EDucate!

For us the greatest success of EDucate! has not been the growing number of subscribers or increasing sales; we believe that the most significant and rewarding experience has been the connection that we have been able to establish with a worldwide struggle for social justice, freedom and democracy. Where we might have raised some eyebrows by what Chomsky calls, speaking truth to power, we have also made long-lasting friendships and intellectual bonds.

One of our most cherished bonds is with Dr. Henry Giroux, one of the world’s greatest educators. We have had the privilege to speak with him over the telephone and were overwhelmed by the energy and dynamism in his voice. After speaking with him for only a couple of minutes we realized why he is considered one of the most inspirational teachers. Imagine what it would be like to attend his classes in person?

We then e-mailed him and asked him if we could do a cover story on his contributions to educational philosophy and in the Critical Theory tradition. We were humbled by his support. As the semester started he could not respond to our exclusive queries but he has promised to conduct an exclusive interview with us in one of the forthcoming editions of EDucate!

What follows will introduce you to the intellectual power of Giroux’s thoughts on critical pedagogy, radical education and the role of schools and teachers in society. We have not tried to rewrite or explain any of his work (a) because we do not feel intellectually or academically equipped to do so (b) his original expression is so powerful that we did not want to tarnish the flair and tenacity of his ideas. We owe our cover story heavily to Carlos Alberto Torres and his interview with Giroux in his fantastic collection of dialogues titled Education, Power and Personal Biography, 1998. Some key sections are excerpted from the introductory chapter of Border Crossing, 1992. Giroux’s critique on traditional schooling has been excerpted from his revolutionary book Teachers as Intellectuals, 1988. Giroux’s call for redefining the purpose and meaning of schooling has been taken from his essay/talk Children’s Culture in the Making: Disney’s Animated Films, 1998. Freire’s and Peter’s comments on Giroux have also been taken from Teachers as Intellectuals, 1988.

Lastly, we would like to thank our friend Laurie Williams and her beautiful website Rage and Hope for providing us with the clear road map on handling an intellectual powerhouse such as Giroux in an efficient manner.

In retrospect

I never intended to be a teacher. After high school, I received a basketball scholarship to a junior college but dropped out and then worked for two years in various jobs. Fortunately, I received another basketball scholarship and it happened to be at a teachers' college. I then went on scholarship to Appalachian State University for a Master's in history, and my education began in earnest because I was assigned as a teaching assistant to a professor who was extremely progressive and radical politically. I learned more from him than I did in all of my formal education up to that point. I started graduate school in 1967 and the country was in turmoil. It was a great period to learn about politics, power, and knowledge outside of the university. After getting my Master's, I taught secondary school for seven years in a small town outside of Baltimore. The town was marked by deep racial divisions, economically and culturally, and the school was heavily segregated in the sense that very few blacks were placed in the college-bound track. I found myself confronted with an institutional and cultural register of racism that I didn't have a language to understand or confront. Tracking seemed so natural to me at that point that I did not equate it at first with a form of racial, gender, and class injustice. The experience radicalized me. In 1967, I became a community organizer trying to change the school. I worked in the black community for one year. And I got fired because of that-because I tried to democratize the school organization and the curriculum.

So I came back to New England and got a job in a suburban school. Coming from a working-class background, I found it very difficult to work with students who were upper middle class, white, and extremely privileged. This proved to be a very difficult terrain for me to negotiate. The school was in Barrington, Rhode Island. I taught there for about six years. These kids were on the fast track for academic and economic mobility. I certainly provided them with alternative ways of seeing the world, but the work just was not rewarding for me. I was also getting tired as a high school teacher. The work was overbearing. It was exhausting. Moreover, I was starting to seriously study radical social theory. I felt it was time to move on and do something that would have a more profound impact.

Teaching for Social Justice

I was teaching in the Social Studies department. The schools were experimenting with their curricula. I was given the freedom to teach courses out of the usual run-of-the-mill orthodoxy. I taught a course on society and alienation, as well as courses on race and feminism. My course on feminism garnered the attention of some right-wing fundamentalists in the community, and the school committee held a public hearing. The story made the local news and a number of right-wing fundamentalist preachers announced on their radio programs that a left-wing feminist was teaching in a local high school. The Right mobilized and managed to convince the school to take my class texts off the library reserve shelves. I didn't use the prescribed books. I would buy five copies of each book and put them on reserve. We were reading books you couldn't get to through normal channels. Plus, I was renting films from the American French Service Committee at five bucks a whack. Even though I had to finance my own courses, it was a great teaching experience, but it caused quite an uproar in the community. My days were numbered after that.

Soon afterwards, I attended a conference on the new Social Studies and met a wonderful guy named Ted Fenton. I raised a number of questions at his conference and after it ended, he invited me to join the doctoral program at Carnegie Mellon University. He was a very gracious and kind guy, and in many ways, helped change my life. He arranged a scholarship for me and off I went. It was truly by happenstance. I got my doctorate in 1977. Soon afterwards, I landed a job at Boston University. My theoretical life took a very specific turn while there. It was a very exciting time to be teaching and studying critical educational theory and practice. Within a few years, I wrote my first book, Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling, which was a real initiation into the necessity of doing rigorous theoretical work. Even now, the book seems relevant to me.

The Shadows of Ignorance

... in 1983 my life changed dramatically. Quite unexpectedly, I was denied tenure by John Silber, the president of Boston University. My tenure process was relatively straightforward. I was given an unanimous vote at all levels of academic review. At the university level, the vote was 13 to 0 in my favor. There were twenty-seven cases up for tenure that year and only three were unanimous. I was one of them. My dean told me he would resign if I did not get tenure and he publicly announced his intentions. I guess he was quite surprised when the provost informed him that I would not be given tenure, in spite of the reviews. In order to avoid any academic embarrassment, Silber decided to go beyond the normal channels of the review process and established his own ad hoc review committee, which included Nathan Glazer, Chester Finn, and others, all of whom were quite slimy. I chose one member of the committee – Michael Apple. The other two choices were out of my hands. Once the reviews came back, I had a meeting with Silber. He made the following offer to me: if I didn't publish or write anything for two years and studied the history of logic and science with him personally as my tutor he would maintain my current salary and I could be reconsidered for tenure. Of course, I declined and started applying for jobs, eventually landing one at Miami University.

He (Silber) had a copy of Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling, and he said, "I hear you're such a great teacher. Why do you write such shit? One of the reasons you're not getting tenure is because of this. Turn to page 34." Or whatever it was. I'm thinking, "God, what is on this page that is so serious?" Then it dawned on me. I had ended a sentence or quote with a reference something like "Horkheimer 1965." He argued that I should have put in the original publication date instead of the later publication date. I was flabbergasted. I said, "Is this a joke?" And he said, "No, this is what scholarship is about." Of course, it was a cheap shot, an attempt to make his case when in fact he didn't have one. I later got back the copy of my book that Silber had used. The book looked brand new. He had only read and marked up the first half of the introduction. The rest of the book was unmarked and appeared to have been unread.

Living Paulo’s Praxis

…It was Paulo Freire's work that gripped me theoretically, because I read him at that period in my life when I was a high school teacher struggling with the politics of education as part of my own life. When I found Freire's work, I discovered a language that I could use to give forceful expression to my own emotions, to the gut-wrenching feelings about the contradictions in which I found myself as an educator.

I've always felt that whatever contribution I made to critical pedagogy was very modest compared to others in the field. I associate critical pedagogy with the work of Paulo Freire. And I think that anyone who took up that field, in some way, had to begin with him whether they liked him or not. Regardless of Paulo's initial theoretical flaws, especially around gender, the fact of the matter is that he gave the term a political importance that it had lacked until his work appeared.

Paulo was crucial in forecasting a number of theoretical interventions, including work in postcolonial theory, cultural studies, critical adult education, literacy and language studies, and the primacy of politics in education. Moreover, his was a social and theoretical project, it was not simply about methodology or practice. Paulo's work suggests at least three important interventions: One, he exemplified what it meant to be a broader intellectual. Paulo was never at home in one place. Paulo's gaze around the questions of power and possibility cut across continents and borders. Second, he revitalized the relationship between theory and practice as an act of politics and struggle for social justice. Third, Paulo gave us a sense of what commitment was. Paulo was a provocateur who gave his life over to struggling for, and with others, and made pedagogy the central defining principle of how you take up questions of agency, power, and politics. Paulo was, for me, a great teacher, a model of humility and inspiration. Many people have labeled me a Freirian, but that label is antithetical to everything Paulo represents. One didn't imitate Paulo, one tried to use his work as a theory rather than as a method, and this meant one had to be a producer of theory rather than one who simply implements other's theories. I used his work along with the work of others within a political project that was specific to my own context, problems, and concerns.

Giroux’s Revolution

It is important to stress that I draw upon and work in a critical tradition to which many people have contributed. If my work has been selected by some as expressing, in a forceful way, that position, that's different than saying that I'm responsible for that position. I'm not. I was lucky enough to be writing about issues at a historical time when a number of important theoretical considerations were being debated and many brilliant people were on the scene. I would not have had those ideas if other people weren't doing it as well.

First, I tried to reinvigorate the debates in the 1970s around theory and resistance by challenging the notion that domination was so oppressive that schools could only be talked about as either prisons or total institutions in the service of oppression. It was an unproductive discourse, and, because it ignored any space for resistance or the complex ways in which power worked, I also wanted to broaden the relationship between schooling and society beyond class by reasserting the issue of general emancipation, and specifically the issue of democracy. Democracy as an articulation was capable of engaging class, race, and gender, but in a way that related them to the broader concerns of public life. I wanted to tie the concept of resistance not merely to the language of critique but also to the language of possibility, one that engaged what it meant to deepen and expand the possibilities of democratic public life.

Secondly, my long-time concern with the role of teachers as intellectuals has certainly been an organizing principle for much of my work. It underwent a number of revisions, moving from a concern with teachers as transformative intellectuals to the more political role of teachers as public intellectuals. This provided me with the theoretical tools to talk about public intellectuals as cultural workers who inhabited a diverse number of pedagogical sites, including, but not reduced to, schools.

Third, my work on popular culture made it possible for me to cross disciplines and write and publish in other fields outside of education.

Fourth, I think my work contributed to a growing recognition of the importance of pedagogy in other fields, including composition, literary studies, speech communication, media studies, and so on. This is not to suggest that people were not doing important work in these fields around education, but my work helped bring a number of these fields together in recognizing the scholarly work going on in education.

A Guide to Critical Thinking

I do a lot of reading and I try to see relationships among ideas, gestate new ideas, and try to figure out how what I read will lead me to challenge my initial concerns or lead me in a new direction. I cut and paste everything I read. I figure out the ideas that matter the most, I take them out of an article, paste them up, and then go back and read them in their most forceful and condensed form.

As I read, for example an article, I make insertions in the margins around ideas that I think are crucial to the article. These "organizing ideas" really represent the shorthand for gaining access quickly to the most important aspects of the article as I interpret them. I then duplicate sections of an article that contain the organizing ideas I have marked. Once I do that, I read the condensed version of the article again, take notes, and create a cover sheet. This provides me with a very quick way of reviewing a piece. It allows me to see relationships that ordinarily would be difficult to recognize.

The most difficult part of writing for me is not the lack of ideas to write about, but rather figuring out how to develop a problematic in which to explore an idea and then how to sequence it. That is a real challenge in my own writing and one I take quite seriously. I can't write anything until I have figured out where I am going with a project, how I am going to develop it, and where it is going to end up.

The Sublime Teacher

My courses are all seminars. I prescribe the materials I think are important but the students have to write papers and defend their positions. This is the basis of a 15-week working-through process. I don't care what positions the students take. I want them to be able to justify whatever position they do take so they come out with a clearer sense of what they believe in and what effects that might have. I think what I really do is politicize the process of education in the minds of the students. As soon as you say people can be agents in the act of learning you politicize the issue of schooling. It becomes political in the best sense of the word, which is to say that students have to become self-conscious about the kinds of social relationships that undergird the learning process. That's a political issue. Another thing I take very seriously in my teaching is illustrating principles with a sense of voice, with somebody's story. There are experiences out there that illuminate larger questions of educational philosophy. We can, for example, talk about the hidden curriculum of racism, about what black kids have to give up to become academically successful and we can do this through their own voices. Or we can talk about people who have no community of memories. We can talk about people who are defined by such a non-belief in the common good that they can't even imagine an alternative vision according to anything other than highly individualistic and egotistical norms. Those stories are important. That is one of the reasons I have a lot of trouble with liberal and procedural morality. It eliminates the stories in favor of abstract rules. Of course, we need to understand that these stories by themselves do not always speak for themselves. But they can become the basis for analyzing a whole range of considerations that are often hidden in the stories. Experience never simply speaks for itself. The language that we bring to it determines its meaning.

It (teaching) is very hard work. That is why teachers need to be intellectuals, to realize that teaching is a form of mediation between different persons and different groups of persons and we can't be good mediators unless we are aware of what the referents of the mediation we engage in are. Teaching is complex, much more complex than mastering a body of knowledge and implementing curriculums. The thing about teaching is that the specificity of the context is always central. We can't get away with invoking rules and procedures that cut across contexts.

About his Students

My students have been for the entirety of my career, without any question whatsoever, the life-sustaining force that kept me going. I love my students, especially their energy, critical openness, and their ability to move in and out of different theoretical terrains.

They have always provided for me an inspiration, and model of hope and learning. Students represent not just people you work with, they also represent a vision for the future. I am never concerned about the particularities of their politics as much as I am about their ability to think critically, to defend their positions, to be sensitive to what it means to address a certain degree of social and political responsibility for what they say and do. My own teaching is rooted in doing all I can to provide the pedagogical conditions that enable them to become agents, capable of governing and not just being governed, being able to take control of their own lives and how they mediate it with the larger society. If they adopt a left, progressive position, that would be great. But if they become critical agents in ways that question the pedagogy of their own self-formation, and link that with the ethical imperative to be able to define their lives in relation to others outside of merely instrumental criteria, I am satisfied. I plant seeds. And I hope that the planting of seeds will flower in ways that will eventually payoff for the students that I have and for the country in which I live. It's not a giant dream; it's a dream in moderation. It's a dream with constraints.

On Radical Education

Radical education doesn't refer to a discipline or a body of knowledge. It suggests a particular kind of practice and a particular posture of questioning received institutions and received assumptions. I would say in a general way that the basic premises of radical education grew out of the crisis in social theory. More specifically, we can distinguish three traits: radical education is interdisciplinary in nature, it questions the fundamental categories of all disciplines, and it has a public mission of making society more democratic. This last point is perhaps the principal reason why radical education as a field is so exciting. We can take ideas and apply them.

On Being Critical

I can't conceive of a radical position that is not at the same time, and even in the first instance, critical both in historical terms about the ways schools have evolved in this country and ideologically in terms of the particular kinds of values that operate in our schools and in our practices of education. Critical education operates on two basic assumptions. One, there is a need for a language of critique, a questioning of presuppositions. Radical educators, for example, criticize and indeed reject the notion that the primary purpose of public education is economic efficiency. Schools are more than company stores. They have the much more radical purpose of educating citizens. Which is why the second base assumption of radical education is a language of possibility. It goes beyond critique to elaborate a positive language of human empowerment.

On Radical Empowerment

It is the ability to think and act critically. This notion has a double reference: to the individual and to society. The freedom and human capacities of individuals must be developed to their maximum but individual powers must be linked to democracy in the sense that social betterment must be the necessary consequence of individual flourishing. Radical educators look upon schools as social forms. Those forms should educate the capacities people have to think, to act, to be subjects, and to be able to understand the limits of their ideological commitments. That's a radical paradigm. Radical educators believe that the relationship between social forms and social capacities is such that human capacities get educated to the point of calling into question the forms themselves. What the dominant educational philosophies want is to educate people to adapt to those social forms rather than critically interrogate them. Democracy is a celebration of difference, the politics of difference, I call it, and the dominant philosophies fear this.

About his Philosophy

I find myself frequently falling back on a distinction John Dewey made over forty years ago between “education as a function of society” and “society as a function of education.” In other words, are schools to uncritically serve and reproduce the existing society or challenge the social order to develop and advance its democratic imperatives? Obviously, I opt for the latter. I believe schools are the major institutions for educating students for public life. More specifically, I believe that schools should function to provide students with, the knowledge, character, and moral vision that build civic courage.

On the ‘Deformity’ of Educational Reforms

Most of them (educational reforms) have to my way of thinking been misguided. What has been the thrust of these reforms? Back to basics, merit pay, a standardized curriculum, raising test scores, evaluation criteria, and the like. This is just another version of the technological fix that ignores the philosophical questions. It is quantifying the educational process in a belief that the outcome will be some kind of excellence or economic competence.

All of this suggests to me that those who are pushing these reforms have no educational philosophy at all. We have to ask what the purposes of education are, what kind of citizens we hope to produce. To say that test scores are the answer is to beg the question of "What do test scores measure anyway?"

Here is a story that perfectly illustrates the point. Joe Clark, a school principal in Newark, has been touted by many reformers as the paragon of what an inner school educator should be. How does Clark operate? He marches through the halls of his school with a bullhorn and a baseball bat, publicly berating anybody who flouts his authority. When students misbehave they must learn the school anthem and sing it over the P.A. system. Clark is given credit for restoring authority to the school and for raising the test scores of his students. What that report omits is that some nine hundred students, most of them minorities, have been expelled to roam the streets with bleak prospects. One has to ask: What educational philosophy motivates this kind of action? What sense of learning do students get? How do teachers teach in such a context?

It brings to the fore for me the crucial role of pedagogy and the question of how we learn to become subjects who engage not only our own self-formation but the possibilities for society at any given time. How does one come to self-understanding? How does one situate oneself in history? How do we relate questions of knowledge to power? How do we understand the limitations of our institutions, or even of our age?

Those are pedagogical questions. Radical educators understand them to be political questions as well. But let's face it, this is a lost discourse. None of the many recent reports about educational reform even scratches the surface of this problem.

On Traditional Schooling

The rationality that dominates traditional views of schooling and curriculum is rooted in the narrow concerns for effectiveness, behavioral objectives, and principles of learning that treat knowledge as something to be consumed and schools as merely instructional sites designed to pass onto students a "common" culture and set of skills that will enable them to operate effectively in the wider society.

Steeped in the logic of technical rationality, the problematic of traditional curriculum theory and schooling centers on questions about the most thorough or most efficient ways to learn specific kinds of knowledge, to create moral consensus, and to provide modes of schooling that reproduce the existing society. For instance, traditional educators may ask how the school should seek to attain a certain predefined goal, but they rarely ask why such a goal might be beneficial to some socioeconomic groups and not to others, or why schools, as they are presently organized, tend to block the possibility that specific classes will attain a measure of economic and political autonomy.

The ideology that guides the present rationality of the school is relatively conservative: it is primarily concerned with how-to questions and does not question relationships between knowledge and power or between culture and politics. In other words, questions concerning the role of school as an agency of social and cultural reproduction in a class-divided society are ignored, as are questions that illuminate the intersubjective basis of establishing meaning, knowledge, and what are considered legitimate social relationships.

The issue of how teachers, students, and representatives from the wider society generate meaning tends to be obscured in favor of the issue of how people can master someone else's meaning, thus depoliticizing both the notion of school culture and the notion of classroom pedagogy.

In my view, this is a limited and sometimes crippling rationality. It ignores the dreams, histories, and visions that people bring to schools. Its central concerns are rooted in a false notion of objectivity and in a discourse that finds its quintessential expression in the attempt to posit universal principles of education that are lodged in the ethos of instrumentalism and a self-serving individualism.