Henry A. Giroux - Theory and Resistance in Education: Towards a Pedagogy for the Opposition, Revised and Expanded Edition (Asor Books)

The Rhetoric of Diversity and the Traditions of American Literary Study: Critical Multiculturalism in English

Lesliee Antonette

Becoming and Unbecoming White: Owning and Disowning a Racial Identity

Christine Clark and James O'Donnell

Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction, 2nd Edition

Barry Kanpol

Michel Foucault: Materialism and Education

Mark Olssen

Revolutionary Social Transformation: Democratic Hopes, Political Possibilities, and Critical Education

Paula Allman

Critical Reflection and the Foreign Language Classroom

Terry A. Osborn

Community in Motion: Theatre for Development in Africa

L. Dale Byam

Nietzsche's Legacy for Education: Past and Present Values

Michael Peters, James Marshall, and Paul Smeyers, editors

Rituals, Ceremonies, and Cultural Meaning in Higher Education

Kathleen Manning

Political Relationship and Narrative Knowledge: A Critical Analysis of School Authoritarianism

Peter B. Armitage

Education, Literacy, and Humanization: Exploring the Work of Paulo Freire

Peter Roberts

Critical Education Against Global Capitalism: Karl Marx and Revolutionary Critical Education

Paula Allman

Henry A. Giroux

Foreword by Paulo Freire

Preface by Stanley Aronowitz

Critical Studies in Education and Culture Series

Edited by Henry A. Giroux

For Susan

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xiii

xv

xix

I

Chapter 1 7

Chapter 2 42

Chapter 3 72

Chapter 4 119

Chapter 5 168

Chapter 6 205

Educational reform has fallen upon hard times. The traditional assumption that schooling is fundamentally tied to the imperatives of citizenship designed to educate students to exercise civic leadership and public service has been eroded. The schools are now the key institution for producing professional, technically trained, credentialized workers for whom the demands of citizenship are subordinated to the vicissitudes of the marketplace and the commercial public sphere. Given the current corporate and right wing assault on public and higher education, coupled with the emergence of a moral and political climate that has shifted to a new Social Darwinism, the issues which framed the democratic meaning, purpose, and use to which education might aspire have been displaced by more vocational and narrowly ideological considerations.

The war waged against the possibilities of an education wedded to the precepts of a real democracy is not merely ideological. Against the backdrop of reduced funding for public schooling, the call for privatization, vouchers, cultural uniformity, and choice, there are the often ignored larger social realities of material power and oppression. On the national level, there has been a vast resurgence of racism. This is evident in the passing of anti-immigration laws such as Proposition 187 in California, the dismantling of the welfare state, the demonization of black youth that is taking place in the popular media, and the remarkable attention provided by the media to forms of race talk that argue for the intellectual inferiority of blacks or dismiss calls for racial justice as simply a holdover from the "morally bankrupt" legacy of the 1960s.

Poverty is on the rise among children in the United States, with 20 percent of all children under the age of eighteen living below the poverty line. Unemployment is growing at an alarming rate for poor youth of color, especially in the urban centers. While black youth are policed and disciplined in and out of the nation's schools, conservative and liberal educators define education through the ethically limp discourses of privatization, national standards, and global competitiveness.

Many writers in the critical education tradition have attempted to challenge the right wing fundamentalism behind educational and social reform in both the United States and abroad while simultaneously providing ethical signposts for a public discourse about education and democracy that is both prophetic and transformative. Eschewing traditional categories, a diverse number of critical theorists and educators have successfully exposed the political and ethical implications of the cynicism and despair that has become endemic to the discourse of schooling and civic life. In its place, such educators strive to provide a language of hope that inextricably links the struggle over schooling to understanding and transforming our present social and cultural dangers.

At the risk of overgeneralizing, both cultural studies theorists and critical educators have emphasized the importance of understanding theory as the grounded basis for "intervening into contexts and power ... in order to enable people to act more strategically in ways that may change their context for the better."' Moreover, theorists in both fields have argued for the primacy of the political by calling for and struggling to produce critical public spaces, regardless of how fleeting they may be, in which "popular cultural resistance is explored as a form of political resistance."2 Such writers have analyzed the challenges that teachers will have to face in redefining a new mission for education, one that is linked to honoring the experiences, concerns, and diverse histories and languages that give expression to the multiple narratives that engage and challenge the legacy of democracy.

Equally significant is the insight of recent critical educational work that connects the politics of difference with concrete strategies for addressing the crucial relationships between schooling and the economy, and citizenship and the politics of meaning in communities of multicultural, multiracial, and multilingual schools.