Henry Giroux Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

As the humanities and liberal arts are downsized, privatized, and commodified, higher education finds itself caught in the paradox of claiming to invest in the future of young people while offering them few intellectual, civic, and moral supports.

Henry Giroux
In the United States the state monopoly on the use of violence has intensified since the 1980s, and in the process, has been increasingly directed against young people, low-income whites, poor minorities, immigrants, and women.

Henry Giroux
State violence, particularly the use of torture, abductions, and targeted assassinations are now justified as part of a state of exception in which a political culture of hyper-punitiveness has become normalized. Revealing itself in a blatant display of unbridled arrogance and power, it is unchecked by any sense of either conscience or morality.

Henry Giroux
The promises of higher education and previously enviable credentials have turned into the swindle of fulfillment.

Henry Giroux
Neoliberal violence produced in part through a massive shift in wealth to the upper 1%, growing inequality, the reign of the financial service industries, the closing down of educational opportunities, and the stripping of social protections from those marginalized by race and class has produced a generation without jobs, an independent life and even the most minimal social benefits.

Henry Giroux
Within the existing neoliberal historical conjuncture, there is a merging of violence and governance and the systemic disinvestment in and breakdown of institutions and public spheres that have provided the minimal conditions for democracy.

Henry Giroux
Collective insurance policies and social protections have given way to the forces of economic deregulation, the transformation of the welfare state into punitive workfare programs, the privatization of public goods and an appeal to individual accountability as a substitute for social responsibility.

Henry Giroux
Marked by a virulent notion of hardness and aggressive masculinity, a culture of violence has become commonplace in a society in which pain, humiliation and abuse are condensed into digestible spectacles endlessly circulated through extreme sports, reality TV, video games, YouTube postings, and proliferating forms of the new and old media.

Henry Giroux
The market-driven spectacle of war demands a culture of conformity, quiet intellectuals and a largely passive republic of consumers.

Henry Giroux
The domestic war against "terrorists" [code for young protesters] provides new opportunities for major defense contractors and corporations who are becoming more a part of our domestic lives.

Henry Giroux
Within the United States especially, the often violent response to nonviolent forms of youth protests must be analyzed within the framework of a mammoth military-industrial state and its commitment to war and the militarization of the entire society.

Henry Giroux
It is precisely through the indeterminate nature of history that resistance becomes possible and politics refuses any guarantees and remains open.

Henry Giroux
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
Under the interlocking regimes of neoliberal power, violence appears so arbitrary and thoughtless that it lacks the need for any justification, let alone claims to justice and accountability. It is truly as limitless as it appears banal.

Henry Giroux
Students, in particular, now find themselves in a world in which heightened expectations have been replaced by dashed hopes.

Henry Giroux
Symptoms of ethical, political and economic impoverishment are all around us.

Henry Giroux
A symptomatic example of the way in which violence has saturated everyday life can be seen in the increased acceptance of criminalizing the behavior of young people in public schools. Behaviors that were normally handled by teachers, guidance counselors and school administrators are now dealt with by the police and the criminal justice system.

Henry Giroux
Young children are being arrested and subjected to court appearances for behaviors that can only be termed as trivial.

Henry Giroux
As young people make diverse claims on the promise of a radical democracy, articulating what a fair and just world might be, they are increasingly met with forms of physical, ideological and structural violence.

Henry Giroux
Today, in the age of standardized testing, thinking and acting, reason and judgment have been thrown out the window just as teachers are increasingly being deskilled and forced to act as semi-robotic technicians good for little more than teaching for the test...

Henry Giroux
Unfortunately, too many academics retreat into narrow specialisms, allow themselves to become adjuncts of the corporation, or align themselves with dominant interests that serve largely to consolidate authority rather than to critique its abuses. Refusing to take positions on controversial issues or to examine the role they might play in lessening human suffering, such academics become models of moral indifference and examples of what it means to disconnect learning from public life. This is a form of education, as Howard Zinn notes, where scholars publish while others perish. Even many leftist and liberal academics have retreated into arcane discourses that offer them the safe ground of the professional recluse.

Henry Giroux
The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current...

Henry Giroux
The freedom and human capacities of individuals must be developed to their maximum but individual powers must be linked to democracy in the sense that social betterment must be the necessary consequence of individual flourishing.

Henry Giroux
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
The promises of modernity regarding progress, freedom and hope have not been eliminated; they have been reconfigured, stripped of their emancipatory potential and relegated to the logic of a savage market instrumentality.

Henry Giroux
Social bonds have given way under the collapse of social protections and the attack on the welfare state. Moreover, all solutions to socially produced problems are now relegated to the mantra of individual solutions.

Henry Giroux
Where I grew up, learning was a collective activity. But when I got to school and tried to share learning with other students that was called cheating. The curriculum sent the clear message to me that learning was a highly individualistic, almost secretive, endeavor. My working class experience...was disparaged.

Henry Giroux
Given the current assault on critical education by various right-wing groups, the increasing corporatization of the university, and the growing influence of the national security state, it is increasingly important that higher education be defended as a democratic public sphere and that academics be seen and see themselves as public intellectuals who provide an indispensable service to the nation.

Henry Giroux
History remains an open horizon that cannot be dismissed through appeals to the end of history or end of ideology.

Henry Giroux
As the welfare state is hollowed out, a culture of compassion is replaced by a culture of violence, cruelty and disposability.

Henry Giroux