War on Youth
In a second annual lecture for the Histories of Violence project, professor, critic and political theorist Henry A. Giroux talks about a subject in which he’s become expert: the systematic ways that governments across the globe visit violence on young people.
In a second annual lecture for the Histories of Violence project, professor, critic and political theorist Henry A. Giroux talks about a subject in which he’s become expert: the systematic ways that governments across the globe visit violence on young people.
— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
Histories of Violence:
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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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