Excellent piece by Henry Giroux. ― Molly
Increasingly, neoliberal regimes across Europe and North America
have waged a major assault on critical pedagogy, public pedagogy, and the
public spheres in which they take place. For instance, public and higher education
are being defunded, turned into accountability factories, and now largely serve
as adjuncts of an instrumental logic that mimics the values of the market. But,
of course, this is not only true for spaces in which formal schooling takes
place, it is also true for those public spheres and cultural apparatuses
actively engaged in producing knowledge, values, subjectivities, and identities
through a range of media and sites. This applies to a range of creative spaces
including art galleries, museums, diverse sites that make up screen culture,
and various elements of mainstream media.[1] What the apostles of neoliberalism
have learned is that artistic production and its modes of public pedagogy can
change how people view the world, and that pedagogy can be dangerous because it
holds the potential for not only creating critically engaged students,
intellectuals, and artists but can strengthen and expand the capacity of the
imagination to think otherwise in order to act otherwise, hold power
accountable, and imagine the unimaginable.
Reclaiming
pedagogy as a form of educated and militant hope begins with the crucial
recognition that education is not solely about job training and the production
of ethically challenged entrepreneurial subjects and that artistic production
does not only have to serve market interests, but are also about matters of
civic engagement and literacy, critical thinking, and the capacity for
democratic agency, action, and change. It is also inextricably connected to the
related issues of power, inclusion, and social responsibility.[2] If young people, artists, and other
cultural workers are to develop a deep respect for others, a keen sense of the
common good, as well as an informed notion of community engagement, pedagogy
must be viewed as a cultural, political, and moral force that provides the
knowledge, values, and social relations to make such democratic practices
possible. In this instance, pedagogy needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and
committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice
of freedom and liberation for the most vulnerable and oppressed, to a critical
sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing
crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles into public issues. Any
viable notion of critical pedagogy must overcome the image of education as
purely instrumental, as dead zones of the imagination, and sites of oppressive
discipline and imposed conformity.
Pedagogies
of repression do more than impose punishing forms of discipline on students and
deaden their ability to think critically, they also further a modern-day
pandemic of loneliness and alienation. Such pedagogies emphasize aggressive competition,
unchecked individualism, and cancel out empathy for an exaggerated notion of
self-interest. Solidarity and sharing are the enemy of these pedagogical
practices, which are driven by a withdrawal from sustaining public values,
trust, and goods and serve largely to cancel out a democratic future for young
people. This poses a particular challenge for educators and other cultural
workers who want to take up the role of engaged public intellectuals because it
speaks less to the role of the intellectual as a celebrity than it does to the
kind of pedagogical work in which they engage.
Please continue this essay here: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/44081-educated-hope-in-dark-times-the-challenge-of-the-educator-artist-as-a-public-intellectual
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