Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
116: Henry Giroux - Critical Pedagogy in a Time of Fascist Tyranny
33 Plays2 years ago
Keynote Transcript: https://writing.humanrestorationproject.org/transcript/dr-henry-giroux-critical-pedagogy-in-a-time-of-fascist-tyranny/
Q&A Transcript: https://writing.humanrestorationproject.org/transcript/conference-to-restore-humanity-2022-keynote-q-a-dr-henry-giroux/
In this extensive episode, we'll be releasing the keynote address and Q&A session from our first speaker at Conference to Restore Humanity: Dr. Henry Giroux.
We are firm believers in free, public access to the pedagogical tools necessary to enact a human-centered education system. And over the next week, we will be releasing almost everything that was presented at our conference, including keynotes, Q&As, and learning track materials. The best things in education should not be gate-kept.
That said, almost all of our conference fees go toward paying our faculty track leaders and keynote speakers. We believe in paying a competitive rate. And to be transparent, HRP used its organizational funds to cover what ticket sales could not. Therefore, if you value this keynote and these resources, your donation ensures that we can continue to host events just like this! Further, your donation highlights that there's a need for events like this, allowing us to secure partnerships and scholarships for grander ideas in the future. If every regular listener donated 25% of the $200 ticket price: $50, we could easily payoff multiple conferences to restore humanity. Visit humanrestorationproject.org/donate to help us out, and stay tuned to our website and social media for conference material releases next week.
What you're about to hear takes place in two parts: the first is a pre-recorded 35 minute speech, followed by an live hour Q&A. If you'd prefer to watch these sessions, they are released on our YouTube channel, simply search Human Restoration Project.
Our guest today really needs no introduction and it's my honor to have a true legend in education here with us. Dr. Henry Giroux is a renowned scholar who has authored or co-authored over 70 books, including directly working with Paulo Freire on education and cultural studies. He's written hundreds of articles and delivered more than 250 lectures. He is a founding theorist of critical pedagogy, being foundational to the study as he literally coined the term. Starting off as a social studies teacher in Barrington, Rhode Island, Giroux has taught at many universities, served as the co-editor of educational journals, and has served on multiple boards. Today, he serves at the board of directors for Truthout, continues to publish more works, and is the Chair for Scholarship and Public Interest and the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar of Critical Pedagogy at McMaster University. Thank you so much, Dr. Giroux, for joining us.
Human Restoration Project is a 501(c)3 nonprofit centered on enabling human-centered schools through progressive pedagogy. We do not endorse any specific political candidates. Conference keynotes and faculty members do not reflect political endorsements by Human Restoration Project.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Support
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to episode 116 of our podcast.
00:00:11
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt, and I'm a member of the progressive education nonprofit Human Restoration Project.
00:00:16
Speaker
Before we get started, I want to let you know that this podcast is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Kevin Gannon, Susan Michelle Harrison, and E. David Miller.
00:00:25
Speaker
Thank you for your ongoing support.
00:00:27
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Conference Overview
00:00:49
Speaker
In this extensive episode, we'll be releasing the keynote address and Q&A session from our first speaker at Conference to Restore Humanity 2022, Dr. Henry Giroux.
00:00:59
Speaker
Our conference, which took place earlier this week from July 25th to July 28th, had a great showing and we were all thrilled by the response to the format that embraced virtual first and allowed time for meaningful conversations.
00:01:11
Speaker
We are firm believers in a free public access to pedagogical tools necessary in enacting a human-centered education system.
00:01:19
Speaker
And over the next week, we will be releasing almost everything that was presented at the conference, including keynotes, Q&As, and learning track materials.
00:01:26
Speaker
The best things in education should not be gatekept.
00:01:28
Speaker
That said, almost all of our conference fees go toward paying our faculty track leaders and keynote speakers.
00:01:34
Speaker
We believe in paying a competitive rate, and to be transparent, HRP used its organizational funds to cover what ticket sales could not.
00:01:41
Speaker
Therefore, if you value this keynote and these resources, your donation ensures that we can continue to host events just like this.
00:01:49
Speaker
Further, your donation highlights that there's a need for these types of events, allowing us to secure partnerships and scholarships for greater ideas in the future.
00:01:57
Speaker
If every regular listener donated 25% of the $200 ticket price, $50, we could easily pay off multiple conferences to restore humanity.
Dr. Giroux's Keynote Themes
00:02:06
Speaker
Visit humanrestorationproject.org to help us out and stay tuned to our website and social media for conference material releases next week.
00:02:15
Speaker
Although you'll hear the same words from Henry soon, I wanted to highlight this statement that he made.
00:02:20
Speaker
Quote, Educators do more than create the conditions for critical thinking and nourishing a sense of hope for their students.
00:02:27
Speaker
They also need to responsibly assume the role of public intellectuals and border crossers within broader social contexts and be willing to share their ideas with other educators and the wider public by making use of new media technologies and a range of other cultural apparatuses,
00:02:44
Speaker
including those outlets that are willing to address critically a range of social problems."
00:02:50
Speaker
Please utilize these resources to plant the seeds of progressive education in your context.
00:02:55
Speaker
Each small step we take together has meaningful, profound change.
00:02:59
Speaker
Always feel free to reach out to Human Restoration Project if we can support or partner with you.
00:03:04
Speaker
What you're about to hear takes place in two parts.
00:03:07
Speaker
The first is a pre-recorded 35-minute speech, followed by a live one-hour Q&A.
00:03:12
Speaker
If you prefer to watch these sessions, they are released on our YouTube channel, simply search Human Restoration Project.
00:03:18
Speaker
Thank you and enjoy.
00:03:20
Speaker
I'm very grateful to be here.
00:03:21
Speaker
I want to thank Chris for inviting me.
00:03:23
Speaker
I think this is an enormously important conference, and I'm hoping it'll make a difference given the
00:03:31
Speaker
the period in which we are now living, which to say the very least is very threatening and poses a danger to public education and higher education, unlike anything I have seen in my lifetime as an educator.
00:03:43
Speaker
I basically want to just say that I want to take up a couple of issues here and just forecast them.
00:03:48
Speaker
One is I want to talk about the state of society and the emerging authoritarianism that we now have to face in which education has become a prime target.
00:03:58
Speaker
That's absolutely crucial.
00:04:00
Speaker
Secondly, I want to talk about critical pedagogy and neoliberalism and the forces shaping education outside of simply fascism.
00:04:09
Speaker
Thirdly, I want to talk about critical pedagogy, why I think it's basically important to understand and to begin to embrace in these dark times.
00:04:18
Speaker
And finally, I'm just going to offer some suggestions that I hopefully will be useful in really thinking about creating a new language for education that both invigorates its vision and provides the condition for people to be engaged, critical agents working collectively to engage in some form of resistance.
00:04:36
Speaker
The talk is really critical pedagogy in a time of fascist tyranny, which I don't think is an overstatement.
00:04:44
Speaker
So let me begin.
00:04:46
Speaker
Across the globe,
00:04:47
Speaker
Democratic institutions such as the independent media, schools, the legal system, certain financial institutions in higher education are under siege.
00:04:57
Speaker
The promise and ideals of democracy are receding as right-wing extremists breathe new life into a fascist past and undermine what I call the public imagination.
00:05:09
Speaker
Reinventing assorted fascist legacy with its obsession with racial purity, white nationalism,
00:05:16
Speaker
and the denial of civil liberties, white supremacists are once more on the move, subverting language, values, courage, vision, and critical consciousness.
00:05:27
Speaker
Education has increasingly become a tool of domination.
00:05:32
Speaker
As right-wing pedagogical apparatuses controlled by the entrepreneurs of hate attack workers,
00:05:38
Speaker
the poor, people of color, refugees, undocumented immigrants, LGBTQ people, and others increasingly considered disposable.
00:05:49
Speaker
In the midst of an era when an older social order is crumbling and a new one is struggling to define itself, there emerges a time of confusion, danger, and moments of great restlessness.
00:06:01
Speaker
The present moment, once again, is at an historical juncture in which the structures of liberation and authoritarianism, fascism and democracy are vying for a future that appears to either be unthinkable, an unthinkable nightmare or a realizable dream.
00:06:19
Speaker
We now live in a world that resembles a utopian, a dystopian novel.
00:06:24
Speaker
Since the late 1970s,
00:06:26
Speaker
a form of what I call gangster capitalism or what can be called neoliberalism has waged war on the welfare state, public goods and the social contract.
00:06:36
Speaker
Neoliberalism believes that the market should govern not just the economy, but all aspects of society.
00:06:43
Speaker
All relationships are now commercialized.
00:06:45
Speaker
It concentrates wealth in the hands of a financial elite and elevates
00:06:50
Speaker
unchecked self-interest, consumerism, deregulation, and privatization to the governing principles of society.
00:06:57
Speaker
At the same time, it ignores basic human needs such as healthcare, food security, decent wages, and quality and meaningful education.
00:07:06
Speaker
Neoliberalism views government as the enemy of the market, limits society to the realm of the family and individuals, and embraces what I call a fixed hedonism and challenges the very idea of the public good.
00:07:20
Speaker
Under neoliberalism, all problems are personal and individual, making it almost impossible to translate private troubles into systemic consideration.
00:07:29
Speaker
This is clearly one of the most dangerous and probably one of the most persuasive elements of neoliberal thought.
00:07:36
Speaker
We live in an age when economic activity is divorced from social cause, meaning that we live in an age in which questions of social responsibility don't amount to much.
00:07:45
Speaker
While policies that produce racial cleansing
00:07:48
Speaker
environmental destruction, militarism, and staggering inequality have become the defining features of everyday life, and also, to say the least, established modes of governance.
00:07:59
Speaker
Clearly, there is a need to raise fundamental questions about the role of education in a time of impending tyranny.
00:08:06
Speaker
Or to put it another way, what are the obligations of education to democracy itself?
00:08:12
Speaker
That is, how can education work to reclaim a notion of democracy in which matters of social justice, freedom, inequality become fundamental features of learning to live with in terms of dignity in a democracy?
00:08:27
Speaker
The growing authoritarianism in the United States, as we all know, or I think we know, is now led largely by a far-right Republican Party
00:08:37
Speaker
that has revealed in all of its ugliness the death-producing mechanisms of white supremacy, systemic inequality, censorship, a culture of cruelty, and an increasingly dangerous assault on public and higher education.
00:08:51
Speaker
We now live in an age in which authoritarianism has become more dangerous than ever.
00:08:56
Speaker
We now, and of course this is evident, as a number of red states have put into place a range of reactionary educational policies that
00:09:07
Speaker
range from burning books and critical race theory to forcing educators to sign loyalty oaths, post their syllabuses online, forcibly force them to post it online, give up tenure, and allow students to film their classes and much more.
00:09:22
Speaker
Not only are these laws aimed at critical educators and minorities of class and color, this far right attack on education is also part
00:09:31
Speaker
of a war on the very ability to think, question, and engage in politics from the vantage point of being critical, informed, and willing to hold power accountable.
00:09:42
Speaker
More generally, it's part of a considered effort to destroy public and higher education and the very foundations of political agency.
00:09:50
Speaker
Under the rule of this emerging authoritarianism, political extremists are attempting to turn public education into a space for killing the social imagination.
Education and Neoliberalism
00:10:01
Speaker
a place where provocative ideas are banished and where faculty and students are punished through the threat of a force or harsh disciplinary measures for speaking out, engaging in dissent and advancing democratic values.
00:10:16
Speaker
We all know that teachers who have spoken out against these far right agendas are often threatened.
00:10:22
Speaker
Their families are threatened.
00:10:24
Speaker
They're attacked at school board.
00:10:26
Speaker
School board members who defend them are now being threatened by far-right goons.
00:10:31
Speaker
This is all now public information.
00:10:33
Speaker
Schools that view themselves as democratic public spheres are now disparaged by far-right Republican politicians who sneeringly define public and higher education, if you're ready for this, as socialism factories.
00:10:48
Speaker
The growing threat of authoritarianism is also visible in the emergence of an anti-intellectual culture that derides any notion of critical education.
00:10:58
Speaker
What was once unthinkable regarding attacks on public education have become normalized.
00:11:04
Speaker
Under attack by the Republican Party, Republican Party legislators, teachers, parents, students, and librarians
00:11:12
Speaker
who oppose book burning, support critical pedagogy, and refuse to remove books from the classroom and library.
00:11:19
Speaker
And as such, they're increasingly being harassed, threatened, and if you're ready for this, called pedophile by extremists on the right.
00:11:28
Speaker
Furthermore, calls for social justice, racial equality, and a critical rendering of history are disparaged as unpatriotic education.
00:11:36
Speaker
Ignorance is now praised as a virtue.
00:11:40
Speaker
The right wing assault on democracy is a crisis that cannot be allowed to turn into a catastrophe in which all hope is lost.
00:11:48
Speaker
It is hard to imagine a more urgent moment for educators to seriously take, to take seriously the necessary steps to make education central to politics.
00:12:00
Speaker
This suggests viewing education as a social concept rooted in the goal of empowerment and emancipation for all people, especially if we do not want to default on education's role as a democratic public sphere.
00:12:14
Speaker
This is a form of education that encourages human agency by creating the conditions that enable students not only to be critical thinkers, but also critically engaged social agents.
00:12:25
Speaker
This is a pedagogical practice that calls students beyond themselves,
00:12:29
Speaker
and embraces the ethical imperative, the care for others, dismantles structures of domination and become subjects rather than the objects of history, politics and power.
00:12:42
Speaker
If educators are going to develop a politics capable of awakening our critical imaginative and historical sensibilities, it is crucial for us to remember education as a project of individual and collective empowerment.
00:12:55
Speaker
a project based on the search for truth and enlarging of the imagination and the practice of freedom.
00:13:01
Speaker
This is a political project in which civic literacy infused with the language of critique and possibility addresses the notion that there is no democracy without knowledgeable and civically literate citizens.
00:13:15
Speaker
Such a language is necessary to enable the conditions to forge a collective resistance among educators, youth, artists, and other cultural workers
00:13:25
Speaker
It seems to me who are actively engaged in fighting this form of domination.
00:13:29
Speaker
Critical education on multiple levels and in diverse spheres is especially important in a society in which the democratization of the flow of information has been reduced to the democratization of the flow of misinformation.
00:13:44
Speaker
It's important for us as educators to note that in the current, the current era is one marked by the rise of disimagination machines.
00:13:52
Speaker
that produce manufactured ignorance on an unprecedented level, and in doing so, give authoritarianism a new life.
00:14:00
Speaker
Even worse, we live in a time when the unthinkable has become normalized in which anything can be said and everything that matters unsaid.
00:14:10
Speaker
Consequently, the American public is rapidly losing a language and ethical grammar that challenges the political and racist machineries of cruelty, state violence, and targeted exclusions.
00:14:22
Speaker
This is especially true at a time when historical and social amnesia have become a national pastime, further normalizing an authoritarian politics that thrives on ignorance, fear, the suppression of dissent and hate.
00:14:37
Speaker
The merging of power with new digital technologies in everyday life have not only altered time and space, they've expanded the reach of culture as an educational force.
00:14:49
Speaker
A culture of immediacy coupled with a fear of history and a 24-7 flow of information now wages war on historical consciousness, attention spans, and the conditions necessary to think, contemplate, and arrive at sound judgments.
00:15:06
Speaker
Under such circumstances, it's important to acknowledge that education as a form of cultural work extends far beyond the classroom.
00:15:15
Speaker
and its pedagogical influence, though often imperceptible, is also crucial to challenge and resist.
00:15:23
Speaker
We must remember that education and schooling are not the same, and that schooling must be viewed as a sphere distinctive from the educative forces at work in the larger culture.
00:15:34
Speaker
Education is more than schooling and reinforces the notion of how important it has become as a general category, as a tool to shape consciousness, the public imagination, and agency itself.
00:15:47
Speaker
One important pedagogical lesson to be learned at a time when language is under assault and stripped of any viable meaning is that fascism begins with hateful words, the demonization of others considered disposable, and moves on to attack ideas,
00:16:03
Speaker
burn books, arrest dissident intellectuals, attack gender minorities, and expand the reach of the carceral state in the horrors of detention centers, jails, and prisons.
00:16:16
Speaker
This is more important to remember since education in the last decades has been four decades, particularly since the election of Ronald Reagan.
00:16:26
Speaker
has diminished rapidly in its capacity to educate young people and others to be reflective, critical, and socially engaged agents.
00:16:35
Speaker
Increasingly, the utopian possibilities formally associated with public and higher education as a public good capable of promoting social equality and supporting democracy have become too dangerous for the apostles of authoritarianism.
00:16:50
Speaker
Public schools, more than ever, are subject to the toxic forces of privatization and mindless standardized curricula.
00:16:58
Speaker
while teachers are de-skilled and subject to intolerable labor conditions, not unlike Walmart workers.
00:17:05
Speaker
Unfortunately, public and higher education now mimic a business culture run by a managerial army of bureaucrats, more suited to work as accountants in pencil factories than in schools.
00:17:18
Speaker
At the same time, all levels of education are under attack by right-wing politicians who are censoring history, forbidding discussions about racism,
00:17:27
Speaker
eliminating tenure and imposing enormous restrictions on teacher autonomy.
00:17:32
Speaker
The current forces of white supremacy are not the only threat to public and higher education.
00:17:38
Speaker
Since the 1980s, conservatives and liberals have increasingly sought to model public education after a business culture, standardized curriculum, teach for the test and flood teachers with one fit only models of teaching.
00:17:53
Speaker
This model was reinforced during the pandemic,
00:17:56
Speaker
with its heavy emphasis on what I would call a crude instrumentalization of pedagogy.
00:18:02
Speaker
This could and continues to be seen in endless emphasis on training exercises to familiarize teachers and students with Zoom, Teams, and other methods of online teaching.
00:18:15
Speaker
The commanding visions of democracy are in exile at all levels of education.
00:18:20
Speaker
Critical thought and the imagining of a better world present a direct threat not only to white supremacists, but also to those ideologues who narrowly embrace a corporate vision of the world in which the future always replicates the present in an endless circle in which capital and the identities that it legitimates merge with each other into what might be called a dead zone of the imagination and pedagogies of repression.
00:18:46
Speaker
One consequence is that the distinction between education and training has collapsed and that the most valued educational experiences are geared for job preparation.
00:18:57
Speaker
What is clear is that corporate models of education attempt to mold students in the market mantras of harsh competition, unchecked individualism, and the ethos of consumerism.
00:19:09
Speaker
Young people are now told to invest in their careers, reduce education to job training, and achieve success at any cost.
00:19:18
Speaker
It's hard to imagine a more sterile vision of education.
00:19:23
Speaker
It is precisely this replacement of educated hope with a repressive neoliberal project and cultural politics that also represents another dangerous assault on public and higher education.
00:19:37
Speaker
Under this corporate-based model of schooling, the destruction of schoolings of public good is matched by the toxic merging of inequality, social sorting, racial cleansing, and the nativist language of borders, walls, and camps.
00:19:52
Speaker
In the shadow of this impending nightmare, the lesson we cannot forget is that critical pedagogy provides the promise of a protected space within which to think against the grain of received opinion, a space to question and challenge, and to imagine the world from different standpoints and perspectives, to reflect upon ourselves in relation to others, and in doing so, to understand what it means as educators.
00:20:19
Speaker
to assume a sense of political and social responsibility.
00:20:24
Speaker
If the emerging authoritarianism and rebranded fascism in the United States is to be defeated, there is a need to make critical education an organizing principle of politics.
00:20:36
Speaker
And in part, this can be done with a language that exposes and unravels
00:20:41
Speaker
falsehoods, systems of oppression, and corrupt relations of power while making clear that an alternative future is possible.
00:20:50
Speaker
Hannah Herant was right in arguing that language is crucial in highlighting the often hidden crystallized elements that make authoritarianism likely.
00:21:01
Speaker
We often call that the hidden curriculum of schooling, but now we have the hidden curriculum of politics.
00:21:07
Speaker
The language of critical pedagogy and literacy are powerful tools in the search for truth and the condemnation of falsehoods and injustices.
00:21:16
Speaker
Moreover, it is true language that the history
00:21:20
Speaker
It's a language that the history of fascism can be remembered and the lessons of the conditions that created the plague of genocide can provide the recognition that fascism does not reside only in the past and that its traces are always dormant, even in the strongest democracies.
00:21:38
Speaker
The ongoing threat of fascist politics and its assault on the foundations of critical consciousness is one more reason for educators to make the political more pedagogical.
00:21:49
Speaker
and the pedagogical more political.
00:21:52
Speaker
Making the pedagogical more political is crucial to recognize that pedagogy is always political, and that it's first and foremost a struggle over agency, over identities, over desires, over values, over knowledge, while also acknowledging that it has a crucial role in addressing important social issues and defining the future.
00:22:15
Speaker
Making the political pedagogical in this instance suggests producing modes of knowledge and social practices that not only affirm oppositional ideas and pedagogical practices, but also offer opportunities to mobilize instances of outrage coupled with direct mass action.
00:22:33
Speaker
What I'm saying here is that to make the political more pedagogical is to take seriously that the political is never removed from acts of persuasion.
00:22:42
Speaker
It's never removed for what it means to make something meaningful in order to make it critical, in order to make it transformative.
00:22:48
Speaker
That when we talk about making the political more pedagogical, we're talking about the struggle over identities and the language that educators need to use in which people can recognize themselves.
00:22:59
Speaker
They can in some way come to grips with the conditions in which they find themselves and be able to expand an analysis of those conditions in order to take it further than they ordinarily would.
00:23:10
Speaker
That's what it means to make the pedagogical more political.
00:23:14
Speaker
Ignorance now rules America.
00:23:17
Speaker
Not the simple alleged ignorance.
00:23:19
Speaker
that comes from an absence of knowledge, but a malicious ignorance forged in the arrogance of refusing to think hard about an issue, to encourage, to engage language in the pursuit of justice.
00:23:31
Speaker
James Baldwin was certainly right in issuing the stern warning and no name in the street that ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
00:23:43
Speaker
In the far right fascist playbook, thinking is now viewed as a threat
00:23:48
Speaker
and thoughtlessness is considered a value, a value that it wants to impose on everyone.
00:23:57
Speaker
As is well known, former President Trump's ignorance is still on display daily and lives through a Republican party which has been taken over by far right extremists.
00:24:08
Speaker
A culture of lies and thoughtlessness now serves as a tool of power.
00:24:13
Speaker
to prevent politics from being held accountable.
00:24:16
Speaker
In addition, ignorance is the enemy of critical thinking, engaged intellectuals, and emancipatory forms of education.
00:24:25
Speaker
To put it differently, ignorance is dangerous, especially when it defines itself as common sense, while exhibiting a disdain for truth, scientific evidence, and rational judgments.
00:24:37
Speaker
However, there's more at stake here than the production of a toxic form of illiteracy celebrated as common sense, the normalization of fake news and the emergence of a discourse of white supremacy.
Empowerment through Education
00:24:48
Speaker
There is also the closing of the horizons of the political coupled with explicit expressions of cruelty and a widely sanctioned ruthlessness.
00:24:57
Speaker
All we have to think about is the war on women's reproductive rights.
00:25:02
Speaker
so severe that laws are being passed now that claim that even if a woman's life is at risk while having an abortion, that she should die rather than have the abortion.
00:25:13
Speaker
This is unimaginable and really reflects an age similar to the medieval times than it does the 21st century.
00:25:21
Speaker
But it also suggests how education has now become a tool to produce a form of mass consciousness rooted not just simply in ignorance, but also in cruelty,
00:25:31
Speaker
and a basic destruction of what I would call democratic values.
00:25:35
Speaker
Under such circumstances, there is a full scale attack on thoughtful reasoning, empathy, collective resistance, and what I would call the compassionate imagination.
00:25:45
Speaker
Words such as love, trust, freedom, responsibility, and choice have been deformed by a market logic that narrows their meaning to either a commercialized relationship, commercialized relationships or in exchanges.
00:25:59
Speaker
or a reductive notion of self-interest.
00:26:02
Speaker
Freedom now means removing oneself from any sense of social responsibility so one can retreat into the privatized orbits of self-indulgence.
00:26:12
Speaker
And so it goes.
00:26:13
Speaker
The new form of illiteracy does not simply constitute an absence of learning, ideas, or knowledge, nor can they be solely attributed to what has been called the smartphone society.
00:26:24
Speaker
On the contrary,
00:26:25
Speaker
Ignorance is a willful practice and goal used increasingly by the Republican Party.
00:26:30
Speaker
And I think this is crucial to actively depoliticize people and to make them complicit with the forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives.
00:26:40
Speaker
Given the current crisis of politics, agency, history and memory, and I think those categories are enormously important in terms of how they relate to each other.
00:26:50
Speaker
Educators need a new political and pedagogical language for addressing the changing context and issues facing the world in which anti-democratic forces draw upon an unprecedented convergence of resources, financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological, to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control.
00:27:15
Speaker
If educators and others are to counter the forces of market fundamentalism and white supremacy, it's crucial to develop educational approaches that reject a collapse of the distinction between market liberties and civil liberties, a market economy and a market society.
00:27:32
Speaker
I'm not against the market per se, but I don't believe society should be basically modeled after a market, should be modeled after democratic values.
00:27:42
Speaker
Human needs should take precedent over profit and financial needs, to say the least.
00:27:48
Speaker
Politics loses its emancipatory possibilities if it cannot provide the educational conditions for enabling students and others to think against the grain.
00:27:59
Speaker
and realize themselves as informed, critical, engaged individuals.
00:28:03
Speaker
There is no radical politics without a pedagogy capable of awakening consciousness, challenging common sense, and creating modes of analysis in which people discover a moment of recognition that enables them to rethink the conditions that shape their lives.
00:28:24
Speaker
As a result, educators should do more than create the conditions for critical thinking and nourishing a sense of hope in their students.
00:28:31
Speaker
They also need to responsibly assume the role of public intellectuals and border crossers within broader social context and be willing to share their ideas with other educators and the wider public by making use of new media technologies and a range of other cultural apparatuses, especially those outlets that are willing to address critically a range of social problems.
00:28:54
Speaker
Capitalizing on their role as civic educators, educators can do more to speak to general audiences in a language that is clear, accessible, and rigorous.
00:29:06
Speaker
More importantly, as teachers organize to assert both the importance of their role as citizen educators in a democracy, they can forge new alliances and connections to develop social movements that include and expand beyond simply working with unions.
00:29:22
Speaker
We see evidence of this movement among teachers and students currently organizing against gun violence and systemic racism, and doing so by aligning with parents, unions, and other social movements in order to fight the gun lobbies and politicians bought and sold by the violence industries.
00:29:39
Speaker
Education operates as a crucial site of power in the modern world.
00:29:45
Speaker
And if teachers are deeply concerned about safeguarding education, they will have to take seriously
00:29:50
Speaker
how pedagogy functions on local and global levels.
00:29:55
Speaker
Critical pedagogy has a key role to play in both understanding and challenging how power, knowledge, and values are deployed, affirmed, and resisted within and outside traditional discourses and cultural spheres.
00:30:11
Speaker
In a local context, critical pedagogy becomes an important theoretical tool for understanding the institutional conditions that place constraints
00:30:20
Speaker
on the production of knowledge, learning, academic labor, social relations, and democracy itself.
00:30:28
Speaker
Critical pedagogy also provides a discourse for engaging and challenging the construction of social hierarchies, identities, and ideologies as they traverse across local and national borders.
00:30:42
Speaker
In addition, pedagogy as a form of production and critique offers a discourse of possibility
00:30:49
Speaker
a way of providing students with an opportunity to link understanding and commitment and social transformation to seeking the greatest possible justice.
00:30:59
Speaker
This suggests one of the most serious challenges facing teachers, artists, journalists, writers and other cultural workers, which is the task of developing discourses and pedagogical practices that connect what my former and late friend Paulo Freire said was a critical reading of the word and the world.
00:31:19
Speaker
in ways that enhance the creative capacities of young people to provide the conditions for them to become critically engaged agents.
00:31:28
Speaker
In taking up this project, educators and others should attempt to create the conditions that give students the opportunity to acquire the knowledge, values, and the civic courage that enable them to struggle to make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical.
00:31:46
Speaker
Educated hope is not a call to overlook the difficult conditions that shape both schools and the larger social order, nor is it a blueprint removed from specific contexts and struggles.
00:31:58
Speaker
On the contrary, it's the precondition for imagining a future that does not replicate the nightmares of the present, for not making the present the future.
00:32:08
Speaker
Educated Hope provides the basis for dignifying the labor of teachers.
00:32:12
Speaker
It offers up critical knowledge linked to democratic social change, affirms shared responsibilities rather than shared fears, and encourages teachers and students to recognize ambivalence and uncertainty as fundamental dimensions of learning.
00:32:28
Speaker
In this case, educated hope is tempered by the complex reality of the times and viewed as a project and condition for providing a sense of collective agency, opposition, political imagination, and engaged participation.
00:32:42
Speaker
Without hope, even in the most dire times, there is no possibility for resistance, dissent, and struggle.
00:32:50
Speaker
Agency is the condition of struggle, and hope is the condition of agency.
00:32:55
Speaker
Hope expands the space of the possible
00:32:57
Speaker
and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present.
00:33:03
Speaker
In the end, there is no democracy without informed citizens and no justice without a language critical of injustice.
00:33:11
Speaker
Democracy begins to fail and political life becomes impoverished in the absence of those vital public spheres such as public education,
00:33:20
Speaker
in which civic values, public scholarship and social engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of the future and take seriously the demands of justice, equity and civic courage.
00:33:32
Speaker
Without financially robust schools, critical forms of education and knowledgeable and civically courageous teachers, young people are denied not just simply the knowledge of citizenship, but the habits of citizenship.
00:33:47
Speaker
critical modes of agency, and the grammar of ethical responsibility.
00:33:52
Speaker
Democracy should be a way of thinking about education, one that thrives on connecting pedagogy to the practice of freedom and social responsibility to the public good.
00:34:04
Speaker
I want to conclude by making some suggestions, however incomplete,
00:34:09
Speaker
regarding what we can do as educators to save public education and connect it to the broader struggle of a democracy itself.
00:34:19
Speaker
First, amid the current assault on public and higher education, educators can reclaim and expand its democratic vocation and in doing so, align itself with a vision that embraces its mission as a public good, not simply an economic good.
00:34:35
Speaker
Second, they can also acknowledge and make good in the claim that there is no democracy without informed and knowledgeable citizens.
00:34:43
Speaker
What does that mean?
00:34:44
Speaker
That means that education is not simply a public good, it's a vital public good.
00:34:48
Speaker
It's absolutely crucial to democracy.
00:34:51
Speaker
It's not just about educating our children, our individual children, it's about saving a society so that it always aligns with the virtues of democracy.
00:35:01
Speaker
Third, education should be defined as a crucial public good and funded through federal funds that guarantee a free, quality education for everyone.
00:35:13
Speaker
The larger issue here is that education cannot serve the public good in a society marked by staggering forms of financial inequality.
00:35:23
Speaker
Inequality is a scourge and a curse.
00:35:26
Speaker
and must be overcome if public and higher education are to thrive as a public good.
00:35:32
Speaker
And that cannot happen, I would argue, under gangster capitalism.
00:35:36
Speaker
Fourth, in order to keep alive the critical function of education, educators should teach students to engage in multiple forms of literacy, extending from print and visual culture to digital culture.
00:35:51
Speaker
Students need to learn how to become border crosses.
00:35:55
Speaker
and think dialectically.
00:35:57
Speaker
Moreover, they should learn not only how to consume culture, but to produce it.
00:36:02
Speaker
And they should learn how to both be cultural critics and cultural producers.
00:36:05
Speaker
This is especially important at a time when culture is dominated by corporate interests.
00:36:12
Speaker
We need to educate students to be able to be cultural producers, to create radio stations, to create films, to create alternative schools, and at the same time to work in those dominant institutions
00:36:22
Speaker
with one foot in and one foot out, to know not just simply how their goals are, but how they work and how they can be transformed in the interest of something much broader, much more democratic, much larger.
00:36:34
Speaker
Fifth, educators must defend critical education both as a search for truth and the practice of freedom.
00:36:40
Speaker
Such a task suggests that critical pedagogy should shift not only the way people think, but encourage them to work to shape a better world in which they find themselves.
00:36:51
Speaker
As a practice of freedom, critical pedagogy arises from the conviction that educators and other cultural workers have a responsibility to unsettle power, trouble consensus, and challenge common sense.
00:37:04
Speaker
This is a view of pedagogy that shouldn't make people comfortable
00:37:08
Speaker
It should disturb them.
00:37:10
Speaker
It should inspire them.
00:37:11
Speaker
It should energize them.
00:37:13
Speaker
It should organize a vast array of questions that allow them to think outside and within in order to challenge the worlds that they occupy.
00:37:24
Speaker
Such pedagogical practices should enable students to interrogate common sense, their own common sense understandings of the world.
00:37:32
Speaker
Take risks with their thinking, however difficult.
00:37:36
Speaker
and be willing to take a stand for free inquiry in the pursuit of truth, multiple ways of knowing, and mutual respect.
00:37:45
Speaker
Students need to learn how to think dangerously.
00:37:49
Speaker
And if I may put it in a way that may not sound too agreeable, they need to learn, as Baldwin once said, how to be troublemakers.
00:37:58
Speaker
They need to learn, as Bell Hooks once said, how to talk back.
00:38:02
Speaker
They need to have enough confidence in their own knowledge and their modes of self-determination to feel the energy of what it means to be an agent and not just a consumer.
00:38:14
Speaker
They need to know what it means to be a subject and not just an object.
HRP's Educational Initiatives
00:38:18
Speaker
They need to see education not as something that molds them, but as something that energizes them.
00:38:25
Speaker
as something that they can use as a tool in which they can understand the world so they can learn how not to be governed, but how to govern.
00:38:33
Speaker
It would seem to me that these are the tools of education that not only make people uncomfortable, they make them joyous.
00:38:40
Speaker
In the uncomfortableness, there's a joy.
00:38:42
Speaker
There's a joy about learning, about growing, about advancing, about understanding the world in a more complex and complete way, about, if I may put it differently, being in control of your own sense of social and political agency.
00:38:58
Speaker
Six, educators,
00:39:00
Speaker
need to argue for a notion of education that is inherently political.
00:39:04
Speaker
Let's do away with the nonsense that education should be neutral.
00:39:08
Speaker
Let's do away with the nonsense that neutrality is a virtue.
00:39:12
Speaker
It seems to me that there is no way that we can deny the political function of education.
00:39:18
Speaker
And in doing that, we need to embrace a distinction that I think is crucial.
00:39:23
Speaker
And the distinction is between what I call a political education and a politicizing education.
00:39:29
Speaker
A political education is that students learn about power.
00:39:31
Speaker
They learn about social relationship.
00:39:33
Speaker
They learn how society bears down on them in ways that shape them.
00:39:37
Speaker
They learn what the elements of truth are in a world in which you need to make a distinction between good and evil.
00:39:44
Speaker
That's a political education.
00:39:45
Speaker
It's an empowering education.
00:39:47
Speaker
A politicizing education is the education of indoctrination.
00:39:52
Speaker
It's an education which says, this is my way or the highway.
00:39:55
Speaker
It's an education which says, we live in a world of certainty.
00:39:57
Speaker
I'm giving you the tools for certainty.
00:39:59
Speaker
Shut up, or you'll be humiliated, or you'll be thrown out of school, or you'll be in some way viewed as unreliable, and we will ruin your sense of self-esteem and your own sense of political agency.
00:40:11
Speaker
You can't believe in something critical and be what I call a pedagogical terrorist.
00:40:18
Speaker
You can't do that.
00:40:19
Speaker
You need to understand that the theories that we bring to these classrooms have to embody a practice that's empowering and not one that simply references who we are outside of the conditions that would enable students to actually question who we are and what we believe in and what we're talking about.
00:40:37
Speaker
Finally, I want to suggest that in a society in which democracy is under siege,
00:40:43
Speaker
It's crucial for educators to remember that alternative futures are possible and that acting on those beliefs is a precondition for making change possible.
00:40:52
Speaker
Radical social change.
00:40:54
Speaker
At stake here is the courage to take on the challenge of what kind of world we want.
00:40:59
Speaker
What kind of future do we want to build for our children?
00:41:03
Speaker
The great philosopher Ernst Bloch insisted that hope taps into our deepest experiences and that without it, reason and justice cannot prevail.
00:41:14
Speaker
In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin, my favorite novelist, adds a call for compassion and social responsibility to this notion of hope, one that is indebted to those who follow us.
00:41:25
Speaker
He writes, generations do not cease to be born and we are responsible to them.
00:41:31
Speaker
The moment we break with one another, the sea engulfs us and the lights go out.
00:41:37
Speaker
Now more than ever, educators must live up to the challenge of keeping the fires of resistance burning with a feverish intensity.
00:41:46
Speaker
Only then will we be able to keep the lights on and the future open.
00:41:50
Speaker
My friend, the late Howard Zinn rightly insisted that hope is the willingness, quote, to sustain, even in times of pessimism, the possibility of surprise.
00:42:00
Speaker
In addition to that eloquent appeal, I would say that history is open,
00:42:05
Speaker
It's time to think differently in order to act differently, especially if as educators, we want to imagine and fight for alternative futures and build new horizons of possibility.
00:42:16
Speaker
Thank you.
00:42:32
Speaker
There's a problem with education today.
00:42:35
Speaker
After decades of standardization and testing-based reforms, students have become overwhelmingly disengaged from their schools, which seem irrelevant to their lives and interests.
00:42:45
Speaker
At Human Restoration Project, we are helping teachers, students, and administrators fight back against the systems of standardization and recreate education to be about purpose-finding and community relevance.
00:42:57
Speaker
To do this, we are creating the Human Centered Schools Network, a collective of teachers, administrators, and schools committed to human-centered education.
00:43:07
Speaker
Members can enter the network through a variety of streams.
00:43:10
Speaker
They might listen to our podcast, download our free open education resources, or participate in our PD and micro-credentialing.
00:43:18
Speaker
Maybe they take a course that uses our materials, such as those at the University of Hawaii.
00:43:24
Speaker
Then, an entire school can contract with us to join the network.
00:43:28
Speaker
The whole school's model operates through five stages.
00:43:32
Speaker
First, teachers and staff are onboarded to the theory and practice of human-centered pedagogy through a series of group discussions, activities, videos, and readings.
00:43:42
Speaker
Second, empathy interviews are conducted and analyzed with our AI transcription partner, Cortico, to determine the needs of the students.
00:43:51
Speaker
Third, educators use teacher action research to implement the principles of human-centered pedagogy.
00:43:58
Speaker
Fourth, Human Restoration Project will check in with teachers throughout the year to lend their support to their research.
00:44:05
Speaker
And fifth, teachers and admin connect with others throughout the Human Centered Schools Network to share what they've learned.
00:44:12
Speaker
This is where the project truly takes off.
00:44:14
Speaker
As teachers train one another and share best practices, the network becomes a self-sustaining project.
00:44:21
Speaker
With our model, together, we can restore humanity to education.
00:44:26
Speaker
I'm going to go ahead and get things started here with some kind of introductory remarks, and then we're going to go ahead and get started.
00:44:33
Speaker
So hello, everyone.
00:44:35
Speaker
Welcome to our Q&A session with Dr. Henry Giroux following his incredible keynote speech that we watched yesterday.
00:44:41
Speaker
Thank you again, Henry, for joining us today.
00:44:44
Speaker
Based off the conversations we had yesterday with folks, your speech was deeply resonated and led to a lot of great discussions.
00:44:51
Speaker
Before we get started, here's the format for today's session.
00:44:54
Speaker
First off,
00:44:55
Speaker
We kind of already did the formal introduction, so imagine that this is directly following the keynote speech.
00:45:01
Speaker
Therefore, we're going to jump right into questions.
00:45:03
Speaker
We picture this as a semi open and formal conversation to learn from one another.
00:45:09
Speaker
The way that you'll do this is feel free to either write your answer in the chat.
00:45:12
Speaker
If you do that, I'll just read it out loud.
00:45:15
Speaker
or raise your hand with the reaction button at the bottom of Zoom.
00:45:19
Speaker
In that case, I'll call on you to ask a question.
00:45:22
Speaker
Please make sure that you lower your hand afterwards so I know if it's a follow-up question or your hand's still up from before.
00:45:29
Speaker
Also make sure that you mute if you're not the person currently speaking.
00:45:32
Speaker
We'll do our best to ensure that all the questions are answered in the event that a question's very similar to another question, we might go on to others.
00:45:40
Speaker
To give you all some time to consider your first question, I did want to share this thing that Nick put together this morning, which is a summary of Drew's speech, which he is sharing right now.
00:45:52
Speaker
So there's a little little word cloud classic of what word or words would you just describe Dr. Drew's keynote and we can see
00:46:02
Speaker
It's, I hope, the things that are the goals of this conference and the folks that you are working through for the track, inspiring, hopeful, needed, democratic, challenging, empowering and powerful and disruptive.
00:46:15
Speaker
All things that I think challenge us to meet the needs of the moment and recognize the fact that this work is needed now more than ever.
00:46:24
Speaker
Something that we keep saying over and over again is that our current times are unprecedented.
00:46:30
Speaker
And every day really is unprecedented.
00:46:32
Speaker
And it's going to take the work of the grassroots of teachers getting together and talking about these things and doing better in order for us to change what's going on in education and in society at large.
00:46:44
Speaker
So with that said, we're going to go ahead and jump into it.
00:46:49
Speaker
I have not prepared any questions whatsoever.
00:46:52
Speaker
So this is very much reliant on the community to come together and ask anything.
00:46:57
Speaker
Feel free to take a second.
00:46:59
Speaker
Either write a question in the chat and or raise your hand and we will go from there.
00:47:08
Speaker
While we're getting ready here, Dr. Drew, do you have anything that you want to want to say?
00:47:13
Speaker
Yeah, refer to me as Henry.
00:47:15
Speaker
I would prefer that.
00:47:16
Speaker
All right.
00:47:17
Speaker
Links, you're first up.
00:47:19
Speaker
Go for it.
00:47:21
Speaker
Hi, can you hear me?
00:47:24
Speaker
Well, nice to meet you all.
00:47:25
Speaker
I'm very excited to be here.
00:47:27
Speaker
My name is Lynx.
00:47:27
Speaker
I use he-him pronouns.
00:47:29
Speaker
I'm a trans educator in Panama.
00:47:33
Speaker
It was very exciting to hear this keynote and very inspiring.
00:47:39
Speaker
There was a lot of discussion about teaching critical thinking and critical thinking in relation to what is going on politically in the world.
00:47:49
Speaker
And I was wondering if you could share some of the
00:47:53
Speaker
methods or things you have found that are a useful way of teaching this critical thinking.
00:48:01
Speaker
I find that working with human rights education, sometimes it is a bit hard getting people to think critically about the news.
00:48:11
Speaker
And it's not as simple as simply exposing them to what is going on.
00:48:14
Speaker
It's also teaching the skills necessary to be able to interpret that.
00:48:19
Speaker
and interpret the different forces that are at play.
00:48:21
Speaker
So I would love to hear some of the methods that are useful for teaching this critical thing and agency.
00:48:29
Speaker
I mean, I think that the question of methods is important and I don't wanna downplay it, but I think we often fail to really understand the importance of what's at stake and what critical education and critical pedagogy is about by beginning with that question.
00:48:49
Speaker
I really think the question to begin with in order to enter into that consideration is, you know, what's the purpose of schooling in the first place?
00:48:57
Speaker
You know, you need some kind of theoretical political framework to understand, you know, ways in which you're going to enter into that question in ways that resonate with approaches that are compatible with it.
00:49:09
Speaker
And they put that in a very general way.
00:49:11
Speaker
I think we can, sometimes we find ourselves being very critical about what education is and what it should do.
00:49:18
Speaker
but we engage in pedagogical methods that are dehumanizing.
00:49:21
Speaker
They're really at odds with the very vision that we bring to the classroom.
00:49:26
Speaker
So I think that's the first issue.
00:49:28
Speaker
The second issue is, for me, it's always important to play around with a certain kind of tension in the classroom.
00:49:36
Speaker
And the first tension for me is to make students feel comfortable and safe.
00:49:40
Speaker
I mean, and not safe in the silly right-wing way,
00:49:44
Speaker
that says that they shouldn't be disturbed, but protected in that they should be able to be able to speak without having to feel that in some fundamental way, they're gonna be punished for it.
00:49:54
Speaker
Even when they're talking about issues that they're taking a chance and taking a risk and engaging in.
00:50:00
Speaker
And that often demands a second issue.
00:50:02
Speaker
And that is, how do we begin to learn a new language?
00:50:06
Speaker
How do we begin to challenge common sense with a language that's outside of the conditions that are the educations that many of these students get?
00:50:14
Speaker
And I think that what I try to do is I try to provide a range of resources for people to read and to watch.
00:50:21
Speaker
Image culture is very important for me in my teaching because I deal with a generation that's basically plugged into images.
00:50:27
Speaker
And so it seems to me that, you know, the resources that we use have to in some way resonate with the students that we're dealing with, have some connection to their lives, some connection to the world in which they live in.
00:50:41
Speaker
Secondly, it's very important around the question of voice for students to learn how to narrate themselves.
00:50:47
Speaker
You know, usually they're on the end of a pedagogy or subjected to a pedagogy in which they basically kind of silence.
00:50:54
Speaker
You know, they don't really have much to say.
00:50:56
Speaker
They're told to learn for the test.
00:50:58
Speaker
They're treated as consumers and objects.
00:51:01
Speaker
And, you know, I always have students in some way be prepared.
00:51:05
Speaker
I try to create a pedagogical situation in which they're going to have to analyze and respond
00:51:11
Speaker
to issues in ways that would allow the class to join in.
00:51:15
Speaker
For instance, all my students have to write something, a page, a paragraph, because I want them to basically have a sense not only of their own voice and how important it is, but also to recognize that when we speak, there are consequences to what we say and that we should engage that, not as a threat, but as a way of enlarging
00:51:36
Speaker
the perspectives that we often bring to the classroom.
00:51:39
Speaker
Another issue is the question of culture.
00:51:41
Speaker
Look, all education is contextual.
00:51:44
Speaker
It's always contextual.
00:51:45
Speaker
And I think that while it's difficult, given the conditions under which many of us have worked, and I was a high school teacher for over seven years, is that we have to be aware of the context in which these students emerge from, their histories, their communities, their deprivations, their strengths.
00:52:04
Speaker
I remember
00:52:05
Speaker
I had a student in high school once.
00:52:08
Speaker
We were taking a test.
00:52:10
Speaker
This is a kid I kind of really resonated with, reminding me of myself in some ways.
00:52:15
Speaker
And I was giving a test and he put his head down, you know, it's a male.
00:52:20
Speaker
And I said something like, I forget his name.
00:52:22
Speaker
I said, Joe, is this a test?
00:52:23
Speaker
He says, you know, I'm sorry.
00:52:25
Speaker
I didn't eat breakfast this morning.
00:52:26
Speaker
I don't care.
00:52:27
Speaker
I mean, all of a sudden I realized something profound happened to me.
00:52:30
Speaker
And that was that the usual ways in which I had been taught
00:52:35
Speaker
to basically pressure kids didn't work.
00:52:38
Speaker
It didn't work.
00:52:39
Speaker
The test was not a threat he acknowledged.
00:52:42
Speaker
The notion of some kind of standard evaluation went out the window.
00:52:45
Speaker
I had to find other resources to talk to these kids.
00:52:48
Speaker
I had to find a language that was meaningful, that was critical, that was transformative.
00:52:53
Speaker
I had to find cultural elements that resonated with who they are and where they came from.
00:52:58
Speaker
I had to find ways to challenge them without putting their identities on trial.
00:53:02
Speaker
And I think we do that, as I mentioned, in the variety of ways that I've talked about.
00:53:07
Speaker
The other issue is I never simply, I was lucky when I taught, we didn't have curriculums imposed on us the way you do now.
00:53:16
Speaker
I didn't have that.
00:53:17
Speaker
So I put books in the library.
00:53:20
Speaker
I paid for them.
00:53:21
Speaker
I did all kinds of things.
00:53:22
Speaker
I basically gave them options to deal with alternative sources.
00:53:26
Speaker
And that's really crucial.
00:53:28
Speaker
And also sources that they bring.
00:53:30
Speaker
You know, the narratives that they often bring are often at odds with the narratives that we bring to the school or the school wants to impose on them.
00:53:37
Speaker
And so it seems to me there's a variety of ways there in which those kinds of issues emerge and were dealt with.
00:53:47
Speaker
I hope that helps.
00:53:50
Speaker
I think that connects well to a question that Steve asked in the chat, which is given the
00:53:57
Speaker
these different ways that we can impact the classroom, how do we go about navigating that and how feasible is that underneath this concept of gangster capitalism?
00:54:08
Speaker
Well, I mean, I think there are a couple of things to consider.
00:54:10
Speaker
I think that because I use the term gangster capitalism, which always gets me in trouble, it basically suggests that you can't talk about schools outside of the broader socioeconomic context in which they exist.
00:54:23
Speaker
You just can't do that.
00:54:24
Speaker
At least I don't believe you can do that.
00:54:26
Speaker
And so to say that we operate within a system that privileges certain ways of looking at the world and certain ways in which we produce particular kinds of subjects, right?
00:54:37
Speaker
And how we assign particular meanings, we have to be conscious of that.
00:54:41
Speaker
We have to be conscious of the forces that bear down on us so that we can make them visible and we can challenge them.
00:54:47
Speaker
That's the first issue.
00:54:48
Speaker
Secondly, it seems to me that, you know,
00:54:53
Speaker
we may live in a society that's moving towards fascism, which I truly believe it is, but that doesn't mean that you can equate power only with domination.
00:55:02
Speaker
I mean, there are always sites of resistance within these schools that can be negotiated, some more difficult, clearly more difficult than others.
00:55:10
Speaker
But I don't think that we should ever do this alone.
00:55:13
Speaker
I don't think the issue is to close the door and say, look, I'm going to work around these pedagogy, these issues and try to do the best I can to educate students in spite
00:55:23
Speaker
of the pressures being placed on him or her or they or whatever.
00:55:26
Speaker
I mean, I think that we have to learn to work with others in the school.
00:55:31
Speaker
We have to learn to work with outside resources like your organization.
00:55:35
Speaker
You know, we have to learn to work with other kinds of social movements.
00:55:40
Speaker
And I think to fight this alone, I think we're in trouble.
00:55:42
Speaker
I think when we privatize that struggle, we sort of surrender the political to the personal.
00:55:47
Speaker
And I think that's a script for defeat.
00:55:49
Speaker
And as difficult as it might be to organize with others, you have to do it.
00:55:52
Speaker
You know, it just simply has to be done.
00:55:54
Speaker
The other side of this, and maybe the fourth issue is, you know, we don't want to despair because too much, to say the least.
00:56:02
Speaker
We want to be vigilant.
00:56:04
Speaker
But that's different than despairing.
00:56:06
Speaker
And I think that, you know, we can look at history and we can look at the current moment of teachers who all over the United States right now and in Chile and in other places are really mobilizing.
00:56:17
Speaker
They've had enough.
00:56:18
Speaker
You know, whether we're talking about gun violence or, you know, teachers, elementary, junior high, high school teachers who are working three jobs and making twenty one thousand dollars a year, who are being told they can't talk about transgender issues, who are being told to ban books, you know, who are being told that they only can teach patriotic education.
00:56:41
Speaker
I mean, you know, we're at a moment in our history where you can't look away.
00:56:48
Speaker
And this stuff really has to be challenged.
00:56:51
Speaker
And I think we see that happening.
00:56:53
Speaker
We see it happening with unions that are mobilizing once again.
00:56:56
Speaker
We see it happening with teachers who are walking out, who are in some ways bypassing even their unions, which sometimes tend to be enormously conservative in terms of these things.
00:57:06
Speaker
So I think something is going on in the midst of gangster capitalism that is hopeful and provides maybe blueprints in some ways for how we should deal with these issues.
00:57:19
Speaker
And I think this is perfect then leading into what Dustin and Skyler were talking about, which is growing those partnerships and basically who can we look toward partnering with?
00:57:31
Speaker
Dustin asks about the connections between critical pedagogy and democracy and who in the local, state, national, international communities we can look to ally with beyond the traditional education system.
00:57:42
Speaker
And then kind of expanding upon that, Skyler asks which people, movements and developments give you hope
00:57:48
Speaker
in this fight?
00:57:50
Speaker
Let me say something before I actually name some movements.
00:57:52
Speaker
I mean, clearly, this is the Black Lives Matter movement, which is in the forefront.
00:57:56
Speaker
But there's also the ecological movements.
00:57:59
Speaker
There are youth movements.
00:58:00
Speaker
There's in North Carolina, there's the movement around questions of inequality and power.
00:58:06
Speaker
But I think that what is central to really address around this question is we have to be able to defend a notion of education
00:58:18
Speaker
that is not privatized, meaning that we not only have to be able to defend it as a public good, we have to be able to defend it as something crucial to democracy.
00:58:26
Speaker
So that means I need to be able to, we need to be able to talk to people whose kids are not in school.
00:58:33
Speaker
I mean, and to be able to talk about the centrality and importance of education in a democracy.
00:58:38
Speaker
You know, what's at stake here is not whether your kid's going to go to college or get a good job.
00:58:42
Speaker
What's at stake here is whether democracy is going to survive.
00:58:47
Speaker
And that makes it very clear how crucial public education is.
00:58:52
Speaker
And I put the word on public because let's be clear here.
00:58:56
Speaker
The attack on education is not because it's failing.
00:58:59
Speaker
The attack on education is because it's public.
00:59:02
Speaker
It's a public good.
00:59:03
Speaker
When you get representatives on the right now claiming that the public schools are socialism factories, or they basically teach communism at the expense of white Christian ideology, you know we're in trouble.
00:59:16
Speaker
And when I say we're in trouble, I mean that we don't want to begin with the question of methods.
00:59:21
Speaker
We really want to begin with the question of visions.
00:59:24
Speaker
We want to begin with a question that really in some way ascertains how important school is as a public good.
00:59:30
Speaker
Now, to get back to these movements, when you look at movements like the Black Lives Matter movement, one in particular, which is not simply about racism.
00:59:39
Speaker
It's about inequality.
00:59:40
Speaker
It's about capitalism.
00:59:41
Speaker
It's about injustice.
00:59:43
Speaker
It's about a whole range of issues that it's trying to tie together
00:59:46
Speaker
But not only that, in the manner of, let's say, Angela Davis is talking about how these struggles are international and how these groups, all of us have to learn from each other and find ways to come together under a larger banner in which our differences are important, but we can't allow them to be so siloed that they lose track of what it means of what the threads are that run through all these forms of oppositions.
01:00:17
Speaker
And this is a little bit of a shift, but I think it takes that then to a very local level.
01:00:25
Speaker
Shelley asks about the effective processes and strategies to foment a shift in culture.
01:00:32
Speaker
She says that she's at a small independent school.
01:00:34
Speaker
And they may call themselves progressive, but she would describe it as being more of a multicultural curriculum and student focused and a lot less focused on explicit anti-racism or liberatory pedagogy or anything like that.
01:00:48
Speaker
So there is that focus on critical thinking, but the content presented doesn't include some of the challenging issues that you bring up in your keynote.
01:00:56
Speaker
How do you take this style of thinking and begin to shift toward critical pedagogy at a local faculty level?
01:01:04
Speaker
I think we need to talk to people about how questions of representation are always tied to questions of history and to questions of power.
01:01:12
Speaker
And I think that once we inject the question of power into this discourse, something happens.
01:01:17
Speaker
We're not just talking about a Benetton notion of representation.
01:01:21
Speaker
The more colors we have, the better off we are.
01:01:24
Speaker
We're talking about how these institutions in their own way, for instance, are complicitous with the very kind of racism
01:01:32
Speaker
that they believe in some way, they falsely believe they're addressing.
01:01:37
Speaker
How do we in some way talk about what it means to talk about funding in public education?
01:01:44
Speaker
How do we talk about access?
01:01:46
Speaker
In other words, what are the mechanisms of power that gives a real meaning?
01:01:50
Speaker
The questions of representation when they're linked, the questions of justice, injustice, equality, and democracy.
01:01:57
Speaker
We need to expand that conversation by making clear what's not in it.
01:02:02
Speaker
What's not in it?
01:02:03
Speaker
You know, what the absences are here.
01:02:05
Speaker
And the absences are often around questions of power, questions of race, questions of class, questions of gender orientations, questions of identity, questions of inequality.
01:02:17
Speaker
These are the issues that we really need to focus on.
01:02:19
Speaker
So we need to shift that conversation.
01:02:22
Speaker
I don't think we need to do it by simply dismissing it.
01:02:25
Speaker
I think we need to find ways to get into it, burrow into it, and all of a sudden make clear that its absences
01:02:32
Speaker
are more defining and far more important than the things that it focuses on and how inadequate they are if they really believe in justice.
01:02:42
Speaker
I mean, you know, you want to take people at their word, right?
01:02:44
Speaker
When they say, well, we're from multiculturalism, you want to say, well, what does that have to do with questions of racism?
01:02:50
Speaker
What does it have to do with questions of inequality?
01:02:52
Speaker
What does it have to do with class differences?
01:02:54
Speaker
And how does the question of power enter into here, both in terms of how this institution is structured and what its relationship is to larger considerations, political, social, and economic institutions outside of the school?
01:03:09
Speaker
That's by the way, not just simply a shift in culture, that's a shift in politics.
01:03:13
Speaker
That's a shift in the kinds of questions that we're raising here and how culture is crucial as simply one element of that conversation.
01:03:23
Speaker
And this is a shift in the question I have as you're talking about this, which is I'm sure many of us here, if not the majority of us, have been placed in a scenario where we've advocated for these things.
01:03:38
Speaker
And especially in the last two or three years, as the culture war has yet again kind of set its sights on teachers, calling folks like us groomers and pedophiles and all these ridiculous things.
01:03:53
Speaker
As we bring up concepts of anti-racism or any kind of social justice type thing, these attacks come both through social media, but that stuff does cater into like having meetings with administrators and families coming in and complaining about our practices.
01:04:07
Speaker
And it's very personal and are kind of dangerous too and violent.
01:04:14
Speaker
How do you feel teachers should respond when they are targeted in this manner for doing these practices?
01:04:21
Speaker
Aggressively.
01:04:24
Speaker
Sorry, aggressively.
01:04:26
Speaker
And I think they need to do it in mass and collectively.
01:04:29
Speaker
I don't think we should sit back and just talk about this violence and then condemn it.
01:04:34
Speaker
I mean, it seems to me what they're saying has to be challenged.
01:04:37
Speaker
What they're saying has to be dealt with with larger groups.
01:04:40
Speaker
What they're saying has to be dealt with, not just simply in the context of where it takes place, but also in the larger medium.
01:04:46
Speaker
I mean, we just don't see enough people on the left and who are progressive talking about this stuff and challenging it.
01:04:54
Speaker
I mean, we really don't.
01:04:55
Speaker
You know, I've been writing about critical pedagogy.
01:04:57
Speaker
I was born after Lincoln died.
01:04:59
Speaker
You know, I've been writing about critical pedagogy for 50 years.
01:05:02
Speaker
And it seems to me that with the exception of very few groups in the United States, progressives in the left have never really taken this that seriously.
01:05:11
Speaker
I mean, it's always about schooling.
01:05:14
Speaker
It's not about education in the broader sense.
01:05:17
Speaker
The culture is a form of education, for instance, and all the ways in which these messages
01:05:22
Speaker
these right wing, horrifically violent messages are being produced, disseminated.
01:05:28
Speaker
I mean, the right does something we don't do.
01:05:30
Speaker
The left doesn't do, or progressives don't do, is they understand the power of ideas being propagated through the mass media as a potentially an enormously powerful educational force.
01:05:45
Speaker
And so we need to link education and schooling.
01:05:48
Speaker
We need to understand how they operate in different spheres.
01:05:51
Speaker
We need to understand what it means to push back.
01:05:54
Speaker
And we need to make clear, you know, what the consequences are for these kids.
01:05:59
Speaker
You know, think about it.
01:06:01
Speaker
I mean, you know, you often hear the argument, I don't want my kid being humiliated, you know, made uncomfortable.
01:06:07
Speaker
Well, you know, one of the arguments I make is, do you really want your kid to be in class where, in a classroom where,
01:06:14
Speaker
If he or she are inundated with white supremacy ideology online, they have no critical tools to recognize it.
01:06:23
Speaker
I mean, do we really want our kids to be stupid?
01:06:27
Speaker
Do you really want to make them vulnerable?
01:06:29
Speaker
If you're really talking about protecting kids, how does ignorance protect kids?
01:06:34
Speaker
You understand?
01:06:35
Speaker
I mean, these are really powerful arguments.
01:06:38
Speaker
that basically go right at the heart of not just simply are they uncomfortable, but in ways in which they're being damaged, in ways in which they're being shortchanged, in ways in which this is not just simply saying we're erasing, for instance, the history of slavery and racism, that we're erasing the possibility for your own kid to basically become an agent in the world and not be seduced by neo-Nazis.
01:07:02
Speaker
So it seems to me that there's a way of entering into that conversation that's a lot different than being defensive.
01:07:10
Speaker
And I think we need to try to understand more.
01:07:14
Speaker
Exactly.
01:07:15
Speaker
Thank you.
01:07:16
Speaker
Thank you.
01:07:18
Speaker
Shifting over to David.
01:07:20
Speaker
David, do you want to ask your question?
01:07:24
Speaker
Yes, thank you.
01:07:26
Speaker
You actually, the discussion between Henry and Chris basically took my question, which was, Henry, you talked about gangster capitalism and on the TV last night was the Godfather part two.
01:07:40
Speaker
And it reminded me that you've got to punch the gangster in the mouth, right?
01:07:45
Speaker
So when you say, respond aggressively, I think when an organization and that right
01:07:52
Speaker
only values power and values, you know, aggression.
01:07:57
Speaker
You know, sometimes you have to be that.
01:07:59
Speaker
So my question is this, how, when you talked about in your keynote being one foot in the organization, one foot in the world, you know, one foot, you know,
01:08:09
Speaker
There's the tendency, I think, especially in movements like the progressive education movement, is that sometimes it can become cannibalistic in the sense that when Michael Cuillerone grabs Fredo and says, it was you, this betrayal, when people,
01:08:26
Speaker
who go to the other side, the dark side, in a sense, and this has happened in some leaders in critical pedagogy, suddenly the outrage is, how could you betray the movement and to align yourself with these people and organizations that do harm?
01:08:42
Speaker
And maybe it's...
01:08:43
Speaker
good to be the divergent in that area and to be almost like a sneaky divergent and fix the problems within, but the problem is how that's accepted by the larger community outside.
01:08:57
Speaker
So my question I guess is, what happens when you are in a precarious situation?
01:09:02
Speaker
and you are given those, like you said, 50 years ago, you weren't given a curriculum.
01:09:07
Speaker
Well, let's say I am given a curriculum and there's not a lot of wiggle room for me to be a troublemaker.
01:09:14
Speaker
What do you suggest to those teachers who find themselves isolated from the movement,
01:09:19
Speaker
by themselves, which the, you know, which the greater world wants to do to these teachers, right?
01:09:24
Speaker
Put them in isolation.
01:09:26
Speaker
How do those teachers make change when their jobs are at risk or maybe even their lives are at risk from the reaction?
01:09:35
Speaker
Oh, no, it's a terrific question, David.
01:09:38
Speaker
And it points to three things for me.
01:09:42
Speaker
First of all, I get that question a lot from teachers who are actually in that scenario.
01:09:48
Speaker
And I think the first thing I tell them is, hey, look, first of all, you've got to figure out and find those resources where other people are in the same situation and how they're doing it, how they're dealing with it, because you don't want to be alone here.
01:10:01
Speaker
And while that may not be helpful in the most immediate sense of dealing with the monsters, so to speak, that are bearing down on you.
01:10:09
Speaker
you begin to gather resources and you begin to get a sense of hope that other people are addressing this question and trying to find ways to deal with it.
01:10:16
Speaker
And in some way, offering solutions.
01:10:18
Speaker
I mean, there's nothing I think is more important in that initial stage where you're isolated, you're threatened, you're fearful, you're scared, when all of a sudden you're part of another community that's saying, hold on, don't allow this to destroy yourself.
01:10:34
Speaker
Let's think about this.
01:10:35
Speaker
Let's look at the resources available.
01:10:37
Speaker
Let's see what we can do.
01:10:39
Speaker
You know, how can we get together somewhere else in a conference?
01:10:42
Speaker
How can we begin to share resources and deal with that?
01:10:47
Speaker
The second thing is I don't ever want to, you know, as a working class kid who grew up in enormous poverty, I have an enormous sensitivity to what it means to lose your job and to be basically not homeless, but without an income.
01:11:03
Speaker
That's a real threat.
01:11:05
Speaker
And I think we have to sometimes, in spite of the nonsense that you'll get from some left purist, we have to find ways to navigate this stuff.
01:11:15
Speaker
Navigate it to be able to keep our jobs, but never lose our dignity.
01:11:19
Speaker
You can never lose your dignity.
01:11:21
Speaker
Some of these steps are incremental for some of us, and some of them are huge, depending upon the constraints that bear down on us.
01:11:27
Speaker
And we have to be supportive of those people who are basically operating under really terrible, really terrible, harsh conditions.
01:11:36
Speaker
We have to find ways to support them, to find ways to get the resources, and to find ways to talk about how, you know, in some cases you may have to move.
01:11:45
Speaker
Sometimes you find yourself in situations that are just incredibly intolerable.
01:11:50
Speaker
And we have to think about these questions.
01:11:53
Speaker
I mean, we can't always say, stay there, suffer, good things will happen, right?
01:11:59
Speaker
I mean, that's fine, but it sounds a little Pollyannish to me.
01:12:03
Speaker
But at the same time, we have to think of the larger considerations about people's lives, how they live.
01:12:08
Speaker
The worst thing that can happen to any of us is when we become subject to a set of circumstances in which the only thing we're thinking about is surviving.
01:12:18
Speaker
When the politics of survival is the only politics you have left, you've been depoliticized.
01:12:24
Speaker
You've been depoliticized.
01:12:26
Speaker
And I think we need to resurrect this term and think about it in terms of the various conditions in which people find themselves who are being depoliticized through questions of fear and so forth and so on.
01:12:38
Speaker
It's one of the reasons why in your godfather analogy, I'm kind of smiling because when I say we have to fight back,
01:12:48
Speaker
I don't mean we assume the tactics they have.
01:12:51
Speaker
I mean, we just become very aggressive about what we stand for and what we won't tolerate.
01:12:59
Speaker
That's important.
01:13:00
Speaker
You know, the battle here, David, in one way or another, whether we like it or not, is about ideas.
01:13:08
Speaker
And it's about visions.
01:13:09
Speaker
Ideas and visions are connected to hope and they're connected to possibilities.
01:13:14
Speaker
We have a vision that doesn't close down the possibility.
01:13:17
Speaker
That's the groundswell.
01:13:19
Speaker
It's not enough.
01:13:20
Speaker
Ideas have to be married to action and action has to be married to social movements.
01:13:25
Speaker
So that's, I'm not sure that, your question is very important, very complex, and I don't wanna brush over it, you know, in some kind of general way that doesn't really address that.
01:13:39
Speaker
But thanks for asking, it's terrific.
01:13:43
Speaker
Awesome, thank you, thank you.
01:13:45
Speaker
Let's do, I'm gonna read off Rachel's and then I'll get to yours, Trevor.
01:13:50
Speaker
So Rachel has a really important question here about students in the room and doing this pedagogy with them.
01:13:59
Speaker
She says that she was struck by a powerful point made in the keynote that we need to engage in critical pedagogy that equips young people to quote, unsettle power, trouble consensus and challenge common sense.
01:14:12
Speaker
And Henry, she wants to hear
01:14:14
Speaker
what you think about this in the context in which those demanding open dialogue deny the trauma for folks with historically marginalized and minoritized identities.
Theory and Practice in Education
01:14:25
Speaker
Basically, how do we honor the need for risk-taking while still honoring that spaces have too often really caused harms to certain folks who aren't in positions of power?
01:14:36
Speaker
Another way of saying that is like, how do we ensure we're discerning discomfort versus harm to marginalized folks?
01:14:44
Speaker
I think the first thing that we want to recognize that trauma is not the basis for agency.
01:14:51
Speaker
I mean, we have to be we have to understand that we're more than victims.
01:14:54
Speaker
At the same time, we have to be sensitive to the histories that people have and where they come from in creating the kind of protective spaces where these issues can be talked about without punishing or humiliating people who engage in those issues.
01:15:07
Speaker
I mean, the one thing I don't want to see happen around that issue is I don't want to see the political collapse into the personal so that the personal becomes all there is and the only measure of how we talk about what we talk about.
01:15:19
Speaker
So it seems to me that in the first instance, you've got to create a supportive classroom where people can basically operate off the assumption you can't humiliate others.
01:15:29
Speaker
You have to listen to what they have to say and you have to be sensitive to what you say.
01:15:34
Speaker
in terms of who's in the room and what the context is and what the histories are that are flowing through that room at the moment.
01:15:40
Speaker
And it seems to me if there's the possibility for a situation that's so overly dramatic for any one particular person, we have to find ways to separate that person from the entire class in ways that we can make them feel comfortable and bring them back in so that their trauma doesn't shut off.
01:16:01
Speaker
the possibility of talking about anything that could make somebody uncomfortable or relate to a particular kind of history.
01:16:08
Speaker
And that's it is difficult.
01:16:10
Speaker
I mean, that's not an easy thing to deal with.
01:16:12
Speaker
I mean, the first issue is you have to be comfortable in that classroom.
01:16:15
Speaker
You have to learn how to take risks.
01:16:17
Speaker
You have to learn how to say things that are troubling and you have to learn how to deal with them in a way that doesn't attack the identity of the person there.
01:16:27
Speaker
I mean, the key is identities are not on trial here.
01:16:30
Speaker
What's on trial are ideas and how we navigate them and how they bear down on us and what their consequences are and how they become something more than simply personal.
01:16:44
Speaker
And I want to call attention to Hannah says in the chat that this is very affirming.
01:16:51
Speaker
She thinks about her experience in Ontario and how many educators who are doing this work are being labeled alarmist by saying that public education is being privatized.
01:17:01
Speaker
And there's a very distinctive narrative that Canada's educational foundations are so vastly different from the States, which is not true.
01:17:10
Speaker
There are a lot of similarities, which I'm sure resonates with you, Henry, given that you live in Canada.
01:17:15
Speaker
So you have that context.
01:17:19
Speaker
Trevor, I believe you're up next if you want to ask your question.
01:17:25
Speaker
Yeah, thanks.
01:17:27
Speaker
So one of the questions that I have is kind of, I think,
01:17:30
Speaker
pulling out a thread that has been emerging in the conversation is how can we sort of repair the divide that's emerging between theory and praxis?
01:17:38
Speaker
So like a lot of these ideas that we're discussing both in the conference and in this discussion are,
01:17:45
Speaker
I think kind of emergent in academic journals, they've been presented at conferences, they aren't necessarily new.
01:17:51
Speaker
But a lot of like the language that is used to present these ideas often is, you know, targeting other academics, funding, academic prestige, et cetera, instead of, you know, trying to reach practitioners.
01:18:02
Speaker
So what do you think it looks like to kind of build a coalition vertically, you know, between classroom teachers and the academy, as well as horizontally between teachers and educators in the classroom?
01:18:13
Speaker
Yeah, thanks, Trevor.
01:18:15
Speaker
It's an important question that honestly has haunted my life for 40 years.
01:18:22
Speaker
How do we talk about overcoming the binary between theory and practice, right?
01:18:27
Speaker
I mean, practice without theory seems to be uninformed.
01:18:31
Speaker
Theory without practice seems to me to be dislocated and out of touch.
01:18:36
Speaker
And it's central to me in that issue of a couple of categories that I hope will be helpful.
01:18:43
Speaker
One is I don't believe that the distinction between theoretical work and accessibility really is at odds with each other.
01:18:52
Speaker
I think we can talk in a language that's accessible.
01:18:54
Speaker
I don't care how complex it is.
01:18:56
Speaker
I completely reject the notion that ideas that are sophisticated have to be put into a language that's abstruse, arcane, and almost unintelligible.
01:19:07
Speaker
Almost unintelligible.
01:19:09
Speaker
And that means that particularly for academics in this case, you know, they have to learn how to be public intellectuals.
01:19:15
Speaker
I mean, when you're a public intellectual, you learn to speak to multiple audiences in multiple ways.
01:19:20
Speaker
And you learn that, you know, you have to be accessible and clear in order to be able to make sure that people resonate and recognize what you're saying, not only with respect to the problems they find themselves in, but with respect to who they are and what it means to engage those issues.
01:19:35
Speaker
So the question of clarity, crucial, absolutely crucial.
01:19:39
Speaker
The other side of this is that, you know, as public intellectuals, we have responsibilities.
01:19:45
Speaker
And that responsibility means that we have to be able to talk to people in ways in which they can understand what we're saying.
01:19:52
Speaker
And I don't think the argument that this is too complex to be made accessible is workable.
01:19:59
Speaker
I mean, I don't think it's fair and I think it's wrong.
01:20:04
Speaker
for people to talk in a language in which they only speak to five other people and they claim, well, that's what theory does.
01:20:10
Speaker
And that's not what theory does.
01:20:11
Speaker
That's what theory shouldn't do, actually, in my mind.
01:20:15
Speaker
Secondly, I think you have to be a border crosser.
01:20:17
Speaker
You don't mean, not only have to learn, you know, the question often is, who are you speaking for?
01:20:22
Speaker
Well, as crucial as that question is, I raise another question.
01:20:26
Speaker
That's who's listening.
01:20:28
Speaker
You know, who's listening here, right?
01:20:31
Speaker
And how do we address that issue?
01:20:33
Speaker
in some fundamental way.
01:20:35
Speaker
And if we're gonna take that question seriously, then it's not that we speak for others, it's that we speak for democracy by talking about race, talking about class, LGBTQ issues, environmental issues in ways that are both accessible and resonate with people's histories and their cultures.
01:20:53
Speaker
You know, we don't just speak for and about, we have to learn from people.
01:20:57
Speaker
And the question is, how do we enrich our own theories by basically
01:21:02
Speaker
David O' Expanding the possibilities of what they mean how they're navigated and how they're expanded in dialogue with others.
01:21:08
Speaker
David O' Because the theory action divide is often a one dimensional divide in terms of its flows, I have the theory i'll provide them from you well that's just bullshit, you know, to say the least.
01:21:23
Speaker
It seems to me there are many, many people who come into these issues with enormous experiences that they're theorizing and talking about.
01:21:30
Speaker
You know, Gramsci used to say, everybody's an intellectual.
01:21:33
Speaker
It's just that some people have the privilege of having a job in which their intellectual skills get, you get paid for that.
01:21:40
Speaker
But, you know, forgive me.
01:21:42
Speaker
I'll tell you a four-second story.
01:21:45
Speaker
I came home from college.
01:21:46
Speaker
My father was a truck driver and a mechanic.
01:21:50
Speaker
He was working on his car.
01:21:52
Speaker
And I started talking about Nietzsche.
01:21:54
Speaker
And he said, what?
01:21:55
Speaker
Nietzsche?
01:21:56
Speaker
Are you kidding?
01:21:57
Speaker
He said, look, do you know how to take this carburetor apart?
01:22:00
Speaker
Nope.
01:22:01
Speaker
He said, you know how to change a muffler?
01:22:04
Speaker
You know, and it goes on and on, right?
01:22:06
Speaker
And he said to me, let me tell you something.
01:22:07
Speaker
When you think your language is the only language that matters, you'll never learn anything in your life.
01:22:12
Speaker
And he got it.
01:22:12
Speaker
And that was a transformative moment in my life.
01:22:17
Speaker
Different people enter these conversations with different languages and different experiences.
01:22:21
Speaker
And I say to academics that understand that, grow up.
01:22:24
Speaker
Just simply grow up, you know, really.
01:22:26
Speaker
The stakes are too high to believe that theory and practice are basically at a divide in which one operates in the academy and the other operates in the realms of everyday life.
01:22:36
Speaker
Or that theory is so astruth, it can't be translated in ways that are accessible and produce enormous, it seems to me, possibilities for expanding who we are as political and social agents.
01:22:48
Speaker
So border crossing, accessibility, clarity, all these things matter.
01:22:55
Speaker
I don't know if that helps.
01:22:55
Speaker
Does that help at all?
01:22:57
Speaker
Oh, Chris.
01:23:00
Speaker
Thanks for the question, really.
01:23:03
Speaker
Nick, go ahead.
01:23:05
Speaker
Yeah, I'm hoping that to kind of balance out what can kind of be the heavy part of my question with sort of the hopeful end.
01:23:13
Speaker
So a couple of things.
01:23:16
Speaker
You know, a lot of your writing lately has really dealt with the contemporary context for, you know, where we are in terms of democratic backsliding and of not just creeping authoritarianism at this point, but barreling, you know, we're on the downhill slide into that.
01:23:35
Speaker
And so I think I'm curious to hear from you on the one hand here, kind of what do you imagine is sort of the worst case scenario here for extrapolating on the political trends as you're seeing them currently?
01:23:51
Speaker
But then the flip side of this too, one of the things...
01:23:55
Speaker
that I've grabbed onto over the last couple of years of the pandemic has been that notion of, you know, in times where nihilism and cynicism is the easy way out, that notion of radical hope could be something that we anchor ourselves to and we can anchor our work in as well.
01:24:14
Speaker
So how do we balance perhaps what you see as the worst case scenario for this with
01:24:20
Speaker
you know, needing to, needing to be, uh, needing to anchor our work and our perspectives in hope.
01:24:27
Speaker
Otherwise it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
01:24:30
Speaker
I mean, the worst case scenario we've already seen, and we saw it in the 1930s in Italy and Germany, and we saw it in Latin America, particularly in the Pinochet and Argentina and other places in the 1970s, the worst scenario was fascism.
01:24:46
Speaker
I mean, I,
01:24:47
Speaker
You know, I use that term and I don't use it lightly because I believe that fascism can emerge in different forms.
01:24:54
Speaker
It doesn't mean that it has to absolutely replicate in every possible way what we saw in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
01:25:01
Speaker
I think that's absolutely nonsense.
01:25:03
Speaker
Hannah Harant has written about that, Primo Levi.
01:25:06
Speaker
I find it hard to debate that point anymore.
01:25:09
Speaker
So yes, what I see coming is unlike anything I've seen in my lifetime.
01:25:13
Speaker
That's for sure.
01:25:14
Speaker
You know, these people are very dangerous.
01:25:18
Speaker
I think they will put people in jail.
01:25:19
Speaker
I think they'll turn schools into something that we might have seen with the evangelicals, you know, who were creating these schools to groom people to be absolutely mindless.
01:25:32
Speaker
So the threat is real.
01:25:34
Speaker
But at the same time, in terms of your latter question, the way I enter that discourse is that without hope, there's no agency.
01:25:43
Speaker
Without hope, there's no sense of being able to imagine how to fight this stuff
01:25:48
Speaker
and what a different future might look like.
01:25:50
Speaker
Without hope, there's cynicism and despair.
01:25:53
Speaker
So in the long run, you can't have politics without hope.
01:25:57
Speaker
And I'm not willing to give up politics.
01:26:00
Speaker
And I'm not willing to suggest this is not a political question anymore.
01:26:03
Speaker
I don't want to reduce this issue to an existential question.
01:26:07
Speaker
And I think that we have a long history of people who have resisted, even in the camps they resisted.
01:26:14
Speaker
As my partner, my wife, Rania, reminded me,
01:26:18
Speaker
the other day, in the camps, people even fell in love, you know, I mean, which is not to, in some way, downplay the horror here.
01:26:27
Speaker
But I'm always amazed at what it is about human beings, even in the worst of times, and their ability to resist, you know, and their ability to fight back, their ability not to look away.
01:26:41
Speaker
I'm always moved by that, you know, and it seems to me that
01:26:45
Speaker
when I put it into a larger context, it's very simple.
01:26:48
Speaker
The choices between hope and deep politicization, the choices between hope and the possibility of a better world, the choices between hope and cynicism, the choices between hope and the ability to imagine that resistance matters.
01:27:04
Speaker
And I'm not talking about a notion of hope that in some fundamental way, you know, we see in Disney, right?
01:27:12
Speaker
I mean,
01:27:13
Speaker
You know, hope is different.
01:27:14
Speaker
Hope is it assesses the reality of what we have to face and then addresses those realities.
01:27:21
Speaker
So, I mean, even in even in the world of Disney, I mean, can you imagine?
01:27:26
Speaker
I mean, they actually forced the LGBTQ people forced Disney to reverse its position around what, of course, DeSantis was doing, who was, to me, one of the most dangerous people in the United States, more so than even Abbott.
01:27:42
Speaker
So I think that that question of hope is not as important, I think it's crucial.
01:27:49
Speaker
And I think we have to rescue it from its often depoliticized, Pollyannish, oh, let's all pray together, you know, after a school shooting.
01:27:58
Speaker
We'll pray together.
01:27:58
Speaker
Well, not really.
01:27:59
Speaker
You know, let's act together.
01:28:02
Speaker
Not pray together, simply act together.
01:28:03
Speaker
You want to pray, that's fine.
01:28:05
Speaker
But let's act together.
01:28:06
Speaker
Let's do everything we can to address these issues, mobilize, stop them, and confront these issues
01:28:11
Speaker
in ways that in some ways suggest there are no guarantees.
01:28:15
Speaker
There are no guarantees of what we're all doing here.
01:28:18
Speaker
And the only way in which you can take that question seriously is to imagine a politics that's infused with struggle and hope.
01:28:25
Speaker
That's it.
01:28:26
Speaker
I don't know if we're gonna win, but I know this, the stakes are too high not to win.
01:28:32
Speaker
That's the
Challenges of Neoliberal Ideologies
01:28:33
Speaker
key.
01:28:33
Speaker
Does that make sense?
01:28:36
Speaker
Thank you.
01:28:37
Speaker
Yeah, that's...
01:28:40
Speaker
Nick, does that address the question?
01:28:42
Speaker
Yeah.
01:28:44
Speaker
So we have about 10 minutes left here.
01:28:46
Speaker
Feel free again to either raise your hand and or ask a question in the chat.
01:28:49
Speaker
I do have a quick question here and then links I'll have, I'll turn it over to you.
01:28:54
Speaker
This kind of relates back to Trevor's question.
01:28:57
Speaker
The folks here are mostly educators, but there's also authors and researchers, professional developers, or any combination of those things.
01:29:06
Speaker
When we blend together,
01:29:08
Speaker
teaching and business to keep the doors open.
01:29:11
Speaker
The dangers of embracing funding to grow our reach and spread these ideas in this very neoliberal space.
01:29:18
Speaker
How do you and folks that are spreading their ideas go about doing that at a mass scale when the things that you're talking about aren't necessarily easily marketed, whether it be like us getting like a grant or publishing ideas through a publisher or whatever it might be.
01:29:33
Speaker
How do we spread our ideas without
01:29:36
Speaker
kind of being corrupted by the institutions?
01:29:38
Speaker
I think the first thing you don't want to do is be a purist.
01:29:41
Speaker
I mean, the first thing you don't want to do, I would reject this by saying corporations are evil and therefore we want to accept money and that's it.
01:29:47
Speaker
I'm sorry.
01:29:48
Speaker
You know, people are being thrown under the bus.
01:29:51
Speaker
And I think that we need to make a distinction between what I would call acceptable reforms and the strategies that emerge from them and what I would call the necessity for a radical transformation of the existing society.
01:30:05
Speaker
You know, if I can convince a corporation with no hands, no attachments to provide endless amounts of money in order to make sure that the kids that come into my school have school lunches, I'm sorry, I'm gonna do that.
01:30:19
Speaker
And I'm not gonna respond, overly respond to the stupid criticism that I've sold out, right?
01:30:25
Speaker
It's one thing to get the money with no qualifications and tell these corporations they're really great citizen corporations,
01:30:31
Speaker
That's fine.
01:30:32
Speaker
But at the same time, I know in the back of my head, they have to go.
01:30:36
Speaker
You know, that in the long run, I don't want corporations that dominate politics under any fundamental way.
01:30:45
Speaker
And that's an argument against capitalism.
01:30:47
Speaker
That's what that argument is.
01:30:48
Speaker
But I need to be able to understand the context and the separations for these arguments in ways that allow us to be more flexible and to help people who in the most immediate sense need that help.
01:31:02
Speaker
The urgency of the issue should dictate the degree to which we're willing to step and have one foot in and one foot out.
01:31:10
Speaker
And when sometimes that one foot in is absolutely essential.
01:31:14
Speaker
It's essential, right?
01:31:15
Speaker
Corporations says, I want to give cameras to kids.
01:31:17
Speaker
Can you, will you do that?
01:31:19
Speaker
You bet I will, as long as they don't dictate what the curriculum is.
01:31:23
Speaker
And as long as they don't dictate what I have to say, and as long as they don't dictate some fundamental imposition on the autonomy that I might have as a teacher to produce what I'm doing both in my class and outside of.
01:31:33
Speaker
Awesome.
01:31:38
Speaker
Thank you.
01:31:38
Speaker
Thank you.
01:31:39
Speaker
That's a perfect answer.
01:31:42
Speaker
We probably have time for two more, maybe three more questions.
01:31:46
Speaker
Links, go ahead.
01:31:46
Speaker
Thank you.
01:31:50
Speaker
Thank you very much for the space.
01:31:52
Speaker
driven me to challenge myself a lot.
01:31:54
Speaker
And I think my question is along, how do we challenge neoliberal thinking?
01:32:03
Speaker
I live in a context where there is barely any left.
01:32:08
Speaker
And so the existence is the far right and then neoliberalism and this idea.
01:32:14
Speaker
And this is where you find any kind of democratic values or human rights values.
01:32:21
Speaker
A lot of the people I work with as an educator are neoliberalists and I'm very interested in how to bring the understanding that these problems are not personal, not individualistic.
01:32:36
Speaker
I was very interested.
01:32:38
Speaker
There's a saying that is said a lot in LGBT education, which is that the personal is political.
01:32:46
Speaker
And
01:32:47
Speaker
it is interesting the way that has been used to turn the political into personal, as if simply existing outside the norms of society is enough resistance.
01:32:59
Speaker
And we don't have to do anything beyond that.
01:33:02
Speaker
And so I'm interested in how do you challenge those ideas?
01:33:05
Speaker
How do you have that conversation?
01:33:10
Speaker
Or where do we start this conversation?
01:33:12
Speaker
Sure.
01:33:13
Speaker
It's a terrific question.
01:33:15
Speaker
And I think that, first of all,
01:33:17
Speaker
Neoliberalism has to be named.
01:33:19
Speaker
You have to know what its ideas are.
01:33:21
Speaker
You have to know what the assumptions are that basically drive it.
01:33:24
Speaker
And you have to come to grips with, in very vivid ways, about how undemocratic it is.
01:33:30
Speaker
I mean, it has nothing to do with democracy.
01:33:32
Speaker
It basically undermines democracy.
01:33:34
Speaker
Whether we're talking about the claim that self-interest is the only thing that matters.
01:33:39
Speaker
How do you have a society where self-interest is the only thing that matters?
01:33:42
Speaker
How do you have a society that sanctions money driving politics?
01:33:46
Speaker
How do you have a society that privatizes everything and hates the public good?
01:33:49
Speaker
How do you have a society that claims in some fundamental way that the only purpose of the government is to basically protect markets when market values have nothing to do basically with human needs?
01:33:59
Speaker
So I think that what you have to do here is you have to build a case to make clear how this ideology since the 1970s has caused massive amounts of damage in terms of staggering inequalities.
01:34:13
Speaker
the flight from any sense of social responsibility, the denial of the importance of human needs over the accumulation of capital and human profits.
01:34:24
Speaker
You have to name it.
01:34:25
Speaker
You have to break it down.
01:34:27
Speaker
You have to make clear how anti-democratic it is.
01:34:29
Speaker
And you have to make clear why we need to fight it if we believe in public goods, if we believe in the social.
01:34:35
Speaker
You can't have a society that makes a claim to democracy when it denies the social.
01:34:41
Speaker
It just simply denies it.
01:34:43
Speaker
You know, when it denies public goods, when it denies in any fundamental way and sees as cruel, I mean, sees as a disadvantage, compassion and justice.
01:34:55
Speaker
I mean, look, you know, when you look at people from Hayek to Friedman now, Milton Friedman, when you look at these people, the one thing that stands out in their neoliberal hysteria is that
01:35:13
Speaker
The one thing we should divorce ourselves from is any sense of social responsibility.
01:35:18
Speaker
The second thing they say is all problems are individual problems.
01:35:22
Speaker
Think about it.
01:35:23
Speaker
You individualize everything and you utterly depoliticize people.
01:35:27
Speaker
You really wanna solve the ecological problem?
01:35:29
Speaker
Make sure your green bin is full.
01:35:32
Speaker
Make sure you use a green bin, right?
01:35:36
Speaker
Thirdly, they prevent in that ideology by privatizing everything, they prevent the possibility, it seems to me, of translating private troubles into larger systemic issues.
01:35:49
Speaker
I mean, when neoliberals say they're in favor of freedom, but not justice, think about it.
01:35:56
Speaker
Think about what freedom means in this case.
01:35:58
Speaker
It means you can ignore science and kill your grandmother, if not your children, right?
01:36:04
Speaker
by claiming, oh, it's all about my freedom.
01:36:06
Speaker
Well, that's not what freedom is about.
01:36:08
Speaker
It's not just about self-interest.
01:36:09
Speaker
It's about the public good.
01:36:10
Speaker
It's about the common good.
01:36:12
Speaker
It's about the social contract.
01:36:13
Speaker
And my argument about neoliberalism is it destroys the social contract, destroys democracy, and destroys all the elements.
01:36:20
Speaker
So that when you say to me, as you mentioned, that the political now, the personal is political now that's been turned around, that's a neoliberal ideology.
01:36:32
Speaker
It's an ideology that individualizes everything, even the political, and says to you, yeah, that's interesting.
01:36:38
Speaker
You're right.
01:36:39
Speaker
That's all there is, is the personal, right?
01:36:42
Speaker
We have to know when we're inhabiting a neoliberal ideology and not aware of it, and not even be aware of how seductive that can be in terms of the issues that are being posed and the way we respond to them.
Conclusion and Future Events
01:37:00
Speaker
Thank you.
01:37:00
Speaker
Thank you.
01:37:01
Speaker
This is, this has been incredible.
01:37:02
Speaker
And the hour went by so quickly.
01:37:07
Speaker
Before I address some upcoming things going off the conference again, thank you, Henry, for being here.
01:37:12
Speaker
Do you have any closing remarks or closing statements you'd like to make to the group before we wrap up?
01:37:18
Speaker
Yeah, I'd like to say, first of all, thank you for inviting me.
01:37:20
Speaker
I'm very honored.
01:37:22
Speaker
And I, I can't tell you how important I think our jobs are as educators.
01:37:29
Speaker
I mean,
01:37:30
Speaker
You're the last line of defense.
01:37:32
Speaker
And I mean that.
01:37:33
Speaker
You're the last line of defense.
01:37:35
Speaker
We need to defend what we do.
01:37:37
Speaker
We need to defend the importance of education.
01:37:40
Speaker
We need to link it to questions of democracy.
01:37:43
Speaker
We need to make clear that all education is a struggle over identities.
01:37:47
Speaker
It's a struggle over agency.
01:37:48
Speaker
It's a struggle over hope.
01:37:50
Speaker
And it's a struggle over the future.
01:37:51
Speaker
So don't give up hope.
01:37:53
Speaker
Fight as hard as you can.
01:37:54
Speaker
Never allow yourself to be stupid.
01:37:57
Speaker
feel completely alone, and take some hope in the sense that the outcomes of what we're seeing are not guaranteed here.
01:38:07
Speaker
Sometimes history changes in a way that's often unexplicable and not anticipated, and that's where we want to go.
01:38:17
Speaker
Thank you.
01:38:17
Speaker
Thank you so much.
01:38:18
Speaker
Seriously, it's an honor to have you here with us and to share these ideas with us.
01:38:23
Speaker
I want to remind everyone that today there is a video released of Dr. Nita Jones keynote, which connects almost too well to Henry's speech.
01:38:34
Speaker
She is the co-editor of Black Lives Matter at School and a member of the Black Lives Matter at School steering committee.
01:38:40
Speaker
Make sure you watch that because we'll have a Q&A session with her tomorrow at 11 a.m.
01:38:45
Speaker
Eastern.
01:38:45
Speaker
And then if you want, in about an hour or so, you can join David Buck, who's with us in the Zoom call to talk about growing the movement in online spaces and what we can do kind of logistically to organize ourselves online.
01:38:59
Speaker
So again, Henry, thank you for being here with us.
01:39:02
Speaker
It's been awesome.
01:39:03
Speaker
And we'll talk to you all really soon.
01:39:05
Speaker
Thank you.
01:39:06
Speaker
Bye-bye.
01:39:11
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Project's podcast.
01:39:14
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
01:39:18
Speaker
You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.