When Schools Become Dead Zones of the Imagination: A Critical Pedagogy Manifesto

Autor/in	Giroux, Henry A.
Titel	When Schools Become Dead Zones of the Imagination: A Critical Pedagogy Manifesto
Quelle	In: High School Journal, 99 (2016) 4, S.351-359 (9 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0018-1498
Schlagwörter	Stellungnahme; Educational Change; Democratic Values; Social Influences; Politics of Education; Social Bias; Public Education; Political Issues; Moral Values; Social Justice + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Bildungsreform; Sozialer Einfluss; Educational policy; Bildungspolitik; Öffentliche Erziehung; Politischer Faktor; Moral value; Ethischer Wert; Soziale Gerechtigkeit
Abstract	In this article Henry Giroux discusses corporate school reform movement and its detrimental impact on the public school system such as the closure of public schools in cities such as, Philadelphia, Chicago and New York to make way for charter schools. Giroux argues that corporate school reform is not simply obsessed with measurements that degrade any viable understanding of the connection between schooling and educating critically engaged citizens. The reform movement is also determined to underfund and disinvest resources for public schooling so that public education can be completely divorced from any democratic notion of governance, teaching and learning. Giroux goes on to say that market-driven educational reforms, with their obsession with standardization, high-stakes testing, and punitive policies, also mimic a culture of cruelty that neoliberal policies produce in the wider society. They exhibit contempt for teachers and distrust of parents, repress creative teaching, destroy challenging and imaginative programs of study and treat students as mere inputs on an assembly line. The situation is further worsened in that not only are public schools being defunded and public school teachers attacked as the new welfare queens, but social and economic policies are being enacted by Republicans and other right-wingers to ensure low-income and poor minority students fail in public schools. Under a pedagogy of repression, students are conditioned to unlearn any respect for democracy, justice, and what it might mean to connect learning to social change. They are told that they have no rights and that rights are limited only to those who have power. Giroux concludes that under neoliberalism, it has become more difficult to respond to the demands of the social contract, public good, and the social state, which have been pushed to the margins of society--viewed as both an encumbrance and a pathology. And yet such a difficulty must be overcome in the drive to reform public education. The struggle over public education is the most important struggle of the 21st century because it is one of the few public spheres left where questions can be asked, pedagogies developed, modes of agency constructed and desires mobilized, in which formative cultures can be developed that nourish critical thinking, dissent, civic literacy and social movements capable of struggling against those antidemocratic forces that are ushering in dark, savage and dire times. [Originally printed on Truthout, Tuesday, 13 August 2013.] (ERIC).
Anmerkungen	University of North Carolina Press. 116 South Boundary Street, P.O. Box 2288, Chapel Hill, NC 27515-2288. Tel: 800-848-6224; Tel: 919-966-7449; Fax: 919-962-2704; e-mail: uncpress@unc.edu; Web site: http://uncpress.unc.edu/
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2020/1/01