extent, in Cape Verde, for example. “There, you can educate in the Portuguese language without violence (to the culture).” I would not say that it was entirely without violating the culture; it was a lesser violation perhaps, but it could be done. More so in São Tomé. However, in Guinea-Bissau, in Angola, and in Mozambique it would be a major violation. Mozambique and Angola are in a worse situation than Cape Verde or Guinea-Bissau. In Angola and Mozambique the situation is dramatic because they did not develop, and historic and social conditions did not allow for the development of a language such as Creole. A Creole did not develop in Angola and Mozambique; what we have in those countries are the national ethno-cultural languages of the different groups of people. There are some thirty languages. . . . I could understand such difficulties. Politically, neither the MPLA (Popular Movement for Angola Liberation) nor the Frelimo (Mozambique Liberation Front), for example, can approach the people of Angola and Mozambique and decree that one of those languages will be the national language. Doing so would be a disaster. Therefore, the only political solution

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available, as a result of linguistic nonviability, was to make the colonizer’s language into the language for a task that is an impossible one: to educate children and youth in a foreign language. Let me read, here and now, from a letter8 published in the book Por uma Pedagogia da Pergunta. However, this language issue posed a problem, a great challenge that the revolutionary leaders had to face. Please note that, not meaning to be simplistic or a reductionist: in the process of independence, there may be, broad brush, two possibilities as to the political orientation to be implemented once the national group has risen to power. The first one would be, for example, while breaking with colonialism, falling, nonetheless, into neocolonialism, that is, a sweetened form of colonialism. Furthermore, neocolonialism cuts down on expenses for the colonizer, who spends less and profits more, because maintaining a space occupied by colonial officials, a bureaucracy, is not necessarily needed. That bureaucracy is gradually replaced by a national one, at a lower cost. Within such neocolonialist stance, the colonizer’s language continues to be absolutely fundamental. Thus, the colonizer goes to great lengths toward the preservation of that language as a power presence. The other political option is a fundamental rupture from the colonialist and a departure toward a type of society that is made independent. Obviously, for nations in the process of building their autonomy, the issue of language is absolutely crucial. After all, the whole business of formal language is, first of all, an abstraction, and what is indeed concrete is language use. The whole business of the Portuguese language, linguistics, all that is an abstraction; what is concrete is the way the people speak, the people’s discourses, which are class-based. A class-based discourse is subject to cultural class changes, to influences, and so on. Now, consider that the problem of language use is that it is directly impacted by errors of culture and of class subjectivities. That is why one of the first measures taken by the colonizer is to seek to impose its language upon the colonized. It is fantastic how the colonized capriciously guard against it, “Let us make use of the language so as to make things easier.” The colonized find defenses against the foreign occupier-language by speaking and maintaining their own language, termed by the colonizer strictly as a bastardized dialect. The colonized can do so because they become convinced that they have a moment of freedom when they express themselves in their own manner of being and of speaking, in their language. Well, that is why the language issue is so fundamental.

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I remember that one of the measures taken by President Nyerere, who just stepped down in Tanzania, was to phase in the change from English to Swahili. In a given year he overcame English in preschool; the following year or two years later, he overcame English in elementary and middle schools. They may possibly have gotten to collegelevel by now. Nyerere is another great African that I disagreed with from time to time, but to me, he is one of the great educators of the twentieth century, not only in Africa but also in the world. He is just not known in Brazil; he is better known in English-speaking countries. I talked with Nyerere a great deal about this issue of cultural identity, and he had the fascinating advantage of speaking both Swahili and English brilliantly. He spoke the English from Oxford English and the Swahili from Tanzania. So this issue of language has to be a central, an essential concern in any political struggle process because the problem of language lies within any program of culture. There is a saying from Amílcar that I think is fantastic, “The struggle for liberation is a cultural fact and a factor of culture.” So now you can see why language is a matter of culture. So for me this should be one of the starting points and should be seen as a concern. Now, obviously you cannot think that this is easy. When I spoke with the Minister I used to say to him, “Look, we must win this fight, we must win this war.” We suggested bringing in a group of linguists with a great deal of knowledge of African languages. However, it is not easy to adopt the Creole language, for example, as the national language that mediates the cultural and political formation of its people. Where might one find the money and the technical, scientific competence needed to translate all the fundamental works that Guinea-Bissau has yet to produce, and that need to be read, studied? How can all that be put into Creole overnight, with what money, what time, and with what competence? Revolution is not child’s play: It is something very serious, and all those issues have to be thought through, including the language issue. When the time came to share our advice, I thought immediately that it was an impossible task. However, a little over a year after arriving there, I wrote a long letter to the minister, which I discussed above.9 I did not publish it in Cartas a Guiné-Bissau for political reasons, as a matter of respect, and as a tactical issue. Later on I ended up publishing it in a book coauthored with Antonio Faudez, Por uma Pedagogia da Pergunta.

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What I sought to draw attention to is how, deep down, using the Portuguese language as the mediation-language in the political, ideological, scientific, and technical formative process of the former colonized is to use superstructure as a determining factor in the social class divisions within the very body of the revolution, and that is a paradox. I said to the Minister, “Listen, what do you think is going to happen? Bilinguals? Pure bilinguals? Those bilinguals are just a few of the Portuguese bourgeoisie who live in the urban centers. Say, for example you are wonderfully bi-lingual, possibly, but I know a Cape Verdean who doesn’t even speak any Creole, he only speaks Portuguese.” Then I said to them, “Listen if these things continue this way, what is going to happen? One might say that, those governing this country twenty years from now will be you. And what will be the role and the participation of the great peasant masses of this country within process of national reconstruction and the creation of a real popular democracy? What role? Tell me where are the masses in this process? They will not play a role, precisely because you people will continue to select for power, through schooling. And obviously, when it comes to a choice between your child who is bi-lingual, and the child of a peasant or rural laborer, who is not bi-lingual, who only speaks Creole, their ethnic language, your child will pass the courses, especially if the evaluation criterion continues to be bathed within the Portuguese intellectualist frameworks.” What if the schools continue to evaluate a child’s capacity for knowledge through the rote learning and memorization of geography and history, without considering in the evaluative process the child’s ability to read the world that the non-Portuguese-speaking child has, the wisdom that child has gained as well, what if none of that is taken into account in the evaluation? What will happen, then, is that only bilinguals will be able to pass to the top of the class. At that point, I can tell who will be governing this country. So I put forward two or three propositions in that aforementioned letter. For example, I provided an analysis of a brilliant experience that took place there regarding a community vegetable garden group that grew out of the literacy courses. When the literacy courses ended, the learning that the group came away with was the discovery of the value of collective work rather than ba-be-bi-bo-bu. Then I demonstrated from my analyses the importance of this, in one of the letters to them, in 1977. The government then began to accept the changes and debate around that, much more openly than before, and I could actually

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understand the difficulty in doing so. One day the president himself told me, “Comrade Paulo Freire, among us we have those that do not accept Creole. They think that it is not a language but an ugly dialect. But obviously this is due to the fact of the penetration of a powerful dominant ideology; even after struggling as we have, one still ends up accepting the colonizer’s profiling of one’s culture, one’s history, and one’s self and therefore deeming one’s own language too ugly and incompetent to express one’s science, technology and art.” For example, in a previous book I claimed that there is no reason for the Portuguese, the German, and the French, just to mention those three forms of language expression, to resent having to use the English word stress. There is no way you can translate stress into those languages, you just have to say stress. After all, the problem with language evolution is that it is deeply linked to the development of productive forces of any society. I say one’s process of technological and scientific development of one’s productive forces, or one is not a good Marxist. Now, what happens is that North-American technological development added its own economic, technological, and political power to the previous tradition of power, which was exactly Britain’s economic-political power over the word. The English language became a modern Latin, for the same plain reasons why Latin was the previous Latin. To claim that Creole does not have the same capacity to express its own science, technology and art is reactionary, it is nonsense, it is pure nonscientific ideology, because Creole is capable of expanding and developing like any other language. Which language is there today that does not have influences from the English language? For me, the only slip on Cabral’s part is precisely in this work of his that I have right here, when he says, “The greatest gift the ‘TuGas’ left was language.” That was one of the rare instances of naiveté by Amilcar. I talked about that in Guinea-Bissau, in one of my interviews. I would tell people, “I cannot understand how an individual who was as rigorous as Cabral, and as cunning at the same time, could have said something like that.” His own widow told me, “It is important to understand that text and the historic and social context in which he stated it.” This question is both fundamental and crucial today, and any analyst of Cabral needs to emphasize this. In any event, what they told me there was that, at the time when Cabral made that statement, some analysis was called for; the risk was emerging in the struggle of a certain sectarization that led Cape Verdeans and Guineans to oppose any Portuguese, to oppose the Portuguese culture, to oppose the

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Portuguese language, to oppose all things Portuguese. Cabral needed, then, to curb the risk of strengthening in that perspective, which, I agree, would have weakened the struggle itself. There was, deep down, a certain naiveté there, because the issue for the colonized as regards the colonizing culture is not to negate it. I mean, it is to negate it ethically; it is not to say that there is nothing of value in it. In that, Cabral was most lucid. No culture can be judged as absolutely bad or absolutely good. Cultures are necessarily different from one another. So the issue is how to take advantage of the positive deeds that the “TuGas” have done. They told me that it was in that context that Cabral said what he said. Therefore, it was a tactical statement. However, if I were Cabral’s comrade and friend at that time, I would have told him the following: “Do not publish this Cabral; change it. Even with all tactical skills that you must have, you have other ways to avoid sectarização (divisions).” By saying what he said, he was admitting to something absolutely nonexistent, which was that language was purely a tool. Then, I do not believe it was simply a matter of tactics; I believe that, in this case, Amilcar was in error. But it is nice to find a doozie of an error in an individual as extraordinary as he.

The Engine of History In Cartas a Guiné-Bissau, at some point, perhaps out of sheer intuition, I state that Amilcar fought for a scientific understanding, but never a scientifistic one, of reality. In the second place, my impression, my conviction, is that Amilcar was a great distance away from positivist criteria. Amilcar was, to me, a very good Marxist, who undertook an African reading of Marx, not a German reading of Marx, nor a nineteenth century reading of Marx. He engaged in a twentieth century reading of Marxist Africa. It is for no other reason that, in the serious speech he gave in Havana, he rules out accepting the assertion that class struggle is the engine of history.10 He negated that in Cuba, and he argues in his writing that it is not class struggle, properly speaking; he historically analyzes the emergence of classes from a technical, a Marxist, standpoint, and asserts that much more than class it is the mode of production that constitutes the engine of history. I have the impression as well that, from the Marxist point of view, when one speaks of class struggle, one possibly does not do so solely taking class to its most technical, most exact sense. Even prior to the historical emergence of social classes, there were conflicts; there were already struggles between contradictory interests, between

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dominant and dominated. But Cabral put it with great independence in Havana, saying that one of his reasons for rejecting class struggle as the engine of history is that he could not accept that Africa had had no history, before. He later poses two epistemological questions. One is this: What took place before the struggle, before the resistance of the classes, and what will there be afterward? Can it be that history will end? This second question seems even more serious to me: Could it be that with the socialist revolution in the world, with the suppression of antagonistic classes and so on, that history will end as well? Might the socialist revolution be a heralding of the end? If it were, I would prefer that it was not. Indeed, what I really love is the history itself. And Cabral poses this question with great independence. But what I think is the following: such an extraordinary man like Cabral should be studied next to another, to me, that extraordinary figure is Gramsci. I do not know if Amílcar studied Gramsci. He never mentions or makes reference to Gramsci, but not on account of being remiss. He truly did not read Gramsci. The works of Gramsci began to be translated when Cabral was fighting and already in the jungles. Gramsci’s first books were translated into Spanish and came out when I myself was in exile. Now, notice how both men, Cabral and Gramsci, are moved by culture, without, however, neither one nor the other having hyperbolized culture. But this was what practically both did, one writing in jail, an arrested captive, thinking his head off, the other writing in the jungle—as I have no doubt that Amilcar’s works, with a few exceptions, for example, his writings from youth, in which he was much more of a poet, were mostly written in the jungle, while fighting. There were perhaps two types of texts, the ones he wrote for the struggle in the jungle, and those meant for the political fight within the United Nations and in universities. Notice this man’s genius, “The liberation struggle is a political struggle for an armed moment, not the other way around.” He never said that the struggle for liberation is a war with a few touches of politics. I mean, there are those who think there is never any politics, just bullets, and he says the opposite: it is a clearly political struggle and fight with its armed moments. And Cabral used both of these moments. He fully lived the substantivity of the struggle. For that reason, he theorized. One day he was in one of the jungles in Guinea-Bissau fighting, and two days later he was receiving the title of Dr. Honoris Causa in one of the universities in the United States and making a speech, as he accepted his doctorate, about the struggle for liberation in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde.

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He would head for the United Nations to fight, and his first great victory was political. He managed to convince the United Nations, and the United Nations convinced the world, that his country was a country occupied by Portugal. The United Nations went there, inside the jungle, in order to rule for independence. That is something extraordinary. Something formidable took place there: conscientization was brought to the Portuguese army by their losses. There came a point when changes would not have occurred in Portugal, the socalled Carnation Revolution, had there not been a war in Africa. It was the Africans in their jungles who transformed and toppled the Portuguese right. They did it. What I related in Cartas a Guiné-Bissau is true: a Portuguese soldier would come down and stab a pregnant woman. He would shake the fetus up and down and spear it on his bayonet. That was true, true. One day the people received Soviet instruments, obtained through Cabral’s fantastic political acumen; he worked on the Soviet Union well to that end. And as the Portuguese would approach, flying, singing along, they started shooting them down like crazy, those boys from the generation I have discussed here. Each airplane that flew by would come down, as the boys did not miss a shot. The pilots would no longer go up; they did not want to go, and they had to make an internal change in Portugal. So, that is why I think a person like Amilcar Cabral should be studied side by side with a person such as Antonio Gramsci. What is the big difference between the two of them? Amilcar died possibly older than Gramsci, and Amilcar had countless years of war in the bush, in the jungle. Conversely, Gramsci was in jail for many years. But I have a conviction that if we study their texts individually or together, it would have enormous importance, and such a study must be undertaken by educators. I think one of the things that is lacking right now for educators is exactly this understanding of education policy and pedagogy.

The Inexperience of African Leaderships My friends, what did this mean to a lucid leadership? An invasion by European groups, both private and public, and state agencies; they descended upon the airports in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde to bring development proposals after the countries in the region attained autonomy. In their majority, such proposals were not for development in the interest of those independent peoples; rather, they were in the interest of the agencies. They found that the national leaderships were

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inexperienced, having only had a great deal of experience in fighting war in the jungles, while lacking this other type of experience with diplomacy, with economic debate, and with an understanding of planning in the interest of the people; all of that had to be worked out, including what all this would cost them to countries in international aid terms. A United Nations expert did not go to Guinea-Bissau without being paid six or seven thousand dollars per month, because an expert is not a political militant, incidentally, being an expert for that very reason. I don’t mean to sabotage anyone; the expert deserves to get paid. But what does that mean from different points of view? It impacts the environment, the politics of the region, local habits. What does all that mean? So that is what I would like to discuss here: the difficulties faced by inexperienced leaderships. We already know how it is not easy; this country of ours here, it is said, became independent on September 7, 1822. That’s right, and it remains in extraordinary dependence. It wasn’t that long ago that a Chilean woman used to come around once in a while to tell Brasilia how economic development should be done; it wasn’t that long ago. So you might imagine what that is from the standpoint of constructing the autonomy, the independence, and the cultural identity of the African peoples.

Notes 1. This chapter by Paulo Freire (1921–1997) is a transcription of a lecture that Paulo Freire gave on November 8, 1985 at the School of education at the University of Brasilia (UNB), and it was originally recorded, transcribed, and organized in Portuguese by Professor Venicio Arthur Lima. It has never been published in English. Its publication in this book has been made possible by the generosity of Professor Nita Freire, the late Paulo Freire’s wife and the executor of the Paulo Freire estate, for which I am eternally grateful. In addition, we would like to extend a special thanks to Alex Oliveira for his technical assistance with this translation. 2. Amilcar Cabral (September 12, 1924–January 20, 1973) was an African agronomic engineer, a writer, a freedom fighter, a Marxist, and a nationalist politician. Cabral led African nationalism movements in GuineaBissau and the Cape Verde Islands and led Guinea-Bissau’s independence movement. Guinean natives, who were agents of Portuguese colonialism, assassinated him in 1973, just months before Guinea-Bissau declared unilateral independence. On April 25, 1974, the military dictatorship that had ruled Portugal was overthrown, resulting in independence movements in Guinea Bissau and the Cape Verde islands. The struggle for independence was under the leadership of Amilcar Cabral and the African

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6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

Pau l o F r e i r e Party for the Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde islands (PAIGC). Translator’s note: Those Africans of Portuguese cultural and linguistic orientations, who were basically the colonized. Translator’s note: TuGa is a pejorative term that was used in colonist Africa to refer to the Portuguese, a kind of slur. Translator’s note: a Brazilian fictional caricature, a mentally-challenged bum, a religious fanatic who prophesizes on the streets. Beato Salu was in a novella, a soap opera actor in Brazil in the 1980s. He was famous for playing as a crazy old men. Cri Cri power was supernatural power or superstitions, and the amulets that were used were called bentinhos. Translator’s note: This is a well-known Guevara saying. At this conference, after this idea, Paulo read a letter that he wrote to Mário Cabral in July 1977. This letter appears in a book Por uma Pedagogia da Pergunta. Rio de Janerio: Paz e terra, 1985, 127–134. Nita Freire added a footnote to the original Portuguese version of this chapter in the book Paulo Freire: Pedagogia da Tolerancia. This volume can be found in “A Paulo Freire Series” of volumes, coordinated by Nita Freire, and published by UNESP. Cf. footnote 3. Translators note: In Das Capital, Marx wrote that class struggle was the engine of history, but deconstructionists, postmodernism, and the like have now generalized the class struggle to include race, class, and gender, plus postcolonial revenge against the West, and so on.

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ommon usage of the term globalization conflates two different meanings. On one hand, this term is shorthand for a specific set of economic and political initiatives undertaken by global elites as part of a new phase in the history of capitalism. In this usage, the term refers first of all to neoliberalism—the global disciplining of workers, the poor, and developing societies in order to respond to a crisis of accumulation in the leading capitalist societies—though secondarily it refers as well to the spread of transnational corporations and consumerism more generally. On the other hand, globalization is also used to refer to a more fundamental process of the withering of the nation-state system as the primary framework for organizing social and political life, and the worldwide cultural interpenetration that reorganizes human society and identities on a planetary scale. This second sense of the term is existential as well as political, and is more or less synonymous with globality. Of course, we live in a particular world, one dominated economically, politically, and culturally by very particular elites, which means that even if these two senses of globalization are different on paper, by and large they overlap in fact, since our experience of the shift to globality is essentially mediated by the powerful and by their vision of what a global society can and should look like. And of course, to the extent that the development of capitalism is the engine that has historically driven the reconfiguration of human life on a vaster and vaster scale, it is not surprising that globalization should be experienced as a new set of experiences of production and consumption. Both of these meanings and dimensions of globalization pose dramatic challenges for people everywhere. First of all, globalization has so

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far meant, among other things, the decline of stable jobs and good benefits for many workers, the proliferation of conditions of superexploitation for others, the abandonment of many to no livelihood at all with the dramatic movement of firms around the globe, the destruction of traditional economies and forms of life, forced migration, cultural imperialism and predatory consumerism, not to mention environmental degradation and perpetual war. For children and youth, these processes have been devastating, leading to important threats to survival and stability. For young people in the global North, these include the specific challenges of incarceration, unemployment, and lack of medical care, among others; in the rest of the world, the destabilizations associated with globalization have made children the targets of war, child labor and slavery, conscription into child armies, and new pandemics. But besides these problems, which are associated with the first, directly political-economic, sense of globalization mentioned above, there are additional, if less tangible, challenges associated with the second sense of globalization—that is, the shift to the condition of globality itself, the organization of human life and meaning on a much vaster and more complex scale. At the most basic level, this movement toward a global organization of social life means the frequent interruption of local narratives and expectations, as well as the experience of powerlessness in the face of apparently vast historical forces. It is also associated with the replacement of familiar frameworks and modes of communication by alien ones, the deterritorialization of identities, and the assimilation of daily practices to a new set of general and planetary social habits. If these are dramatic changes for people generally, for young people they are particularly stark, unmooring them from familiar contexts, teaching them extreme forms of alienation, and throwing them headlong into the coldness of a future with no guarantees. Of course, many observers have pointed out that globalization and the condition of globality also create new and important social possibilities and opportunities. The very insatiability of power and the incessant expansiveness of capital, as they remake the conditions in which people work and live, driving them ever more completely into the culture of the commodity, also create a new kind of commonality between people everywhere. This means that while people increasingly share in the experience of subjugation to the same free market fundamentalism, they also potentially share in new forms of oppositional identity. In addition, the spread of popular culture around the world (even if not in all directions equally) potentially makes possible new and powerfully hybrid forms of art, politics, and identity. The tools of the powerful, in particular telecommunications and the Internet, are to some extent

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also available for global social justice movements. And it may be that Marx and Engels are still correct in their view that there are certain forms of parochialism that it is a blessing rather than a curse to be made free of through the influence of the spread of capitalist culture and the struggle against it.1 It is important, at any rate, to point out that if there are positive possibilities that emerge through globalizing processes, they are important precisely in being creatively discovered in resistance to actually existing globalization. This accounts for the complex identity of the new transnational protest movements, which are both antiglobalization and pro-alternative globalization at the same time. If young people are especially exposed to the dangers and challenges of globalization described above, they are also at the cutting edge of the opportunities it presents. After all, if these opportunities are to be taken advantage of productively, and if the threats to sociality and survival that are posed by global immiseration, war, and plunder are to be countered, it is young people who will do it. Thinking carefully about education and pedagogy is crucial in this regard. Furthermore, given the reorganizations of experience and identity produced by globalization mentioned above, it is clear that teaching and learning as part of the movement for social transformation must be reconceptualized in some fundamental ways. Put simply, critical pedagogy as such is insufficient in this conjuncture; what is needed is a critical pedagogy of the global. This must be more than a recognition of, and a determination against, the evils of the rulers. In addition, a critical pedagogy of the global must be able to reckon with the fundamental transformations of consciousness, experience, and identity that are central to the shift to the historical condition of globality. Not only does this mean a consciously transnational perspective, but it also implies a flexibility and innovativeness that can respond to the terrifying (and sometimes exhilarating) openings that the landscape of the global forces upon us. In this article, I will sketch the broad outlines of such a pedagogy through an exploration of several central theoretical dilemmas that critical educators and activists are confronted by in the context of globalization.

Globalization and Identity Changes in the objective structures and conditions of social life are deeply intertwined with changes in the kinds of meanings that can be constructed to give sense to the lives of individuals and communities. Globalization puts familiar forms of identity under pressure, as people are variously marginalized and incorporated by new economic and political processes. Widespread immigration, which is itself an effect

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and crucial dimension of the global economy, challenges given identifications as well as provokes new ones. For example, Saskia Sassen describes how immigrants in the United States are incorporated into a new “serving class,” upon which depends the elite beneficiaries of the global economy.2 At the same time, the feminization of service work gives women in this sector access to income and independence that they often did not have before. Globally, gender identities and worker identities come together in ways that are empowering (as when women make use of gendered modes of communication and organization in the service of workplace solidarity) as well as disempowering (as when capital takes advantage of the devaluation of women’s work in order to increase the rate of exploitation).3 Beyond this, globalization puts in doubt the validity of national identifications generally, as the national space is penetrated by supranational economic and political processes that throw disparate populations together in new ways while revealing in especially dramatic fashion the fundamentally imaginary nature of national identity in the first place. Thus, the diversification of the population in the United States challenges white-supremacist assumptions about the cultural content of “Americanness,” which is expressed in new forms of linguistics, xenophobia, and racism. In this connection, Arjun Appadurai describes the difficult dialectics of “majority” and “minority” populations within the context of the insecurity provoked by globalization. Ethnic cleansing and genocide are catastrophic attempts to respond to this uncertainty, as “majority” populations seek to exorcise the implicit threat posed by minorities and demographic diversity generally—namely, the possibility that these majorities represent merely a contingent demographic reality rather than a pure expression of the nation.4 Globalizing processes reorganize the basic conditions for being and understanding the limits of oneself and one’s context. Globalization literally and figuratively deracinates and deterritorializes people, throwing them out of occupations that gave meaning to their lives and disrupting communities and cultures. But it also powerfully articulates individual lives to global forces, and through them to the terrain of the global itself. The North American Free Trade Agreement has wrought havoc on indigenous communities in Mexico, while also provoking them into forms of resistance that directly confront not merely the local cacique, but the heart of globalizing capital itself. Furthermore, this resistance serves as a crucial node in a worldwide set of popular movements of opposition. In this way, alongside the prevailing mode of globalization as the increasingly total subjugation of the social to capital, there is as well a dramatic alternative and oppositional vista on an

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absolutely different scale from the old visions—the scale of the totality. In addition to the traditional vertical projections of identity upward from the soil of community, ethnos, and nation, there is the possibility of a horizontal extension, as people are linked sectorally to others resisting the same social forces and conditions across the globe. This is a dramatically new reconfiguration of class identification and struggle, as the vast majority begin to find a new solidarity against an increasingly embattled global elite. The movements of the dispossessed in South Africa, as Ashwin Desai reports, have given rise to an original identity that is outside of and opposed to the party, ethnic, racial, and workerist ones of prior struggles: the “poors” are all those who find themselves sharing the common condition of subjugation to a neoliberalizing economy managed by a “revolutionary” capitalist party (the African National Congress).5 But this is not simply a negative identification, the designation for those who have been left behind by neoliberalism; this is also potentially the banner of a powerful new social subject. The poors stake a claim to the empty space laid bare by globalization—the space of the discarded, redundant, and marginalized. History, they say, belongs as much to them as to the rulers and managers. Of course, there are also less oppositional articulations of the opportunities opened up by globalization for new identities, subjects, and citizens. The boosters of capitalist globalization tout in particular the exciting forms of empowerment available to the emerging middle classes in developing countries. Thus, Thomas Friedman is ecstatic about the upward mobility of Indian service workers employed in call centers and high-tech firms.6 He is silent with respect to the violence of capital, except to the extent that he notes that some populations have not yet figured out how to connect to the benefits of the new “flat world” of globalization. A more sophisticated version of this optimism is promoted in the currently fashionable idea of “cosmopolitanism,” which argues that globalization makes possible a kind of transnational citizenship that values cultural difference while also promoting certain ethical universalisms.7 This proposal glibly runs together the vast range of different confrontations with the global; the intellectual’s leisurely appreciation for the varieties of human experience is different from the peasant’s sudden apprehension of a neoliberalized economy that forces him or her out of a livelihood. But the idea of cosmopolitanism does foreground an important new form of agency, if properly appropriated. The power of protest on the global scale is made possible, after all, by a truly transnational and cosmopolitan effort of communication and coordination, even if the effects of this protest remain so far uneven and difficult to assess.

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Marx and Engels argued that the conquest of the world by the capitalist mode of production was a brutal and tragic passage, as well as an enlightening and productive one, since it opened a broader vista for the vast majority and made possible a general human and historical progress.8 This perspective may too quickly dismiss what has been lost and damaged. It is wrong to assume a priori that the historical dialectic is ultimately worth the ravages of its unfolding. By the same token, however, it is important not to overlook the powerful possibilities made available by globalization as a general process of cultural transformation. It is important to explore the new windows that are opened on and for human being by this basic shift in the conditions of existence. The global perhaps unfolds a new technology of the human, of which the glossy new software and communications technologies are only a weak reflection. This deeper formation would not be an instrumental one, but rather a technology of solidarity—a more powerful and liberatory organization of human relationships across the planet, capable perhaps of finally contesting the subjection of sociality to the imperative of accumulation. This solidarity is as yet only emergent. It will require a great deal of physical, mental, and spiritual work and imagination to accomplish it. And it will require a deeply pedagogical engagement, since it cannot simply be manufactured but only collaboratively learned and communicated. This is the central historical task, especially for the young. For educators, this means participating in a process of working with students through successive challenges and anxieties, as familiar frames of references are replaced, new relationships formed, and new knowledges gained. And perhaps even more profoundly than is usually imagined (even by critical educators), this will have to be a process in which teachers are learners just as much as students are. Rather than the expert teaching the novice or the leader guiding the disciple, the global itself, as overarching condition and horizon, teaches everyone together a new form of life.

Global Power and the Possibility of Democracy Globalization provokes questions about the new dimensions of power, as well as the new challenges and possibilities for democracy, which critical education must analyze and explore. Is the essence of power in this historical moment the same as before, or different? Can democratic principles that already exist be simply extended to the scale of the global, or is it necessary to invent new ones? In responding to these questions, an important conceptual starting point is the idea

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that capitalism, and thus society generally, is facing a deep and global crisis of accumulation—an inability to find enough profitable outlets for the surplus capital that has been accumulated in the process of production. This is the source of the never-ending search for cheaper and cheaper labor, and is the motivation behind neoliberalism and its impulses to privatization. To be able to continue to expand, capitalism must penetrate spheres that have so far been external to it. First of all, this involves expanded reproduction (the enrollment of more and more people into the productive process as workers). But in the context of systemic crisis, more drastic means must be found, including simple plunder, or “accumulation by dispossession,” in which public resources and economic sectors are commandeered by transnational firms (for example, the privatization of utilities, water services, and transportation), and in which human creativity and the riches of nature are commodified in new ways (for example, the patenting of natural organisms and indigenous knowledge).9 At work here, then, are the simultaneous and contradictory processes of proletarianization and deindustrialization, as some are incorporated into punishing factory work while others are expelled from it and exploited in new ways, and as capital searches for previously uncolonized areas of social life to penetrate. The dramatic ramification and complexification of the global economy is a fundamental fact that affects everyone, and which must reorient critical efforts to understand and intervene against power. For one thing, the very notions of democracy, the public sphere, and hegemony, which have served as basic organizing principles for critical educators and activists, have to be reexamined in light of global processes that do not necessarily respect the political limits and logic that organize these ideas. Globalization tends to absorb all public spaces and processes into the logic of capital without regard to national boundaries, variously extending or withdrawing productive capacity at the same time that it commodifies culture everywhere. Therefore, globalization undermines the usefulness of political strategies organized around, or conceived in the context of, the nation-state. In broad terms, as Samir Amin describes, this is the political crisis that confronts contemporary societies, as ideologies and languages across the spectrum that are concerned with paradigms and policies of the nation-state fail to come to terms with a global economic (and social) reality that is not premised on this prior political logic.10 To the extent that critical pedagogy, as well as popular movements, conceptualize their projects in terms of discrete national spaces, and in terms of building historical blocs capable of intervening to influence the state,

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they fail to adequately comprehend the present and risk being sidelined by contemporary developments. By the same token, understanding globalization can shed new light on many of the most intractable issues that we confront. For example, the effort to reduce and privatize social services in the United States (including education), which is usually criticized simply as the illconceived project of ideological conservatives, can instead be understood more broadly as a form of structural adjustment designed both to reorient public life to the culture of the market and to absorb new sectors of it into the sphere of capitalist accumulation.11 However, we should go even further and recognize that we have to do here with processes that are more than economic, in the narrow sense. The new colonizations and penetrations of the era of globalization are also biopolitical—that is, they aim to assimilate and exploit not only laborpower, as traditionally understood, but even the fundamental capacities of desire, communication, and affect that organize human sociality in the first place.12 Thus, the effect of recent transformations in education (for example, the spread of voucher and “accountability” initiatives) is not just to inculcate ideologies but also to reorganize the very subjectivities, habits, and desires that construct who and what students might be as social beings. And globalizing processes are also, I would argue, forms of spiritual plunder, as the hope and solidarity of humanity are alienated into a profound despair that seems not only impotent against power, but which also reproduces forms of social crisis that appear to justify power’s intervention and its management of social life. This dynamic is at work first of all in the expulsion of young people from the worlds of education and work into conditions of hopelessness, and then again, in response to this problem, in the invention of “solutions” in the form of new non-spaces for youth to inhabit as mercenaries on the proliferating fronts of the global war, or as inmates in the forgotten landscapes of the prison-industrial complex. What notion of democracy can be adequate to these difficult conditions, and to the very framework of the global? Some have argued that the historical goals of socialism—the overcoming of capitalism, and the establishment of alternative forms of international social production—must remain the goals for any democratic movement;13 in fact, capitalist globalization makes this a realistic and urgent project in a new way, as transnational forces and projects of opposition can be more clearly observed and imagined. On the other hand, others have argued that while the global era involves an increasing interconnectedness of peoples and recognition of legitimate differences, the basic principles of deliberative democracy remain unchanged. In this view,

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the consensual agreement of equals, as Seyla Benhabib puts it, arrived at within conditions of universal respect and reciprocity, is the precondition for truly democratic politics, and perhaps especially so in the context of a global multiculturalism.14 Others have argued that an entirely new paradigm is needed and that democracy can only be imagined as the political project of a new global actor that we can only begin to glimpse in the present. Thus, for Hardt and Negri, democracy is simply the progressive materialization of this subject—a deepening and widening of the networks of social communication and collaboration of the “multitude.”15 However, any understanding of democracy in the age of globalization and any critical pedagogical project to imagine and construct it must come to terms with the fact that discourses and strategies based on narratives of the nation and logics of the national state must give way to a global conception. This means recognizing that globalization and globality represent more than an extended internationalism, and instead constitute a fundamentally new mode and horizon of social life.

New Collectivities, New Struggles The patterns and changes described above together create a condition of extreme uncertainty. The precariousness of life chances, the erosion of norms and expectations, the pressures on familiar forms of identity, and the distance and velocity of power confront individuals with daunting challenges. Zygmunt Bauman calls this condition “liquid modernity,” a historical stage characterized by a new fluidity and impermanence, as opposed to the solidity of the structures of state, society, and rationality that characterized the old order (or “solid” modernity). Furthermore, as Bauman describes, at the same time that individuals are faced with fundamentally new uncertainties, they are also given the sole responsibility for navigating this landscape and weaving together some reliable framework of meaning and security— even though the difficult conditions they face are in fact the result of systemic contradictions.16 Therefore, the task of critical theory and pedagogy, and radical politics generally, is not only to expose and resist the organized power of the state and society but also to begin to imagine a different sociality. The problem is not merely the way that power intrudes into the lives of people, but in addition the way that it retreats and abandons individuals to their fates. Neoliberalism perfects the catastrophic synthesis of these two projects, assimilating populations into the process of capitalist reproduction on an expanded scale, and then just as suddenly expelling them into the gigantic global reserve labor

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army as firms scale down or move across the globe. Even in societies at the center of global power, the growth of a new many-tentacled security state coincides with a tendency away from the forms of control associated with the extended welfare state, as the drive for flexibility on the part of capital results in the paring down of state regulations and interventions in the economy. In an older sociological idiom, this is both a decolonization and recolonization of the “life-world.” In this context, while it is necessary to reinvigorate the public sphere and promote forms of enlivened and engaged citizenship and pedagogy, as Bauman and Henry Giroux argue, this is not enough.17 If global power aggressively intervenes in social life at the same time that it flees society (and its commitments to it), then this power must be assertively contested and not merely bypassed. This means that principled critique and confrontation remain crucial responsibilities for the left in theory and practice. In addition, calls to revivify arenas of public life and democracy, including education, must be careful not to fall back on the very senses of subjectivity that power relies on as mystifications. A project of global social transformation means more than simply supplying actual content to the empty ideologeme of the “individual.” Against the idea that the critical task remains “the selfconstitution of individual life and the weaving as well as the servicing of the networks of bonds with other self-constituting individuals,”18 we must consider whether globality at last presents us with the possibility of escaping individuality as the organizing logic of social life and the chance to discover a new logic of collectivity. This is an important challenge for critical pedagogy to the extent that it has tended to emphasize conscientization at the individual level, against the deterministic and monolithic senses of agency of the old left.19 But if familiar ideas of class and collectivity belong to an older modernity that is fast being eroded, what new classes might be imagined or built, or might perhaps already be emerging? If “democracy” can be rethought in ways that are able to substantively respond to the dilemmas posed by globality, it must be rethought in this context. A dramatically fluid and volatile present, which remakes the conditions of social life, meaning, and identification in an instant, calls for an equally radical project of collective imagination and transformation. A new collective subject of opposition and alternative globality needs to set out into the unknown and to discover itself in the process of building another world. That this is indeed a process of opposition as well as creation means that the emphasis in critical theory on public life has to be radicalized, and social transformation conceived of as a project aimed specifically against power and capital at the same time

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as it unfolds a culture of democracy. Social justice movements cannot expect neoliberalism and empire to simply fade away as new transnational collaborations are organized; they will have to be countered and challenged at the same time that a different future is built. This contradiction is evident in the gatherings of the World Social Forum, which seem to suggest in their transnationalism a new democratic movement, but which at the same time more immediately bring together specific regional struggles against neoliberal assaults.20 Class antagonisms, reconfigured and projected on a global scale, will remain. On the other hand, even in the context of this struggle, the fundamentally new conditions of the present will require a radically creative imagination, one that goes beyond, for instance, a Deweyan and radical democratic perspective. Rather than a project of social reconstruction, which implies a redoing (and doing better) of something that has already been accomplished, 21 what is necessary in the present is the building of a form of life that is original. This is an open-ended project, since not only can the future not be known before its construction, but in addition the subject that creates it can only gradually be disclosed to itself in the process. What new class and class consciousness will emerge from the ranks of the marginalized, the dispossessed, and the increasingly vast majority that suffers the depredations of the global elite and the social processes that reproduce its hegemony? The shackdwellers’ movements, the organizations of part-time and unemployed workers, and the unions of the landless and the castoff do not easily fit the old class categories, and yet they represent powerful new forms of political agency and subjectivity. The Global Women’s Strike highlights the invisibility of the labor of women and girls as well as the global inequities in pay and life chances between women and men, and in so doing strikes at the heart of capital, which depends on this invisibility both to hide and to ratchet up the rate of exploitation. A widespread and widening ecological consciousness, to the extent that it is serious in its commitments, must come up against the imperative of capital to constantly expand (whether in traditional or “green” industries, as Joel Kovel points out),22 and therefore must begin to create strategies against capitalism itself. These creative experiments, and others, begin to expose new political landscapes and to suggest new forms of subjectivity and sociality, ones not based on the exchange-value of human creativity or on the exploitability of natural diversity. Critical pedagogy must urgently make these emergent tendencies available to youth. If these new movements are still somewhat open and amorphous, that is because they are outside the social logic of capital, and so can only

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appear as blank spaces in the global geography that capital has incessantly mapped and mined to exhaustion. The actual shape they come to take, and the names of the subjects they propose, can only be spoken in the actual unfolding of their organization and opposition, a process in which young people must necessarily take a central part.

Teaching and Solidarity If social transformation at this point in history can only be imagined in global terms, as the foregoing discussion suggests, this means that liberatory education has to have a perspective on the relationship of local and global, and a strategy for mediating this dialectic. Critical pedagogy in the present should make vivid for students their own actually existing relationships, as inhabitants of a territory or region, to broader relations of power and exploitation, on the model of the concentric regional circles of Paulo Freire’s “generative themes.”23 On the basis of this interpolation of the global into the imaginary and insular space of the national, students can begin to reconfigure identifications in terms of a solidarity with those in struggle across the globe. But in order for this to take place, it is also necessary for educators to engage students in a critical reading, not merely of injustice or oppression generally, but of power and capital as global processes. This does not mean imposing a distant and alienating vocabulary, but rather initiating students into a new mode of thinking about their own lives and communities. At the same time, however, this may, in part, feel like the intrusion of a dangerous discourse, especially in the United States. But in this pedagogical and discursive choice, a political one is made as well—to participate in a conversation that has been joined by radical and left movements globally, rather than to surrender to limits tacitly enforced by a parochial progressivism. But at the same time that critical teaching connects students to urgent global questions and to a critical reading of power, it must also rethink its own assumptions. The paradigm shift involved in the transformation of national and international issues and identifications to global ones means that critical pedagogy must also be transformed. In particular, in a social universe whose basic realities are changing at an unprecedented pace, and in which there is essentially no simple map by which to navigate, the function of the teacher as leader or guide is challenged. For better or worse, in a world crisscrossed by unprecedented and expanding fissures in its social, political, economic, and ecological fabric, young people themselves will ultimately be the ones who discover a path. This does not imply that educators

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should abdicate their place and power; rather, it means that critical teachers must discover ways to initiate and collaborate in this process with young people, rather than imagining themselves as in possession of a fundamentally different and deeper understanding and authority. Human beings are faced now not simply with the responsibility to pursue the vocation of humanization and to overcome oppression; beyond this, they confront the necessity of constructing a new world. The imagination of young people must take a new and more central role in this project, since their visions are less likely to be constrained by the limitations of discourses and traditions that were forged in conditions that are disappearing. Furthermore, in the double-sided movement of neoliberalism described above, new forms of hyper-authoritarianism are produced at the same time that power finds new ways to secede from public space. This is particularly apparent in schools, where new regimes of policy and pedagogy reconstruct education as a form of punishment.24 This is an entirely different degree of authoritarianism than that with which critical pedagogy has so far concerned itself. Rather than focusing simply on the construction of docile and compliant subjects, this new authoritarianism—as expressed in exit exams, zero tolerance, “back to basics” and scripted curricula, and other measures—aims covertly to exclude vast numbers of youth from participation in public life altogether. In this environment, any rigid consolidation of authority (even “critical”) risks being experienced as violent—as well as being assimilated by the hyper-authority that is omnipresent and overdetermining within the institutions. This does not mean that the very idea of authority should be dispensed with. Wherever there is solidarity, there is some form of authority. The challenge is to imagine more fully collective and collaborative organizations of authority, which distribute it across a network of participants.25 The uniqueness of the teacher’s position in this arrangement would not be that of a leader, or of some disinterested facilitator, but rather that of provocateur, senior participant, chief organizer, and mentor. The existential, political, and ethical imperative to learn to navigate a fluid world together means inventing more profoundly collective solidarities than we have known before. In addition to interrogating received wisdoms and identifications in order to produce hybrid classroom cultures, this means participating in the construction of larger and properly global communities and political projects, which can then be enacted in a multiplicity of individual sites, including educational ones. Rather than initiating students into already established “communities of practice,” or socializing students into the established habits

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of a stable democratic society, the center of gravity must shift to constructing new communities of practice, new habits, and a new society. There is an important transition that must take place from incorporation to creation, from inculcating democratic culture to clearing the ground for the discovery of a new culture for a new world. For example, although it is necessary to recognize, in the context of changing technologies, the importance of cyberliteracies and “multiliteracies” in addition to traditional print literacy,26 educators must also consider what new communities are made possible for young people by the changing landscape of electronic communication, and what new forms of abandonment are being invented for those who are excluded from these landscapes. Since the possibilities of the new are discovered in the process of determined opposition to the assaults of power and capital in the present, this also means that as power becomes more aggressive and mobile, so must educational opposition—it must look beyond the classroom and participate in struggles on the ground against global militarism, racism, and privatization. Youth themselves have recently led the way in walkouts and protests in support of immigrants’ rights, against the war in Iraq, and against the impoverishment of curriculum and opportunities in the schools. These struggles are at the leading edge not merely of social movements but also of critical pedagogy. They suggest new collectivities, commitments, and kinds of mobility that critical teachers should study and take their cues from as they seek to bring their own resources and understanding into active collaboration with the energy of students, which is already in motion.

Conclusion Is it possible to imagine an emerging culture of opposition that would be equal to the global scale of capital itself, and yet is rooted in the materiality of human experience? Standpoint theory, from Lukács to feminism, has identified the resistant power of theory and practice with the fact of being connected to the experience of a particular group, however broadly or narrowly defined.27 Does the global necessarily transcend any particular experience, or is there a planetary particularity that might be called human, and which remains tied to a particular geography, namely this earth? As paradoxical or difficult as it appears, I believe that this is the task of critical theory and pedagogy in the present: to participate in articulating an oppositional planetary identity that draws its strength from the histories of resistance that the vast majority who live and have lived have shared. If this does not make

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of the human a simple abstraction, it is because the broad particularity that this culture would be built on is the particularity of the global majority, as against the elite. The determined content of this culture must be the life of struggle, in all its colors and shapes—blending the cities and the selva, the soil and the concrete. Its unprecedented variegation, velocity, and complexity must even begin to surpass the limits of the hybrid, and to become something else—a new language and color never before seen or heard. What would make this culture authentic is what has always made culture authentic in modernity—a participation in resistance, a refusal of exploitation, colonization, and recolonization, and the construction of a form of being that looks beyond bondage. This was Frantz Fanon’s principle for culture in the context of national liberation struggles against Europe’s fraying empires: not a repetition of precolonial forms but an expression of the contemporary aspirations of the people.28 In the present, the challenge is to overcome a simple backwardlooking allegiance to the old places, and to find a language for the new local, as it is increasingly materialized by the changing conditions of life: namely, the global itself. Hardt and Negri are correct in suggesting that local struggles now immediately confront global forces and participate in a resistance that is repeated globally as part of a common moment.29 In contrast to their notion of “multitude,” however, a new global language of resistance must start from the ground up, from the collision of living vernaculars and actual itineraries of human experience rather than from some pre-given image. The first stages of this transformation can be seen in the transnationalism of new cultural idioms emerging from the “global cities” in the street-level cosmopolitanism of popular music and popular intifadas. The next stages cannot be foreseen but will have to involve an actual slipping of the boundaries that are now only crossed over. In this regard, if the social forces that assault and reorganize people’s lives are now properly global, critical pedagogy must also move toward an oppositional transnationalism that supports the resistant expressions of young people, is in solidarity with radical educators everywhere, and forges a path with others toward new forms of social life. The democratic and resistant identification that waits to be created in this connection is not simply a recognition of oneself in the struggle of this group, but rather a recognition of oneself in all struggles—in resistance itself. As this spirit finds its material form and expression, we will better understand what a global identification can be, and what it means to renew a humanist commitment even as the content of the human is changing. To teach is to keep the paths open to this place, rather than to decide what it must be.

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Notes 1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin Books, 1967), 82–84. 2. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York: The New Press, 1998), 90. 3. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 168. 4. Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 82–85. 5. Ashwin Desai, We are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002). 6. Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 28. 7. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006). 8. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto. 9. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 145–152. 10. Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Contemporary Society (London: Zed Books, 1997), 64–72. 11. Peter McLaren, Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); Peter McLaren, Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy Against Empire (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); Kenneth Saltman, The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education (New York: Routledge, 2005). 12. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 108–116. 13. Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization. 14. Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 15. Hardt and Negri, Multitude. 16. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2000). 17. Bauman, Liquid Modernity; Henry Giroux, The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the Culture of Fear (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005). 18. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 49. 19. See, for example, Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. M. B. Ramos (New York: Continuum, 1996); Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, trans. R. R. Barr (New York: Continuum, 1999). 20. T. Mertes, “Grass Roots Globalism,” in Debating Empire, ed. G. Balakrishnan (London: Verso, 2003), 146.

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21. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: The Free Press, 1944). 22. Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (New York: Zed Books, 2002), 24. 23. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 84. 24. See Pauline Lipman, High Stakes Education: Inequality, Globalization, and Urban School Reform (New York: Routledge, 2004); William Lyons and Julie Drew, Punishing Schools: Fear and Citizenship in American Public Education (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006). 25. Noah De Lissovoy, “Frantz Fanon and a Materialist Critical Pedagogy,” in Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now?, ed. P. McLaren and J. L. Kincheloe (New York: Peter Lang, 2007). 26. New London Group, “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures,” Harvard Educational Review 66, 1 (1996): 60–92. 27. See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000); S. Harding, “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is ‘Strong Objectivity’?” in Feminist Epistemologies, ed. L Alcoff and E. Potter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 49–82; N. Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, ed. S. Harding and M. B. Hintikka (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1983), 283–310. 28. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963). 29. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), xiv–xv.

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A f t e rwor d Gustavo E. Fischman

While it is difficult to assess the “real” influence of Critical Pedagogy

in today’s schools and teacher education programs, it would be hard to deny that as a collective movement it has produced one of the most dynamic and controversial schools of thought in North America. Nonetheless, practitioners often see Critical Pedagogy as controversial. In many graduate programs there are often strong negative reactions to the proposals of Critical Pedagogy, varying from direct hostility to the explicit message of educational change, mockery due to the opaqueness of many texts, and skepticism about the application of the ideas because they are produced without grounding in actual schools. These reactions could be interpreted as acts of resistance, as expressions of ideological and political struggles, direct manifestations of positions taken consciously (or not taken) against the focus on the political dimensions of schooling, the goal of transforming schools and society, and the key role that educators play in these processes. But it is also important to explore other dynamics related to this phenomenon. One of those dynamics is related to the use of narratives of redemption that at best can inspire some educators, but which very often are confusing and alienate teachers and students and ultimately prevent conversations and the possibility of meaningful dialogues and alliances. What is a narrative of redemption (NR)? Simply put, a NR is an analysis in which schools are described as being horrible, oppressive, discriminatory, bad at teaching, and so on, but through the redemptive power of very mighty agents and their ideas, they will be beautiful. The connection between the terrible present and the promising future is the heroic super teacher. Besides the obvious caricature of my portrayal, redemptive narratives are common in teacher training institutions and especially strong in popular culture. From To Sir with Love, Dangerous Minds, and Stand and Deliver to the teachers of

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television’s Boston Public, the NR provides the basic discursive structure of most Hollywood films and the way their characters are positioned within the dynamics of schooling. The NR erases the backgrounds of these teachers and any process that leads them toward critical consciousness and makes their heroic achievements pure acts of will that are implemented instantly, and that achieve virtually instantaneous results. The mark that NR works is when an individual teacher overcomes all the systemic failures through the sheer force of his or her heroic and “organic” consciousness and deeds. The heroes in these narratives are frequently people who become teachers without going through teacher education courses. Their successes are not due to anything they could learn in a teacher education program. When others follow the lead of the super teacher, the class or school as a larger system is redeemed. The resonance of the NR is related to how schools are positioned as key sites for the transformation of future generations and the perfection of the society; the NR has been a dominant narrative of public schooling since the time of Horace Mann and is part of the discursive grammar of schooling that literally defines the purpose of public education. The solution to current social, cultural, political, and economic problems is deferred from the adult context of real social and political struggle to the childhood context of formation, and the classic U.S.- and enlightenment narrative of progress through the rational application of scientific child rearing becomes enacted. Both supporters and opponents of Critical Pedagogy often use the redemptive narrative, and one of its distinctive indicators is that teaching appears as both the target of the harsh social criticisms and the last space of hope, a frontier dividing the critical juncture between the possibility of achieving society’s dreams or the failure to uphold those aspirations. In that critical juncture of society’s imaginary about teachers, they become the makers of terrible presents and hopeful futures. However, the use of the NR in the teaching of Critical Pedagogy also contributes to the proliferation of gloom and doom. In fact, it often does so quite well. This framing is quite traditional and is a close follower of the religious discursive tradition of sin-crisis-failure-trauma that is completed with redemption-absolution-recovery-success. If accepted, this redeeming educational vision will, after the defeat of the oppressing enemy, create a harmonious “oppression free” ideal school, in which the flawless smiling teacher and the perfectly motivated student will co-construct learning and transform schools and lives with the force and strength of their wills.

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A distinguishing and remarkable characteristic of the NR is the normative presentation of conflicts and struggles as expressions of hope in connection with educational and social change. This popular narrative strategy works quite well as a cinematic devise or as a motivational speech, and it has been the dominant account of public schooling in North America. These elements give to NR strong emotional connections. Yet, only within redemptive narratives of heroic teachers and students is it possible to find real “hope” in racist situations, oppressive contexts, discriminatory practices, and banking educational systems. A naïve NR is dangerous because it naturalizes “educational struggles,” minimizing and ignoring the risks and suffering of those directly involved in those situations. These narratives overpromise the outcomes of teaching and learning in Critical Pedagogy classrooms, and they oversimplify the pathways that teachers and students must follow to embody, even faintly, emancipatory projects. An important risk arises from this perspective. Whilst a number of educational interactions are articulated through plain and explicit oppressive practices, and others are explicit in their articulation of pedagogies of freedom and hope, the great majority of those interactions fall in more ambiguous categories. Contrary to other pedagogical models that postulate canonical, ahistorical, and reductionist perspectives. Critical Pedagogy postulates that understanding the structural and multiple forms of oppression, both explicit and implicit, that saturate educational processes is a necessary step for transforming them. Critical Pedagogy encourages educators to understand their practices inserted in their broader sociopolitical contexts because the creation of another type of schooling requires having a critical understanding about the concrete situations in classrooms, schools, and societies in order to change them. Moreover, Critical Pedagogy argues that educators need to understand not simply the concrete situation but the historical antecedents that produced the situation, along with the current dynamics that point toward where the concrete situation is moving. It is into this dynamic of motion that interventions—limitacts—could be inserted. Critical Pedagogy also highlights how the individuals in the situation are part of the situation. In other words, and as the contributors of this book make abundantly clear, the concrete results of schooling are the result of people’s particular linguistic, cultural, social, and pedagogical interactions, which both shape and are shaped by social, political, economic, and cultural dynamics. These “internal” limitacts are part of what is excised from the NR in popular culture. Such critical understanding is based on the assertion that developing the

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conditions for the emergence of awareness about oppressive structural causes is not only the most ethical but also the most consistent political-pedagogical perspective for consciousness-raising. By emphasizing the importance of the pair—understanding-transforming,— Critical Pedagogy also points to the fundamental relationship between educational and social transformations, keeping in constant view new means of breaking down all forms of oppression. The problem arises when, in our attempts to “teach and demonstrate” the realities of oppression, we present them “as an opportunity” for hope and transformation. It would be better to recognize that conflicts and struggles are part of the everyday life of schools and societies, sometimes explicit and clear, often implicit and confusing, but always anchored in complex manners and expressing multiple dynamics of class, race, sexuality, language, and ethnicity. It is in this unavoidability of the educational conflicts that practitioners of Critical Pedagogy “must speak for hope, as long as it doesn’t mean suppressing the nature of the danger.”1 The other necessity here is not to think or act as if the oppression can be fully escaped, so in fact oppression is always (to some degree) reproduced in our understanding and in our actions, even when we believe they are profoundly and completely critical. The concrete results of schooling, as understood through the lived experience of the relationship between teachers and students, cannot be simply reduced to absolute and universal terms of either complete failure or total success. For countless teachers, assessing the results of the pedagogical intervention is constrained by conflictive relationships and the ways in which each of us, as members of multiple and specific social groups, recognizes, perceives, believes, and acts upon complex and contradictory realities. Proponents and practitioners of Critical Pedagogy do not need and cannot sustain their narratives based on idealized super teachers and critically super-conscious Gramscian “organic intellectuals” as the only and privileged agents of change. Critical Pedagogy would greatly benefit by valuing and understanding the importance of potentially transformative characteristics that are already present in many teachers, even if those are formulated in naïve forms or in commonsense terms. Commitment is one of these potentially transformative characteristics. How many times when visiting a school or when teaching our classes do we encounter teachers who declare their commitment to the notions of equal opportunity, fairness, caring, and democracy? Clearly, in most cases those are formulated as depoliticized notions of commitment, and in some cases naïve perspectives about equal opportunity or

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caring. Understanding teaching as an activity that involves commitment is more of an orientation or a process than a final state of being and perhaps, more importantly, commitment likely precedes or at least develops with conscientization.2 Commitment is a starting point, but it must be deepened in order to sustain teachers for the long road without maps, and with many detours and setbacks along the way. Teaching of Critical Pedagogy should begin here as well. As Paulo Freire has noted: “Concientization is not exactly the starting point of commitment. Concientization is more of a product of commitment. I do not have to be already critically self-conscious in order to struggle. By struggling I become conscious/aware.”3 In other words, an educator who is committed to ideals of fairness, economic, political, and cultural democratization, and social transformation is a critical educator even if he/she has never heard or read of Stanley Aronowitz, Antonia Darder, Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Joe Kincheloe, Donaldo Macedo, Peter McLaren, Shirley Steimberg and the many more associated with the development of the field. Truly, the point for Freire is that these ideals of fairness, democracy, and the like only are meaningful as they are made real in the struggle to embed them within the everyday life of the school/community. I believe that there are many teachers who are already transformative/organic intellectuals, “critical” and conscious, active participants in social and political networks. Many are taking risks by speaking out and naming oppressive realities. Yet many of these critical teachers are limited to denunciations and only able to outline the annunciations of a more just future (which can only be robustly filled in through the efforts of a movement, through collective struggle). However, I believe that large numbers of teachers as well as practitioners of Critical Pedagogy have the energy and commitment but are at times confused, or even unaware, of the limitations or capacities to be an active proponent of social change. One of the most pressing challenges for Critical Pedagogy is to harness this energy, commitment, and desire to change and enable it to form into a collective force that can lead the transformation of schooling. Critical consciousness always implies that the subject has some awareness of the immediate world that concerns him or her. As Freire came to recognize, a deep understanding of the complex processes of oppression and domination is not enough to guarantee personal or collective praxis. What must serve as the genesis of such an understanding is the recognition of the existence of multiple forms of oppression and that every individual participates in them. In other words, the commitment to struggle against injustice is not “organic,” neither is it more

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natural for some people than for others. One can arrive at critical consciousness and praxis from several positions within an oppressive situation, which is after a situation has been shared by the oppressor and oppressed alike. Further, this commitment could start in abstract terms, but it is actualized not just through individual struggle but also by developing a community of similarly committed fellow activists. Conscientization is embodied individually, but it comes through collective dialogue, analysis, and actions. Only by developing an understanding that is born of a commitment to social justice in cooperation with others can such an understanding lead to both the type of conscientization and the counter-systemic networks necessary to challenge the hegemonic structures of domination and exploitation. The notion of the teacher as a committed intellectual is exactly the opposite of the teacher as the organic superagent of educational change, where he/she is able to do all the heroic tasks, and thus everything is possible. Relying on notions of “organic” solidarity to stable and unshakable identities as the prerequisite for developing pedagogies worthy to be called critical is still constrained by a sense of dualistic redemption. It is important to avoid simplistic either/or perspectives that will leave us without the conceptual and pedagogical tools to understand how and to what extent many teachers feel educational dynamics developed by Neoliberal globalizers as positive and fair. Part of the power of the Neoliberal discourse in education is its promise to deliver equity, based on just and neutral standards and ideals of excellence. Critical Pedagogy cannot simply ignore the notions of technical improvements in schooling, the importance of accountability systems, or dismiss all the teachers who resonate with these notions as guilty of being ideologically corrupt and unable to get rid of their false consciousness. The inequities of capitalism and other forms of oppression can be challenged and even defeated, but not simply by understanding its formation; rather, it requires developing the will and the courage— the commitment—and the social, cultural, and political organization to struggle against it in cooperation with others. Following Badiou, it is possible to assume that the accomplishments of the committed intellectual will be a lot more humble: The conception of politics that we defend is far from the idea that “everything is possible.” In fact, it is an immense task to try to propose a few possibles, in the plural—a few possibilities other than what we are told is possible. It is a matter of showing how the space of the possible is larger than the one we are assigned—that something else is possible, but not that everything is possible.4

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Potentially, a great number of teachers could be committed intellectuals, based on the functions that they could perform and not on any essential virtue or characteristic. For these teachers the starting point will very likely be an attempt to understand how the multiple forms of exploitation are affecting his/her students, their families and communities, and him or herself, and the institution within which s/he works. The need to understand can evolve into commitments to reflectively act in the classrooms (and beyond) as one of the focal points to transform the world. Teachers as committed intellectuals are the embodiment of the Freirean notion that praxis and the capacity to engage in critical self-consciousness are not enough to transform both the repressive and integrative functions of the hegemonic orders, but nevertheless they are necessary in order to find ways to actively intervene in the world order in ways that have the potential to transform that world. Those working in Critical Pedagogy could help teachers to become committed intellectuals by working together in recognizing that hegemonic or dominant educational discourses are not perfectly consistent and conceptually seamless but fundamentally contradictory and conflictive. Educational discourses are never immune from the larger context of concrete workplace practices that are also incorporated into to the international division of labor and refracted through race, class, and gender antagonisms. Those in the field of Critical Pedagogy could be more effective agents of educational change by taking up the challenge of getting closer to schools and teachers, helping also to enable students to achieve their vision of the good life, to gain the skills and competencies they feel they need as workers, citizens, and family and community members. By concretely helping teachers and communities, Critical Pedagogues could realistically demonstrate how important it is to recognize how struggles in other institutional and social contexts cannot be detached from what is happening in schools. That is one concrete way educators could be assisted in the recognition of the totalizing character of Capitalism and its complex articulations with discriminatory regimes based on race, sex, nationality, abilities, and so on. Contrary to the all-powerful “heroic-teacher” or the all-knowing “super-conscious critical-teacher” of the NR, the teacher as committed intellectual is oriented by the goals of educational and social justice without succumbing to essentialist positions about hope or easy rhetorical discourses of good versus evil. This rejection of reductionist binaries should also include a rejection of simplifying evil Neoliberalism versus good social democracy.

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Educators in concrete schools could start with naïve ideas of hope, but the reality of their schools demonstrates them that hope is not an external characteristic or the natural resolution of a pedagogical situation, something alien to their daily struggles. Teachers as committed intellectuals can engage in individual and collective actions as an integral part of the always contradictory and conflictive ongoing processes of conscientization and educational change. As the contributors of this book demonstrate, Critical Pedagogy cannot be anything other than democratic and leftist. It is a historical and steadfast critic and adversary of the banking model of education, refusing to accept the appearance of normality imposed by unfair and sorting mechanisms, and the resignation promoted by the “There Is No Alternative” posture. As Zygmunt Baumann points out, “If an optimist is someone who believes that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist is someone who suspects that the optimist may be right, the left places itself instead in the third camp: that of hope. Refusing to preempt the shape of the good society, it can’t but question, listen and seek.”5 Questioning, listening, and seeking alternatives for the construction of better schools and better societies as acts of hope have clear resonance with Freire’s ideas and are consistently emphasized in this book. Understanding hope in a Freirean sense implies placing it in a concrete, practical experience of collective struggle, dialogue, and conflict. For Freire and the authors of this book, hope is historically and ontologically situated and cannot be the “natural” result of struggles; however, it is intimately tied to those struggles. Educational hope requires solidarity and agency, and it is collectively constructed with the commitment of individual teachers, and yet it cannot be sustained on redemptive narratives of super-teacher heroism, whether wrapped in Hollywood imagery or pretended critical discourses. This book is a major contribution in the search to overcome the limitations of redemptive narratives in education, combining strong conceptualizations about the current challenges to more democratic and fair schooling and clear pledges to the notions of social and educational transformation. In addition, the contributors of this volume provide simultaneously conceptually sophisticated and pragmatic tools to pursue the construction of pedagogies of freedom where commitment to justice and fairness is encouraged, where respecting different perspectives on sciences and arts is stimulated, where disagreement is not punished, where caring for the other and a desire to know is celebrated, and where a passion for democracy and creating fair and inclusive futures is welcomed.

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As noted before, it is difficult to assess the real influence of Critical Pedagogy, but it is undeniable that it still inspires many teachers, and I am sure that this book will significantly encourage and motivate many more. If the ideas of Critical Pedagogy are still inspiring teachers, educators, and administrators, it is in large measure because the shortcomings of the banking system are the norm and not the exception, and because even today there are more teachers willing to commit and affirm that the other school experiences, more democratic, more open, more tolerant, and even more creative and efficient, are not only achievable but necessary.

Notes 1. R. Williams, Resources of hope (New York: Verso, 1989), 322. 2. G. Fischman and P. McLaren, “Rethinking Critical Pedagogy and The Gramscian Legacy: From Organic to Committed Intellectuals,” Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies 5, 4 (2005): 425–447. 3. P. Freire, Education for the Critical Consciousness (New York: Continuum, 1989), 46. 4. A. Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understandings of Evil (London: Verso, 2001), 115. 5. Z. Bauman, “Has the Future a Left?” Soundings 35 (2007), http://www. lwbooks.co.uk/journals/articles/bauman07.html (accessed September 10, 2008).

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Stanley Aronowitz has taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York since 1983, where he is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education. His scholarships involve labor, social movements, science and technology, education, social theory, and cultural studies. He is also the director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work at the Graduate Center at CUNY. In his most recent book, Against Schooling (Paradigm, 2008), Aronowitz “makes a brilliant and impassioned argument for the necessity of creating new knowledges and social and cultural practices that do not repeat the privileging hierarchies of previous generations . . . ” (Peter McLaren, 2008). Antonia Darder is Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Latino/a Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana, Champaign. Over the years, her scholarship has focused on comparative studies of structural inequalities as these manifest within a variety of schooling and societal context. She is the author of several books, including Culture and Power in the Classroom (1991) and Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love (2001); and coauthor of After Race: Racism After Multiculturalism. Noah De Lissovoy is Assistant Professor of Social Foundations of Education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is the author of Power, Crisis, and Education for Liberation: Rethinking Critical Pedagogy, forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan. He writes on cultural studies and education, processes of oppression and resistance in schooling and society, and contemporary theories of liberatory pedagogy and praxis. Ramin Farahmandpur is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Policy, Foundations and Administrative Studies at Portland State University. His interests include critical pedagogy, Marxism, and multicultural education. He is the coauthor of Teaching

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against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, (2005). Gustavo E. Fischman is an Associate Professor in the Mary Lou Fulton College of Education at Arizona State University. His areas of specialization are comparative education, Critical Pedagogy, and the use of image-based methodologies in educational research. He actively teaches and collaborates on research projects in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. He is the coeditor of Reseñas Educativas/Education Review and Archivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas/Educational Policy Analysis Archives. Paulo Freire (1921–1997), the Brazilian educationalist, has left a significant mark on thinking about progressive practice. His Pedagogy of the Oppressed is currently one of the most quoted educational texts (especially in Latin America, Africa, and Asia). Freire was able to draw upon, and weave together, a number of strands of thinking about educational practice and liberation. Freire made a number of important theoretical innovations that have had a considerable impact on the development of educational practice—and on informal education and popular education in particular. Paulo Freire contributed a philosophy of education that came not only from the more classical approaches stemming from Plato, but also from modern Marxist and anticolonialist thinkers. In fact, in many ways his Pedagogy of the Oppressed may be best read as an extension of, or reply to, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, which emphasized the need to provide native populations with an education that was simultaneously new and modern (rather than traditional) and anticolonial (not simply an extension of the culture of the colonizer). Freire is best known for his attack on what he called the “banking” concept of education, in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. The basic critique was not new—Rousseau’s conception of the child as an active learner was already a step away from tabula rasa (which is basically the same as the “banking concept”), and thinkers like John Dewey were strongly critical of the transmission of mere “facts” as the goal of education. Freire’s work, however, updated the concept and placed it in context with current theories and practices of education, laying the foundation for what is now called critical pedagogy. Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. His most recent books include: America on the Edge (2006); Take Back Higher Education—coauthored with Susan Giroux (2006); Beyond the

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Spectacle of Terrorism (2006), Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (2006), The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (2007), and Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed (2008). Maxine Greene has been at the forefront of educational philosophy for well over half a century as a teacher, a lecturer, and author. She is the Founder and Director of the Center for Social Imagination, the Arts, and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she has been on the faculty since 1965 and is now Professor Emeritus. Maxine Greene holds a PhD (1955) and M.A. (1949) from New York University and a B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University (1938), in addition to nine honorary degrees from universities across the country. Nathalia E. Jaramillo is Assistant Professor of Cultural Foundations at Purdue University. She is author and coauthor of numerous articles and essays on the topic of critical pedagogy, feminism, and education politics and policy. Most recently she coauthored the book entitled, Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire: Towards a New Humanism. She is affiliated with the Centro Internacional Miranda in Caracas, Venezuela, and is currently involved in research that examines the Bolivarian education model. Donaldo Macedo is a full Professor of English and a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Education at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He has published extensively in the areas of linguistics, critical literacy, and bilingual and multicultural education. His publications include: Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (with Paulo Freire, 1987), Literacies of Power: What Americans Are Not Allowed to Know (1994), Dancing With Bigotry (with Lilia Bartolome, 1999), Critical Education in the New Information Age (with Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux and Paul Willis, 1999), Chomsky on Miseducation (with Noam Chomsky, 2000) and Ideology Matters (coauthored with Paulo Freire, forthcoming). Sheila L. Macrine is an Associate Professor in the Curriculum and Teaching Department at Montclair State University in New Jersey, United States. Her scholarly interests focus on connecting the cultural, institutional, and personal contexts of pedagogy, particularly as they relate to the social imagination and progressive democratic education. She writes about the relationships among the complex social issues of difference (race, class, gender, disability, etc.) within urban

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schools and the political economy of schooling within the broader context of postindustrial capitalism. Peter McLaren is a Professor at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author, coauthor, editor, and coeditor of approximately forty books and monographs. Several hundred of his articles, chapters, interviews, reviews, commentaries, and columns have appeared in dozens of scholarly journals and professional magazines since the publication of his first book, Cries from the Corridor, in 1980. His work has been translated into seventeen languages. He lectures internationally and is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. Fernando Naiditch is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Montclair State University, New Jersey. He completed his Ph.D. in Multilingual Multicultural Studies at NYU in 2006, where he received the Outstanding Dissertation Award. He has been working in applied linguistics, ESL/EFL, and teacher education for fifteen years in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and the United States. His research focuses on intercultural communication and second language learning. Joao Paraskeva currently is a visiting Professor of Educational Leadership at Miami University in Ohio. He also taught for ten years at the University of Minho in Portugal. Dr. Paraskeva is an international scholar. He has published twelve books and numerous chapters and articles on a wide range of topics in the field of critical education. As a result, Dr. Paraskeva has established himself as an important critical scholar. Kenneth J. Saltman is an Associate Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Research at DePaul University in Chicago. He is the author, most recently, of Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools (Paradigm Publishers, 2007) and editor of Schooling and the Politics of Disaster (Routledge, 2007) from which his contribution to this volume was adapted. These books continue his long-standing study of the corporatization of public education.His work attempts to relationally comprehend political, economic, and cultural struggles and the possibilities for education to contribute to critical democratic transformation.

I n de x

13–14, 24, 54,

dominant 129–30 feebleness of 176 culture authentic 203 Culture Wars 15, 123, 136 curriculum 34, 43, 62, 64, 112, 123, 125, 132–4, 146, 202, 220

Cabral, Amílcar 1–2, 6–7, 167–79, 183–8 Chomsky, Noam 13, 24, 79, 81, 87, 90, 94–6, 158, 219 crisis, military-political 102 critical consciousness 126, 133, 135–6, 159, 208, 211–12, 215 critical educators 43, 56, 65, 70, 73, 113, 127, 160, 162, 164, 191, 194–5, 211 critical literacy 6, 119–20, 126, 128–35, 219 Critical Paradigm 125–6 critical pedagogues 1–2, 213 critical pedagogy 1–8, 11, 55–7, 59, 66–9, 73–5, 111–12, 114, 119–25, 127–9, 158, 165, 191, 198–205, 207–15, 217–19 critical theory 2, 24, 47, 197–8, 202 critique, historical materialist 66–7 cultural studies 24, 47, 75–8, 105, 215, 217–18 culture 1, 8, 16, 19, 23, 44, 60–1, 77, 92–3, 141, 158–9, 175, 179–81, 183–5, 202–4, 217–18 corporate 15, 29

Darder, Antonia 6, 76–7, 165–6 De Lissovoy, Noah 77, 189–90, 192, 194, 196, 198, 200, 202, 204–5, 217 democracy 3–5, 13, 18–26, 42–4, 79–81, 83–4, 90, 97–8, 120–1, 145, 151–3, 162–3, 165–6, 194–8, 204–5, 210–11 culture of 121, 199 participatory 34, 81 democratic 7, 11–12, 14, 19–21, 23–4, 43, 46, 48, 89, 124, 133, 203, 214–15 democratic education 95, 135, 142 democratic ethos 29, 43, 48–9 democratic rights 6, 81, 84, 119, 122–3, 164 democratic schooling 154, 160 democratic society 28, 47, 114, 121, 141, 159, 163 democratic values 14–15 Department of Education 34, 53 development, economic 80–1, 99, 187 Dewey, John 2, 15, 29, 49, 121, 125, 131, 135, 138–9, 142, 144–5, 148–9, 205, 218 Dial, Karla 35, 51–2

Al Qaeda 84–5, 88 Aronowitz, Stanley 3, 13, 24, 26, 62–3, 76, 119, 130, 135, 211, 217 Bauman, Zygmunt 197, 204

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dialogue 13, 21–2, 131, 139, 143–4, 163–4, 172, 207, 214 differences 21–2, 61, 75–6, 78, 126, 129–30, 146–7, 156–7, 169, 178, 186, 219 dignity, human 5, 56–7 disaster capitalism 4, 27, 46, 49 discourses 16, 23, 36, 92, 97, 109, 120–1, 123, 126, 129–31, 138, 145, 147, 197, 201 academic 129, 131–3 dispossession 37, 45–6, 163 dissent 17, 24, 82–3, 112, 151, 153–8, 161–5 domination 66, 114, 153, 155, 211–12 Dunayevskaya, Raya 67–8, 70, 77–8 dynamics 67, 207–9 education 3–7, 11–15, 23–7, 33–4, 43–4, 46–9, 53, 57–60, 75–7, 80–2, 113–14, 121, 134–5, 155–6, 162–4, 217–20 bilingual 64, 154 multicultural 217, 219 progressive 47, 56 Education Pedagogy Cultural Studies 51 education policy 49, 60, 64–6, 77, 186 education politics 26, 219 educational debates 43 Educational Management Organizations (EMOs) 28, 40 Educational Policy Studies Laboratory 49–50 Educational Researcher 75, 77 Emergency School Vouchers Likely 51–2 EMOs (Educational Management Organizations) 28, 40 empire 24–5, 59, 75–7, 98–9, 114, 199, 204–5, 219

Empowering Education 124, 126, 135–6 English language 183 equity 51–2, 145, 212 erasure 59, 61, 66 Europe 99, 101 Farahmandpur, Ramin 8, 75, 114 Fischm, Gustavo E. 208, 210, 212, 214 for-profit 30–2, 34 Freire, Paulo 2–3, 6–7, 8, 94, 96, 113, 115, 119, 120–2, 126, 129, 131–3, 135–6, 139, 142–3, 148, 149, 164, 166–7, 168, 170, 172, 174, 175, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 186, 187, 188, 200, 204, 205, 211, 214–15, 218–19 Freire, Nita 7, 187–8 Freirean 3, 119, 121, 124, 213–14 Freirean pedagogy 112–13 funding, public 38, 40 Garvey 8, 76, 136 Giroux, Henry A. 11, 24–6, 50, 54, 96, 218 Giroux, Susan Searls 24 global capitalism 42, 44, 49, 72–3, 76, 78, 97, 102, 111, 114, 218 globality, condition of 190 globalization, neoliberal 42, 53–4 Golden Opportunity 35, 51–3 Gramsci, Antonio 71, 185–6 Greene, Maxine 3, 6, 135, 137, 161, 164, 219 Guevara, Che 178, 188 Guinea-Bissau 7, 168–71, 174, 176–9, 181, 183, 187 Gulf Coast 5, 27–8, 34–5, 40 Hannaway, Jane 36, 51–2 Hardt and Negri 98–100, 197, 203–4

I n de x Harvey, David 42, 44–5, 53 Hegelian dialectic 67–8, 70 hegemony 95, 154, 195, 199 High Stakes Education 50, 205 High-Stakes Testing and Student Achievement 32, 50 Hill, Paul 49, 51–2 history, engine of 184–5, 188 Humanism and Democratic Criticism 6, 25–6, 141, 149 humanizing 65–6 Hurricane Katrina 27, 34–6, 51–3, 127 identity 64, 67, 106, 129, 144, 153, 157, 189–91, 193, 197 cultural 60–1, 66, 162, 181, 187 identity politics 154, 156–7 Imagining Justice in Culture 153, 155, 157, 159, 161, 163, 165 imperialism, theory of 98–9 institutions, educational 21, 90 intellectual practice 18–20 Iran 85, 87, 103 Iraq, occupation of 97, 102–3 Iraq war 25, 85, 87 Jaramillo, Nathalia E. 5, 55, 75, 219 Junk King Education 49 Katrina 35–8, 40, 51–2, 219 Katrina’s Displaced Students 51–2 Kinnan, Chris 38, 40 Lakes Region 50 language colonizer’s 180 critical 91–2 language policy 65 Latin America 42, 48, 66, 87, 218 Latina, education of 59, 61 Lazere, Don 133, 136 learning 3–4, 7, 11, 15, 20, 22, 32–3, 48, 58, 62, 110, 113–14,

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120–1, 123, 126, 128, 134, 208–9 liberals 20, 90–1 liberation 3, 68, 123, 136, 145, 168–9, 176, 181, 185, 217–18 Liquid Modernity 197, 204 Los Angeles Unified School Districts 110, 112 Macedo, Donaldo 2, 5, 65, 77, 79, 95, 136, 211, 219 Macrine, Sheila L. 1, 6, 8, 119, 167, 219 Marx, Karl 44, 67–70, 75, 77, 103–5, 113, 165, 184, 188, 191, 194, 204 Marxist 2–3, 7, 57, 183–4, 187 mass media 33, 47, 83, 86, 90, 126, 130 materialism, historical 67, 75, 77–8 McDonald 29, 107 McLaren, Peter 2–3, 5, 8, 50, 55, 57, 75–8, 204, 205, 211, 215, 217, 220 media 45–6, 81–2, 91–3, 105, 137, 147, 155–6, 160 Meier, Deborah 50, 53 militarism/military 19, 25, 44, 61, 71, 87, 98, 103 Morrison, Toni 13, 140, 147–9 Mozambique 1, 179 multiculturalism 157, 166, 217 Muslims 92–3, 143, 152 Naiditch, Fernando 167, 220 nation-state 60, 71, 195 NCLB (No Child Left Behind) 4, 27–8, 30–3, 39–41, 48, 50, 52, 59, 65, 77, 109–10, 127, 159 Necessity of Critical Pedagogy 4, 11 negation 68, 70, 73 second 68 negativity, absolute 68–9

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neoliberalism 4, 6, 41–5, 47, 53–4, 73, 97, 100, 153, 160–1, 166, 189, 193, 195, 199, 201 cultural pedagogy of 46–7, 53 Neoliberalization of Education and Schooling 106 neoliberals 1, 14, 42–4, 48–9, 55, 102, 105, 109, 112, 153 New New Orleans 51–2 New Orleans 30, 35–8, 40, 46, 48, 51–2, 98 New Orleans’ Troubled Schools 51–3 Nicaragua 83–4, 87–8 No Child Left Behind see NCLB oppression 4, 66, 72, 90, 92, 113–14, 142, 157–8, 200–1, 210–12, 217 Oregon 106–7 overhaul 51–3 PAIGC 7, 169, 175–6, 188 Paraskeva, Joao 167, 220 participation, student 120, 124 Patriot Act 82–3, 87–8, 152, 162 Paulo’s work 1–2 Pedagogia 180–1, 188 pedagogical 22, 47–8, 166, 200 pedagogue 3, 167, 169, 172 pedagogy 7–8, 14, 20–2, 57–9, 65–7, 73–5, 81–2, 121–3, 131–2, 136, 148–9, 163–4, 191, 197–9, 201–5, 218–19 banking 125 Pedagogy Good 119–35 policies, economic 106, 109, 111–12, 162 Policy Futures in Education 49, 53, 166 Policy-makers 63–4, 79, 82–3, 85–6, 156, 159 political analysts 102–3 political dissent 157, 160, 162, 166 political economy 5, 56, 154

political processes 191–2 political struggles 165, 185, 207–8 politics 8, 11, 13–15, 19, 21–3, 26, 29, 41, 43–5, 48, 95, 121–2, 155–7, 161, 163–4, 185 politics of erasure 59, 61 population 5, 56, 59–61, 79–80, 88, 152–4, 159, 178, 192–3 Portland Public Schools 106–7 Portugal 178, 186 Portuguese language 179–80, 182, 184 postmodernism 67, 75, 77, 105, 188 power 13–14, 18–22, 57–8, 71, 93–4, 119–20, 122–4, 126, 128–30, 132, 136–7, 158, 175, 180, 193–8, 200–2 corporate 17–18, 23, 34 teacher-student 123 powerlessness 7, 139, 158, 160, 190 praxis 67–8, 70, 75, 90–1, 142, 168, 171, 174, 212–13, 217, 219 President Bush 82, 85, 87, 92, 94 privatization 14, 27–8, 30–1, 33–4, 38, 40–1, 43, 45–6, 48, 50, 56, 111, 128, 160, 195, 202 educational 30, 36–7, 49 public school 35–6, 53 profits 16, 27–9, 37, 44–5, 48, 59, 80, 94, 97, 112, 153, 166, 180 progressive educators 110, 135, 177 projects, pedagogical 74 public 148–9 public education 4, 28, 30–2, 38–9, 41, 45, 49, 51, 106, 110, 148, 204, 208 Public Education in New Orleans 36, 51–2 public schooling 14, 27–8, 31, 33, 37, 41, 43, 46, 49, 159–60, 208–9 public spheres 4, 12, 14, 19, 22–4, 28, 30, 56, 69, 97, 121, 195, 198

I n de x race relations paradigm 154, 156–7 racism 59, 62, 70, 92, 123, 153–6, 166, 192, 202, 217 Reagan 86–7, 100, 114, 122 rebuilding 5, 38–40, 46 Rebuilding Opportunity and Equity 51–2 Rees, J. 102–3, 115 Renaissance 2010 32–3 Rethinking Critical Pedagogy 215, 217 Review of Education Pedagogy Cultural Studies 51 revolution 1, 58, 71, 77, 167, 169, 172, 176, 178–9, 181–2, 204 pedagogue of the 169 Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy 65, 67 revolutionary educator 177–8 revolutionary pedagogue 169 rhetorical forms 132–3 right-wing 17, 30, 34–5, 37–8, 42, 51–3, 127 rights, civil 5, 56, 83–4, 159–61, 165 Robinson, W. I. 71–3, 78 Rochester, J. M. 57–8, 76 role 4, 11–12, 15, 19, 22, 36, 43, 48, 59, 63, 69, 79, 83–4, 99–101, 111, 182 Routledge 24, 26, 49–51, 53–4, 76, 135–6, 166, 204–5, 220 Rowman and Littlefield 24, 49, 53, 204, 218 Saddam Hussein 85–7, 92, 101 Said, Edward 13, 18, 21, 24–6, 149 Saltman, Kenneth J. 27, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53–4, 220 School Choice 33, 35, 39, 51 school curriculum 53, 108–10 school reform 33–4, 48, 51 school vouchers 35, 37–9

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schooling, political economy of 111, 220 Schooling in Disaster 29, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53 Schools, Edison 28, 30, 36, 49, 51, 204 segregation 155–7 self-censorship 83, 90–1, 93 Shadow of Globalization 53–4 Shor, Ira 6, 119, 136 siege 44, 135 social class 76, 105, 119, 184 social justice 6, 8, 14, 50, 56, 90, 92, 119, 123, 135, 152, 154, 156, 159, 162, 212–13 social life 1, 21, 62–3, 66, 70, 143, 195–8, 203 social order 22, 46–8, 62, 73, 141 social problems 19, 21, 44, 140 social relations 5, 29, 45, 48, 58, 66–7, 99, 108, 123–4 social struggles 71–2 socialism 66, 68–9, 76, 104, 196 society 4, 59–60, 67–71, 80, 120–4, 126, 128–9, 131, 133–6, 138–9, 153–4, 160, 177–8, 197–8, 207–10, 214 civil 69, 71–3, 75, 153 classed 177 majority of 73 open 86, 89–90 solidarity 69, 112, 128, 143, 146, 193–4, 196, 200–1, 203, 214 Soviet Union 42, 100–2, 186 State Department 17–18, 87 state terrorism 83, 87–9 status quo 6, 18, 119–21, 123, 126–7, 129, 133–5, 161 struggles 1, 4, 6–7, 14, 29–31, 66–7, 71–4, 111, 113–14, 165, 170–1, 174–6, 183–5, 199– 200, 202–3, 209–14 students, working-class 16, 110, 128

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subjectivity 64, 68, 130, 196, 198–9 Swahili 181 teacher authority 3, 20 teacher education 3, 48, 75, 220 teachers, critical 120, 124, 126, 201–2, 211 teaching 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 149 terror 18, 23, 57, 84, 86–8, 92–3, 113, 151, 153, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160–1, 163 culture of 151–3, 158, 160, 162, 165 totalitarianism 23, 26, 83 toward critical pedagogy of the global 189–203 transformation 28, 69, 72, 74, 91, 93, 132, 196, 198, 200, 203, 208, 210–11 educational 7, 214 TuGas 171–3, 183–4, 188 UNB (University of Brasilia) 6, 167, 187 Uncertain Times 1, 3–4, 8–9 Undermine Public Education 51–3 Undermining Democratic Education 49 United Nations 87, 185–7 United States 5, 11, 17, 31, 44–5, 47–8, 59–61, 63–4, 66,

79–80, 88–91, 99–105, 112, 151–3, 155–6, 218–20 University of Brasilia (UNB) 6, 167, 187 University of Chicago Press 49, 135–6 Urban Institute 37, 51–2 Using Disaster to Privatize Public Schooling 4, 27 Victims, Katrina 51–2 vouchers 37–40, 196 vouchers undermine 37 Wall Street 88, 97, 123, 127–9 war of maneuver 71 Washington Times 35, 51–2 Western-developed democracy kit 5, 80 women 84, 93, 106, 111, 134, 137, 146, 161, 192, 199 Wood, George 50, 53, 135 workers 62, 66, 91, 99, 103, 111–12, 119, 131, 142, 154, 189–90, 195, 213 world common 145–6 new 113–14, 201–2 www.heartland.org 51–3 www.pfaw.org 51–3 www.schoolcommercialism. org 49–50 Zinn, Howard

12, 14, 24, 84, 95