Giroux: The Struggle for Life in the Classrooom

Originally published in 1988, Giroux's Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life was published shortly after the 1983 report by Ronald Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in Education: A Nation at Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform. Implied by the title, the report explores charges that the United State's education system was failing to meet the national need for a competitive work force, and after evaluating tends in test scores between 1963 to 1980 along with comparing American schools to other nations, the report offered some 38 recommendations for reform. Now thinking about the 2005 edition of Giroux's book, we can consider that many of the recommendations were not implemented, and in fact, the best known education bill, No Child Left Behind, was signed into law in 2001 under the Bush administration (but with bipartisan support). Among other reforms such as "highly qualified teachers" and providing student contact information to military recruiters, this law requires that all schools accepting state funding administer a state (not national) standardized test and that each school must make annual yearly progress (AYP) (e.g., this year's eighth graders must do better than last year's on the same test). Giroux criticizes Bush's policies charging the standardized curricula and testing to be the kind of regulation that reduces education to job training and rote learning maintain the status quo of 1% vs. the 99%. Giroux believes that Bush is cultivating a public pedagogy of militarism, a significant element of imperialist ideology, the rhetoric of modernity following the logic of colonialism. The rhetoric of modernity that if you work hard enough, you can have anything is a myth, and policies like NCLB make sure that dreams of equality stay just that: dreams.

What was once a country founded on principles of cooperation and participation -- or a democracy -- is now a country establishing principles of individualistism and competition -- or capitalism. From civic to corporate, the sentiment of consumerism in schooling is rampant. Testing companies for students and teacher assessment are making a bundle, and students are taught that learning is a testing, that success in life can be measured quantitatively. So when I read Giroux's book Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life now, in 2012, his argument for critical pedagogy seems more important than ever, for I argue that the reason our students are not "competing" on the national level is not because our education system does not have high standards but that America's education system does not even know other nations, does not value global consciousness, does not teach inclusivity, participation, and critical engagement. The testing movement has fostered a "thin" democratic pedagogy that engages in skills rather than ideas, which has killed the spirit of debate and analysis and the conditions that cultivate theorizing and interrogating. Students look for, ask for, the worksheet to "fill-in" the answers. They wait for the teacher to pose the question that needs an answer. They only know they learned if they see an "A" or a "meets.

When Giroux talks about teacher education, he explores how teacher training has been reduced to similarly "think" methods. The prescriptive day-by-day curriculum, the research-based textbooks, the standards-based workbooks -- all of these are what Giroux calls "teacher-proof curricula." When districts fail to meet AYP, the response is to look for programs: "What programs will guarantee that we meet next year?" And there goes $3000 on materials to teach THAT subgroup of ELLs, Special Ed, low-income kids who are making us a failing school. Giroux writes that such "solutions" that define classroom life as "a fundamentally one-dimensional set of rules and regulative practices rather than as a cultural terrain where a variety of interests and practices collide in a constant and often chaotic struggle for dominance" (187). The truth is that now, that is what teachers are looking for. When I did a study last year with a group of eighth grade teachers about the 2005 mandate to teach about genocide, they all commented that what kept them from being compliant with the mandate was not having the materials to teach it. The mandate was open and allowed teachers to develop the unit of study, but they wanted the teacher-proof curricula, yet, when we talked about the state tests, they said that they hated having to "teach to the test." These teachers realized during our interview how far they have come from the way they "used to teach." All of the teachers have been teaching since before No Child Left Behind and even a few were teaching before A Nation at Risk. They talked, some emotionally, about how they missed reading stories with their students; they missed having discussions; they missed the time in class where students asked questions and wondered.

What Giroux seems to be arguing for, beyond critical pedagogy, is for this cultural terrain - -a sort of cultural study to support critical pedagogy. Now, I don't think he is talking about multiculturalism at all. I think he wants us to think about all the public spaces in which education swims through our culture and perhaps how we can shift our culture, specifically the culture of the classroom towards something much more alive and active. He asks that teachers take up the role of social activist and organize their classes around ideas of thick democracy. the question remains, and I think Giroux fails to address this question in this edition, as to how teachers do the work of a social activist in public schools dependent on test scores for funding. Will teachers who cultivate a "cultural terrain" where students critically engage in issues related to the local and global world "meet" the criteria for a passing score on their evaluations? Will their students "meet" the standards on state and soon national assessments? What are we to do with the current education system if the answer is "yes"? And then what are we to do if the answer is "no"? Giroux fails to outline a plan for how can we mobilize citizens to to demand schools adopt more democratic education policies, but perhaps he knows that the efforts may be futile. I think many Americans believe what I called (and Freire calls) a myth about success (that if you work hard, you can be in the 1%). I think Americans believe it because of the exceptions we see on TV -- the Oprahs, who come from nothing and become millionaires. And I think that most people love America because of the consumerism and the competition that breeds consumerism. They think we have a social democracy to some degree, an ideology of universal access to social rights such as education, health care, and child/elderly care but also freedom from discrimination based on differences of ability, age, ethnicity, gender, race, sexual orientation and social class,but they aren't willing to think about education as a form of social class discrimination.

For now, teachers can raise consciousness. We can work with our students, as Giroux and other critical pedagogy advocates would suggest, to make visible the power structures of public life, the reproductive public sphere (113).


Notes:

• Argues for a discourse of ethics--a language of critique and a language of possibility
• Democracy: it is not patriotism
• To capture the imagination of people today you need a sense of moral well-being Not only material well-being on moral purpose not only material improvement
• citizenship is and I geological process and a manifestation of specific power relations
• Schools are not neutral places where they are deeply implicated income-producing aspects of dominant culture that serve to reproduce and unjust and on equal society
• 1920s and 30s social Reconstructionists develop education for students as critical thinkers addressing social problems transforming inequalities
• Education cannot be reduced to criticism there must be some action building a background of values and beliefs to make change
• citizenship education could not merely take place in the school but needs a wider social sphere
• Sputnik in the 1950s social Reconstructionist education education became nationalistic one-dimensional
• An example where citizens working together create important social changes and improved the quality of life
• citizenship education must be seen as a form of cultural production making of citizens must be understood as a process we experience as well as our relations to others in the world in a system of representations and images
• The opposite of citizenship education his corporate self interest industrial psychology and cultural uniformity is nationalistic and discussed as patriotism; what goes along with this is mastery efficiency control raising test scores
• All on problematic appeals to rules and individual success no talk of conflict no messiness of social relations of sexism racism and class discrimination it isn't easy clear in democracy; teachers are monitored scrutinized and measured according to these rules school assessment school achievement is numerical scoresheet
• Students need to learn the language of the community and public association how to create an intern their own stories along with those others who inhabit different cultural racial and social positions to balance their own individualistic interests with those of public good
• the logic of new patriotism educated generations of future citizens by molding them
• Ideology is complex contradictory system of discourse images and then through which we experience ourselves in relation to each other
• This means that a new logic of education might be  the logic of thick democracy must include the production of new images to promote the language of possibility combining strategy of opposition and strategy for constructing a new social order
• Alternative route rules for teachers and students to pursue in and out of school linking the political struggle within schools to broader societal issues teachers using their skills to work with others who are redefining citizenship as a collective alliance with various societies 
• Step one is to protest authorities that treat human beings as means and reproduce relations of domination force and violence; Power and ideologies and capitalist society that mask a totalitarian ethics and strip critical discourse from public life
• Step two develop a vision of the future rooted in social relations that give  meaning to community life; understand democracy as a struggle for extending civil rights and improving the quality of human life
• How to do this is with and at the call discourse with the historical) that comprehends the historical consequences of what it meant to take and emancipatory position on the poor and suffering such as the Gulag, Nazis, Pol Pot*******
• Such images represent tear domination and resistance but also examples of what principles have to be defended and plot against any interest of freedom and life
• Discourse of critical democracy discourse of emancipatory experience discourse of possibility
• It is a political project it is situated in reading historical traditions critically the human capacity for political grades rather then the doctrine of historical. Inevitability
• Students have a growing political  illiteracy; consumerism individualism teach about a critical view of American history students allowed to speak from their own traditions and voices
• Dewey's conception of the valuing process the need to focus on situations which are not only problematic but controversial rather than teaching unquestioned truths of fact and values the classroom must be seen as an arena of political and social process making ... Challenge the Western moral tradition
• Remember the suffering of the past and that out of this remembering it. Ethics should be developed in which solidarity sympathy and care become central dimensions of an informed social practice
• Teach in the spirit of debate and analysis one that provides the pedagogical conditions for students to learn how to theorize well affirming... getting the voices to put students speak learn and struggle the teacher cannot demand a student not to be a racist but here she can subject a position to critique that reveals it is an act of moral and political irresponsibility related to social and historical practices
• Student voices need to be explored with their inherent semantic contradictions analyzing the ideological tension revealed by the student who claims he believes he is a good citizen but also registers racist or sexist remarks about women
• Counter to the Rortyian claim among some educators that critical theorists have no right to impose their language constructs and others
• Like Barry says teachers have to take a position and make it clear to students but we also have to recognize the fact of their own commitment does not give them right to impose a particular position on their students
• The task is not to impose our dreams and then go to challenge them to have their own dreams to define their choices not to uncritically assume them
• He argues that America is becoming a land without memory one important function of schools is to establish a society without a history of protest or a multiplicity of social and political discourses
• Examine history as a form of liberating remembrance
• Teach democracy as a way of life not as a government; democracy as a means to make the individual and democracy as the purpose of enriching the lives of individual
• First schooling is not politically are morally neutral institution; Second intellectual development had to be linked to a general theory of social welfare and could not keep isolated as a goal for the sake of its own development; not just about the capacity for critical thinking it's also about the experience in the formation of character as part of social welfare face-to-face associations that stress squaw operation solidarity and social responsibility
• Democracy involves the studying of specific social problems and conditions helping students develop the general. Social welfare necessary to expose students to a variety of point of view
• Johanne Baptist Metz argues that identity is formed when memories are aroused
• Nearest tunes are important because they provide the possibility purple reclaiming one's own stories and for forging bonds of solidarity with the living and with those who have suffered in the past
• Solidarity as a form of practice represents a break from the bonds of isolated individuality and the need to engage for and with oppressive groups and political struggles that challenge the existing order of society as being institutionally repressing and unjust 
• Classroom practices can be organized around forms of learning in which the knowledge and skills acquired served to prepare students to later develop and maintain those public spheres outside schools that are so vital for developing website solidarity and which democracy as a social movement operates  as an active force 100
• educators need to identify the kinds of material and ideological preconditions that need to exist before schools compete effective---healthcare nutrition tomorrow morning until resources
• Teachers need the power and authority to organize and shape the conditions of work so that they can teach collectively produce alternative curricula and engage in the form of emancipatory politics
• What students should learn his knowledge about social forms through which human beings live. Knowledge about power how it works racism and sexism class exploitation and structures of everyday life not to denounce stereotypes but to expose and deconstruct the processes through which they are produced and circulated
• Provide students with the language through which they can analyze their own lived relations and experiences this is affirmative and critical
• instead of emphasizing individualistic and competitive approaches to learning students are encouraged to work together on projects in terms of their production and of their evaluation
• Now it's first has to be made meaningful to students before it can be made critical
• curricula must be part of public responsibility personal freedom democratic acceptance rejecting norms and practices that and buy an extended interests of domination human suffering and explication--with such a public philosophy teachers can defend the curriculum choices to make it through this course that aims at developing an educated and powered and critical citizenry
• A teacher defines the role pedagogically and politically within the school educator speaks to the wider sphere of intervention in which the concerns of authority now its power and democracy teaching learning listening and mobilizing the interests of a more just and equitable social order
• Teachers have to lay bare how certain knowledge gets chosen was interests it represents and why students might be interest in acquiring it---this is a body of knowledge approved by staff and the general community and district
• Textual analysis-- open the text to deconstruction interrogated as part of a wider process of cultural production make the text and object of intellectual inquiry put the reader not as a passive consumer but as an active producer of meaning the text is no longer and authorial assents waiting to be translated it as a text that becomes a collection of discourses with the play of contradictory meaning 139********
• Treat text as a social construct that is produced out of the number of available discourses locate the contradictions and gaps with in an educational text and situate them historically in terms of the interest they sustain and legitimate recognize in the text it's internal politics of style and how this opens up and constrains representations of the world; how the text silences certain voices and how it is possible to release possibilities from the text that provides new insights and critical readings regarding human understanding and social practices
• Students might also be considered before my text multilayered subjects with contradictory and diverse voices that present different readings of the material provided in class regardless of how important such material is politically
• Toni Bambara-- stories are never neutral  they are always tied to particular memories narratives and history in order to move beyond pedagogy of voice that to Jess at all stores are innocent we must examine such stories around the interest and principles that struck Japan and interrogate them this part of a political project that either undermines or enables the values and practices that provide the foundation for social justice equality and democratic community 160
• Questions of racism and sexism cannot be treated merely as topics of academic interest such a position should not prevent the dialogue;   define the structure of such a discussion as to prevent racist or sexist remarks from being made simply as an exception of one point of view among many
• Study of history and teacher education programs too often excluded our histories of women minority groups and indigenous peoples this exclusion is not politically innocent when we consider how existing social arrangements are partly dependent on the subjugation and elimination of the histories and voices of those groups marginalized by the dominant culture 192
• Educators can serve to uncover and excavate those forms of historical and subjugated knowledges that point to the experiences of suffering conflict and collective struggle link the notion of historical understanding to elements of critique and hope 213******
• Schools need to be defended as an important public service educate students to be critical citizens who can think challenge take risks and believe that their actions will make a difference in larger society places provide the opportunity preliterate occasions provide opportunities for students to share their experiences to work and social relations that emphasize care and concern for others and to be introduced forms of knowledge to provide them with the conviction an opportunity to fight for quality of life in which all human brings benefit 214****
• Prevent democracy from collapsing into a new form of barbarism