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Cynicism, disillusionment, and a dispiriting sense of purposeless has cast a shadow over American society seriously draining it of any language or vision that might imagine a different sort of society from the dysfunctional, militarizing, and deeply unequal social order that marked the current historical period.

Henry Giroux

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Henry Giroux
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 18
Journalist
Teacher
Providence
Rhode Island
Social
Periods
Current
Dispiriting
Sense
Shadow
Cast
Purposeless
Order
Vision
Currents
Draining
Might
Sort
Casts
Unequal
Different
Imagine
Seriously
Dysfunctional
Society
Deeply
Disillusionment
American
Period
Marked
Language
Historical
Cynicism

More quotes by Henry Giroux

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Neoliberalism is vulnerable. When it comes to talking about social provisions, the only argument they have is the argument of barbarians: that social provisions make people dependent, and dependency is an evil, and people have to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. And that is such bullshit that it boggles my mind.
Henry Giroux
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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.
Henry Giroux
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Young people oppose those market-driven values and practices aimed at both creating radically individualized subjects and undermining those public spheres that create bonds of solidarity that reinforce a commitment to the common good.
Henry Giroux
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The rise of the punishing state and the governing-through-crime youth complex throughout American society suggests the need for a politics that not only negates the established order but imagines a new one, one informed by a radical vision in which the future does not imitate the present.
Henry Giroux
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Neoliberal ideology is enormously powerful.
Henry Giroux
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Problems become privatized and removed from larger social issues. This is one task, connecting the personal problems to larger social issues that progressive leftist intellectuals have failed to take on as a major political and educational project.
Henry Giroux
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Very little appears to escape the infantilizing and moral vacuity of the market.
Henry Giroux
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I think in light of the other two registers that you mention, there's also that moment. I mean, to what degree do we begin to take education seriously about the production of a subject in which questions of individual and social agency are linked to democratic possibilities? And so for me, there are three registers there that we need to address.
Henry Giroux
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We need a new political language with broader narratives. Such a language has to unravel the pervasive ideological, pedagogical, and economic dynamics of a form of economic Darwinism that now governs much of the world. This system must be demystified, politicized, and recognized for the ways in which it has come to pose a dire threat to democracy.
Henry Giroux
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Pedagogy is not about training, it is about critically educating people to be self reflective, capable of critically address their relationship with others and with the larger world. Pedagogy in this sense provides not only important critical and intellectual competencies it also enables people to intervene critically in the world.
Henry Giroux
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Only a well-organized movement of young people, educators, workers, parents, religious groups and other concerned citizens will be capable of changing the power relations and vast economic inequalities that have generated what has become a country in which it is almost impossible to recognize the ideals of a real democracy.
Henry Giroux
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Given that by age 23, almost a third of Americans are arrested for a crime, it becomes clear that in the new militarized state young people, especially poor minorities, are viewed as predators, a threat to corporate governance, and are treated as disposable populations.
Henry Giroux
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When you begin to suggest that dissent, opposition, resistance, the only way to deal with it is not to listen to it and to engage in dialog with it, but basically to label it as anarchy and to repress it with the most violent, in the most violent means possible. I mean, that's essentially an element of neofascism. That's not about democracy.
Henry Giroux
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I think that contradictions, unless they're understood, unless they're analyzed, unless they're thoughtfully probed, unless people have a sense of what those contradictions mean - there's just as much of a chance that they'll move into embracing fascism as there is that they'll move into a more radical conception of democracy itself.
Henry Giroux
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But we need more than a broader understanding of what is a good society or a moral and political critique of the existing market fundamentalism engulfing American society, we also need to create new forms of solidarity, new and broad based social movements that move beyond the isolated and fractured politics of the current historical moment.
Henry Giroux
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I know she [Hillary Clinton] comes out of a legacy with her husband in which the Democratic Party did more, it seems to me, to subjugate blacks to the dynamics of oppression, poverty. The mass incarceration state.
Henry Giroux
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Clearly, one does not have to give up being an academic, retreat from rigorous research, or renounce the importance of specialization in order to address major social issues. I don't think you give up theoretical rigor by writing in a way that addresses major social concerns and is at the same time accessible to wider informed general audiences.
Henry Giroux
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Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, schools are feeding our prisons.
Henry Giroux
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As the pleasure principle is unconstrained by a moral compass based on a respect for others, it is increasingly shaped by the need for intense excitement and a never-ending flood of heightened sensations.
Henry Giroux
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Symptoms of ethical, political and economic impoverishment are all around us.
Henry Giroux