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Youth and the Politics of Disposability:
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"Higher education is more than an investment opportunity, citizenship is about more than consuming, learning is about more than preparing for a job in the defense industries, and democracy is about more than making choices at the local mall."
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These are dangerous times in the United States, especially for young people, as war, fear, moral panics, insecurity, and a particularly virulent contempt for social needs have become the dominant motifs shaping American life. While it is often acknowledged that we live in an age in which the loss of American standing in the world is related directly to its ill-fated war in Iraq and its reckless free-market triumphalism deciding the fate of most nations of the world, what is often ignored by many critics, with their singular fixation on the war abroad, is that another war is being waged on the home front. [1] One recent consequence of the war at home can be seen in the crushing assault on civil liberties – most evident in the passing of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 – which conveniently allows the Bush administration to detain indefinitely anyone deemed as an enemy combatant without recourse to the traditional right to challenge their detention. Further evidence of the war at home can be seen in the ongoing attack on the poor, child care, immigrants and public goods, as well as in the restructuring of the tax system to benefit the rich and drain resources from the poor, the middle-class and the public treasury. Unfortunately, the Bush administration seems dangerously incapable of questioning itself, even as it trivializes democratic values, redistributes wealth upward, aggressively attempts to destroy the welfare state, subordinates the needs of society to the dictates of corporate power and views misfortune as a weakness. [2] Everybody is now a customer or client, and every relationship is ultimately judged in bottom-line, cost-effective terms as the neoliberal mantra “privatize or perish” is repeated over and over again. Responsible citizens are replaced by an assemblage of entrepreneurial subjects, each tempered in the virtue of self-reliance and forced to face the increasingly difficult challenges of the social order alone. In short, private interests trump social needs, economic growth becomes more important than social justice, and the militarization and commercialization of public space now define what counts as the public sphere. The consequences for politics, democracy and public life are devastating and can be seen in the growing gap between the rich and the poor and the downward spiral of millions of Americans into poverty and despair. The haunting images of dead bodies floating in the flooded streets of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina along with thousands of African-Americans marooned on rooftops, abandoned in the Louisiana Superdome, and waiting to be rescued for days on the roofs of flooded houses serve as just one register of the despairing racism, inequality, and poverty in America. The stark realities of race and class divisions along with the widening reach of poverty, racism, and the abuse of human rights are also visible in an array of troubling statistics. For instance, the poverty rate in the United States rose to 12.5 percent in 2004—and includes 35.9 million people. For African-Americans the poverty rate was twice the national rate with 24.4 percent of blacks living below the poverty line. Moreover 45 million people are uninsured in the US, and the number has increased by 6 million since 2000, the year George W. Bush was appointed to the presidency. And, yet, as important as these statistics are they cannot capture lived reality of hardship and suffering that millions of Americans face everyday because they are locked out of decent health care, responsible schools, safe places to live, and decent jobs. While a great deal has been written critically about the passing of new anti-terrorist laws in the name of “homeland security” that make it easier to undermine those basic civil liberties that protect individuals against invasive and potentially repressive government actions, there is a thunderous silence on the part of many parents, educators, and politicians regarding the ongoing insecurity and injustices suffered by young people in this country, which is now being intensified as a result of the state’s increasing resort to repression and punitive policies. The current concerns about terrorism and security almost completely ignore what these terms mean outside of a violent attack against property and persons. There is a sense of moral and political indifference, if not cynicism, about the forms of domestic terrorism suffered by children who are poor, hungry, homeless, neglected, lack medical care, or suffer physical abuse by adults. Children have fewer rights than almost any other group and consequently their voices and needs are almost completely absent from the debates, policies, and legislative practices that are constructed in terms of their needs. All of these issues raise the fundamental question of what it might mean to take children seriously as a political and moral referent in order to gauge not only the health of a democratic society but also to define the obligations of adults to future generations of young people. Democracy increasingly appears damaged, if not fatally wounded, as those who are young, poor, immigrants, or economically marginalized people of color are excluded from the operations of power, the realm of politics, and crucial social provisions. For over a century, Americans have embraced as a defining feature of politics the idea that all levels of government would assume a large measure of responsibility for providing the resources, social provisions, and modes of education that enabled young people to be prepared for a present that would offer them a better future while expanding the meaning and depth of an inclusive democracy. Taking the social contract seriously, American society exhibited at least a willingness to fight for the rights of children, enact reforms that invested in their future, and provided the educational conditions necessary for them to be critical citizens. Within such a modernist project, democracy was linked to the well-being of youth, while the status of how a society imagined democracy and its future was contingent on how it viewed its responsibility towards future generations. But the category of youth did more than affirm modernity’s social contract rooted in a conception of the future in which adult commitment was articulated as a vital public service, it also affirmed those vocabularies, values, and social relations central to a politics capable of defending vital institutions as a public good and contributing to the quality of democratic public life. At stake here was the recognition that children constitute a powerful referent for addressing war, poverty, education, and a host of other important social issues. Moreover, as a symbol of the future, children provide an important moral compass to assess what Jacques Derrida calls the promises of a “democracy to come”. [3] Such a vocabulary was particularly important for public and higher education, which often defined and addressed its highest ideals through the recognition that how it educated youth was connected to both the democratic future it hoped for and its claim as an important public sphere. But just as education has been separated from any viable notion of democratic politics, youth have been separated from the discourse of either the social contract or any ethical notion of what it might mean for society to provide young people with the prospects of a decent and democratic future. Youth increasingly have come to be seen as a problem rather than as a resource for investing in the future. Framed largely as a generation of suspects, they are now treated as either a disposable population, fodder for a barbaric war in Iraq, or defined as the source of most of society’s problems. Youth now constitute a crisis that has less to do with improving the future than with denying it. As Larry Grossberg points out, “It has become common to think of kids as a threat to the existing social order and for kids to be blamed for the problems they experience. We slide from kids in trouble, kids have problems, and kids are threatened, to kids as trouble, kids as problems, and kids as threatening”. [4] Punishment and fear have replaced compassion and social responsibility as the most important modalities mediating the relationship of youth to the larger social order. No longer “viewed as a privileged sign and embodiment of the future”, [5] youth are now increasingly demonized by the popular media and derided by politicians looking for quick-fix solutions to crime. James Allen Fox a Northeastern University professor publicly claims that “teenagers are temporary sociopaths–impulsive and immature” while former Secretary of Education, William Bennett describes youth as a rising wave of superpredators, in spite of the fact that youth crime has dramatically and continuously declined since the mid 1990s. Hollywood movies such as 187, Thirteen, Clueless, Brick, and Hard Candy consistently represent youth as either dangerous, utterly brainless, or simply without merit. A recent episode about youth on Sixty Minutes is suggestive of this kind of demonization. Focusing on ways in which young people alleviate their alleged boredom, the show focused on the sport of what is called “bum hunting”, in which young people search out, attack and savagely beat homeless people while recording the event as a homage to the triumph of reality television as a staple of everyday life. As reprehensible as this act is, it is equally reprehensible to demonize young people by suggesting that such behavior is in some way characteristic of youth behavior in general. But then again in a society in which the marketplace only imagines students either as consumers or as billboards to sell sexuality, beauty, music, sports, clothes, and a host of other consumer products, it is not surprising that young people can be so easily demonized and savagely misrepresented. Viewed as an enemy to be contained and punished, young people are now the object of responses that were unthinkable 20 years ago: criminalization and imprisonment, psychotropic drugs and psychiatric confinement, and zero tolerance policies that model schools after prisons. In the case of the latter, federal law now provides financial incentives to schools that implement zero tolerance policies, in spite of their proven racial and class biases; drug sniffing dogs, metal detectors, and cameras have become a common feature in schools, and administrators willingly comply with federal laws that give military recruiters the right to access the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of students in both public schools and higher education – even though we now have numerous cases of rape and sexual abuse by recruiters who use their power to commit criminal acts against children. Trust and respect now give way to fear, disdain, and suspicion as critical pedagogical practices in schools give way to flourishing pedagogies of surveillance. Under such circumstances, children have fewer rights than almost any other group and fewer institutions protecting these rights. What are we to make of third graders being subjected to strip search in Kansas City, Missouri? What are we to make of the fact that in Chicago alone over 3 million students, mostly poor African-Americans, were suspended because of zero tolerance laws; or that the proportion of fifteen-to-seventeen-year olds in jail is expanding at twice the rate of the population as a whole; or that while spending on education increased by 374 percent, spending for prisons increased 823 percent in the last decade? Instead of providing a decent critical education to poor young people, President Bush and his cohorts serve them more standardized tests, [6] enforce abstinence programs instead of scientifically informed sex education, and advocate creationism updated as Intelligent Design instead of scientific reason. [7] Youth who are poor and racially marginalized fare even worse and often find themselves in classes that are overcrowded, lack basic resources, and subject to policies largely designed to warehousing young people rather than educating them with even minimal basic literacy skills. Rather than providing young people with vibrant public spheres, the Bush government offers them a commercialized culture in which consumerism is the only condition of citizenship. The hard currency of human suffering that impacts on children can also be seen in some astounding statistics that suggest a profound moral and political contradiction at the heart of one of the richest democracies in the world: The rate of child poverty rose in 2004 to 17.6 percent boosting the number of poor children to 12.9 million. Moreover, children are a disproportionate share of the poor in the US in that they are 26 percent of the total population, but constitute 39 percent of the poor. Similarly, 9.3 million children lack health insurance and millions lack affordable child care and decent early childhood education; and the infant mortality rate in the United States is the highest of any industrialized nation. Programs that benefit young people are being slashed at the same time that the Bush administration drains the public treasury of billions of dollars through tax cuts for the rich, a disastrous war in Iraq, and appropriations for a bloated military budget, which in 2007 will be around $439 billion, and does not include an additional $120 billion funds requested by the Pentagon “to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq”. [8] Paul Krugman calls Bush’s latest budget projections a form of class warfare since he “takes food from the mouths of babes and gives the proceeds to his millionaire friends”. In this case, savage cuts in education, nutritional assistance for impoverished mothers, veterans’ medical care, and basic scientific research help fund tax cuts for the inordinately rich. Laura Flanders defines Bush’s recent budget as a hit list targeting teens and kids because it “calls for cuts in emergency medical services for children, cuts in K-12 education funding, cuts in vocational education and the highly successful Head Start Program. There are food-stamp cuts and a five-year freeze on child care. A $41 million college loan program is eliminated. The whole National Youth Sports Program which has provided athletics for low income kids is cut, as in cut out”. [9] I think Paul Krugman, once again, gets it right in claiming that under the Bush administration, “The hijacking of public policy by private interests” parallels “the downward spiral in governance”. [10] Too many youth within the degraded economic, political, and cultural geography occupy a “dead zone” in which the spectacle of commodification exists side by side with the imposing threat of massive debt, bankruptcy, the prison-industrial complex, and the elimination of basic civil liberties. Indeed, we have an entire generation of unskilled and displaced youth who have been expelled from shrinking markets, blue collar jobs, and any viable hope in the future. Indeed, as Bob Herbert points out, more than five million youth between the ages of 18-24 are out of school, work, and hope. Rather than investing in the public good and solving social problems, the state now punishes those who are caught in the downward spiral of its economic policies. Punishment, incarceration, control, and surveillance represent the face of the new expanded state. One consequence is that the implied contract between the state and citizens is broken and social guarantees for youth as well as civic obligations to the future vanish from the agenda of public concern. Similarly, as market values supplant civic values, it becomes increasingly difficult “to translate private worries into public issues and, conversely, to discern public issues in private troubles”. [11] Alcoholism, homelessness, poverty, and illiteracy, among other issues are not seen as social but as individual problems–matters of character, individual fortitude, and personal responsibility. Ardent consumers and disengaged citizens provide fodder for a growing cynicism and depoliticization of public life at a time when there is an increasing awareness not just of corporate corruption, financial mismanagement, and systemic greed, but also of the recognition that a democracy of critical citizens is being replaced quickly by a democracy of consumers. At the heart of this contradiction are both the fate of democracy and the civic health and future of a generation of children and young people. For many young people and adults today, the private sphere has become the only space in which to imagine any sense of hope, pleasure, or possibility. Culture as an activity in which young people actually produce the conditions of their own agency through dialogue, community participation, public stories, and political struggle is being eroded. In its place we are increasingly surrounded by a “climate of cultural and linguistic privatization” [12] in which culture becomes something you consume and the only kind of speech that is acceptable is that of the fast-paced shopper. In spite of neo-conservative and neoliberal claims that economic growth will cure social ills, the market has no way of dealing with poverty, social inequality, or civil rights issues. It has no vocabulary for addressing respect, compassion, decency, and ethics or, for that matter, what it means to recognize anti-democratic forms of power. These are political issues not merely economic concerns. A political system based on democratic principles of inclusiveness and nonrepression, in contrast, can and does provide citizens with the critical tools necessary for them to participate in investing public life with vibrancy while expanding the foundations of freedom and justice. The current state of youth bears heavily on both public and higher education. Childhood as a core referent for a vibrant democracy and an embrace of social justice appears to be disappearing in a society that not only rejects the promise of youth, but the future itself “as an affective investment”. [13] But the crisis of youth not only signals a dangerous state of affairs for the future, it also portends a crisis in the very idea of the political and ethical constitution of the social and the possibility of articulating the relevance of democracy itself. In what follows, I want to argue that youth as a political and moral referent does not only refer to young children, but also to those youth who inhabit our institutions of higher learning, posed to become adults by virtue of the knowledge, capacities, and skills they learn as critical citizens, workers, and intellectuals. Higher Education and the Crisis of the Social Within the last two decades a widespread pessimism about public life and politics has developed in the United States as market ideals have taken precedence over democratic values, and individual rights now outweigh collective concerns. Within this impoverished sense of politics and public life, the university is increasingly being transformed into a training ground for the corporate workforce, and with it any notion of the future that views higher education as a crucial public sphere in which critical citizens and democratic agents are formed. Anyone who spends any time on a college campus in the United States these days cannot miss how higher education is changing. Strapped for money and increasingly defined in the language of corporate culture, many universities seem less interested in higher learning than in becoming licensed storefronts for brand name corporations – selling off space, buildings, and endowed chairs to rich corporate donors. College presidents are now called C.E.Os and are known less for their intellectual leadership than for their role as fund raisers and their ability to bridge the world of academe and business. Venture capitalists now scour colleges and universities in search of big profits made through licensing agreements, the control of intellectual property rights, and investing in university spin-off companies. In the age of money and profit, academic subjects gain stature almost exclusively through their exchange value on the market. This is all the more so as the Bush Administration attempts to weigh more control over higher education, cut student aid, plunder public services and push states to the brink of financial disaster. As higher education increasingly becomes a privilege rather than a right, many working class students either find it impossible financially to enter college or because of increased costs have to drop out. Those students who have the resources to stay in school are feeling the tight pressures of the job market and rush to take courses and receive professional credentials in business and the bio-sciences as the humanities lose majors and downsize. Not surprisingly, students are now referred to as “customers”, while some university presidents even argue that professors be labeled as “academic entrepreneurs”. [14] As higher education is corporatized, young people find themselves on campuses that look more like malls and they are increasingly taught by professors who are hired on a contractual basis, have obscene work loads, and can barely make enough money to pay the loans for their cars. Tenured faculty are now called upon to generate grants, establish close partnerships with corporations, and teach courses that have practical value in the marketplace. There is little in this vision of the university that imagines young people as anything other than fodder for the corporation or an appendage of the national security state. What was once the hidden curriculum of many universities – the subordination of higher education to capital – has now become an open and much celebrated policy of both public and private higher education. [15] Higher education has also been attacked by right-wing ideologues such as David Horowitz and Lynne Cheney who view it as the “weak link” in the war against terror. [16] Horowitz also acts as the figurehead for various well-funded and orchestrated conservative student groups such as the Young Americans and College Republicans, which perform the ground work for his “Academic Bill of Rights” policy efforts that seek out rare but juicy instances of “political bias” – whatever that is or however it might be defined – in college classrooms. These efforts have resulted in considerable sums of public money being devoted to hearings in multiple state legislatures, most recently in Pennsylvania, in addition to helping impose, as the Chronicle of Higher Education put it, a “chilly climate” of self-policing of academic freedom and pedagogy. [17] It gets worse. At the University of California at Los Angeles, the Bruin Alumni Association has posted on its website an article called, “The Dirty Thirty”, in which it targets what it calls the university’s “most radical professors”. [18] Radical, according to this group, appears to mean, among other things, holding views in opposition to the war in Iraq, supporting affirmative action, and attacking [quote] “President Bush, the Republican Party, multi-national corporations, and even our fighting men and women”. [19] The Bruin Alumni Association does more than promote “McCarthy-like smears”, intolerance, and anti-intellectualism through a vapid appeal to “balance”; it also offered, at least initially, a $100 prize to any student willing to provide information on their professor’s political views. Of course, this type of classroom intervention has less to do with protesting genuine demagoguery than it does with attacking any professor who might raise critical questions about the status quo or hold the narratives of power accountable. [20] Illegal and unethical spying at the national level now seems to offer yet another strategy to harass professors, insult students by treating them as if they are mindless, and provide a model for student participation in the classroom that mimics tactics used by fascists and Nazi plants in the 1930s. Another serious threat facing higher education comes from the ongoing militarization of public life. In its assumption that military power is the highest expression of social truth and national greatness, the Bush administration opens a dangerous new chapter in American military history that now gives unfettered support to what C. Wright Mills once called a “‘military metaphysics’ – a tendency to see international problems as military problems and to discount the likelihood of finding a solution except through military means”. [21] The influence of militaristic truths, values, social relations, and identities now permeates and defines American culture. As higher education is pressured by both the Bush administration and its jingoistic supporters to serve the needs of the military-industrial complex, universities increasingly deepen their connections to the national security state in ways that are boldly celebrated. Universities now supply resources, engage in research projects, and accept huge amounts of defense contract money to provide the personnel, expertise, and tools necessary to expand the security imperatives of the U.S. government. The CIA and other Intelligence Agencies are developing diverse connections to higher education, not only shaping academic programs but allocating vast sums of money for research projects. Public universities such as Penn State, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, and a host of others, expand the reach and influence of the national security state by entering into formal agreements with agencies such as the FBI. [22] Graham Spanier, the president of Penn State University argues in a statement pregnant with irony that the establishment of the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, which he heads, “sends a positive message that leaders in higher education are willing to assist our nation during these challenging times”. [23] Such commentary reads like a page out of George Orwell’s 1984, countering every decent and democratic value that defines higher education as a democratic public sphere. Resistance in Dark Times In opposition to the corporatization and militarization of higher education, the dumbing down of rigorous scholarship, and the devaluing of the critical capacities of young people, there is a prominent educational tradition in the United States extending from Thomas Jefferson to John Dewey in which the future of public education and the university is premised on the recognition that in order for freedom to flourish in the worldly space of the public realm, citizens had to be formed, educated, and socialized. Within this democratic tradition, education was not confused with training, and its critical function was propelled by the need to educate students to create citizens capable of defining and implementing universal goals such as freedom, equality, and justice as part of a broader attempt to deepen the relationship between an expanded notion of the social and the enabling ground of a vibrant democracy. If higher education is to become a meaningful site for educating youth for a democratic future, educators and others need to reclaim the meaning and purpose of higher education as an ethical and political response to the demise of democratic public life. At stake here is the need to insist on the role of the university as a public sphere committed to deepening and expanding the possibilities of democratic identities, values, and relations. This approach suggests new models of leadership, organization, power, and vision dedicated to opening higher education up to all groups, creating a critical citizenry, providing specialized work skills for jobs that really require them, democratizing relations of governance among administrators, faculty, and students, and taking seriously the imperative to disseminate an intellectual and artistic culture. Higher education may be one of the few sites left in which students learn the knowledge and skills that enable them to not only mediate critically between democratic values and the demands of corporate power, but also to distinguish between identities founded on democratic principles and identities steeped in forms of competitive, unbridled individualism that celebrate self-interest, profit making, and greed. Addressing education as a democratic endeavor begins with the recognition that higher education is more than an investment opportunity, citizenship is about more than consuming, learning is about more than preparing for a job in the defense industries, and democracy is about more than making choices at the local mall. Reclaiming higher education as a public sphere begins with the crucial project of challenging, among other things, corporate ideology and its attendant notion of corporate-time – in which time is accelerated and fragmented and increasingly replaces public time – which fosters dialogue, thoughtfulness, and critical exchange, providing opportunities for knowledge that deepens democratic values while encouraging pedagogical relations that question the future in terms that are political, ethical, and social. Higher education is a hard won democratic achievement and it is time that parents, faculty, students, college alumni and concerned citizens reclaim higher education as a fundamental public good rather than merely a training ground for corporate interests, values, and profits. Higher education also needs to be defended against those religious and secular ideologues that harbor a deep disdain for critical thought and healthy skepticism and look with displeasure upon any form of education that teaches students to read the world critically and to hold power and authority accountable. Education is not only about issues of work and economics, but also about questions of justice, social freedom, and the capacity for democratic agency, action, and change as well as the related issues of power, exclusion, and citizenship. These are educational and political issues and should be addressed as part of a broader concern for renewing the struggle for social justice and democracy. Academics and Public Life Institutions of higher education resonate with their democratic possibilities when viewed as deeply moral and political spaces in which intellectuals assert themselves not merely as professional academics but as citizens whose knowledge and actions presuppose specific visions of public life, community, and moral accountability. This view suggests that higher education be defended not as an adjunct of the corporation or the national security state but as a vital public sphere in its own right, one that has deeply moral and educative dimensions that directly impact on civic life. This defense must be maintained by academics redefining their roles as public intellectuals who can move between academic institutions and other public spheres in which knowledge, values, and social identities are produced. If the university is to remain a site of critical thinking, collective work, and public service, educators will have to redefine the knowledge, skills, research, and intellectual practices currently being favored in the university. Central to such a challenge is the necessity to define intellectual practice “as part of an intricate web of morality, rigor and responsibility” [24] that enables academics to speak with conviction, enter the public sphere in order to address important social problems, and demonstrate alternative models for what it means to bridge the gap between higher education and the broader society. Under such conditions, it is crucial to construct intellectual practices that are collegial rather than competitive, refuse the instrumentality and privileged isolation of the academy, link critical thought to a profound impatience with the status quo, and connect human agency to the idea of social responsibility. Increasingly as universities are shaped by a culture of fear in which dissent is equated with treason, the call to being objective and impartial can easily echo what George Orwell called the official truth or the establishment point of view, however unconscious or unintentional. Lacking a self-conscious democratic political project, the role of the university intellectual is often reduced to a technician or functionary engaged in formalistic rituals unconcerned with the disturbing and urgent problems that confront the larger society. In opposition to this view, I will argue that public intellectuals should combine the mutually interdependent roles of critical educator and active citizen. This suggests finding ways to connect the practice of classroom teaching to the operation of power in the larger society. I think Edward Said is on target when he argues that the public intellectual must function within institutions, in part, as an exile, as someone whose "place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma, to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations". [25] In this perspective, the educator as public intellectual becomes responsible for linking the diverse experiences that produce knowledge, identities, and social values in the university to the quality of moral and political life in the wider society. Moreover, academics have a responsibility not only to prepare their own students to engage the world critically but also to recognize the impact their students will have on a generation of young people twice removed from the university. The importance of such an educational challenge and project can be seen in a survey conducted a few years ago by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation which found that 36% of U.S. high school students believed that “newspapers should get government approval of stories before publishing”. [26] Clearly, it is precisely because of a lack of education about student rights, First Amendment freedoms, and the meaning of a substantive democracy that gives legitimation for views that are much closer to fascism than to what it means to be a critical citizen in a democracy. Education cannot be decoupled from political democracy and such education should take place at all levels of schooling, but it must gain its momentum in those colleges and universities among students who will go back to the schools, churches, synagogues, and business world in order to produce new ideas, concepts, and critical ways of understanding the world in which young people live. If educators are to function as public intellectuals they need to provide the opportunities for students to learn that the relationship between knowledge and power can be emancipatory, that their histories and experiences matter, and that what they say and do counts in their struggle to unlearn dominating privileges, productively reconstruct their relations with others, and transform, when necessary, the world around them. More specifically, such educators need to argue for forms of pedagogy that close the gap between the university and everyday life. Their curriculum needs to be organized around knowledge of communities, cultures, and traditions that give students a sense of history, identity and place. Edward Said is again helpful. Said urged academics and students to accept the demands of “worldliness”, which implied “lifting complex ideas into the public space”, recognizing human injury outside of the academy, and using theory as a form of criticism to change things. [27] Worldliness required not being afraid of controversy, making connections that are otherwise hidden, deflating the claims of triumphalism, bridging intellectual work and the operation of politics. It meant combining rigor and clarity, on the one hand, and civic courage and political commitment, on the other. Educators need to construct pedagogical approaches that do more than make learning context-specific; in effect, they need to challenge the content of established canons, and, similarly, to expand the range of cultural texts that count as "really useful knowledge". As public intellectuals, university teachers must begin to use those electronically mediated knowledge forms that constitute the terrain of mass and popular culture. I am referring here to the world of media texts – videos, films, music, and other mechanisms of popular culture that operate through a combination of visual and print culture. What I am suggesting here is that educators challenge the traditional definition of schooling as the only site of pedagogy by widening the application and sites of pedagogy to a variety of cultural locations and in doing so alert students to how public pedagogy operates through the educational force of the culture at large [print culture versus visual culture]. The content of the curriculum should affirm and critically enrich the meaning, language, and knowledge forms that students actually use to negotiate and inform their lives. Academics can in part exercise their role as public intellectuals via such curricula by giving students the opportunity to understand how power is organized through the enormous number of "popular" cultural spheres that range from libraries, movie theaters, and schools to high-tech media conglomerates that circulate signs and meanings through newspapers, magazines, advertisements, new information technologies, computers, films, and television programs. Needless to say, this position challenges neoconservative Roger Kimball's claim that "Popular culture is a tradition essential to uneducated Americans". [28] Of course, what is at stake is not only important questions about how knowledge is produced and taken-up, but what it means to provide the conditions for students to become competent and critically versed in a variety of literacies while at the same time expanding the conditions and options for the roles they might play as cultural producers (as opposed to simply teaching them to be critical readers). Although it is central for university teachers to enlarge the curriculum to reflect the richness and diversity of the students they actually teach, they also need to decenter the curriculum. That is, as Stanley Aronowitz points out, students should be actively involved in governance, "including setting learning goals, selecting courses, and having their own autonomous organizations, including a free press". [29] Not only does the distribution of power among teachers, students, and administrators provide the conditions for students to become agents in their learning process, it also provides the basis for collective learning, civic action, and ethical responsibility. Moreover, student agency emerges from a pedagogy of lived experience and struggle not from mere formalistic mastery of an academic subject. I have suggested that educators need to become provocateurs; they need to take a stand while refusing to be involved in either a cynical relativism or doctrinaire politics. This suggests that central to intellectual life is the pedagogical and political imperative that academics engage in rigorous social criticism while becoming a stubborn force for challenging false prophets, fighting against the imposed silence of normalized power, “refusing to allow conscience to look away or fall asleep”, and critically engaging all those social relations that promote material and symbolic violence. [30] There is a lot of talk among social theorists about the death of politics and the inability of human beings to imagine a more equitable and just world in order to make it better. I would hope that of all groups, educators along with their unions would be the most vocal and militant in challenging this recognition by making it clear that at the heart of any viable form of critical education is the assumption that learning should be used to expand the public good and promote democratic social change, especially for young people. Public and higher education may be one of the few spheres left where the promise of youth can be linked to the promise of democracy. Education in this instance becomes both an ethical and political referent in that it not only furnishes an opportunity for adults to provide the conditions for young people to become critically engaged social agents, but also symbols of a future in which democracy creates the conditions for each generation of youth to struggle anew to sustain the promise of a democracy that has no endpoint but must be continuously expanded into a world of new possibilities and opportunities for keeping justice and hope alive. In concluding, I want to suggest that struggles over how we view, represent, and treat young people be seen as part of a larger public dialogue about how to imagine a future linked to the creation of a strong inclusive democracy while simultaneously articulating a new vocabulary, set of theoretical tools, and social possibilities for re-visioning civic engagement and social transformation. We have entered a period in which the war against youth, especially poor youth of color, offers no apologies because it is too arrogant and ruthless to imagine any resistance. But the collective need and potential struggle for justice should never be underestimated even in the darkest of times. I realize this sounds a bit utopian, but we have few choices if we are going to fight for a future that enables teachers, parents, students, and others to work diligently and tirelessly in order to make despair unconvincing and hope practical for all members of society, but especially for young people, who deserve a future that does a great deal more than endlessly repeat the present. Henry A Giroux holds the Global Television Network Chair in Communication Studies at McMaster University and currently lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. His books include America on the Edge (Palgrave 2006) and The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the Culture of Fear (Palgrave 2003).
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