Henry Giroux Quotes

The new illiteracy is about more than not knowing how to read the book or the word; it is about not knowing how to read the world.

Think of the question of mass incarceration. Think of the coding that the Republican Party has used for years, whether they're talking about Obama or blacks or Willie Horton.

Getting ahead cannot be the only motive that motivates people. You have to imagine what a good life is.

Collective freedom provides the basic conditions for people to narrate their own lives, hold power accountable, and embrace a capacious notion of human dignity.

The present generation has been born into a throwaway society of consumers in which both goods and young people are increasingly objectified and disposable.

The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current.

America has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated.

War is one of the nation's most honored virtues, and its militaristic values now bear down on almost every aspect of American life.

It is precisely through the indeterminate nature of history that resistance becomes possible and politics refuses any guarantees and remains open.

Under neoliberalism, culture appears to have largely abandoned its role as a site of critique.

Within neoliberal narratives, youth are mostly defined as a consumer market, a drain on the economy, or stand for trouble.

Everyone, especially minorities of race and ethnicity, now live under a surveillance panoptican.

Look, in neoliberalism the ruling elite understand something.

Youth are no longer the place where society reveals its dreams.

Collective freedom is one devoid of material bondage and one that supports the institutions necessary for democracy.

Public problems collapse into the limited and depoliticized register of private issues.

Justified by the war on drugs, the United States is in the midst of a prison binge made obvious by the fact that since 1970, the number of people behind bars... has increased 600 percent.

Young people refuse the notion that financialization defines the only acceptable definition of exchange, one that is based exclusively on the reductionist notion of buying and selling.

War provides jobs, profits, political payoffs, research funds, and forms of political and economic power that reach into every aspect of society.

Very little appears to escape the infantilizing and moral vacuity of the market.

The market-driven spectacle of war demands a culture of conformity, quiet intellectuals and a largely passive republic of consumers.

The domestic war against "terrorists" [code for young protesters] provides new opportunities for major defense contractors and corporations who are becoming more a part of our domestic lives.

Students, in particular, now find themselves in a world in which heightened expectations have been replaced by dashed hopes.

Violence comes in many forms and can be particularly disturbing when confronted in an educational setting if handled dismissively or in ways that blame victims.

Once ignorance is weaponized, violence seems to be a tragic inevitability.

We need to remember that education can be both a basis for critical thought and a site for repression, which destroys thinking and leads to violence.

Youth are becoming the site of society's nightmares.

Social solidarities are torn apart, furthering the retreat into orbits of the private that undermine those spaces that nurture non-commodified knowledge, values, critical exchange and civic literacy.

At the same time, you see in those studies, you see the emergence of various movements among black youth that are really challenging the ideology of neoliberalism since the 1980s.

Neoliberal ideology is enormously powerful.

Within neoliberal narratives, the message is clear: Buy/ sell/ or be punished.

The promises of higher education and previously enviable credentials have turned into the swindle of fulfillment.

The generation of youth in the early 21st century has no way of grasping if they will ever be free from the gnawing sense of the transience, indefiniteness, and provisional nature of any settlement.

The architecture of war and violence is now matched by a barrage of goods parading as fashion.

Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, schools are feeding our prisons.

The war on terror, rebranded under Obama as the "Overseas Contingency Operation," has morphed into war on democracy.

As modern society is formed against the backdrop of a permanent war zone, a carceral state and hyper-militarism, the social stature of the military and soldiers has risen.

I also think that one of the things we often fail to realize is that that kind of violence is now legitimated in multiple public spheres.

Everyone is now a potential terrorist.

As the welfare state is hollowed out, a culture of compassion is replaced by a culture of violence, cruelty and disposability.

Young people refuse to be defined exclusively as consumers rather than as workers, and they reject the notion that the only interests that matter are monetary.

Today, there is a new focus on public values, the need for broad-based movements for solidarity, and alternative conceptions of politics, democracy and justice.

In some cities such as Washington, DC, that 75 percent of young black men can expect to serve time in prison.

Education must become central to any viable notion of politics willing to imagine a life and future outside of casino capitalism.

Any collective struggle that matters has to embrace education as the center of politics and the source of an embryonic vision of the good life outside of the imperatives of predatory capitalism.

Historical and public memory is not merely on the side of domination.

Young black men in America have an identity ascribed to them that is a direct legacy of slavery.

Young black men are considered dangerous, expendable, threatening and part of a culture of criminality.

Young children are being arrested and subjected to court appearances for behaviors that can only be termed as trivial.

Increasingly, poor minority and white youth are being funneled directly from schools into prison.