Some Thoughts Concerning Education Book

In The Abandoned Generation: Democracy beyond the Culture of Fear (2003), Henry A. Giroux argues "that the United States is at war with young people" who "have become the all important group onto which class and racial anxieties are projected" (xvi). Giroux writes that, "Instead of providing them with vibrant public spheres, we offer them a commercialized culture in which consumerism is the only obligation of citizenship" (xviii).

Giroux believes that educational public spheres are the places where students can inspect the past and open up new possibilities for the future (9): "Educators need to provide spaces of resistance within the public schools and the university that take seriously what it means to educate students to question authority, recall what is forgotten or ignored, and make connections that are otherwise hidden" (40-41).

Educators must teach critical literacy, which is not just about training to be critical consumers, but also "offering them [students:] the knowledge, skills, and tools to recognize when the new technologies and media serve as either a force for enlarging democracy or when they shut it down" (39).

Since the 1980s, but especially after September 11, 2001, neoliberalism and a culture of fear have controlled our politics, causing a crisis of democracy. Youth have been the target of this fear, through advertising, movies, media portrayal of violence, and political rhetoric; "youth prompts in the public imagination a rhetoric of fear, control, and surveillance" (xvii). Neoliberalism is dangerous because of
a) its central tenet that market relations define social and public life (32),
b) "commercialization, privatization, and the creation of a worldwide economy of part-time workers" (35),
c) the elimination of public spaces, and difficulty of relating private problems within public concerns (35), and
d) the depoliticization of life through the creation of cynicism (119).