Quote

The pessimism of the intellect is the starting point for struggle. It's not the end point, it's the starting point. You have to make something critical to make it meaningful, to make it transformative.

Henry Giroux

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Henry Giroux
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 18
Journalist
Teacher
Providence
Rhode Island
Critical
Starting
Struggle
Point
Something
Transformative
Make
Pessimism
Meaningful
Intellect

More quotes by Henry Giroux

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The alternative position to whether torture is acceptable - that's not an alternative position, that's barbarism. The question here is not whether torture is acceptable or whether it works. It should be simply seen as a war crime. There's no other position on torture.
Henry Giroux
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With no adequate role to play as consumers, many youth are now considered disposable, forced to inhabit zones of social abandonment extending from homeless shelters and bad schools to bulging detention centers and prisons.
Henry Giroux
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The degree to which fear now becomes an organizing principle of society is enormous compared to what it was like in the past.
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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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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Youth are becoming the site of society's nightmares.
Henry Giroux
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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.
Henry Giroux
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The historical legacies of resistance to racism, militarism, privatization and panoptical surveillance have long been forgotten and made invisible in the current assumption that Americans now live in a democratic, post-racial society.
Henry Giroux
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The market-driven spectacle of war demands a culture of conformity, quiet intellectuals and a largely passive republic of consumers.
Henry Giroux
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The value of making young people stupid, subject to an educational deficit has enormous currency in a society in which existing relations of power are normalized. Under such conditions, those who hold power accountable are reviewed as treasonous while critically engaged young people are denounced as un-American.
Henry Giroux
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Neoliberal ideology is enormously powerful.
Henry Giroux
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The fight for education and justice is inseparable from the struggle for economic equality, human dignity and security, and the challenge of developing American institutions along genuinely democratic lines.
Henry Giroux
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The Obama administration doesn't see schools as a public good. It doesn't see schools as places where basically we can educate students in a way to take democracy seriously and to be able to fight for it. It sees them as basically kids who should be part of the global workforce.
Henry Giroux
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In some cities such as Washington, DC, that 75 percent of young black men can expect to serve time in prison.
Henry Giroux
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Everyone, especially minorities of race and ethnicity, now live under a surveillance panoptican.
Henry Giroux
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All of this in [Donald] Trump now has become so overt that it's difficult when we talk about repression not to talk about white supremacy, not to talk about its legacy, from slavery to lynching to mass incarceration, and what it has developed into.
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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If the ongoing struggles waged by young people are to matter, demonstrations and protests must give way to more sustainable organizations that develop alternative communities, autonomous forms of worker control, collective forms of health care, models of direct democracy and emancipatory modes of education.
Henry Giroux
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The future doesn't have to mimic the worst parts of the present. There are new ways of sharing information, and as long as they don't give up on the importance of politics, the future is certainly open.
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