Henry Giroux Against Bill and Melinda Gates
In a Truthout video interview about his recent article "When Schools Become Dead Zones of Imagination," social critic Henry A. Giroux describes the neoliberal capture of public education as "an attempt to move away from understanding students as young people who have a voice, who have a sense of creativity, a sense of possibility."
In a Truthout video interview about his recent article “When Schools Become Dead Zones of Imagination,” social critic Henry A. Giroux describes the neoliberal capture of public education as “an attempt to move away from understanding students as young people who have a voice, who have a sense of creativity, a sense of possibility.”
Giroux was responding to a comment about the proliferation over the last decade of alleged means of measuring students’ physio-mental responses to different styles of teaching and the supposed benefits therein. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a big advocate of the trend.
“I think the end point is to produce students who basically can’t think,” Giroux said. “I mean, students who are incapable of being creative, students who are incapable of questioning authority, and students who basically have no considerations or concerns with any form of pedagogy that would take into consideration the responsibility of what it means to be a citizen or the responsibility one has to the other. Or for that matter, to imagine a future in which questions of justice and democracy even matter.”
“I think we have to understand something here. This obsession with metrics is an attempt to move away from understanding students as young people who have a voice, who have a sense of creativity, a sense of possibility. It’s so narrowing, the definition of what we call learning, that these places are what we call dead zones. So the issue here is not just an obsession with metrics. The issue here is to implement a pedagogy of oppression under the banner of some kind of reform for which metrics is the only measurement.”
— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
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The spaces of retreat from public life occupy too many institutions of higher education, which have been transformed into dead zones of the imagination mixed with a kind of brutalizing defense of their own decaying postures and search for status and profits.
It is frightfully clear that the conditions for totalitarianism and state violence are with us, smothering critical thought, social responsibility, the ethical imagination and politics itself.
A new kind of infantilism now shapes daily life as adults gleefully take on the role of unthinking children and children are taught to be adults, stripped of their innocence and subject to a range of disciplinary pressures designed to cripple their ability to be imaginative.
Higher education is defined more and more as simply another core element of corporate power and culture, viewed mostly as a waste of taxpayers' money, and denied its value as a democratic public sphere and guardian of public values.
Once an emancipatory project predicated on the right to study and engage the past critically, history under the reign of neoliberalism has receded into a depoliticizing culture of consumerism, a wholesale attack on science, the glorification of military ideals, an embrace of the punishing state, and a nostalgic invocation of the greatest generation.
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